LOVE
1898 printed plate of Papyrus Oxyrhynchus I 7, a fragment of Sappho.

6th–4th c. BCE

Greece. On Lesbos, Sappho calls a goddess into an apple grove. At a dinner in Athens, they argue what desire wants. A school of friends says you would not choose to live without them.

What does eros want?

Hither to me from Crete, to this holy temple, where is your pleasant grove of apple-trees.

Sappho, fragment 2

Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, about the sixth century. She asks the goddess Aphrodite to come from Crete into a grove of apple trees. The lines are broken. This picture is not her hand. It is a copy made centuries later in Egypt, at Oxyrhynchus, and printed in 1898. After her, a dinner in Athens and a school of friends answer different questions.

Athens. A dinner. Diotima speaking, as Socrates tells it.

  1. from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty
  2. from one going on to two
  3. and from two to all fair forms
  4. and from fair forms to fair practices
  5. and from fair practices to fair notions
  6. until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty

and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.

Diotima, in Plato, Symposium

A school. Fourth century.

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Sappho.To the goddess. To desire. To the absent beloved.Then a school, to friends. Not the same address.

Sources

The surviving lines are broken. Friendship, cult, desire, and address to a goddess can occupy the same fragment. Aristophanes' myth in the Symposium is comic.

  1. Sappho. Fragment 2. English after Henry Thornton Wharton, Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation (London: David Stott, 1885). Public domain.
  2. Plato. Symposium. Diotima’s ascent. English after Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871). Public domain. Lineated from the climb that later readers called the ladder of love. A set of speeches, not a taxonomy.
  3. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics 8.1. English after W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908). Public domain.
  4. Grenfell, Bernard P., and Arthur S. Hunt, eds. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, vol. 1. London: Egypt Exploration Fund, 1898. Plate of P.Oxy. I 7. Public domain.