Ode to Aphrodite

[9] However, Anne Carson's edition of Sappho argues for Ποικιλόφρον’,[8] and more recently Rayor and Lardinois, while following Voigt's text, note that "it is hard to decide between these two readings".

[14] The poem is written in Aeolic Greek and set in Sapphic stanzas, a meter named after Sappho, in which three longer lines of the same length are followed by a fourth, shorter one.

[18] The ode is written in the form of a prayer to Aphrodite, goddess of love, from a speaker who longs for the attentions of an unnamed woman.

[23] As late as 1955 Edgar Lobel and Denys Page's edition of Sappho noted that the authors accepted this reading "without the least confidence in it".

[c][28] The poem contains few clues to the performance context, though Stefano Caciagli suggests that it may have been written for an audience of Sappho's female friends.

[30] Ruby Blondell argues that the whole poem is a parody and reworking of the scene in book five of the Iliad between Aphrodite, Athena, and Diomedes.

For instance, at the beginning of the third stanza of the poem, Sappho calls upon Aphrodite in a chariot "yoked with lovely sparrows",[35] a phrase which Harold Zellner argues is most easily explicable as a form of humorous wordplay.

Keith Stanley argues that these lines portray Aphrodite "humorous[ly] chiding" Sappho,[37] with the threefold repetition of δηυτε followed by the hyperbolic and lightly mocking τίς σ', ὦ Ψάπφ', ἀδικήει; [d][37]