Ex Sapphus Poematis

Abstract

The present article attempts to clarify the implications of the phrase "ex Sapphus poematis" which recurs several times in the earliest known commentaries on Ovid's Letter of Sappho (Her. 15), with a view to surveying the philological backgrounds which led Angelo Poliziano to pursue two separate lines of research, one on the sources and the other on the rhetorical structure, when he annotated Sapphus Epistula in his personal copy of Ovid (Bodl. Auct. P. II. 2, 238v-241v.; cf. Mediterraneus VIII 1985, 1-51). The argument proceeds the following steps : Francesco Filelfo, if not Bessarion, is the most likely figure who was responsible for a wide-spread 15th century view, that SE was Ovid's translation of Sappho's original poetic epistle ; Giorgio Merula, Filelfo's pupil, revised the master's view, and in the Interpretatio in SE, Venetiis (ante) 1475, stated that SE, though not a translation, contained "multa ex poematis Sapphus" that Ovid had brought into it, without, however, showing concrete evidence to support his contention; Domizio Calderini, reacting sharply to Merula's Interpretatio, presented in his Commentarius in SE fresh evidence from the Scholia in Apollonium Rhodium iv 57-58, demonstrating that Ovid had really made use of Sappho's poem on Luna's love to Endymion when he alluded to it in SE 89-90. Calderini's Greek quotation was a paraphrase derived possibly from the scholia in Cod. Laur. xxxii 9, 242v. In answer to Calderini Merula contended in his Adversus Domitii Commentarius, Venetiis 1478, that his earlier interpretation of SE 39-40 was to be preferred to Calderini's, quoting Demetrius' testimony that the figure of anadiplosis was one ol the characteristics that constituted Sappho's verbal charites. Thus SE, a Latin poem of dubious authenticity though it is, provided the eminent Greek scholars of the mid-1470s with a serious cause for retrieving Sappho-fragments from the most recondite sources available at the time, in order to define Ovid's debt to Sappho's poetry, in materials or in rhetorical devices. Poliziano's annotations clearly betray the close attention he paid to the works of contemporary scholars, and the departures from them toward an intensive rhetorical study of SE with the emphasis on Ovid's skill in the prosopopoiia of Sappho in love.