Comparison of Catullus' and Sappho's poems

Both Catullus’ poem 51and Sappho’s original poem 31 suggest the authors’ an agitated moods. Pretending to be Sappho, Catullus conveys a nervous feeling when romantically attracted to another person, which has an acute physical effect on him, “lingua sed torpet.”  Sappho similarly says, “My tongue freezes,” in A.S. Kline’s translation, thereby pointing to her intense shyness.  These poems have the same tones.

While Catullus’ poem and Sappho’s original poem relate via mood, they also differ in their expression of the lover’s relationship with the gods. Catullus audaciously depicts his lover as different from and above the gods, “Par esse deo videtur…superare divos.” Catullus does not use “cum” to describe the lover as equal to the gods, but uses the dative, which seems to remove the lover from the gods and leads to “superare divos,” or the fact that the lover surpasses the deities. Richard Crowell, however, describes Sappho’s lover as “An equal of the gods,” and Kline depicts the lover as “Equal with the gods;” thus, Sappho does not appear to write as boldly about her lover as Catullus does. While Catullus describes the lover as more than a deity, Sappho seems to present the lover as on par with deities.

The significance of the poems’ tones and choice of words appear to result from the historical context. Sappho lived in the 7^th-6^th century B.C. when the Greeks worked to replace tyrants with democracy. As Greece was turning into a people-centered society, Sappho was composing poems focused on human relationships or personal experiences. Catullus was poetically fluorite during the late Roman Republic when the Romans felt disgusted with politics and the civil wars and religious devotion weakened; hence, more individualistic poetry emerged. Both Sappho and Catullus lived during politically tumultuous times that gave birth to lyric poetry.