Girl, interrupted: more about echoes of Sappho in Epigram 55 of Posidippus

Abstract

Epigram 55 of Posidippus, a poet who flourished in the third century BCE, refers to the songs of Sappho. Thatis what I argued already in my posting for 2015.11.19. But the reference to Sappho in that epigram is evenmore complex than I had said in that posting. In that posting (at n8), as also in an earlier piece I hadpublished (Nagy 2010, listed in my Bibliography), I had mentioned the idea of “girl, interrupted”—borrowingthe words of the title given by Susanna Kaysen to her 1993 book, Girl, Interrupted, which was the same titleused in the 1999 film version featuring Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie, and Clea Du Vall. (The same titleresurfaces, without any reference to its history, in an article by Daniel Mendelsohn 2015, also listed in myBibliography.) I connected this idea of “girl, interrupted” with an idea that I saw being developed in the elliptic story told by the allusive words of Epigram 55 about a girl named Nikomakhe whose happy young life was sadly interrupted by a premature death. Nostalgically, the words of the epigram recall the happy times when this girl together with her girlfriends were singing the love songs of Sappho, sung one after another. Such singing of Sappho’s songs, I argued, promises to cancel the interruption of the girl’s happy life. But what isthe context for such singing? Since my last posting for 2015.11.19, I have been reconsidering this question in e­-conversations with a few dear friends, and what follows here in this posting for 2015.12.03 is a tracking of my reconsiderations.