Allison Zhou

Professor Carrico, GSI: Jerilyn Sambrooke

Rhetoric 103A, Discussion 103

8 October 2016                                                    

Homeric and Sapphic Frameworks of Beauty

            The particular passage of focus is Fragment 11 from Sappho, a poem entitled “A company of soldiers.” Although Sappho appears to denounce figures of beauty associated with the Homeric tradition and, in turn, offer her own framework for the judgement of beauty through love, the poem conjoins both modes of discerning beauty: the Homeric and the Sapphic—insisting that beauty is not intrinsically vested in the objects perceived as beautiful, but is rather produced through an object’s relation to another, in the intermediary, and associative space between them.

            The poem opens mocking Homeric images of beauty. Sappho postulates that “some say that the most beautiful sight upon earth’s/Dark soil” (1-2) are “a company of soldiers on horse” (3), “a line of soldiers on foot” (5), or “a fleet of ships” (6). According to Sappho, what has traditionally been perceived as beautiful have been stately, noble images of objects associated with war and destruction culled from scenes in Homeric epics, a text directly referred to by the phrase “dark soil” (2) in the poem. The beauty of such dignified, military scenes seems to arise out of the objects themselves, and are beautiful in and of themselves, independent from any external forces for the guarantee of its beauty.   

            However, in lines 7-8 of the poem, Sappho proffers her own framework for the judgment of beauty, which she locates in the realm of love. Sappho explains: “Ah, but for me/This honour belongs to whoever one loves” (7-8). By insisting that beauty resides in the one who one loves, Sappho produces an ambiguity regarding the exact location from whence beauty arises, which she demonstrates through her example of Helen. According to Sappho, “its easy to see why” (9) is beautiful, and it is because “the most gorgeous woman on earth, Helen/Abandoned her man/Most excellent of all men!/And made sails for Troy!” (11-14). Here, it is unclear whether Sappho finds Helen beautiful because she abandoned her man, or whether she sailed to Troy. The exact source of Helen’s beauty is indeterminable, unlike the form of beauty which is believed to be intrinsically rooted in noble objects of war of the Homeric tradition: soldiers, carriages, and ships. Instead, Helen is conferred beauty through her actions, or her decisions to abandon her husband and sail away—beauty is accorded through an object’s relationality to another, and actions upon each other, it is not a ready-made substance that exists within objects themselves. The space that produces beauty that Sappho hereby refers to as love, is the intermediary, liminal space of association and connection that exists between objects.

            After delineating the differences between the Homeric formulation of beauty and her own, Sappho fuses both frameworks of beauty and insists on reconciling her own conception of beauty with traditional Homeric modes of thought through images that combines stately, grand Homeric elements with the criteria of her own conception of beauty: relationality, association, and mediation. At a first glance, Sappho appears to be denigrating Homeric scenes of beauty in the opening lines of the poem, but upon more careful reading, Sappho has already imbibed traditional Homeric images of beauty with relationality through the repetitive syntactical structure of “object+on+object.” The three, opening, Homeric scenes of beauty: “company of soldiers on horse” (3), “line of soldiers on foot” (5), and “a fleet of ships” (6), all abide by the common structure of having an object, followed by “on,” and another object. The “object+on+object” structure already encodes a disconnect between the supposed object of beauty, the “company of soldiers (3), “line of soldiers” (5), or the “fleet” (6), with the second object that it is in beautiful relation with: “the horse” (3), “on foot” (5), or “the ships,” (6). That is, the company of soldiers are only beautiful in relation to the horses that they are on, and the line of soldiers are only beautiful because they are on their feet. Each counterpart does not achieve beauty independently of the other, and their beauty is only formed through the union of both units in the formula.