A Company of Soldiers

Isabella Castrodale

Kuan Hwa

This figurative reading takes as its subject fragment 11 of Sappho’s poems from this site.

A Company of Soldiers

In Homer’s shadow, Sappho makes a name for herself by taking love as the topic of her poetry rather than adhering to the traditional use of poetry for the adulation of the acts of soldiers in war. In fragment 11, Sappho not only thematizes love, a subversive action in itself, but also promotes love as more worthy of thematization than war due to the greater beauty of love’s actors. Sappho accomplishes this by first putting the actors of love and war in opposition; prompting the reader to compare their beauty in terms of the magnitude of the actions that beauty causes. Then, in her discussion of the actions of Helen, an exemplar of an agent of love, Sappho situates the devastation caused by love as incomparably more catastrophic than that produced in war due to its peculiar nature and therefore inculcates love as incomparably more beautiful than war and by extension, more worthy of song.

Sappho begins fragment 11 with the employment of juxtaposition by placing the concepts of war and love side by side to draw out their similarities and differences. She does so by proposing that the beloved, one of the actors of love, is more beautiful than any of the actors of war, such as soldiers on foot, horse, or at sea. This juxtaposition is particularly effective because the two things are compared in terms of beauty, a category that does not seem to be a fair one in which to measure the pair due to their obviously dissimilar nature. Sappho cannot be proposing that the beloved is more beautiful than a fleet of ships; such a proposition would be as unfair as it is obviously true. Therefore, by placing the actors of love and war in the forefront of a beauty competition, Sappho is actually forcing the reconstruction of the measurement altogether in order to allow for a more accurate competition. The typical measure of beauty at face value is contorted into a more situationally appropriate measure of beauty by the magnitude of the deeds it mobilizes. In short, this figurative device of juxtaposition enables the subversion of the typical beauty competition in such a way that the reader, going forward, must evaluate the beauty of the actors of the two themes, war and love, in terms of which has more formidable deeds done in their honor. The deeds of the lovers, soldiers in their own respective battlefield, are therefore placed in competition with the deeds of a glorious army.

Having placed the actors of war and of love in a suitable contest, Sappho begins to defend her favoring of the love. She begins by saying that the superior beauty of the beloved to the fleet of soldiers is “easy to see.” Immediately following such a suggestion, she shouts, “Look!” The use of ecphonesis, or exclamation, is to indicate extreme emotion. Given that the action she demands, to look, is not a difficult one, the audience can sense that Sappho is feeling consternation. The device helps Sappho to articulate the clear superiority of the beauty of love by demonstrating that anyone’s failure to recognize it is an infuriating act of insolent refusal to complete the undemanding task of looking, an act so infuriating that it provoked her to yell.

Next, Sappho turns her attention strictly to the action of Helen, which is presented as evidence for the superior beauty and therefore ability of love to motivate terrible action than war. When articulating the actions of Helen, rather than express the complete idea in a single line, Sappho isolates the action through the use of enjambment, or the manipulation of the rhythm of the poem. She begins one line with the subject, Helen, and skips to the next line before revealing what Helen had done. The reader rushes to the next line to find that Helen had abandoned her husband. The enjambment of lines makes the action particularly powerful because it structurally separates Helen and her man in the same way that her action literally did. Helen is estranged from her husband, not present in the line, having once again left Menelaos alone. In addition, this enjambment works in combination with an additional juxtaposition. Two beautiful characters sandwich a very ugly action. Helen is described as “the most gorgeous woman on earth.” Her old husband, Menelaos, is described as “most excellent of all men.” What lies between these two surpassingly beautiful actors is the absolutely ugly action of abandonment which constitutes in its form an absolute contradiction to the actors surrounding and involved in it. The action by Helen, onto Menelaos, which was motivated by love for another man, is an unthinkable inconsistency. War is not capable of motivating such inconsistencies of actor and action. In war, the soldiers are dressed for destruction and no matter how terrible the action, it is still within the possible realm of things imaginable in wartime. In love, a gorgeous woman and excellent man are not expected to do ugly things to one another. Establishing both the devastation of abandonment and this important dialectic, Sappho is able to support her proposition of the superior power of love’s beauty to cause calamity because, although war may force its actors to do awful things, love may force its actors to do preposterous things.

Having addressed the action of Helen, Sappho turns her attention directly to love, personified in Aphrodite. In characterizing how Aphrodite motivated Helen to abandon Menelaos, Sappho utilizes tricolon parallelism. She describes the action in three structurally identical clauses, each beginning with “so” and ending with an adjective ending in “-ly.” The listing of the characteristics reinforces the impression made by the previous one and focuses the reader, clueing them in to the significant nature of the deeds caused by love that would make those deeds more ruinous than those caused by war. First, Aphrodite is described as having led Helen astray suddenly, which implies quickness that is painfully absent in war with particular reference to the lengthy Trojan war. Next, Aphrodite is described as having led Helen astray easily, which again strongly contrasts the typical incarnation of war in Homeric work as an ongoing struggle against two equally matched sides. Such struggle is worlds away from the overwhelming power that Aphrodite is demonstrated as having over Helen, and the brevity with which she overtakes her. Finally, Aphrodite is described as having led Helen astray gently, which is the absolute antithesis of the bloodshed which is characteristic of war. In sum, Sappho’s parallelism in her description of the way love creates devastation focuses the reader on its peculiarity; love and its actors exert far less in destroying one another.

Although the poem does not end there, Sappho has finished articulating her point. In her newly designed battleground, war does not stand up to love, least of all in its ability to provoke unspeakable tragedies. Sappho uses several figurative devices to show that love is more beautiful and more worthy of poetry than war because it motivates more devastating deeds and more unthinkable deeds and does so in a way that is utterly graceful and effortless in comparison to war.  Although, when she wrote, Sappho was already the sovereign in the realm of epic poetry about love, with fragment 11 and the devices of juxtaposition, ecphonesis, enjambment, and parallelism, she privileges poetry about love over poetry about war, and therefore seems to advance her dominance in the entire realm of epic poetry.