Translation: Sappho and Anactoria
Some say Sappho is the best, others say priamels are neat, but what do I say?
Sappho Fr 16
Οἰ μὲν ἰππήων στρότον, οἰ δὲ πέσδων,
οἰ δὲ νάων φαῖσ’ ἐπὶ γᾶν μέλαιναν
ἔμμεναι κάλλιστον, ἐγὼ δὲ κῆν’ ὄτ-
τω τις ἔραται
πά]γχυ δ’ εὔμαρες σύνετον πόησαι
πά]ντι τ[οῦ]τ’· ἀ γὰρ πολὺ περσκέθοισα
κά]λλος ἀνθρώπων Ἐλένα [τὸ]ν ἄνδρα
τὸν πανάριστον
καλλίποισ’ ἔβα ’ς Τροίαν πλέοισα
κωὐδὲ παῖδος οὐδὲ φίλων τοκήων
πάμπαν ἐμνάσθη, ἀλλὰ παράγαγ’ αὔταν
οὐκ ἀέκοισαν
[Κύπρις· ἄγν]αμπτον γὰρ [ ὔμως ] νόημμα
[δαμνα]ται κούφως τ[άκερ᾽ ὠς] νοήσηι.
κἄμε νῦν Ἀνακτορίας ὀνέμναι-
σ’ οὐ παρεοίσας
τᾶς κε βολλοίμαν ἔρατόν τε βᾶμα
κἀμάρυχμα λάμπρον ἴδην προσώπω
ἢ τὰ Λύδων ἄρματα κἀν ὄπλοισι
πεσδομάχεντας.
Some say that horsemen, some, a host on foot
is loveliest of all that the dark lands boast,
and some say warships; but I say it’s what
you love the most.
How effortless to make this perfectly
clear to you all, for the incomparable
Helen, that beauty more than human—she
forsook her noble,
her royal husband and shipped for Troy, with all
concern for her dear parents and dear child 10
forgotten, [despite her womanly self-control]
misled, beguiled
by Cypris—who makes even] firm minds [stray
and melt in day-dreams,] and does it easily.
And now I’m thinking of Anactoria,
who’s not with me:
thinking of how I’d rather see her sway—
her dancer’s walk and sparkle, her face beaming—
than all of Lydia’s chariots and array
of soldiers gleaming. 20
I like to imagine that this poem’s first stanza enters a public debate in a strikingly subversive way. Starting with Gyges’ ascension in 680 BCE, Lydia’s Mermnad dynasty was the major power on the Anatolian coast for the next century and a half. Their kings, from Gyges to Croesus, picked off the cities of Ionia and Aeolia one by one, though they never had the fleet to menace offshore islands like Lesbos. Nonetheless, they were interested in Lesbian politics, and at one point supported Alcaeus’ faction against that of Pittacus in the civil unrest in Mytilene. In this context, with the Lydian headland clearly visible across the water from Mytilene, it’s not too hard to imagine the people of Lesbos debating how best to prepare for a potential attack: should they focus on shoring up their land army, cavalry, or fleet? What would be best (κάλλιστον)?
Sappho, if she is indeed responding to such questions, does so in a manner that should make us doubt their urgency. Her opening gambit plays on the fact that κάλλιστον means “most beautiful” as well as “best.” If the οἰ μὲν and οἰ δὲ (“some” and “others”) of her first line were debating the objective effectiveness of different kinds of troops, Sappho makes another point entirely, that beauty and desirability are in the eye of the beholder; there’s no accounting for taste; de gustibus non est disputandum. In doing so, she neutralizes the entire discussion by denying it any objective grounds: “Let’s just agree to disagree.”
This poem is therefore an expressive exercise disguised as an argument: besides the exemplum of Helen — who, though she is herself καλλίστη (πολὺ περσκέθοισα κά]λλος ἀνθρώπων, “far surpassing [all other] people in beauty”) and married to an ἄνδρα πανάριστον (“entirely noble husband”), nevertheless wanders off with an inferior specimen — Sappho offers herself and her preoccupation with Anactoria, who makes her mind wander from the point in the same way that Helen physically ran off with Paris. The critic and podcaster of Sleerickets fame, Matthew Buckley Smith, claims (in many episodes, e.g. here) that “no poem is not improved by reading it as a dramatic monologue,” with what he calls “magic quotation marks.” That is certainly how I read this one: Sappho the speaker implicitly becomes Exhibit B in support of her argument, but what we are left with is not really a sense of its objective validity so much as its emotional truth, for her, at the moment she is speaking it. In a way, the leap to Anactoria at the end of the poem is not unlike the scene in Iliad 3 when Helen appears on the walls of Troy to watch her new husband face off against her old one (and get his ass handed to him):
Such then were the leaders of Troy sitting upon the tower.
And they, as they saw Helen approaching the tower,
in undertones spoke winged words to one another:
“No blame that the Trojans and strong-greaved Achaeans
have suffered so long on account of such a woman;
terribly does she seem like the immortal goddesses to look on.”
[Il. 3.153-8, trans. Caroline Alexander]
Rather than describe Helen’s beauty as a novelist might, Homer shows its effect on those around her. Similarly, Sappho achieves a kind of indirect praise of Anactoria by showing the gravitational pull she has on Sappho’s thoughts, even in her absence.
It is worth noting that Sappho’s first stanza takes the rhetorical form known as a “priamel,” a technical term in classics for a list which has the effect of emphasizing its final item; the preceding elements are referred to as “foils” for the last one, toward which our focus is inexorably channeled. It’s a figure the Greeks used extensively but left to the Germans to name. Priamels often appear at the opening of poems and provide an engaging way of getting to the topic; in an oral/aural performance they create suspense, with the audience listening intently for the point, to be gratified when it comes. Pindar, a public poet par excellence, is a priamel factory:
Water is best, while of all riches, gold,
like fire in the dark, shines well apart.
But if it’s games, my heart,
you want to hymn, what star could you behold
more warm or more unrivaled in the air
than the bright sun,
or what contest compare
to Zeus’s at Olympia? Not one.
The First Olympian Ode opens with a priamel listing three or four items pre-eminent of their kind: water, which Pindar merely calls the “best;” gold, the most precious of metals; and the Olympic games, which outshine other Panhellenic contests as the sun the lights of heaven—the sun serves as both foil and vehicle for the games, the true subject. Another famous priamel opens his Hymn to Zeus:
Well: shall we hymn Ismenus River
or golden-spindled Melia, his mother,
or else the sacred Race of the Dragon, or
Cadmus, or Thebe in her deep blue crown,
or Heracles and his all-daring power,
or the delectable renown
of Dionysus, or the wedding of
white-armed Harmonia?
Sadly, the poem only survives in a few scattered pieces, so we can’t see how Pindar homes in on Zeus out of this welter of options. (Incidentally, this is the poem that occasioned the famous anecdote, according to which the poet Corinna, supposed to have been Pindar’s teacher, is said to have told him to “sow with the hand, not from the full sack”—not bad advice, for me as for Pindar.)
There are lots more examples of priamels in Classical and English poetry, from Shakespeare to Baudelaire (I ll.9-24) to Auden, many of which my teacher, Bill Race, lists in his book Classical Genres and English Poetry. Here though I’d like to suggest that priamels are especially well-suited to one form in particular, which incidentally happens also to rhyme: the villanelle. That’s mostly because two of the best known examples, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas and One Art by Elizabeth Bishop, are in fact priamels. Both poems function in notably similar ways, gaining their effect and power by the turn, in the envoy, to the you (my father, Alice), after a list whose effect is to accrue tension and interest while we wait. To judge from these two poems, there’s no rule about the order of items in the list—while Bishop’s builds, from “lost door keys” to “a continent,” Thomas’s seems (maybe) to degenerate, from “wise men” to “good men” to “wild men” to “grave men.” Anyone who has read this far and is looking for a poetic exercise could do worse than to tackle a ‘priamanelle.’
