David Wong

GSI: Kuan Hwa

Rhetoric 103A

Figurative Analysis

A Company of Soldiers

The life of Sappho is rather unknown, with most of what is known about her only to be contained within her poetry. With most of her poems containing themes of love and the poet’s suffering because of this love. The fragment that I will focus on will be fragment 11 called “A Company of Soldiers”. This fragment seems to be a poem about the value of a loved one.

            The first stanza contains what is a list with an order of importance rising from the first element of the list to the end. Sappho begins the list with “a company of soldiers on horse”. So in this case she is starting off big. This is since at the time period, I assume power and wealth of a person can be attributed to thier military might. This can be due to power being associated to how many people you can have serve under you and essentially die for you. So the list begins with the bottom of the military hierarchy as a company of soldiers on horses, which are the cavalry and horse archers which are at the bottom of this hierarchy. Then she goes up the ladder to a legion, then the navy, which was one of the best at its time, and ends with “to whoever one loves”. With the use of a list, this shows just how much Sappho believes that love above all else, is at the top. With the list crescendoing from the least powerful to the most powerful. In the first stanza, she also uses “beautiful” and “honour”. These two words represent their own category, since beauty is usually attributed to what is appealing to the eye and honor is usually attributed to the military or values, so not usually together. In this way, she compared her love to a military power, with the usage of honor being attributed to them.

            Then on the second stanza, Sappho uses an example of Helen to compare to the first stanza. This was used to in some way to validate her statement in the first stanza. To do this she uses Helen and some hyperboles to describe Helen and Menelaus. Helen was described as the “most gorgeous woman on earth” and Menelaus as the “most excellent of men”. This goes back to what she started in the first stanza as Menelaus is the king of Mycenaean Sparta so a leader of the Spartan armies which would put him at the very top and Helen to be the most gorgeous was able to attain one of the most powerful men, but in the end she flees with Paris, who would be considered to be below Menelaus as Menelaus is the “most excellent”.

            Then on the fourth stanza, which breaks when compared to the previous stanzas, she states that it was “Cypris’ fault”. She begins blaming the Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation and while doing so Sappho names the goddess in three different ways. The goddess is called Cypris, then Aphrodite, then as just a goddess. This is a use of repetition to stress how much emotion she has towards the goddess, but it also shows how Sappho believes that it is impossible to grasp this love. This is due to Sappho blaming it on a celestial being. Using the list, she goes from something that can be put on solid ground to a goddess which is impossible to be grasped by humans. Since the name Cypris was based on the supposed birth site of the goddess being Cyprus, which is a physical location that a person can go, then to Aphrodite which is a name that can be easily given, then to a goddess, which is what ultimately they are as it is something that cannot be understood by mortal minds making it a stranger. She then ends the stanza with an anaphora “so suddenly, so easily, so gently”. This seems to me to be that she has given in, that it is the actions of a goddess, someone that cannot be interfered by mortals.

            She ends the fragment with her recalling of Anactoria and how much Sappho longs to see her which draws a full circle as in the first stanza she states that the most beautiful is whoever one loves, and as she loves Anactoria, she is the most beautiful for Sappho greater than “all the glittering chariots of the Lydia”. So to me, the entirety of the poem began as an argument of the power of love to become a mellower and more personal poem.

            Another interesting element that I was unable to comment on was the structure of the poems lyrically that formed the structure of the poem. This would be more apparent to me if I knew the Greek language or had the Greek version available. Since most of her poems were meant to be sung with a lyre, with a meter which became known as a Sapphic stanza. What this implies is that the poem can be read as a song so it should contain similar choice of words used in a song as there must exist a flow for the words to smoothly be sung. So I would expect some usage of scheme like alliterations or symploce that the English translation does not show due to the fragments being originally in Greek.