André LARDINOIS Sappho Fr. 5: Family Drama or Love Song?

In a forthcoming article (CP 2003), Joel Lidov will argue that the story of Sappho’s brother Charaxus with an Egyptian courtisan, mentioned by Herodotus (2.135), is probably not based on Sappho’s own poetry but on a later source. It is therefore time to re-evaluate the fragments of Sappho that seem to speak about her brother Charaxus.

One of the most important fragments that has been connected with the story of Charaxus is Sappho fr. 5 Voigt. This fragment was first published in 1898 with a reconstruction of the German Hellenist Friedrich Blass, who proposed to read the words kasignêton and kasignêtan in lines 2 and 9 of the fragment and interpreted the poem as a reconciliatory gesture of Sappho to her brother. In this paper I will argue against this interpretation and propose instead that the fragment constitutes a love poem about a male lover. My reading will be based on a cross-cultural comparison of the fragment with Near Eastern love poetry and on the vocabulary and internal dynamics of the fragment, which closely resemble that of Sappho fragment 1.