User:Elissa Rubria Honoria/sandbox

Copying Sappho 31 article to use as model for article on Sappho 47

Sappho 31 is a poem by Ancient Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos. It is also known as phainetai moi (φαίνεταί μοι) after the opening words of its first line, or Lobel-Page 31, Voigt 31, Gallavotti 2, Diehl 2, Bergk 2, after the location of the poem in various editions containing the collected works of Sappho. Possibly an epithalamion - a wedding poem, intended to be sung to the bride at the entrance to her nuptial chamber - or an enkomion - a poem of praise. It is perhaps Sappho's most famous poem.

Sappho 31 was one of the two substantially complete poems by Sappho to survive from ancient times, written in Sappho's vernacular form of Greek, the Lesbian-Aeolic dialect. More fragments have been found in recent years, particularly in the Oxyrhynchus papyri. Sappho adopts her usual metrical form, the Sapphic meter of four lines: three lines of eleven syllables, and a fourth line of five syllables. Four strophes survive, plus a fragment of a fifth verse or concluding line. Sappho's poems were designed to be sung, and use direct and emotional language. The author starts by praising the beauty of the bridegroom, likening him to a god, but then describes her jealousy and the physical manifestations of her distress upon seeing a young woman whom she loves with her new husband, the epiphany bringing her to a symbolic death. The word choice, with alliteration and assonance, and repetition of short clauses - particularly the conjunction "δέ" - build up a rhythmic effect similar to a ritual incantation.

Longinus's treatise On the Sublime (Περὶ ὕψους, Perì hýpsous) selects the poem as an example of the sublime for the intensity of its passionate emotions. It was quoted in Plutarch's "Dialogue on Love" (Έρωτικός, Erotikos) in his Moralia (a Latin translation of the original Greek title, Ἠθικά, Ethika, Ethics).

The opening words of the poem - "he appears to me, that one, equal to the gods..." - are almost identical to the opening of Sappho 165, with the pronoun changed ("her" in Sappho 165 rather than "me" in Sappho 31).

The poem was adapted by Roman poet Catullus, and addressed his muse Lesbia, in his erotic poem Catullus 51, which begins "Ille mi par esse deo videtur" ("He seems to me to be equal to a god"). A recent scholarly reconstruction, using the evidence of Catullus's sapphic poem 11 as well as poem 51, suggests that the poem may originally have had up to 8 stanzas (see http://www.armand-dangour.com/sensational-sappho/).