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Anactoria
Anactoria (or Anaktoria) is the name of a woman mentioned by poet Sappho as a lover of hers in Sappho's Fragment 16 (Lobel-Page edition often referred to by the title "To an Army Wife, in Sardis". Sappho 31 is traditionally called the "Ode to Anactoria", though no name appears in it (A. C. Swinburne, quoted in Lipking 1988 wrote a long poem in '' Poems and Ballads'' titled ''Anactoria'', in which Sappho addresses Anactoria in a long monologue written in pentameter with rhyming couplets. The poem created a sensation amongst contemporary readers by openly approaching hitherto taboo topics such as |
Sappho's Fragment 16
Sappho 16 is a fragment of a poem by the archaic Greek lyric poet Sappho. It is from Book I of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho's poetry, and is known from a second-century papyrus discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt at the beginning of the twentieth century. Sappho 16 is a love poem – the genre for which Sappho was best known – which praises the beauty of the narrator's beloved, Anactoria, and expresses the speaker's desire for her now that she is absent. It makes the case that the most beautiful thing in the world is whatever one desires, using Helen of Troy's elopement with Paris as a mythological exemplum to support this argument. The poem is at least 20 lines long, though it is uncertain whether the poem ends at line 20 or continues for another stanza. Preservation Fragment 16 was preserved on Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1231, a second-century manuscript of Book I of an edition of Sappho, published by Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt in 1914. In 2014, a papyr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
