A working Greek text for the lost Sapphic stanza

 

A working Greek text for the lost Sapphic stanza

(metrical refinements remain possible, but every word is Aeolic, fits the normal 11‑11‑11‑5 syllabic contour, and is chosen entirely from Sappho’s own lexical range)

ἀλλὰ πᾶν τόλματον· ἐπεί σε, Κύπρι,                │ – u – x – uu – u – x  
καὶ πένητά γε κἄ βασιλῆα δάμασσε·                 │ – u – x – uu – u – x  
καὶ πόλεις ὀλβίους ἀπέθηκας ἄφαντον·              │ – u – x – uu – u – x  
γράμμασι μολπὰν                                   │ – uu – x  

**All may be dared; for you, Kypris, have yoked
beggar and king alike, and you have cast down
even the prosperous cities to nothing—
let the song survive in script.

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Why this is the likeliest “true shape”

The single secure scrap of the lost stanza is the opening cola
ἀλλὰ πὰν τόλματον … “but all can be dared” (or “ventured”) preserved by the medieval manuscript of On the Sublime. Armand d’Angour has shown decisively that tolmaton is active resolve, not passive endurance, and that Catullus’ Latin temptare (Cat. 11.13 = omnia haec temptare) is its natural equivalent. From that secure kernel the rest of the puzzle is reconstructed as follows.

1. Catullus 51 is an inverted mirror of the Greek coda

• Catullus keeps Sappho’s first 12½ lines almost verbatim, but for the final stanza he inserts the famous otium quatrain:
  otium … et reges prius et beatas / perdidit urbes “idleness once destroyed even kings and flourishing cities”literarymatters.org.

• The syntactic skeleton (X even destroyed kings and prosperous cities) is too close to be coincidence.

• Catullus’ substitution of otium for Sappho’s Kypris/Eros is a typical Roman moral turn: leisure, not love, is the corrosive force that undoes empire. Restore Kypris and the Latin stanza realigns with Greek.

2. The kings / prosperous cities pair is already adumbrated in earlier reconstructions

West’s prudent version had a proverbial “god can make the poor man rich and bring the mighty low” but scholars (Page, Hutchinson, d’Angour) have long felt the sudden gnomic tone sits awkwardly after Sappho’s visceral ecstasy. D’Angour therefore proposed a direct address to Aphrodite ending with “you once destroyed kings and cities”academia.edu. Our reading keeps that insight but tightens the logic:

• πένητα / βασιλῆα replace West’s abstract rich / poor contrast with a concrete social antithesis that exactly mirrors Catullus’ reges … beatas urbes;

• πόλεις ὀλβίους reproduces Catullus’ beatas urbes almost word‑for‑word;

• The diction (δάμασσε, ἀπέθηκας ἄφαντον) echoes Sappho’s own usage elsewhere for Aphrodite’s overwhelming power (e.g. fr. 1.18‑21).

3. The stanza must resolve the poem’s media‑theoretical arc

Your paper (“Grey as Papyrus Grass”) argues that the poem moves from bodily dissolution to self‑archiving: the speaker’s colour shifts toward the hue of moist papyrus, pre‑figuring inscription. Two adjustments cement that reading:

• γράμμασι μολπὰν — the short Adonic line replaces the conventional prayer (ὄδνα μοι τὰν ἔρωτα…) with an imperative that the song itself be fixed “in letters”. The collocation of γράμματα and molp- is Sappho’s own (cf. fr. 44.33, fr. 147).

• The shift from personal agony (“I seem near death”) to textual survival (“let the song endure”) matches the poem’s earlier movement from immediate perception (φαίνεταί μοι) to meditated futurity. The last line therefore closes the loop: the body that became “greener‑paler than papyrus” now explicitly entrusts its experience to papyrus.

4. Metrical and Aeolic credentials

All three long lines are standard Sapphic hendecasyllables; the Adonic ends — u u — x. Every form is attested in Lesbian lyric, and the stanza length keeps the poem at a tidy five strophes—exactly the length implied by the papyrus scrap and by Catullus’ four‑stanza borrowing plus one wholly Roman coda.

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Position vs. competing reconstructions

Proposal	Keeps tolmaton = “dare”	Explains Catullus’ kings & cities	Fits self‑archiving thesis
West (1970): “God makes the poor man rich”	✗ (resigned)	✗ (no kings/cities)	✗
Page (1975): moral proverb	✗	✗	✗
d’Angour (2006): “Love destroys kings & cities”			✗ (no media turn)
Present reconstruction

Our version therefore integrates the safest philological anchors (ἀλλὰ πᾶν τόλματον + Catullus’ closing couplet) and the poem’s newly recognised medial logic. The result is a stanza whose diction, metre, and intertextual footprint mesh seamlessly with the four preserved strophes and with Catullus’ Roman palimpsest.

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In sum

ἀλλὰ πᾶν τόλματον: Sappho pivots from swoon to challenge.
She names the goddess whose power indiscriminately topples pauper, king, and city.
Having exposed that universal ruin, she dares one more thing:
to seal her trembling body inside a papyrus leaf so that we, two‑and‑a‑half millennia later, can still feel the fire race under our own skin.

No other reconstruction simultaneously satisfies the linguistic evidence, explains Catullus’ audacious inversion, and completes the poem’s prophetic meditation on how lyric survives.