The "What Are You Doing This Moment" Thread

Necuratul said:
Sappho :kickass:
Click to expand...

Indeed. It was a very interesting lecture on her poetry last night. She drew interesting connections to the Trojan War and Aristotle. I had to post a response to the lecture (as every week) to the class folder on the campus conference app:

"A major theme of the lecture was that of love in ancient Greek society. This erotic form of love was said to be characterized by a one-way relationship between the lover and the beloved. The lover, older and possessed by passion, draws himself or herself to the beloved, who is stationary and exhibits the attracting qualities, such as beauty and charisma. What intrigued me about this part of the discussion was how the lecturer applied this formula to the principle function of the cosmos, through the conjectures of Aristotle. Aristotle named the spheres of the sun, moon, stars and earth as the lovers who are drawn toward the outwardly surrounding prime mover. The use of the term “prime mover” instantly made me think of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, particularly the Paradiso, in which the poet travels from the mount of Purgatory upwards into the heavenly spheres towards the empyrean, the seat of God. The connection to Aristotle’s prime mover now made sense of Dante’s “primum mobile” which acts as the outermost sphere, which actuates cosmic motion.
And now I saw a fundamental connection between Sappho’s concept of love and the quintessential goal of Judeo-Christendom. Just as a lover moves towards the beloved is the source of such erotic gravity, so are the faithful compelled to move toward God, who resides in the prime mover, the “primum mobile”, of heaven. Dante’s detailed account of the heavens is owed heavily to the theories of Aristotle, who extrapolated the inner forces of love to apply to the outer forces of the cosmic order. The major difference between Dante and Sappho/Aristotle is, as the lecturer pointed out, that the ultimate purpose of this fundamental attraction is eternal unity in a Christian perspective (in love, marriage; in the universe, union with God in heaven), and a temporary bond that is recycled as the beloved ages to become the lover; the spheres of Aristotle’s universe never unite with the prime mover toward which they strive.

In the Q & A portion of the lecture, there was a mention of the Roman poet Catullus and his appreciation of Sappho’s poetry; he drew from her as a primary influence in his poems regarding the nature of love. The lecturer spoke of Catullus’ translation of Sappho’s 31st poem, which I was chanced to have translated in my junior year Latin class. I noticed the similarity when reading her version of the poem and was confused as to why they were similar. Then I realized that in more than one of Catullus’ poems, he addresses his lover with the epithet “Lesbia”. This is an obvious reference to Sappho, as Lesbos was her homeland. In truth, Catullus, who lived 500 years after Sappho, was addressing Clodia, using Sappho’s epithet as homage to his poetic influence. It is my intention to compare the Greek and Latin texts of both poems to see how similar they actually are."
 
Lounging away the last 15-or-so minutes before I have to head off for a Theory of Computation test.
 
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