Sappho's Fragment 16

Sappho 16 is a fragment of a poem by the archaic Greek lyric poet Sappho. It is from Book I of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho's poetry, and is known from a second-century papyrus discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Sappho 16 is a love poem – the genre for which Sappho was best known – which praises the beauty of the narrator's beloved, Anactoria, and expresses the speaker's desire for her now that she is absent. The poem is at least 20 lines long, though it is uncertain whether the poem ends at line 20 or continues for another stanza.

Fragment 16 was preserved on Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1231, a second-century manuscript of Book I of an edition of Sappho, published by Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt in 1914. In 2014, a papyrus discovered by Simon Burris, Jeffrey Fish, and Dirk Obbink – P. GC. inv. 105 – added a few words to the known text of the poem. This papyrus dates to the late-second or early-third century, and is in the same hand as a second papyrus published for the first time in 2014 (P. Sapph. Obbink), which preserves five stanzas of Sappho's Brothers Poem.

Fragment 16 is, along with the other poems of Book I of Sappho's works, composed in Sapphic stanzas. This metre is made up of stanzas of four lines, the first three of which are Sapphic hendecasyllables, of the form "¯ ˘ ¯ × ¯ ˘ ˘ ¯ ¯ ˘ ¯ ¯", followed by a five-syllable adonean, of the form "¯ ˘ ˘ ¯ ¯". At least five stanzas survive; whether the poem ends there or continues into what Burris, Fish, and Obbink number fragment 16a is disputed.

The poem is one of five surviving poems by Sappho which is about "the power of love". It expresses the speaker's desire for the absent Anactoria, praising her beauty. This encomium follows the poet making the broader point that the most beautiful thing to any person is whatever they love the most; an argument that Sappho supports with the mythological example of Helen's love for Paris. Some commentators have argued that the poem deliberately adopts this position as a rejection of typical Greek male values. The poem follows a chiastic structure, beginning with a preamble, moving through to the mythical exemplum of the story of Paris and Helen, and returning to the subject of the preamble for the concluding stanza.

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