The second book of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho was built on a single music: every poem in it ran in the fourteen-syllable line the ancient metricians called the Sapphic pentameter, a glyconic swollen with two dactylic runs — Hephaestion says so outright, and Athenaeus, quoting the silver-cups line printed here, names "the second book of Sappho" as his source. Those two notices are the ancient warrant for this grouping, and this work gathers everything of Book Two that survives in public-domain witness: one papyrus poem with the end of its neighbor, and seven quotation fragments torn out by grammarians, metricians, a doctor, and a Stoic logician. Each fragment is printed under its standard Lobel-Page / Voigt number with its preserving source noted, so every scrap is citable. One number is missing on purpose: fr. 48, quoted by the emperor Julian, has no public-domain text on hand, and the gap is left visible rather than papered over.

The center of the work — and the longest run of Sappho then known — is the Wedding of Hector and Andromache (44), from a third-century papyrus roll dug out of Oxyrhynchus and published by Grenfell and Hunt in 1914; the roll’s own subscription, "Songs of Sappho," is the attribution. It is Sappho doing Homer in her own metre: the herald Idaeus runs in with news of "undying fame" — Homer’s exact phrase for glory that outlasts death — and the freight he announces is not war-spoil but bridal goods, bracelets and purple robes and ivory, Andromache carried over the salt sea toward a city that turns out in carriages to meet her. The poem ends in sound: myrrh and cassia and frankincense on the flame, the older women crying the ololyga, the men calling on Apollo, and bride and groom hymned as "the equals of gods" — a phrase that cannot help but recall fr. 31’s "equal to the gods," here spoken without dread, by a whole city at once. Reading it against the Iliad is the whole point and the whole ache: every listener knew what becomes of Hector, of Andromache, and of Troy. Before it stands the tail of another poem (43), seven broken line-ends from some night festival that close on a summons: "but come, my dears — for day is near."

After the papyrus, the lightning-flashes. Eros arrives "again" and shakes the wits like a mountain wind hitting oaks (47); the poet looks back at Atthis, loved "long ago," when she seemed "a small child, and without grace" (49) — tenderness and condescension in one breath; indecision becomes anatomy, "two minds in me" (51), a line preserved because a Stoic wanted a specimen negation; and human limit gets its exact measure: no one touches the sky with two forearms (52). Galen quotes the sermon on beauty — looks carry only "as far as the seeing goes"; goodness makes beauty (50) — and two domestic miniatures survive on single rare words: consent given "as long as you wish it" (45), and limbs laid on a soft cushion (46).

The Greek texts are public-domain witnesses kept as printed: Grenfell and Hunt’s 1914 editio princeps for the papyrus (their restorations in square brackets, including readings later editions revised), and Edwin Marion Cox’s 1924 edition for the quotations, with Cox’s print artifacts preserved and flagged — fr. 47’s "ὄπος" (evidently ὄρος, "mountain," the same class of garble as fr. 16’s "γαπ") is translated by the evident sense and logged in the translator’s notes. Where the papyrus tears, the translation tears with it.