A Study Guide for Sappho's "Fragment 2"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Sappho's "Fragment 2," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535823654

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09

Fragment 2

Sappho

500s BCE

Introduction

Fragment 2 was composed by Sappho sometime in the sixth century BCE. 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, Sappho asks the goddess to come and celebrate a joyous occasion with the poet, and presumably with her young female students. Sappho organized a group of her young female students into a thiasos, 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 century BCE. After Sappho's death, her poems were preserved in a library in Alexandria, Egypt, in the early third century BCE, 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 throughout 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 preserve her compositions, which had been memorized, on papyrus. The result was at least nine volumes of poetry, most of which eventually disappeared from the written record and has been lost. The work that has survived did so in ways that seem quite serendipitous now. Some of her works were quoted by other authors and survived in the preserved texts of later writers. Others of Sappho's original papyrus texts survive only as papyrus fragments recovered from Egyptian rubbish heaps. Prior to the twentieth century, only a few lines from Fragment 2 were known to exist. These few lines had been quoted by the early fourth-century philosopher Hermogenes in his treatise Kinds of Style. Additional lines from Fragment 2 were found by Medea Norsa, an Italian papyrologist,