Sappho’s Fragments 16 V. The bedazzlement

Fragment 16 V is a brief poem in which Sappho, arguing with strict logic and taking as her example the myth ot Helen, formulates the oldest known theory of me nature of beauty. Her modernity is striking beauty is not an absolute quality, but rathcr the fantastic product of the sexual impulse. The details of its phenomenology are enumerated and supported by the Homeric tradition: the initial bedazzlement disturbs the senses, giving risc to illusions; it blinds reason, intoxicates, causes oblivion; but when desire is extinguished, memory and awarenes return and, with them, pain. Understood in these terms, we can see how the Helen of the Odissey goes about dispensing seduction like an analgesic drug. The process repeats itsel over and over again: all of us, each and every one of us, are its subjects, it acts nor just upon that singular Psycho-physical experience of love, but also on the marriage customs of the age, in which the choice of a partner was not provided for. and women abandoned their own environment in order to become part of their husbands'. Thus the poetry of Sappho, which forms part of the iniciation into adult female life, by revealing the relativiry of beauty in the mechanism of love distances its female pupils from their own emotions and protects them against loneliness by including them in a shared religious experience.