The structure of Sappho's books: metre, page layout, and the Hellenistic and Roman poetry book

The paper argues that the edition of Sappho that surfaces in book fragments from antiquity is coherent and was coherently designed. This coherence is evident not only in the metrical arrangement but also in the editorial layout (especially in the use of παράγραφοι); this in turn allows us to draw conclusions on the authorship of fragment 44a Voigt and on the metrical arrangement of Book 4. The first section of the paper discusses evidence about ancient editions, starting from P.Colon. inv. 21351 + 21376. It analyses layout and metre in Sappho’s Books 1–3 as known to us from papyrus evidence and ancient discussions. The section argues that our papyrus evidence matches statements by Hephaestion on the evolution of editorial layout in antiquity. The second section discusses the attribution of P.Fouad 239 (Sappho F 44a Voigt = Alcaeus fr. 304 in Lobel and Page 1955).4 Metre, content and language suggest an attribution to either Alcaeus (as argued by Lobel and Page) or Sappho (as argued by, e.g., Voigt and Bonanno). The editorial layout provides a new strong argument in favour of the hypothesis that P.Fouad 239 was part of Book 2 of an ancient edition of Sappho. The third section of the paper discusses metre and layout of Book 4 in Sappho’s ancient edition(s). On the basis of editorial layout, it argues that Book 4, in the standard edition reflected in the surviving post-Alexandrian papyri, was not metrically homogeneous. Section 4 discusses the arrangement of Books 5–7; section 5 analyses the evidence on the order of poems in Book 8 and/or in the book of Epithalamia, with special attention to P.Oxy. 2294 = Sappho F 103. The final section (section 6) discusses the ordering of poems in ancient editions of Archilochus, Hipponax and Theocritus, especially in relation to metrical criteria. It claims that Theocritus, Callimachus and Horace imitated Hellenistic ordering criteria of poetry books of archaic poetry, and in particular the ordering criteria used in Sappho’s books; this is especially clear in Horace’s collection of Epodes.