“Ode to Their Highness Atlantia”:

A Horatian Ode in Sapphic Verse from 300 AD Aegyptus Province

***click the title of this page for the full documentation, including Works Cited and an analysis of the poem***

Heavy now, the crown on your head must rest, no?

Far beyond the helm, which so recent there sat.

Force of circumstance may account the crown’s mass

Missing in aspect.

Odd, how weight remains, though the royal band there 5

Differs so in size when compared to Konos.

Heated in the crucible, ore blooms silver:

Alchemy proven.

Transmutation is, at its heart, a challenge:

Make material from the every-day rise, 10

No additions given, just quality deep

Purified, surfaced.

Lone Pygmalion prayed: though a master sculptor,

Living fire he scorned in a woman’s bright eyes --

Loved he ivory more, Aphrodite’s soft gift; 15

Beautiful, empty.

Cadmus, Thebes’ first king, did a dragon once slay;

Sowed he monster’s teeth, which then sprouted Spartoi,

Bloody men who killed, at a stone’s provoking --

Should such as these rule? 20

Those of tooth and tusk may comprise whole cities;

Thrones demand much more, so our crowns are well cast.

In the furnace-list, be they ferrous, argent:

All will be tested.

Copper may bronze make, just as men improve, true; 25

Plain to precious though? Metamorphosis rare.

Zosimos revealed the material secrets:

Metals have spirit.

Victor, which are you? Of a dull-hewn iron

Gilt by state and pomp? Or a rarer champion, 30

Silver heart revealed when the armored slag drops?

Show us your mettle.

I. Introduction

“Ode to Their Highness Atlantia” is a Horatian Ode written in Sapphic verse in honor of the winner of Crown Tourney. Sapphics are a lyric verse form attributed to Sappho (c. 600 BCE), a female poet from the island of Lesbos (Brogan et al.). This poem uses the long tradition of Sapphic verse in Latin as the basis for an Ode directed to the winners of Crown Tourney. It combines the thematic, metrical, and figurative expectations of lyric verse forms from the first centuries CE, and the historical context of poetry and the world at the time, to situate an original poem specifically in Roman-controlled Egypt c. 300 CE. (The use of “Their” and having no male-gendered nouns to refer to the subject is intentional -- this poem suits either Prince or Princess by Right of Arms -- as Sappho would have wanted).

II. Sapphic Verse: From Greek to English

The Sapphic hendecasyllabic (11 syllable) verse has a particularly complicated history. It was first used by Sappho (for whom it was named) in 600 BCE, and was further complicated by her classical contemporary Alcaeus (Brogan et al.). This original form is difficult to describe, because Greek-language verse uses counted syllables (like haiku!), rather than accented ones, or, as quoted in Tweedie’s guide to the form:

“The original sapphic form was determined by quantitative meter, based on the nature of the ancient Greek language in which syllables were either long or short, depending on vowel length and ending sound. However, modern sapphics are rendered in accentual meter determined instead by the stress and intensity of a syllable. The accentual meter of the sapphic approximates the original form by equating long syllables with stressed ones, and short syllables with unstressed ones.”(poets.org)

For further explanation, some “long” and “short” syllables in English are provided below, and a sample line of Sapphic verse written literally this way -- let’s imagine a detective taking a bribe:

Notice how the stresses in English words don’t necessarily correlate with the syllabic length. The word “nothing” has the first syllable stressed (NOthing), but the Greeks would have considered that /nuh/ sound to be a short syllable because the vowel sound is short (/nuh/ instead of /no/) and there is only a consonant on one side. Because English is a much more accented language, most English poets attempting to successfully capture Sapphic verse “attempt to reproduce the internal stanzaic dynamics as well as the interstanzaic movement of the Horatian ode by using accentual templates for the quantitative rhythms. An accentual template is an array of stressed and unstressed syllables organized in approximately the same pattern as the long and short syllables of the original” (Willett).

In Horace’s time, the Latin pedagogical method for hendecasyllabic verse changed the meter slightly more. Becker explains that “Horace’s Latin Sapphic is more fixed than his Greek models...there is an expected caesura after the fifth syllable, immediately preceding the pair of short syllables” (168). What seems to make the late Roman Sapphics particular to their time and place is this caesura, and so it will be included in my circa 300 CE Sapphic ode. “Later Latin poets follow this model, making a caesura after the fifth syllable a rule: we find no exceptions in, e.g., Seneca, Statius, Prudentius…” (Becker 168).

As multiple classical scholars and translators have recommended this method (as opposed to trying a more...interpretive strategy, like some poets, who translate the soaring tones of the form into heroic couplets *shudder*), I will be reproducing Latin Sapphic stanza as / for stressed syllable, u for unstressed, x for either, and a || for the caesura -- an intentional pause in a line).