1. DEIXIS AND PRAGMATICS IN ARCHAIC LYRIC

The last fifty years of scholarship have transformed and enriched our view of Sappho and Alcaeus, helping us understand their works as songs for oral performance, playing a role in social and ritual interaction, and in the song culture of the archaic world.Footnote ² But one feature of a strongly pragmatic approach—the tendency to treat ‘locational’ elements in the songs as references to the actuality of original performance—risks underestimating the extent to which the songs create an imaginative world for lyric purposes, of privileging pragmatics at the expense of poetics.Footnote ³

Thus Rösler, for example, argued that the ‘oral’ poetry of the lyric era was characterized by true deixis to objects in the real world (‘deixis ad oculos’), while in the literary poetry of the Roman era, like that of Horace, deictic references had become transparently fictional or imaginary (‘deixis am Phantasma’).Footnote ⁴ The constant deixis to specific people and places in archaic songs points to occasions of original performance where these deictically indicated things would be present.Footnote ⁵ So, for example, named addressees in archaic Greek lyric were actually present at the occasion of first performance, whereas in Roman lyric, they were imaginary—poetic conceits. In this analysis, in archaic oral lyric, deixis is to the real world, while, in written lyric, deixis is part of poetics.

Rösler's analysis privileges performance as the key criterion for determining what is going on in a song.Footnote ⁶ Few scholars today would adopt such a strongly pragmatic view of the significance of deictic expressions. D'Alessio,Footnote ⁷ for example, argues that Greek lyric exhibits a range of relationships between the text and the circumstances of performance: ‘What we have may range from the wholly fictional, to the poem composed in order to “work” in a single definite circumstance, and even to the apparent transcript of an extempore poem.’ He argues for a more nuanced approach to deictics in archaic lyric, and against attempts to use deictic references to found accounts of actual performance circumstances without careful examination. Archaic lyric songs are ‘not necessarily deictically centred on the performance circumstances’ but ‘have the linguistic capacity to operate free from contextual boundaries’.Footnote ⁸ The complexity of the relationship between text and performance is a key focus of the recent collection of essays by Budelmann and Phillips.Footnote ⁹ These approaches emphasize the importance of taking account of the range of contexts in which the songs may have been performed.Footnote ¹⁰ Analysis of deictic terms must take into account the characteristic of lyric not just to reflect performance realities but to create imaginative worlds.Footnote ¹¹

Underlying such approaches is a distinction between the circumstances of performance and the world created by the poems. This distinction is central to cognitive approaches to communication and poetry. In the next section I will look at two of these approaches, deixis theory and Text World Theory, as well as other methodological approaches to lyric (especially that of Culler) to establish a methodology for looking at locations in Sappho and Alcaeus.

2. LOCATION—COGNITIVE APPROACHES

What do we mean when we talk about the setting or location of a poem? It is wider than the physical location. In the analysis of deixis theory it encompasses, at a minimum, as well as place, coordinates of time and person (that is, where, when and who/what is present).Footnote ¹² These coordinates emanate from a deictic centre or origo, giving meaning to terms with deictic force (that is, terms that can only be understood on the basis of knowledge of the deictic centre they issue from), terms such as ‘this’, ‘there’, ‘you’, ‘yesterday’. In turn, deictic vocabulary in a poem provides pointers that can be used to establish information about the deictic centre they proceed from. This is particularly important in the context of lyric. In a lyric poem, typically, no prior information is available about the deictic centre, but the reader or hearer is left to establish the origo (the ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘who’ of the world of the poem) from deictic pointers and from other evidence in the text. In this discussion, I will use the term ‘Location’ to refer to the deictic centre of a lyric poem from time to time in the poem, in terms of these main deictic coordinates.Footnote ¹³

‘World’-based methodologies take this cognitive analysis further,Footnote ¹⁴ seeing the mental impression created by a discourse as a ‘world’ established in the reader's mind. Text World TheoryFootnote ¹⁵ (the most developed form of this type of analysis) takes as its starting point a distinction between the ‘discourse world’ where discourse happens and the ‘text worlds’ created in the minds of the discourse participants by that discourse. For example, where A describes last night's party to B, the discourse world is that conversation (which has an actual, real-world time and place), while the text world is the impression created in B's mind of the party (with different time, place and personae): the persons in the text world are called ‘enactors’. Text World Theory recognizes that a text world is created not just by the words of the participants but also by other factors, such as the context of the discourse, background information known to the participants, and the participants’ cultural background. Text worlds are founded on analogy, that is, discourse participants will create a text world based on knowledge of the real world, as well as other cognitive and cultural patterns pre-existing in their minds. Text World Theory recognizes that the text world can change as the discourse progresses, in particular where there is a change to the main temporal-spatial-personal coordinates, and this is called a ‘world-shift’, akin to the ‘deictic shift’ of deixis theory.Footnote ¹⁶

Text World Theory was developed as an analysis of communication both written and non-written. In a written text, like written lyric poetry, the discourse world is (somewhat confusingly in this case) the text of the poem, while the text world is the world created in the reader's mind by the poem. In orally performed poetry such as that of Sappho and Alcaeus (or for that matter the ‘lyrics’ or traditional or popular performed songs) the categorization is more complex. This special case is not directly considered by writers on Text World Theory, as far as I am aware. In performed lyric, there is a face-to-face performance context, but the discourse world, which creates the text world in the audience's minds, is still the poetic text, at least to the extent that the discourse world consists in the words used to create the text world. Where there is a written text, Text World Theory calls the discourse world ‘split’, that is, the audience occupy separate spatial and temporal locations from the author.Footnote ¹⁷ In performed lyric, however, since the audience occupy the same time and the same space as the singer, there is the possibility for the audience to see themselves in a united discourse world, that is, the one they share with the singer. In the terms of Text World Theory, the ‘I’ of a poem may typically be seen as an enactor of the author. But performed lyric opens up the possibility for the audience to see the ‘I’ as the singer herself. In performed lyric we can see the singing ‘I’ as a position ‘waiting to be inhabited’ by the singer of the song from time to time. In this discussion, I will use ‘song’ to refer to the poems of Sappho and Alcaeus to signal their character as performed works,Footnote ¹⁸ and ‘singer’ to refer to the lyric ego, ‘impersonated’, as it were, by the actual singer of the song from time to time (recognizing the potential for the audience to position the lyric ego on a spectrum of identification with the ‘poet’, on the one hand, or with the ‘singer’, on the other).

So in performed lyric the text world is still the world created in the listener's mind by the discourse world, logically and functionally distinct from the discourse world. In considering archaic poetry, this clear distinction helps articulate and define the distinction between circumstances of performance and the world of the song, even where the relationship between the two may be complex. What I am calling the ‘Location’ in lyric is the spatial, temporal and personal coordinates of the text world, logically and functionally distinct from the actual location where the song was first performed or happens to be performed at any time.

Lyric poetry has special characteristics distinguishing it from other types of discourse.Footnote ¹⁹ First, the main aim of the discourse is not the conveying of information but entertainment. Text worlds are created to advance poetic aims (to delight the imagination, to support the poem's themes, to ‘instantiate’ generic reflection in a specific time and place). Second, the text world in lyric is particularly labile and complex. Because of the brevity of lyric, the reader or audience must make inferences to create a text world on the basis of a few words. World-shifts may be frequent and sudden, often effected without the formal shifters of narrative. A person may suddenly be addressed, a place or object suddenly referred to by a deictic, or ‘nominated’ into the text world. Locations may be created and discarded from one moment to the next. Finally, Locations may be deliberately ambiguous or interpreted in different ways by different readers. In lyric, Location is a tool of poetics, created and shifted as the discourse of the lyric progresses, in furtherance of the artistic effect sought by the poet. Our sense of the lyric Location is progressively shaped by deictic and other indicators and by the full range of poetic signals (including intertextual signals), creating a sense, across a range of possibilities, of the text world at any one time.Footnote ²⁰ ‘Reading a literary text involves a process of context-creation … using the text to construct a cognitively negotiable world, and the process is dynamic and constantly shifting.’Footnote ²¹ The shifting world of lyric discourse involves a constant cognitive activity on the part of the reader, whereby she is continually challenged to locate the Location in time and space, or to determine the identity and character of the discoursing ego.Footnote ²²

A further peculiarity of lyric is that it does not have to be located anywhere in particular. Lyric has the option of eschewing altogether indications of location in time, space and person, so that the lyric voice is an anonymous vehicle. Someone is speaking (‘I’) but it is not clear who, where or when they are. Culler uses a variety of parallels to capture this distinctive quality of the lyric voice, comparing it to epideictic or to a prayer-book or songbook.Footnote ²³ In this mode, lyric is a text of unlocated expression in metre, a voice or location which each reader or performer can herself assume as part of the lyric experience. The degree of ‘locatedness’ in the poem can be seen as a spectrum: the extent to which the poem is perceived by the reader or audience as set in a particular time or place, the extent to which the lyric ‘I’ and the second-person addressees are identified as belonging to particular individuals, may be altered as the lyric progresses by deictic and other signals.Footnote ²⁴ The poet has the option, for example, to start in ‘unlocated’ mode and to introduce indications of a specific Location as the lyric progresses. Alternatively, he can start with a specific, located scene and move to a generic, gnomic utterance reflecting on the scene described: as, for example, in Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, where the poetic ‘here and now’ (the rural churchyard) is the jumping-off point for a discourse on fame and mortality. Such moves from generic to specific reflect a quintessential quality of lyric expression: the perception of the general through contemplation of the specific, and the instantiation of general propositions at a particular moment in time and space.Footnote ²⁵

Written and oral lyric favour different Locations. Written lyric favours a Location imagined as a poet composing (a ‘Location of composition’) like Gray's Elegy. In archaic lyric, on the other hand, delivered by a singer and received by an audience in performance,Footnote ²⁶ the deictic centre of a lyric poem is characteristically established as itself a performance, so that ‘I’ is the performer, ‘now’ the time of performance, and ‘here’ the physical performance location (a ‘Location of performance’). The Location of the text world is assimilated to, or replicates, the discourse world. Location of performance is not, however, restricted to poetry that was in fact performed. Horace, for example, is also characterized by Locations of performance. In archaic performed lyric, the choice of a Location of performance is intended to assimilate the lyric Location to the actual circumstances of performance.Footnote ²⁷ In Horace, on the other hand, the selection of a Location of performance (which probably bears no correspondence to circumstance of performance or composition) is determined by intertextuality—Horace's homage to his Lesbian lyric predecessors—and also by the advantages this mode creates, for example directness and veracity, for the kind of lyric Horace was aiming to create.Footnote ²⁸

In some archaic lyric, deictic indicators suggest that the Location is the time and place of an original performance. For example, in Solon, fr. 19 W., Solon addresses Philocyprus, king of Soloi in Cyprus:

Herodotus implies that Solon in fact did deliver these lines to Philocyprus in Soloi itself (so that the song would resemble the text of a speech):Footnote ²⁹ an exact relationship between lyric Location and the circumstances of the original performance. But Solon may have composed the song to commemorate his visit and thank his host, without actually performing it there (as is often supposed for Solon's political songs addressed to the Athenians).Footnote ³⁰ In this case, the Location and the circumstances of performance would diverge: Solon's song would be more like a declamation.Footnote ³¹ In any case, the subsequent reperformance of the song outside Soloi breaks the correspondence between Location and circumstances of reception, turning the song into an artefact with this kind of commemorative effect: making the song work for an original performance (if there was one) was probably not the only aim of the choice of Location, perhaps not even the primary one.

This Solon song illustrates key points. We can typically construe the lyric Location of archaic lyric from the text itself, but we cannot determine the actual circumstances of original performance without external evidence.Footnote ³² Even where an exact correspondence between lyric Location and the circumstances of original performance can be proven, that correspondence only exists in the case of that single original performance, not in the case of other multiple reperformances. Finally, even where there is apparently an exact correspondence between lyric Location and the circumstances of original performance, there is still a crucial distinction between the actual circumstances of delivery/reception and the world created in the audience's mind by the text. The best formulation of what is going on in this song is that the lyric Location is Solon speaking to the king of Soloi in Soloi; and (as a further secondary inference about the first actual circumstances of performance) it is possible that Solon may in fact have delivered the song in Soloi in its first performance.

3. LOCATION IN SAPPHO AND ALCAEUS

As we saw, the Locations of most of Sappho's and Alcaeus’ songs, established by the consistent presence of named addressees in dialogue, sympotic spaces, prayers and temples, assimilate to, or mirror, the plausible/potential circumstances of actual performance.Footnote ³³ They present ‘deictic replication’ of the circumstances of performance. The text world has the same deictic coordinates as the discourse world: there is an ‘I’ addressing a ‘you’ or a ‘we’ in a Location whose reference to the performance world is often reinforced by references to drinking or singing. This is the predominant mode of the songs.

In this mode, the ‘I’ and ‘you’ of the lyric Location are designed to resonate within a group performance setting, offering the audience the ability to identify their own ‘here and now’ with the lyric Location, to ‘occupy’ the created world of the song. These correspondences allow what in Text World Theory is called ‘projection’, enabling the listener to project herself into the text world,Footnote ³⁴ identifying the actual singer with the lyric ego, and herself as one of the group addressed as ‘we’ in the song (as enactors of themselves in the text world). By creating a lyric Location as close as possible to the envisaged circumstances of performance, the poet allows the audience to project themselves into the Location. At the same time, they may be challenged by the potential differences between the lyric Location and the circumstances of the performance. The effect is to create a text world which is both similar but at the same time interestingly, imaginatively, different from the time and the space the audience find themselves in: a ‘blended’ world that will vary on each performance occasion, depending on a range of factors including the extent to which circumstances of performance align to the lyric Location.

Performed lyric like the songs of Sappho and Alcaeus can thus be seen as an example par excellence of Culler's concept of the epideictic nature of the lyric voice: these texts are songs waiting for a singer to inhabit their deictic origo, to ‘step into the shoes’ of the lyric ego.Footnote ³⁵ They create a Location whose deictic coordinates are already assimilated to the actual performance location that the singer in performance will occupy, populated with the accoutrements and activity of the symposium or gathering, including actual addressees.Footnote ³⁶ These songs, composed as they are for a face-to-face performance, imitate the ‘canonical situation of utterance’Footnote ³⁷ they are destined for.

This ‘mirroring’ of the likely or potential circumstances of performance that we find in archaic lyric can be paralleled in other traditional song forms. Traditional songs are typically ‘performative’. Drinking songs, for example, depict a group drinking (‘Gaudeamus, igitur’; ‘We'll drink a drink to Lily the Pink’). Another traditional song form composed for performance in or by a group, with strong performative elements, is the sea shanty (a type of work song sung on merchant sailing ships). Here is an example, ‘Strike the Bell’, a song to be performed while pumping the bilge on a ship.Footnote ³⁸

Such a song presents a range of deictic elements familiar from the songs of Alcaeus. The Location evokes plausible circumstances in which the song might be performed. Deictics (‘the bell’, ‘the poopdeck’, ‘the wheel’) and other ‘world-building’ elements establish a detailed picture of the Location, which, when performed on board as work song, assimilate to the ‘here and now’ of the performance. Wherever the song is performed, a setting is established that is canonical to the group. The Location also incorporates deictic references to people within it, identified generically (‘the captain’, ‘the second mate’) or by name, ‘Anderson’ (another device to lend specific or realistic detail to the Location). As in Alcaeus, fr. 6, a nautical drama is played out, including a brewing storm. Above all, the Location incorporates typical action and typical speech of the group (‘ethos action’ and ‘ethos speech’). The Location replays the group to itself, saying ‘this is who we are, this is what we do, this is the sort of people we are’. And there is another device common in Sappho and Alcaeus: the imperative (‘strike the bell’). This is a powerful tool in the creation of Location, a device which simultaneously nominates a person into the text world, establishes a relationship between speaker and addressee, and calls on the addressee to perform an ‘ethos action’ (cf. in Alcaeus ‘drink’, in Sappho ‘sing’). These addresses are not ‘apostrophes’—where the lyric voice addresses absent persons—but addresses by the singer to a person envisaged as being present in the lyric Location.

This nautical Location fulfils a role in the song culture it stems from. As well as entertaining the group, and helping with the pumping, it has a social purpose, reinforcing the ethos of the group. To achieve these effects, it is crucial that the Location is a Location of performance that corresponds to a real environment in which the group performs activity that defines it. The specificity incorporated into the Location is a device to enhance this recreation of group experience that is key to its effect.

The Location par excellence for archaic lyric is the symposium, a place that is both the actual circumstances of performance of many of the songs and the audience group's iconic reference location, the scene of key ethos actions and ethos speech (drinking, cult practice, faction speech). For Alcaeus in particular, the claustrophobic masculine world of the andreion, marked out by objects which define adherence to a male martial culture, is the default Location. It is an inward-looking space of memory and solidarity, defined against the outside world, and a place of refuge from it (warmth against the winter storm, refreshment and relief from the hot ‘dog star’ months), a perennial space renewed through the seasons. It constitutes a ‘centre’ not just in the sense of deictic origo but also as the locus of the group and its values. The objects within the space, for example the armour in Alcaeus, fr. 140, may have a paradigmatic moral function for the group, calling them to action outside it. The group inside the sympotic space is defined by encounter in song with the world outside it: the group's factional opponents, a citizen body characterized by faction and folly. The singer, as master of ceremonies, addresses, commands and encourages his comrades, taking on the role of symposiarch, calling on the other enactors through imperatives to perform ‘ethos actions’: to drink, to mix and pour wine, stoke the fire, apply perfume and put on garlands; but also taking the role of faction leader, exhorting, reminding of ancestors and duty, vituperating factional enemies.

Many of the songs of Sappho have a Location similar to that of Alcaeus: a group (in this case of women) singing, conversing and praying, developed with names of participants, and with imperatives calling on participants to perform ethos actions (singing and praying rather than drinking). The group are shown engaging in ethos speech (discussing and celebrating erōs, song and fashion, praying for the safe return of absent male family members, lamenting the departure of female friends and lovers, engaged in faction competition with rival groups). It is a reasonable guess that, as with the songs of Alcaeus, this type of Location mirrors a real life setting that is both circumstances of the performance and an iconic reference location for the group.

But if the Locations in these songs mirror a typical group gathering, they are not a record of or script for a particular one: Alcaeus’ songs recreate the symposium, not a particular symposium.Footnote ³⁹ The deictic references depict a sympotic world, equipped, as in the sea shanty quoted above, with ‘realistic’ details (named addressees, storms, objects like windlasses or armour). It is possible that specifically identified objects or people correspond to people and objects in the actual world,Footnote ⁴⁰ so that what is mirrored in the lyric Location is in some sense ‘a symposium of Alcaeus and his group’, rather than any old symposium. But these people and objects are also elements of the poetically created Location, the text world. Thus to ask ‘Did Melanippus exist and was he present at a performance?’ does not materially advance our understanding of the song. Melanippus may have been present in a performance,Footnote ⁴¹ but might equally be a figure like ‘Anderson’ in the sea song. He is a person envisaged as being present in the lyric Location, an element of the text world. Deictically depicting an actual, particular, original performance location would have created a rather banal song with a short shelf life. Alcaeus’ aim was rather to create a song rich in typical action and speech that could be performed on a number of occasions. Alcaeus’ songs are ‘fully immersed in a performative context, to which they often refer’, but not straightforward scripts of performances.Footnote ⁴²

For these reasons, the use of the term ‘deixis ad oculos’ to refer to deixis in a poetic text to things present at real circumstances of performance is misleading.Footnote ⁴³ Although performed lyric takes place in a face-to-face scenario, it is not the ‘canonical discourse of utterance’ where participants use discourse to share information and employing deixis to actual objects to do so, but rather an imitation of face-to-face discourse for poetic effect. These effects include, as we have seen, deliberate mirroring of the circumstances of performance to create the illusion of face-to-face discourse. To talk about ‘deixis ad oculos’ in these circumstances risks confusing poetic device with reality. In poetry all deixis is ‘deixis ad phantasma’, is ‘imagined’.Footnote ⁴⁴ It exists to advance the world of the song, not to point to objects present at the first performance.

The ethos-laden Locations of Sappho and Alcaeus, playing back the audience group to themselves as they sing, drink, curse their enemies, mourn dead or missing friends and relatives, also have a role in the Lesbian song culture that reperformed the songs,Footnote ⁴⁵ and in the wider potential world of reperformance. The songs project the group to these further (‘secondary’ and ‘tertiary’) audiences. The ‘factional’ elements in both Alcaeus and SapphoFootnote ⁴⁶ define not just the group to itself but also promulgate its values and discourse agonistically, as part of a competition of voices within Lesbian song culture. For such subsidiary audiences, inhabiting the deictic centre through performance involved a different type of experience. Some elements of the Location would be generic enough to be adopted by the singer and audience as their own. Where references were more specific, reperformance must have been perceived as taking on the role of another original singer and group.

The Location is not always a simple mirroring of the circumstances of performance, but may be an imaginative development of it, embellished with elements not present in performance: for example the ‘nautical’ songs of Alcaeus.Footnote ⁴⁷ Rather than an external, or even a metaphorical, Location, the ship in these songs can be seen as in a sense identical to the main sympotic space, a poetic development of it.Footnote ⁴⁸ Like the sympotic space, it has benches and apparently ‘walls’ which enclose it.Footnote ⁴⁹ Within it, its occupants are tossed by the waves of factional strife, in a wine-fuelled and claustrophobic turbulence, in which the only option is to grab the oars and row like mad, in a desperate effort to save oneself from the perfidy of factional opponents. The Location is under siege, commensality and cooperation are compelled by the threat of imminent destruction. Alcaeus’ audience were likely both sailors and symposiasts (as well as faction members), and songs such as Alcaeus’ fr. 6 imaginatively combine all these elements, creating a ‘symposium at sea’Footnote ⁵⁰ (in the terms of Text World Theory a ‘blended world’Footnote ⁵¹) that combines drinking song, sea shanty and faction song.

Sappho's fr. 2 is apparently another example of the imaginative development of the Location, this time with divine and ritual elements. The agnon nauon to which Aphrodite is invited to come in the opening lines is developed as a quasi-magical environment where ‘enchanted sleep flows down’, and the goddess herself is invited to pour into golden cups nectar that is ‘mixed up with the festivity’. We can plausibly imagine this as the ‘group’ Location imaginatively transformed (just as Alcaeus’ andreion is transformed into a ship) by the divine epiphany, merging the human and divine worlds, as Aphrodite joins the feast. The Location transcends the circumstances of performance, transporting the audience to new worlds. The ‘blending’ effect achieved in this way is remarkable in that it implicates not just the text world but also the discourse world. The participants are encouraged to see their actual location as in some sense a ship or transformed by an epiphany. This ‘transporting’ arises because the basic deictic coordinates of performance are replicated, but with the addition of imaginative elements different from those in the (likely) performance situation.

The songs of Sappho and Alcaeus thus establish a text world that is like the world of expected performance but with the capacity to vary it imaginatively, creating a complex interplay between performance reality and poetic imagination. For these reasons, it may not always be possible definitively to identify a physical Location in Sappho and Alcaeus as this or that actual spatial location. For example, scholars have identified the space depicted in Alcaeus' fr. 140 as andreion, temple and so on.Footnote ⁵² But the identification of Homeric allusions in the description of the armour suggest assimilation of the Location to a mythic or Homeric poetic world.Footnote ⁵³ The Location may reflect an imaginative development of actual circumstances of performance.Footnote ⁵⁴

4. PRAYERS—ALCAEUS, FR. 129

Prayer (which clearly played a key role in the activity of the groups of Sappho and Alcaeus) is a powerful Location generator in the songs. It comes with its own set of deictic coordinates: ‘I’ or ‘we’ in prayer call on ‘you’, the god, to come ‘here’ (a space which may be developed as a full-fledged Location), to fulfil ‘my’/‘our’ wishes expressed in prayer. Prayer thus has the potential to launch within a few words a physical space, relationships and attitudes. It also sets up multiple time frames, for prayer is an invocation in the present that looks forward to the prayed-for future state, while frequently looking back to times the god has helped in the past. Prayer exhibits par excellence the ‘performative’ aspect of lyric: ‘language as act rather than representation’, ‘language used to make things happen’.Footnote ⁵⁵ When performed, the lyric prayer appears in some sense actually to constitute a prayer in the text world, ‘reconstituted’ by the performance occasion. For this reason, addresses to gods in archaic lyric should not be seen as poetic apostrophes. As with mortal addressees, the god is perceived as actually addressed in the lyric Location, and probably in the circumstances of performance too. The well-known formats that are typical of archaic lyric—group address, prayer to god—function as ‘paradigms’ to establish the text world (like the ‘scripts’ of cognitive theory).Footnote ⁵⁶

Alcaeus’ fr. 129 illustrates the use of prayer form as a world-building device, and the importance of Location in a song's thematics. In this case the physical location is identifiable with a real place, the sanctuary of the three gods at Messon,Footnote ⁵⁷ which is as thematically crucial to this song as the churchyard in Gray's Elegy. Hera was probably addressed, as chief goddess of the sanctuary, in the first line:Footnote ⁵⁸

The lyric Location is established using the deictic coordinates of prayer (‘come here, to this sacred space, help us’). Classic elements of prayer form are used to develop the various stages of the structure of the song (though the song hardly sticks to typical prayer patterns as it progresses).Footnote ⁵⁹ The appeal to the gods is initiated with a description of the cultic space they occupy in terms of its religious and social significance. The august nature of the space is built up with elaborate epithets establishing a long tradition of practised piety, enshrining from the outset Lesbian communality. As in Alcaeus, fr. 140, the physical location will go on to found an appeal to the hetairoi, to act in the spirit of these values, avenge fallen comrades, broken oaths, and rescue the suffering dēmos, and an appeal to the gods to assist this endeavour and repair Pittacus’ outrages to the things that they protect, by virtue of their cultic status and habitation of ‘this’ common temple. The sacred precinct is developed as the citadel of values from which the campaign to right the wrongs of Pittacus must be launched. To establish the precinct as having this significance, Alcaeus has rewritten the foundation story for the temple found in Sappho, fr. 17 (or at least has chosen an alternative version).Footnote ⁶⁰ The Location is fashioned to serve the needs of the particular song.

The physical location is highlighted by strong proximal deictics: ‘τόδε᾽ pushed to the front of the word order and strongly juxtaposed with both Hera (probably) and ‘the Lesbians’, so we have: god—location—community in the first line. This strong deictic emphasis on current physical space and time is built out of the proximal deictics of prayer form, where the god is invoked to come ‘here’ to ‘this’ sacred space.Footnote ⁶¹ The deictically signalled Dionysus parallels the apostrophized Hera (‘and you too, Dionysus’).Footnote ⁶² The lyric Location is immersed in this iconic sacred space where the gods are present.

The Location here poses an interpretative challenge. The singer is clearly envisaged as present at the temple, with the hetairoi group. How to find a plausible space where we can put both persons and setting, group and temple? This led Rösler to give pragmatic effect to the deictics, to imagine a shelter constructed at the temple precinct where the exiles gathered to hear Alcaeus perform this song.Footnote ⁶³

Treating the deictics here as primarily a feature of poetics rather than of pragmatics may help resolve the dilemma. This looks like another example of ‘transformation’—replication of deictic coordinates of performance but with variation. Alcaeus’ fr. 6 was not performed on a ship but probably in an andreion, yet the lyric Location is in some sense a ship. In the same way, fr. 129, wherever it was actually first performed, is envisaged in some sense by the audience as ‘located’ at the Messon temple. Just as in fr. 6 Alcaeus addresses the hetairoi on board a ship, here he leads them in prayer at the temple. Such an address may be improbable as a real-life scenario but not as a poetic Location (just as we do not have a problem with the lyric ego in Gray's Elegy writing verse at dusk in a churchyard). The elevation of the sacred site to the position of deictic origo in the world of the song is a function of its role as cultic and political origo, a source of validation and cultic power called down on the head of Pittacus. Like Gray in his churchyard, or Horace at Soracte, Alcaeus positions the thematic centre also as deictic centre. The deictics in the song are not pointers to the reality of performance but a poetic device, tying the song in each performance to the closely imagined iconic space.Footnote ⁶⁴

5. SAPPHO'S LOCATIONS: FR. 31

As we have seen, ‘deictic replication’, the mirroring of the circumstances of performance, is also the dominant mode in Sappho. Address to women, typically named, or to a god is a feature of nearly all the surviving songs of Sappho.Footnote ⁶⁵ Where we have enough of the song to reconstruct the context, we can see that these are not just poetic apostrophes but addresses to actors taking part in the action in a specific imagined Location, often in dialogue with other actors. The envisaged space is one where women are accustomed, and encourage each other, to sing in praise of, or in dialogue with, each other on topics such as beauty, fashion, singing and desire, and (as we can now see from the new Brothers poem) absent male relatives. Sappho's songs are constructed as examples of the kind of song that women in the Location they describe are urged to sing by the imperative ‘sing’. They are performative (as in the deictics of Sappho, fr. 160: ‘I shall now sing these delightful songs beautifully for my companions.’). However, Sappho's Locations are more dialogic, more complex, than Alcaeus’, with multiple characters; for example fr. 22:

In this song, A, the singer, invites B herself to sing in erotic praise of C, an act in which A emotionally participates (‘I rejoice’). Again, in fr. 94, the singer describes a dialogue between herself and another woman who is leaving, reporting the words each addressed to the other. In fr. 96, the speaker addresses another woman on the subject of a third who has left for Sardis, who ‘took delight in your song’ and remembers ‘gentle Atthis’: here, as in fr. 22, the singer reports, and comments on, a discourse between two other women, with whose relationship the singer is emotionally engaged. In the new Brothers Poem, the speaker encourages another woman to bid her pray for the safe return of Charaxus (another ‘performative’ scenario, the song both commanding and enacting the desired prayer). Such Locations go beyond a recreation of generic circumstances of performance, establishing ‘mini-dramas’: dramatized exchanges apparently recreating the day-to-day life of a group, like a mime, or a Platonic dialogue.Footnote ⁶⁶

Before concluding, I want to apply the analysis of this article to a work that of all Sappho's songs presents the most complex issues of deictic interpretation: fr. 31. Approaches to this song typically focus on establishing the circumstances of original performance. The resulting analyses both differ widely and are incapable of proof from the evidence of the text itself (for example the song is a marriage song,Footnote ⁶⁷ a training song for an audience of parthenoi,Footnote ⁶⁸ an ‘Abschiedslied’,Footnote ⁶⁹ or a written text for private performanceFootnote ⁷⁰). This variety suggests it may never be possible to deduce from the song its performance circumstances, in a way capable of securing consensus.Footnote ⁷¹ It may be more helpful to focus on analysing the ‘locational’ elements in the song as part of its poetics, rather than as clues to its performance (Sappho, fr. 31.1–8; text from Budelmann [n. 52]):

As with so many other Sappho songs, we have an address by a speaking first-person female to a female addressee. We naturally want to think of the addressee as present in a Location of performance, with ‘deictic replication’ of the circumstance of performance, like the figures in Sappho, fr. 22. Here, however, the addressee is not named, nor is the Location described, leading Rösler to conclude that the addressee, exceptionally, is ‘imaginary’.Footnote ⁷² For Hutchinson, too, the addressee is an apostrophized non-present lover, in the manner typical of later Western lyric.Footnote ⁷³ But this seems hard to square with the urgent present tenses in lines 3–4, which give a strong impression of the singer describing a scene in ‘real time’, in the manner so familiar from Sappho's other lyric Locations.

Van Emde BoasFootnote ⁷⁴ notes the shifting or ambiguous quality of the text world in the song: ὄττις points to a generic putative man, but then the closely imagined description replete with world-building elements suggests an actual scene, so that κῆνος does double work, both setting up the generic ὄττις and functioning as an actual distal deictic—‘that man over there’. Likewise, the subjunctive in the description of the singer's own reaction to the girl (ὠς γὰρ <ἔς> σ᾿ ἴδω) implies a repeated occurrence (‘whenever I look at you’), but the urgent present and perfect tenses in the description of the erotic symptoms plunge us back into a lyric present. The listener is left unsure whether to construe the scene as ‘recreated real time’ or as apostrophe. The song seems deliberately to veer between an ‘active participatory mode’ and another, more distanced mode.

In fact, this contrast between a generic ‘objective’ point of view and an engaged subjective viewpoint is fundamental to the song:Footnote ⁷⁵ the contrast between the man who has objective eudaimonia (is godlike) because he is fortunate enough to be with the girl, while remaining emotionally unaffected, and the extreme subjective erotic reaction of the singer which brings her ‘near death’.

This contrast is embedded in the song in a shifting lyric Location. The mode of the opening is the bridegroom makarismos of wedding songs,Footnote ⁷⁶ inviting us to read the deictic coordinates as those of a praise song, with the lyric ego as an anonymous external observer, formulaically praising the objective eudaimonia of the man achieved by virtue of his married status.Footnote ⁷⁷ But then this perception is disrupted. The person apostrophized by the pronoun τοι is not the man but the girl. And by line 5, the lyric ego, the μοι of line 1, is revealed not as the outside observer of a praise song but as an emotional participant in the lyric Location. She ‘emerges from the shadows’ as a figure directly affected by the observed scene. The switch is effected with the same verb used in fr. 22 to describe an erotic reaction to a sensory trigger: ἐπτόασεν.Footnote ⁷⁸ But whereas the discourse scenario in fr. 22 is a group of women together, praising each other, the singer in fr. 31 is pointedly excluded from the action group. The girl is addressed, but cannot, will not, hear. Deictics are crucial here: as we saw, κῆνος is not just a referent setting up ὄττις but also a distal deictic describing a scene ‘over there’, separated from the singer, a scene in which the man, but not the singer, sits ‘near’ (πλάσιον) and ‘opposite’ (ἐνάντιος) the girl.Footnote ⁷⁹ The ‘sweet laughter’ is shared with the man in an intimate conversation from which the singer is cut off.

There is thus a ‘paradigm’ shift in the song's Location, from impersonal praise song to a personal erotic address akin to the song Abanthis is asked to sing to Gongyla. This transforms the relationship of the three primary actors (man, girl, singer). The singer is transformed from impersonal praise singer to lover, the man from laudandus to object of erotic envy, and the girl takes on the role of the beloved. φαίνεταί μοι is revealed not as a formulaic phrase introducing a trope but as a statement of the singer's subjective emotional reaction.Footnote ⁸⁰

The man here is in the first place a ‘foil’, whose coolness in the presence of the girl contrasts with the intensity of the singer's reaction, but at the same time a reflection of the singer's own emotional state: he achieves his godlike status partly as a projection of the singer's own erotic emotion, appearing godlike to her because she imagines herself being in his deictic position, sitting near the girl, over ‘there’. And he seems to have a role in producing the intensity of the singer's reaction by virtue of his status as a ‘man’—an intruder into the prototypical all-female Sapphic Location. The ‘symptoms’ experienced by the singer are intensified by erōs unfulfilled or thwarted, bringing the singer to a hyperbolic flirtation with death, a state akin to the one caused by the parting in fr. 94. It is apparently seeing the girl, through the eyes of the man permitted closeness to the girl by virtue of his position as man, that sparks so violent an emotional reaction.Footnote ⁸¹

The song appears to contrast man–woman relations in marriage, which bring people eudaimonia, and the emotions of the Sapphic group, characterized as having an unbearable intensity. The contrast between the ‘godlike’ status of the man and the ‘deathlike’ experience of the singer is, in the lyric world of the poem, not necessarily negative: the subjective intensity of the singer's erōs is more thrilling, lyrically more attractive, than the objective eudaimonia of the praise song. In a similar way, in fr. 16 the subjective reaction excited by Anactoria's ‘lovely step’ and ‘sparkling face’ (cf. ‘sweetly laughing’ in fr. 31) is contrasted with, and preferred to, objectively admirable fleets and armies. The sight of Anactoria in that song (like the vision of Gongyla in fr. 22 or the girl's sweet laugh in fr. 31) excites in the singer an emotional erotic reaction that is privileged in the value system of the songs. Both songs (frr. 16 and 31) move from a conventional trope to a deeply personal erotic reaction, breaking clear of a formulaic, objective opening, becoming an ode to the power of erotic subjectivity. The erotic ‘death’ in which Sappho's fr. 31 culminates takes on the aspect almost of an apotheosis, though one different from that attributed to the man at the start.

This shift from objective to subjective is accomplished by a shift in Lyric location from praise song to erotic personal song, each having their own system of spatial and relational deixis and their own value system. The ‘praise song’ paradigm constructs a Location where a praise-singer observes a ‘happy couple’ in a distanced, objective way. The ‘love song’ paradigm constructs a Location where the singer is robbed of her wits by a beloved who is present. Throughout (returning to Rösler's question), the girl is envisaged as present in the lyric location. This is not an apostrophe but an imagined Location, a lyric world based on real-life elements, imaginatively transformed.