Back and forth from general to special kinds of erotic love, further variations on a theme of love-on-wings in Song 1 of Sappho and elsewhere

Abstract

In Song 1 of Sappho, as our mind’s eye views Aphrodite, goddess of erotic love, at the moment when she starts driving her chariot pulled by birds called strouthoi and travels with the speed of light, in a miraculous instant, all the way down from the bright heavens above, down to the dark soil of our earthly human existence here below, how are we to imagine these birds of hers? Are they birds in general’ or are they, more specifically, sparrows—to name one special kind of bird? A special meaning that is given for strouthos, when we look up the word in dictionaries, is ‘sparrow’, but a general meaning of ‘bird’ is also attested. So, if we think specifically, we could imagine the birds of Sappho’s Aphrodite either as sparrows or as other special kinds of birds that are not sparrows. I say this because, if we consider the overall evidence of ancient Greek verbal and visual arts, Aphrodite as the goddess of erotic love is traditionally linked not only with sparrows but also with a wide variety of other birds. And, in many cases, the birds of Aphrodite cannot be identified as a special kind of bird, as a species. A case in point is the picture I have chosen as illustration for the cover of this essay. This picture, painted on a lekythos from South Italy, shows a girl gazing at a little bird that is perched on her finger. In this case, there are no distinctive visual markings to be found on the exterior appearances of the girl and the bird, and so, to the uninitiated eye, the two “characters” in the “story” of this picture appear to be, simply, a pretty girl and a little bird. But there are also more specific ways of looking at these two “characters.” As we will see in this essay, the pretty girl can become, more specifically, the goddess Aphrodite, and the little bird can become in turn, even more specifically, a special kind of bird that is specially favored by the goddess herself.