page_title: Tithonus poem
section_title: Poem
hierarchical_section_title: Tithonus poem / Poem
caption_attribution_description: English: Museo Bardini - Paintings
context_page_description: The Tithonus poem, also known as the old age poem or the New Sappho, is a poem by the archaic Greek poet Sappho. It is part of fragment 58 in Eva-Maria Voigt's edition of Sappho. The poem is from Book IV of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho's poetry. The poem was first published in 1922, after a fragment of papyrus on which it was partially preserved was discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Papyrus fragments published in 2004 almost completed the poem, drawing international media attention. The poem is one of very few substantially complete works by Sappho, and deals with the effects of ageing. There is scholarly debate about where the poem ends, as four lines previously thought to have been part of the poem are not found on the 2004 papyrus.
context_section_description: The Tithonus poem is twelve lines long, and is in a metre called "acephalous Hipponacteans with internal double-choriambic expansion".  It is the fourth poem by Sappho to be sufficiently complete to treat as an entire work, along with the Ode to Aphrodite, fragment 16, and fragment 31: a fifth, the Brothers Poem, was discovered in 2014.
  The poem is written as an exhortation to a group of young women, putting forward the singer as an example to emulate. It discusses the singer's old age, and tells the audience that while they too will grow old and lose their beauty, their musical abilities will be retained.  Anton Bierl suggests that the poem was originally composed as a didactic work, intended to teach young women about beauty and mortality.  It is one of a number of Sappho's poems which discuss old age.
  The poem's common name comes from the Greek myth of Tithonus, which is mentioned in lines 9 to 12 of the poem.  According to legend Tithonus was a Trojan prince, loved by Eos, the goddess Dawn.  She asked that Zeus make her lover immortal; he granted the request, but as she did not ask for eternal youth for Tithonus, he continued to age for eternity.  The story of Tithonus was popular in archaic Greek poetry, though the reference to him in this poem seems out of place, according to Rawles.  However, Page duBois notes that the use of a mythical exemplum to illustrate the point of a poem, such as the story of Tithonus in this poem, is a characteristic feature of Sappho's poetry – duBois compares it to Sappho's use of the story of Helen in fragment 16.Martin Litchfield West considers that these lines seem like a weak ending to the poem, though Tithonus functions as a parallel to Sappho in her old age.
caption: Tithonus, detail of Aurora e Titone c. 1635, Giovanni da San Giovanni
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