Brothers Poem
Other writers examine the poem's worth in the corpus of Sappho's poetry, as well as its links with Greek epic, particularly the homecoming stories of the Odyssey.
[1] In 2014, Dirk Obbink, Simon Burris, and Jeffrey Fish published five fragments of papyrus, containing nine separate poems by Sappho.
[9] There is evidence that the roll was damaged and repaired; it was later reused as cartonnage – a material similar to papier-mâché made with linen and papyrus – which Obbink suggests was used as a book cover.
The initial version of Obbink's article announcing the discovery said that the papyrus was in a private collection, but did not discuss its origin or ownership history, as would be usual when reporting on a newly-discovered ancient artefact; C. Michael Sampson describes this absence as "anomalous and suspicious".
[14] Obbink later claimed that the German officer mentioned by Hughes was an "imaginative fantasy",[17][18] and that the original belief that the papyrus had come from mummy cartonnage was due to a misidentification.
He claimed that the papyrus derived from the collection of David Moore Robinson, who had purchased it in 1954 from an Egyptian dealer, Sultan Maguid Sameda, and on his death left it to the University of Mississippi Library.
[22] It was this anonymous owner who gave Obbink, the head of Oxford University's Oxyrhynchus Papyri project, access to the papyrus and permission to publish it.
[24] In an article for Eidolon, C. Michael Sampson and Anna Uhlig observe that no documentation supporting this account has been produced, and that the evidence for it is "principally Obbink's word".
[28] A third possible provenance was reported in 2020, when Brent Nongbri published an email from Mike Holmes, the Director of the Museum of the Bible Scholars Initiative, which revealed evidence that P. GC.
[33] Theodore Nash argues that "the convoluted cartonnage narrative was simply a red herring to legitimise a recently looted papyrus".
[41] The narrative consists of an address to an unnamed listener, structured in two parallel sections, concerning two of Sappho's brothers, Charaxos and Larichos.
[42] The speaker hopes that Charaxos will return successfully from a trading voyage, and that Larichos will grow into manhood,[43] and take up his position among the elites of society in Lesbos.
In the final stanza, the speaker hopes that Larichos will "[lift] his head high"[50] and "become an ἄνηρ [man] in all senses", as Obbink puts it,[51] and release the family from its troubles.
[52] When Obbink published the poem in 2014, he attributed it to Sappho based on its metre, dialect (Aeolic), and mentions of Charaxos and Larichos, both of whom are identified in other sources as her brothers.
[8] Nonetheless, evidence provided by Herodotus indicates that Charaxos was mentioned in poems that were attributed to Sappho during the fifth century BC; therefore it is likely to be at least authentically from archaic Lesbos.
[60] The addressee of the poem is unnamed in the surviving text,[61] but many suggestions have been made as to their identity – Camillo Neri lists eleven possible candidates.
Many (including Martin L. West, Franco Ferrari, Camillo Neri, and Leslie Kurke) select Sappho's mother as the most likely option.
He suggests that the speaker's offer to pray to Hera is a "solution appropriate to her gender",[68] and contrasts with the masculine belief that the family's problems can be solved through Charaxos' pursuit of wealth.
[66] In contrast, Mueller and Leslie Kurke both argue that the addressee is probably meant to be female, based on Sappho's use of the word θρυλέω ("chattering" or "babbling") to describe their speech.
[74] For instance, Lardinois sees Charaxos and Larichos as fictional characters: he draws comparisons to the poetry of Archilochus about Lycambes and his daughters, generally considered to be fictionalised.
Silvio Bär argues that the poem was deliberately positioned here because it was seen as a sort of continuation of that fragment by the editor of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho's poetry.
[97] The relationship in the poem between the speaker, Charaxos, and Larichos parallels that of Penelope, Odysseus, and Telemachus in Homer:[98] in the Brothers Poem, the speaker awaits Charaxos' return from overseas and Larichos' coming-of-age; in the Odyssey, Penelope awaits Odysseus' return and Telemachus' coming-of-age.
[99] Additionally, Anton Bierl suggests that the context of Charaxos' being away in Egypt – according to Herodotus, in love with the courtesan Rhodopis – parallels Odysseus' entrapment by Calypso and Circe.
[101] Mueller suggests that the Brothers Poem is a deliberate reworking of the Homeric story, focusing on the fraternal relationship between Sappho and Charaxos in contrast to the conjugal one between Odysseus and Penelope.
Obbink, the apparent alphabetic arrangement in the Alexandrian edition of her works, and the implausibility of any poem beginning with the word ἀλλά (meaning "but" or "and yet"), suggest that at least one opening stanza is missing.
[116] Obbink also suggests that the opening lines originally contained a mention of the death of Sappho's father when she was young, which was the source of Ovid's anecdote at Heroides 15.61–62.
[118] Other commentators expressed concern about the provenance of the papyrus, fearing that it had been illegally acquired on the black market, or even that it was a forgery like the Gospel of Jesus' Wife.
[18] Douglas Boin in The New York Times criticised the failure to discuss the papyrus' provenance properly as "disturbingly tone deaf to the legal and ethical issues".
[119] Following reports in 2019 that Obbink had illicitly sold several fragments of papyrus to Hobby Lobby, which were then donated to the Green Collection, further questions about the provenance were raised.
[122] Richard Rawles suggested that part of the reason that the poem was initially considered disappointing was because it was not about sexuality or eroticism – a factor that he predicted would make the fragment of greater interest in the future.
