Fragment 2
‘‘Fragment 2’’ was composed by Sappho sometime
in the sixth centuryBCE. Many of Sappho’s poems
focus on love and marriage, often taking the form
of pleas to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. In
‘‘Fragment 2,’’ Sapphoasks the goddess to come
and celebrate a joyous occasion with the poet, and
presumably with her young female students. Sap-
pho organized a group of her young female students
into athiasos, a cult that worshipped Aphrodite
with songs and poetry. ‘‘Fragment 2’’ was most
likely composed for performance within this cult.
‘‘Fragment 2’’ has no specific date of composition
but, like all of Sappho’s work, was composed in the
sixth centuryBCE. After Sappho’s death, her poems
were preserved in a library in Alexandria, Egypt, in
the early third centuryBCE, but eventually the texts
disappeared, and only fragments now remain.
During her lifetime, Sappho never wrote down
a single poem. Instead, she sang her compositions.
She lived during an era that is defined as marked by
the end of strictly oral tradition and transition to the
written word. Her poetry was celebrated through-
out the Greek world and often copied and passed
around, but all of this occurred many years after her
death. After her death was when the development
of a more advanced Greek alphabet and writing
materials allowed Sappho’s admirers to finally pre-
serve her compositions, which had been memo-
rized, on papyrus. The result was at least nine
volumes of poetry, most ofwhich eventually disap-
peared from the written record and has been lost.
Theworkthathassurviveddidsoinwaysthatseem
quite serendipitous now. Some of her works were
61SAPPHO
500sBCE