Longinus’ rhetorical treatise, On the Sublime, cites Sappho, fr. 31 to illustrate her ability to select and combine intense feelings of love, while Demetrius’ On Style cites many short passages as examples of hyperbole and charming vocabulary. There is, however, no attempt in these rhetorical treatises to analyze these poems as wholes. Indeed, Sappho’s Hymn to Aphrodite (fr. 1), cited by Dionysius of Halicarnassus merely to illustrate her ‘smooth’ style, provides a sophisticated example of the rhetorical persuasion common to hymns, beginning with the invocation, in which the supplicant seeks to enlist divine assistance by defining the god in such as way as to induce her or him to carry out the request:
Immortal Aphrodite of the ornate throne, wile-weaving daughter of Zeus, I beg you, do not overwhelm my heart, mistress, with pain or anguish,
But come here, if ever before you heard my cries from afar, and, heeding them, you left your father’s golden house and came
On your yoked chariot; beautiful swift sparrows, rapidly flapping their wings, carried you over the black earth down from heaven through the middle of the sky,
And quickly arrived. And you, blessed one, with a smile on your immortal face, asked what was wrong this time and why this time I called,
And what my insane heart most desired for me to have: ‘Whom this time am I to persuade to take you back as a friend? Who is wronging you, Sappho?
Tell me, for if she flees, she will soon pursue;
And if she refuses gifts, she will soon be the one to give;
If she does not love, she will soon be in love,
Even if she does not want to’.
Come to me now again, free me from my bitter cares; bring about all that my heart desires to happen, and you yourself be my ally.
The epithet ‘wile-weaving’ (doloploke, 2) hints at Aphrodite’s willingness to engage in intrigue, while the reminder of her previous responses to the speaker’s calls for help in Lines 5-24, with its vivid description of her rapid descent from Olympus, her smiling face, and her dramatic speech, offers persuasive justification for the request to ‘come to me now again’ (25) and be her ‘ally’. The rhetorical strategy in fr. 2, another hymn/prayer, is to describe the festivity to which she summons the deity in such lovely terms that Aphrodite will be inclined to attend and even ‘pour nectar’ (15).42
A different form of rhetorical argument is used in fr. 16, which opens with a priamel in which the speaker surveys what ‘others’ consider the most beautiful thing on earth and contrasts her own choice, ‘that which one loves’ (3-4):
Some say an array of cavalry, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth, but I say it is whatever a person loves.
It is perfectly easy to make that understood by everyone, for she who far surpassed humans in beauty, Helen, abandoned her husband, the best of men,
And went sailing off to Troy
And took no thought of her daughter
Or dear parents, but... led her astray...
[which] now has reminded me of Anactoria, who is not here.
I would rather see her lovely walk and the bright sparkle of her face than those Lydian chariots and armed footsoldiers.
She then supports this assertion with an argument everyone can supposedly understand, by citing the paradeigma of Helen, who abandoned everyone dear to her in order to follow Paris to Troy. Returning to her own situation (‘now’), the speaker declares that she would rather see her beloved Anactoria’s ‘lovely walk and the bright sparkle of her face’ than any military displays. The philosophical proposition advanced in this poetic argument, aesthetic subjectivism, has been widely discussed, and has even been called an ‘astonishing thesis... [that] contains the potentiality of overthrowing any absolute value’.43
Alcaeus, Sappho’s contemporary, also uses forms of argumentation in his poetry. In fr. 42, for example, he also employs the paradeigma of Helen, but arrives at a very different conclusion from that of Sappho. In these two poets we see selective uses of the Homeric tradition to construct opposing arguments. What Alcaeus highlights in his treatment of Helen is not her beauty but the destruction she inflicts on the Trojans who harbored her:
As the story goes, because of evil deeds bitter grief came to Priam and his sons, Helen, on account of you, and Zeus destroyed holy Ilium with fire.
Not such was the tender maiden, whom the noble Peleus, inviting all the blessed gods to the wedding, married and led from the palace of Nereus
To the home of Cheiron. He loosened the girdle of the chaste maiden and the love of Peleus and of the best of Nereus’ daughters flourished, and in a year
She bore a son, the best of the demigods, blessed driver of shining steeds.
But the Trojans and Phrygians perished for Helen’s sake, along with their city.
The contrasting paradeigma (‘not such was’, 5), developed in Lines 5-14, emphasizes Thetis’ proper marriage to Peleus, their love, and the birth of their son, Achilles. The argument rests on the contrasting examples, namely Helen’s illicit love and ‘evil deeds’ (1) that resulted in wholesale destruction, and Thetis’ marriage that produced a blessed demigod (13-14).
Alcaeus also uses an exemplum a fortiori in fr. 38A, a carpe-diem poem addressed to Melanippus:
Drink and get drunk with me, Melanippus. Why do you think that once you have crossed the eddying Acheron you will again see the clear light of the sun?
Come, then, do not aim for great things: take note that King Sisyphus, Aeolus’ son, who knew more than any man, thought that he could overcome death, but in spite of his intelligence fate made him twice cross eddying Acheron and. . .
King Zeus, son of Cronus, made him toil
Under the black earth. Come, then, do not hope for these things: now, if ever, while we are young, [let us] endure any of these sufferings the god may give.
If even Sisyphus, the cleverest of men, who contrived to come back from Hades, could not escape his doom in the end, how could we possibly hope to do so? Therefore Melanippus should join the speaker in getting drunk and accepting their lot while they are young. If we had more of Alcaeus’ political poetry, we would undoubtedly find more evidence of rhetoric. Dionysius of Halicarnassus goes so far as to say (On Imitation 6.205): ‘indeed, throughout his works, if one stripped away the meter, one would find political rhetoric’.44
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