Book Five of the Alexandrian Sappho comes down to us chiefly in a single ruined object: a few leaves of a parchment book, copied in Egypt in the seventh century after Christ — twelve hundred years after the poems were made — dug up at the turn of the twentieth and coaxed legible in Berlin with chemical reagents, leaf by leaf, between 1902 and 1907. The book had been torn apart; top and bottom of every page are gone; one page is effaced past reading. And yet on its two best-preserved pages stand two of the greatest things Sappho ever wrote. One is the parting poem: "I honestly wish I were dead," it begins — but the despair is quoted, not confessed, for it is the other woman, leaving against her will, who weeps it, and Sappho who answers like a steadying hand on the shoulder: go, and be glad, and remember — and then, in the long unrolling sentence the tears interrupt, she does the remembering herself: the violet wreaths, the woven garlands at the soft throat, the royal myrrh, the soft bed, the satisfied longing. Grief is answered with an inventory of pleasure. The other is the poem to Atthis about the woman who has gone away to Lydia: once she held Atthis like a goddess for all to know; now, among the women of Sardis, she shines as the rosy-fingered moon after sunset outshines the stars — and the light spills across the salt sea and the flowered fields, the dew comes down, the roses and chervil and melilot bloom, an entire nightfall poured out of one absent woman — while she paces far away, her tender heart devoured by grief, crying for us to come; and Night, the many-eared, carries what she cries across the water. Around these two stand the wrecks: a list of robes and garlands in saffron and purple; five line-ends of which two can still be made out; the scrap that names Gongyla and swears by the blessed one that there is no pleasure left, and a longing to die; and a single line from Pollux about wrapping someone well in soft, downy cloth. Each fragment is printed under its standard Lobel-Page / Voigt number with its preserving source noted, so every scrap is citable, and the gaps are left visible on purpose: the effaced sixth page, the Cleis fragment and its neighbor published too recently for any public-domain text to exist, and the corrupt handcloths quotation that Athenaeus expressly assigns to "the fifth book of the lyric poems" — deferred, not faked. What can be read is here, and what cannot be read is honestly torn.