place
Sardis
also: Σάρδεις, Σαρδ- (parchment trace)
Capital of Lydia, across the water from Lesbos — the great inland city to which the woman of fr. 96 has gone. Its luxury and its distance are both inside the poem: she shines among Lydian women, and Night carries her cry back across the sea.
Reading notes
- Fragments of Book Five §96 Sard[is
Capital of Lydia. Only the letters ΣΑΡΔ survive at the head of the poem (Blaß supplemented 'from Sardis' in the apparatus), but they place the absent woman: across the strait and far inland, in the richest city of the Greek east's hinterland.