From the heavenly to the earthy and back, variations on a theme of love-on-wings in Song 1 of Sappho and elsewhere

Abstract

In this essay, I start by considering the word strouthoi, conventionally translated as ‘sparrows’, in Song 1 of Sappho. At line 10, these birds are seen at the moment when they take wing and fly off. They are pulling behind them, as they fly, the chariot of the goddess Aphrodite, conveying their divine mistress from her heavenly home and winging their way, full speed, through the vast stretches of ethereal space extending from the luminous Sky up above all the way down below to the dark soil of Earth, described at line 10 as ‘black’. In the twinkling of an eye, the goddess arrives, in instant response to an earthbound female’s cry for divine help in her pursuit of success in love. The earthly female is earthy in her appeal to the celestial female, and I deliberately say “earthy” here to imply an eroticism that is not sublime but earthbound, maybe even soiled, dirty. So also the earthy little sparrows that are pulling the chariot of the goddess, notorious as they are for their voracious sexual appetite, can be seen as soiled, dirty. And I would compare also the earthy little passer or ‘sparrow’ in Poems 2 and 3 of Catullus. This pet bird, belonging to that ‘girl from Lesbos’, Lesbia, is a poetic replication of the strouthoi or ‘sparrows’ we saw in Song 1 of Sappho. But these winged attendants of Aphrodite are to be contrasted in their earthiness with the heavenliness of two alternative attendants that we see pictured in a classical Athenian vase painting that I studied in a previous essay (Nagy 2020.12.04, linked here). These other attendants are heavenly cupids—humanoid Erotes fluttering with luxuriant swanlike wings that extend from their shoulders—and they too, like the sparrows in Song 1 of Sappho, are pictured as pulling the chariot of Aphrodite. The picturing of these heavenly Erotes brings me to the question I address in my essay here: despite the visible contrast between heavenly and earthy love-on-wings, is there anything heavenly—or at least sublime—about the earthy little sparrows of Aphrodite?