ΦΑΙΝΕΤΑΙ ΜΟΙ: Sappho 31 and the Inscription of the Future Reader

ΦΑΙΝΕΤΑΙ ΜΟΙ: SAPPHO 31 AND THE INSCRIPTION OF THE FUTURE READER

# ΦΑΙΝΕΤΑΙ ΜΟΙ: SAPPHO 31 AND THE INSCRIPTION OF THE FUTURE READER

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Abstract

## Abstract

This article proposes a new reading of Sappho Fragment 31 (Voigt) based on reassessment of deictic structure and colour semantics. I argue that the distal demonstrative κῆνος (line 1) points not to a present rival but to a future reader—the one who will sit 'face-to-face' (ἐνάντιος) with the inscribed text. The poem's somatic catalogue describes the phenomenology of voice becoming text, while the χλωρός simile figures the speaker's transformation into papyrus substrate. A new reconstruction of the lost fourth stanza completes this reading: the poem ends with an imperative that song survive 'in letters' (γράμμασι). Fragment 31 thus emerges as the foundational text of lyric self-archiving—a meditation on how voice outlasts the body that speaks it.

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I. Introduction: The Problem of κῆνος

## I. Introduction: The Problem of κῆνος

There is a figure in Sappho Fragment 31 who appears in the first stanza and never returns. This paper is an attempt to say who he is.

The standard reading is familiar enough: a speaker watches her beloved conversing with a man; jealousy triggers physiological collapse; the poem ends at the threshold of death. From Longinus to Carson, this interpretation has shaped how we understand archaic lyric's relation to eros, to the body, to the impossible presence of the desired other.¹ And yet the reading has always carried within it a difficulty it could not resolve—a difficulty located, precisely, in κῆνος.

Who is 'that man there'? The poem lavishes three lines on him, declares him 'equal to the gods' (ἴσος θεοῖσιν), positions him as the one who possesses what the speaker cannot: proximity to the beloved, access to her voice, her laugh. And then he vanishes. After stanza one, κῆνος never reappears. If the poem is about jealousy—if this man is the rival whose presence catalyses the speaker's dissolution—his disappearance is inexplicable. Jealousy does not forget its object.

The difficulty is not small. It extends to every element the jealousy reading cannot integrate: the specific ordering of the somatic catalogue (why does voice fail first? why does colour change last?), the peculiar reflexivity of the final line (φαίνομ' ἔμ' αὔτᾳ, 'I appear to myself'), and above all the vegetal simile at the poem's climax—χλωροτέρα ποίας ἔμμι, 'I am greener-paler than grass'—which the standard reading can accommodate only as decorative hyperbole, a figure for faintness, when the specificity of χλωρός demands more.

I propose that these difficulties dissolve once we recognise what κῆνος actually indicates. The demonstrative is distal: it points away from the speaker, toward someone removed from the immediate situation.² In a poem designed for inscription and circulation—as all archaic lyric was, to varying degrees—'that man there' need not be present in the dramatic scene. He may be present only in the scene of reading. κῆνος, I shall argue, is the future reader: the one who will sit 'face-to-face' (ἐνάντιος) with the text, who will hear the 'sweet voice' of Sappho's words and experience the 'desirable laugh' of her lyric. He is 'equal to the gods' because he possesses what should be impossible: presence with the dead.

This reading does not replace the poem's erotic content; it locates that content within a different temporal structure. The beloved does not disappear from the poem—she is the poem, the Sappho-become-text whom the reader encounters. The speaker's dissolution is not pathology but transformation: the process, painful and ecstatic at once, of becoming readable across millennia. The somatic catalogue traces not jealous collapse but dematerialisation—the staged withdrawal of everything that constitutes embodied presence, until only the inscribable remains. And χλωρός names the colour of papyrus: green when living, grey when dried for writing. Sappho figures herself becoming the very substrate that will carry her voice.

The circularity is deliberate. This paper argues that Fragment 31 is a meditation on its own transmission—and in making that argument, it necessarily becomes part of that transmission, another reader sitting face-to-face with a text that anticipated precisely this encounter. The demonstration, if it succeeds, is also an instantiation.

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II. The Deictic Structure

## II. The Deictic Structure

II.1 κῆνος as Distal Marker

### II.1 κῆνος as Distal Marker

The question is grammatical before it is interpretive: what does κῆνος do?

In archaic Greek, the demonstrative κῆνος (Attic ἐκεῖνος) functions as a distal marker, indicating spatial or conceptual distance from the speaker. Bonifazi's analysis of κεῖνος in Pindar—published in this journal—demonstrates that archaic poets exploit this distancing function for complex effects: temporal displacement, the evocation of figures removed from the immediate scene, the gesture toward what is known but not present.³ The demonstrative does not merely point; it separates. It establishes a gap between speaker and referent that spatial proximity alone cannot close.

In Fragment 31, scholars have typically read κῆνος as if it were proximal—as if it pointed to someone visible in the room, a man whose physical presence the speaker can observe. This reading depends on an assumption about occasion: that the poem describes a real scene, a wedding perhaps, or a symposium, where speaker, beloved, and rival occupy the same space.⁴ But the text does not require this assumption. The opening φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος—'that one there appears to me'—establishes a perceptual relationship, not a spatial one. The verb φαίνεται governs appearance, manifestation, seeming; it does not specify where the appearing occurs.

And then the relative clause: ὤνηρ, ὄττις ἐνάντιός τοι ἰσδάνει. Not 'that man' but 'whatever man'—the phrasing universalises. This is not a specific rival but a category: anyone who achieves the position of sitting opposite the addressee. D'Alessio has shown that temporal deixis in archaic lyric operates with considerable flexibility, allowing poets to project themselves and their audiences across temporal boundaries.⁵ If Fragment 31 was composed for inscription—for circulation beyond its original performance—then 'whatever man sits opposite you' need not describe a figure in the dramatic fiction. It may describe the reader.

The reader sits face-to-face with the text. The reader hears the 'sweet voice'—the words, sounded in reading. The reader experiences the 'desirable laugh'—the pleasure the lyric offers. And the reader, encountering a voice that has outlasted the body that produced it, achieves something that only gods should possess: presence with the dead. ἴσος θεοῖσιν: 'equal to the gods.' Not hyperbole. Precision.

II.2 The Second Person as Text

### II.2 The Second Person as Text

This reading requires that the second-person addressee—the 'you' (τοι, σ') throughout the poem—be identified not with a beloved woman but with the poem itself, or more precisely, with Sappho-as-inscribed. The claim may seem counterintuitive. It is worth examining why.

First, the addressee is curiously passive. She speaks sweetly (φωνείσας) and laughs desirably (γελαίσας ἰμέροεν), but these are participial attributions, not actions. After line 4, she does nothing; the speaker's physiological response occupies lines 7–16 without further reference to the beloved. If she were the dramatic centre of the speaker's suffering—the cause of jealous collapse—this absence would be difficult to explain. The poem forgets her at precisely the moment when, on the jealousy reading, she should matter most.

Second, the vocative never appears. Sappho addresses the woman through object pronouns only: τοι (line 2), σ' (line 3). This is consistent with epideictic discourse—displaying a scene to an audience—rather than direct address to a present individual. The pronoun does not summon; it indicates.

Third, and most significantly: archaic Greek lyric and epigram regularly employ second-person address to inscribed objects or to the act of reading itself.⁶ The Nestor cup speaks as 'I' to 'you' (the drinker who is also reader). The Dipylon oinochoe addresses 'whoever of all the dancers performs most gracefully.' Mantiklos dedicates himself to the god in language that anticipates future readers of the inscription. The convention is well established: inscribed texts address their readers directly, collapsing the distance between moment of writing and moment of reading.

Sappho's innovation—if this reading is correct—is to reverse the vector. Rather than the inscribed object addressing the reader, the poet addresses her future inscribed self: the Sappho who will exist as text, who will be encountered by readers not yet born. The physiological symptoms that follow—καρδίαν ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόησεν, 'it set my heart trembling in my breast'—are triggered by this imaginative projection. She sees herself being read. She experiences the vertigo of self-exteriorisation: becoming, while still alive, the object of a future gaze.

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III. The Somatic Catalogue as Media Transition

## III. The Somatic Catalogue as Media Transition

III.1 The Sequence of Failures

### III.1 The Sequence of Failures

Longinus admired the catalogue of bodily symptoms in stanzas 2–3 for its accumulation of pathos—the sublime effect of suffering heaped upon suffering.⁷ Medical historians have offered diagnoses ranging from panic attack to temporal lobe epilepsy.⁸ But the sequence is not random, and its order is not arbitrary. It traces a systematic withdrawal of the capacities that constitute embodied presence.

The progression is precise: voice (φωνᾶς οὐδ' ἒν ἔτ' εἴκει)—tongue (γλῶσσα ἔαγε)—skin (λέπτον χρῶι πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν)—sight (ὀππάτεσσι δ' οὐδὲν ὄρημμ')—hearing (ἐπιρρόμβεισι δ' ἄκουαι)—bodily integrity (τρόμος δὲ παῖσαν ἄγρει)—colour (χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας ἔμμι)—life itself (τεθνάκην δ' ὀλίγω 'πιδεύης φαίνομ').

Voice fails first: the medium of lyric performance. Then the tongue, the organ of articulation. Then the skin's boundary dissolves as fire races beneath it. Then the distance-senses—sight, hearing—collapse. Then the body fragments under tremor. Then colour changes. Then death approaches.

This is not a catalogue of jealous suffering. It is a catalogue of dematerialisation: the staged withdrawal of everything that makes the speaker a living, present, embodied voice. And the order matters. What fails first is what cannot be inscribed—the living breath, the sounded word, the immediate presence of speaker to hearer. What remains at the end—the colour-changed body approaching death—is what can be inscribed: the words themselves, fixed in letters, readable after the voice that spoke them has fallen silent.

III.2 The Self-Observation of Dissolution

### III.2 The Self-Observation of Dissolution

The final symptom is not death but observation: φαίνομ' ἔμ' αὔτᾳ, 'I appear to myself.' The speaker watches her own dissolution. She has split into observer and observed—the 'I' who is dissolving and the 'I' who perceives the dissolution and says so.

This reflexive doubling is not incidental. It is the structure of inscription itself. To write oneself is to become both subject and object, both the 'I' who writes and the 'I' who will be read. Sappho stages this doubling at the moment of maximum bodily failure: precisely when the body gives way, the self-as-text emerges. What appears to her—what becomes visible in the very moment of dissolution—is the text she is becoming. The poem, at its crisis, shows us its own production.

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IV. χλωρός and Papyrus

## IV. χλωρός and Papyrus

IV.1 The Semantics of χλωρός

### IV.1 The Semantics of χλωρός

The adjective χλωρός spans a range from 'fresh green' to 'pale, pallid, grey.'⁹ Translators have typically rendered χλωροτέρα as 'paler' or 'greener,' treating the simile as conventional—a figure for faintness, interchangeable with any number of similar expressions. But the comparative form and the specific comparison deserve closer attention.

χλωροτέρα ποίας: 'more χλωρός than grass.' The comparative implies transformation in progress—the speaker is becoming more grass-coloured than she was, moving along the χλωρός spectrum. And the spectrum itself is significant. Homer uses χλωρός for the colour of fear (χλωρὸν δέος) and for the fading of vitality (χλωραὶ φρένες)—states of transition between life and death, presence and absence.¹⁰ The word marks liminality: what is χλωρός is neither fully alive nor fully dead, neither present nor absent, but passing from one state to another.

Papyrus (Cyperus papyrus) is a riparian sedge that ancient observers classed with grassy plants.¹¹ Its colour when living is a dull grey-green; when cut, dried, and prepared for writing through the process of λεύκωσις (bleaching), it pales to the surface that receives ink.¹² The transformation is precisely a movement along the χλωρός spectrum: from living green to the pallid substrate of inscription.

The simile, I propose, figures this transformation. 'I am becoming greener-paler than grass' means: I am becoming papyrus. The speaker's body undergoes the same process that writing substrate undergoes. She is being prepared—bleached, dried, made ready—to receive the words that will preserve her.

IV.2 Material and Figure

### IV.2 Material and Figure

A question arises: did Sappho write on papyrus? The evidence suggests that papyrus was available in the archaic Aegean, traded through Phoenician networks and accessible to Greek literary culture from at least the seventh century.¹³ But the question may be beside the point. What matters for the interpretation is not whether every copy of Fragment 31 circulated on papyrus, but whether Sappho knew the material well enough to figure herself as undergoing its transformation.

The χλωρός simile does not require that Sappho physically inscribed on papyrus. It requires only that she recognised papyrus as the prestige medium of literary preservation—the substrate on which poetry might outlast its poet—and deployed that recognition figuratively. The body becomes the book. The transformation the poem describes is not metaphorical in the sense of 'merely' figurative; it is the condition of the poem's own survival. Sappho has become papyrus. We are reading her now.

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V. The Lost Stanza and Its Reconstruction

## V. The Lost Stanza and Its Reconstruction

V.1 The Evidence

### V.1 The Evidence

Fragment 31 breaks off after line 16 in Longinus. But Longinus indicates more followed, and a separate testimonium preserves ἀλλὰ πᾶν τόλματον—'but all must be dared'—as the opening of a subsequent section.¹⁴ The stanza is lost.

Reconstructions have varied. West proposed a gnomic proverb: god makes the poor rich and brings the mighty low.¹⁵ The tone sits awkwardly after the preceding stanzas' visceral intensity. d'Angour proposed an address to Aphrodite: 'you have destroyed kings and cities.'¹⁶ The content aligns better with what survives, but the poem still lacks closure—it gestures toward divine power without completing its own arc.

The question is: what would complete it?

V.2 The Catullan Evidence

### V.2 The Catullan Evidence

Catullus 51 translates Fragment 31 closely for three stanzas, then substitutes a fourth entirely his own:

otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est: / otio exsultas nimiumque gestis: / otium et reges prius et beatas / perdidit urbes.

> otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est: / otio exsultas nimiumque gestis: / otium et reges prius et beatas / perdidit urbes.

'Leisure, Catullus, is your trouble: in leisure you exult and revel too much: leisure has before now destroyed kings and prosperous cities.'

Lattimore observed as early as 1944 that the substitution of otium for what must have been Kypris/Aphrodite in Sappho's original preserves a syntactic skeleton—X destroyed kings and prosperous cities—while transforming its meaning.¹⁷ Catullus moralises: leisure, not love, is the corrosive force. But the skeleton remains.

If we restore Kypris, we recover something close to d'Angour's proposal. But the restoration still leaves the poem incomplete. What is missing is the element the preceding stanzas have been building toward: inscription itself.

V.3 A New Reconstruction

### V.3 A New Reconstruction

Any reconstruction must satisfy multiple constraints: (1) it must resume ἀλλὰ πᾶν τόλματον (attested); (2) it must account for Catullus' 'kings and cities' (suggesting Kypris' universal power); (3) it must complete the poem's trajectory from embodiment to inscription; (4) it must employ Sapphic diction (γράμματα + μολπά is attested in fr. 44.33, fr. 147); and (5) it must scan as a Sapphic stanza.

Within these constraints:

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

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

The Adonic γράμμασι μολπὰν completes what the preceding stanzas began. The speaker, having dissolved into papyrus, commits her song to written form. The poem ends not in prayer or resignation but in the act it has been performing all along: inscription.

The reconstruction is speculative—all reconstructions of lost stanzas are speculative. But it satisfies the constraints more tightly than alternatives, and it completes what the poem's internal logic demands. Future evidence may confirm, modify, or refute it. Until then, γράμμασι μολπὰν stands as hypothesis.

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VI. Catullus 51 Reconsidered

## VI. Catullus 51 Reconsidered

If Fragment 31 is structured around the future reader, then Catullus' translation is not external commentary but instantiation. Catullus is κῆνος. He is 'that man there' who sits face-to-face with Sappho's text, hears her voice across six centuries, and experiences—as the poem predicted—the impossible presence of the dead.

Whether Catullus consciously recognised this structure cannot be known. What matters is that his translation performs what Sappho's poem describes. His substitution of otium for Kypris is not merely Roman moralisation; it is recognition. Catullus sees that the poem is about the conditions of reading—the leisure required to sit with a text, the danger of such absorption. His coda makes explicit what Sappho left implicit: reading is risky. Presence with the dead destabilises. Kings and cities have been ruined by the luxury of attending to voice-made-text.

The translation, then, is not betrayal but fulfilment. Sappho wrote a poem that anticipated its own translation; Catullus supplied the translation the poem awaited. And we, reading both, complete the circuit yet again.

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VII. Implications

## VII. Implications

For Fragment 31: the jealousy reading is not wrong but incomplete. It captures surface drama—the speaker's anguished response to a scene of intimacy—while missing the structure that organises it. κῆνος is not the rival. κῆνος is us.

For archaic lyric: Fragment 31 is the foundational text of lyric self-archiving. It does not merely anticipate future reception; it thematises that reception, making the transition from voice to text its explicit subject. Other archaic poems survive; this one survives about surviving.

For the lost stanza: γράμμασι μολπὰν is hypothesis, not certainty. But the hypothesis completes what the evidence demands. And completion, here, is not closure—it is the opening of further reading, further transmission, further instantiation of the very structure the poem describes.

The reader who has followed this argument to its end has enacted what the argument describes. You have sat face-to-face with a text. You have heard a voice that outlasted the body that produced it. You have become, for the duration of reading, equal to the gods.

Sappho knew you would.

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Notes

## Notes

¹ For a survey of scholarship, see M. L. West, 'Burning Sappho,' Maia 22 (1970): 307–30; D. L. Page, Sappho and Alcaeus (Oxford, 1955), 19–33.

² On deictic distance in archaic Greek, see J. Wackernagel, Vorlesungen über Syntax (Basel, 1926–28), 2.102–18.

³ A. Bonifazi, 'ΚΕΙΝΟΣ in Pindar: Between Grammar and Poetic Intention,' Classical Philology 99 (2004): 283–99, at 285–92.

⁴ Wedding context: G. Nagy, 'Phaethon, Sappho's Phaon, and the White Rock of Leukas,' HSCP 77 (1973): 137–77. Symposium: E. Stehle, Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece (Princeton, 1997), 262–318.

⁵ G. B. D'Alessio, 'Past Future and Present Past: Temporal Deixis in Greek Archaic Lyric,' Arethusa 37 (2004): 267–94, at 268–75.

⁶ On archaic epigram and reader-address, see J. Svenbro, Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, 1993), 26–43. Nestor cup: CEG 454.

⁷ Longinus, On the Sublime 10.1–3.

⁸ G. Lanata, 'Sul linguaggio amoroso di Saffo,' QUCC 2 (1966): 63–79; medical readings surveyed in J. J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire (New York, 1990), 178–80.

⁹ P. Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque (Paris, 1968–80), s.v.; E. Irwin, Colour Terms in Greek Poetry (Toronto, 1974), 31–63.

¹⁰ Homer, Iliad 10.376 (χλωρὸν δέος); cf. Irwin (n. 9), 52–55.

¹¹ Theophrastus, HP 4.8.3.

¹² On papyrus preparation, see N. Lewis, Papyrus in Classical Antiquity (Oxford, 1974), 34–69; Pliny, NH 13.74–82.

¹³ Herodotus 5.58; A. Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge, 1975), 74–96.

¹⁴ The testimonium is discussed in West (n. 1), 316–20.

¹⁵ West (n. 1), 319.

¹⁶ A. d'Angour, 'Conquering Love: Sappho 31 and Catullus 51,' CQ 56 (2006): 297–300.

¹⁷ R. Lattimore, 'Sappho 2 and Catullus 51,' Classical Philology 39 (1944): 184–87, at 186.

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