Middlemarch instal the new version for apple

He does so, despite the fact that he was writing long before the discovery of any new Sappho papyri. Ħ Nonetheless, Müller in the 1840s describes Sappho’s apple poem as ‘a fragment lately discovered’. But such ‘new’ Sappho poems lay in the future as Eliot wrote Middlemarch. Many more papyri have been discovered since that date, and our knowledge of Sappho is more extensive nowadays than at any time since classical antiquity.

Then, in 1879, a papyrus containing a new fragment of Sappho was discovered at Faiyum in Egypt. Sappho’s poems had been extracted from these sources and published in separate volumes as early as the 1550s, and in 1681 the French scholar Anne Le Fèvre published an edition of Sappho that made her work more widely known across Europe. For most of the last thousand years Sappho has been known only by those poems and fragments that happened to be recorded by other writers: one whole poem, three partial poems and various shorter fragments and pieces, down (sometimes) to single words. Despite her once widespread popularity, she fell out of favour in the centuries after her death, either because the Aeolic dialect of Greek in which she wrote came to be considered ugly, or else because of disapproval by the Christian church at her bisexuality. 2Ĥ Müller adds a footnote: ‘the fragment is in Walz, Rhetores Graeci, vol. In a fragment lately discovered, which bears a strong impression of the simple language of Sappho, she compares the freshness of youth and the unsullied beauty of a maiden’s face to an apple of some peculiar kind, which, when all the rest of the fruit is gathered from the tree, remains alone at an unattainable height, and drinks in the whole vigour of vegetation or rather (to give the simple words of the poetess in which the thought is placed before us and gradually heightened with great beauty and nature): ‘like the sweetapple which ripens at the top of the bough, on the topmost point of the bough, forgotten by the gatherers-no, not quite forgotten, but beyond their reach’. 2 Karl Otfried Müller, History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, trans.

Middlemarch instal the new version for apple