Sappho, Tithonos and the ruin of the body.

The ruins of classical antiquity provoke a paradoxical, antinomic response; they evoke fears of decay and death, even as they promise survival and even immortality. The paper illustrates this point by discussing a newly discovered fragment of Sappho. The author suggests that the poem's meanings, held in abeyance, echo the ways in which we encounter the ruins of antiquity as twenty-first-century readers, identifying with these bodies, desiring both the pathos of ruin, and the consolations of the material objects' relative immortality. Twenty-first century readers of Sappho's poetry read, restore and reinscribe her poems within the horizon of their own aesthetics, their conscious and unconscious desires. The fragment, with its doubled, ambiguous, ambivalent endings, juxtaposed with other recovered fragments, is emblematic of the encounter with the remnants and ruins of all of antiquity, material remains that call for identification and fantasy, the recognition of inevitable physical decay, and the utopian hope for immortality, or, failing that, survival and the persistence in ruin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]