performing song and dance designed to promote cohesion of the group and to instill the values of the
polis. Those values include a recognition of the importance of physical attractiveness, grace in movement,
and musical and literary accomplishment, all of which makes the girl the object of desire and, therefore,
sought after as a potential bride. A similar situation will have existed in the case of choruses of young
boys (with, naturally, the “values” slightly modified to accord with the role that the boys are expected to
adopt when they reach adulthood), but very little happens to survive of the poetry written for such a
context. What is of particular interest, however, in the poetry of Sappho and Alcman is the intensity of
personal emotion expressed in what appears to be poetry composed for public performance by a
collective body of performers. Again, it seems that individual and personal expression is countenanced so
long as it is either defused by appearing within a conventionalized context or diffused among a number of
voices. In this way, these collective choruses of boys and girls on the verge of adulthood, whose training
confers credit on a named and individualized adult, are the literary equivalent of the anonymous kouroi
and korai, likewise on the verge of adulthood, whose inscriptions name the individual adult by whom or
in whose memory they are dedicated.
“Pursue the fair gifts of the Muses, girls, the Muses whose breasts are fragrant as flowers; pursue the
limpid song of the lyre. My own body, which once was lithe, is now the victim of age, and my hair is
gray, once black. My spirit has become so heavy that my knees won’t bear me up, though once they
were frisky as fawns and eager for the dance. This is cause for constant complaint, but what can I
do? To be human and ageless, that cannot be. Once, they say, Tithonus aroused the passion of Dawn
of the rosy arms, and she carried him off to the ends of the earth. Young he was and handsome; but
still, with time, he was seized by gray age, though his wife was forever young.” (Sappho, P. Köln
21351 + 21376)One of the preoccupations of Sappho, and, indeed, of Greek poets in general, is the transitory character of
human attractiveness and of human life. The very verse in which Sappho, Alcman, and others celebrate
the fleeting loveliness of youth is subject to the same ravages of time and decay. As we have seen, most of
Archaic poetry has not survived, but on occasion we are lucky enough to witness the recovery of a
precious remnant of that tradition. As recently as 2014 two nearly complete short poems of Sappho were
published, along with fragments of other poems, some of which had been previously known. The tattered
papyrus that preserves these fragments dates to a time nearly a thousand years after the lifetime of the
poet. Still, its publication occasioned considerable excitement in the community of Classical scholars, as
well as some controversy regarding the manner in which the papyrus came to light. Ten years earlier, in
2004, a much older papyrus fragment (figure 26) was published that contained another nearly complete
poem by Sappho. The text was written in the early third century BC and thus preserves the earliest
manuscript evidence for Sappho’s work, even though it belongs to a time hundreds of years later than the
time of Sappho herself. As was often the case with texts written on papyrus, after the text had outlived its
usefulness, it was used as cartonnage for a mummy in Egypt. It is for this reason that it was preserved
until today, since the dry conditions of the Egyptian sands inhibit the deterioration that would occur in
most European locations. Appropriately, the poem laments Sappho’s own deterioration as she ages and is
no longer able to participate in the dance. Even the mythical Tithonus, she says, was overtaken by the
decay that comes with old age, referring to the story of the lovely goddess of the Dawn, who fell in love
with the mortal Tithonus and requested that he be made immortal, but forgot to ask that he be exempt from
aging. With characteristic subtlety, by associating herself with the fate of Tithonus, Sappho gracefully
compliments the young girls to whom the poem is addressed, who are implicitly likened to the radiant and
immortal Dawn.