One
Sappho's Amatory Language

Giuliana Lanata Translated by William Robins

At times, Sapphic poetry—most particularly the amatory lyric of Sappho— has been injured by its own extensive success. It has come about, in other words, that, confronted by such an imposing phenomenon, ancient as well as modern criticism has abdicated its proper nature as an interpreter in order to surrender itself to the "ardent" and "ineffable" tones of dithyrambic exaltation, of mawkish sentimentality, of decadent sensiblerie . A patient (and petulant) excerptor of the vast specialist literature on the topic could compile without too much difficulty a small anthology of bad taste within the field of so-called imitative criticism. Even a critic as sober, moderate, and cautious as D.L. Page let himself take part at one point, introducing in two pages of his Sappho and Alcaeus a description of the "society" of Lesbos fit for the pen of J.A. Symonds, which seems directed less by any kind of critical necessity than by the "Mediterranean" myths of a nineteenth-century Englishman: "exquisite gardens, where the rose and hyacinth spread perfume; pine-tree-shadowed coves, when they might bathe in the calm of a tideless sea."' Welcome, then, are the calls for methodical sobriety put forward by Max Treu at the beginning of the brief interpretive essay included in his edition of Sappho,2 and according to which Page's book is, in fact, to such a great degree informed.

From another angle, due to an incomprehension already current in antiquity about the historicosocial context within which to place Sappho's poetry for a correct evaluation of its contents, criticism took the road of

a more or less sensitive or fervent or scandalized denunciation, or more often a hazy and evasive psychologism of a kind that strove (and strives, for this is not a closed chapter) to illustrate "amorous fullness," to reconstruct the interior history of a "beautiful Soul." In this choir there is no lack of voices, animated by chivalric indignation, that in response to any "calumny" point to the "skilled housewife"3 in Sappho, the "madame landlady" for some pensioned Edwardian, a second Madame de Maintenon, the "lady professor" of literature and belles-artes. Nor does it seem that any better service has been rendered to the interpretation of Sappho's poetry by those modern critics who have made a great display of the latest Freudianisms.

Thus whoever today would reconsider in its complexity what is usually improperly called Sapphofrage is tempted to repeat, albeit with amused irony and with different motivation, some words that Gunther Zuntz wrote in his tastefully disdainful Latin: "Philologorum in mores inquisituro luculentam sane hae interpretandi rationes praebent materiam: ad Sappho nihil pertinet."4 If, among other things, it is true that "the eternal feminine" is exalted more willingly in criticism written, for example, in Italian, in criticism written in German hints of südliche Glut (southern passion) frequently appear.

Naturally, there have been many espousals of positions that were supposed to "de-dramatize" the question and bring it back to more appropriate terms. So, for example, Erich Bethe in an article that remains fundamental5 (but also Beloch, DeSanctis, and Marrou, to mention some names) has clarified very lucidly the place that homosexual love occupied in archaic Greek society—in Sparta as well as in Chalcis, in Lesbos as well as in Crete, within both male and female communities or associations—where it constituted one of the bonds and at the same time established itself as an important pedagogic instrument. Typical of this historical moment in Greek civilization is the tendency to consider the learning process as the work of a careful and overshadowing vigilance exercised on the

by the

, who for his own sake is pledged to make himself worthy of his role as a guide. However, the idealization of this picture as wrought by the idyllic or "prude" moralism of various later sources should not blind our eyes to the reality of the amorous relations to which archaic lyric attests with complete naturalness.

As far as regards Sappho in particular, the question has been restudied recently by Reinhold Merkelbach, who in a long article, "Sappho und ihr Kreis," reexamined the internal and external evidence that enable a reconstruction, around the poetess, of a Mädchenbund , a circle held together by communal life and by sacral bonds, within which they could (no, indeed, they had

to) establish those particular erotic tensions that the poetry of Sappho reveals. Unfortunately, behind this Mädchenbund the still-unexorcised specter of the Mädchenpensionat rises again in some way, even if cum grano salis , and Merkelbach avoids a direct engagement through comparisons with the nature of Sapphic eros, to which he quickly nods in a note that proves sybilline to me.6

On the other hand it is to say the least curiously indiscrete, and not generally justified by language parallel to ephebic poetry, for Page to presume to find in the fragments of Sappho any "evidence for practice" beyond evidence "for inclination" for homosexual love.7 For if, for example, Solon or Anacreon can be very explicit,8 yet in the ephebic collection that closes the compilation of Theognis (and where Sapphic imitation is widely evident, as I will discuss more thoroughly below) one finds rather rare "evidence for practice" in the sense intended by Page. Moreover, and just to ironize a little in such a "compromising" situation, Sappho certainly did not mean to provide a kind of sociological documentation on the sentimental and sexual initiation of the girls on Lesbos in the manner of Margaret Mead, or like that furnished so prolixly by Mary McCarthy concerning the gifts at Vassar College.

And, it might be said in parentheses, one needs to proceed cautiously here as in any analogous case of using fragments to reconstruct a "biography" that might otherwise run the risk of being "romanticized." For example, in fragment 1219 it is certain, it seems to me, that the lady speaking in the first person, rejecting love or marriage with a younger man, is not Sappho. K.J. Dover has recently urged a salutary caution in interpreting the fragments of archaic lyric where the poet seems to speak in propria persona , citing rather conveniently fragment 10.1 of Alcaeus,

, where the feminine form shows that the person who speaks is not Alcaeus.10 The problem of the right age for marriage appears in a typical Hesiodic sequence (Op . 695 ff.) and recurs with frequency in Greek poetry, as is shown by, among others, the

of Stobaeus who cites the Sapphic fragment (4.22.5; IV pp. 542 ff. Hense). Likewise in the case of Sappho, who gives a joking variation of it in her famous fragment 105, one ought to think rather of an epithalamic motif.

I therefore would not like to investigate here the "amorous life" of Sappho or the "life" of the thiasos , but would rather like to attempt a reconstruction,

which will be based above all on data provided by the language (given that others have already clarified the historicosocial assumptions) of the environment and conditions in which a very specific poetic experience, though by no means unique in the archaic Greek world, matured. The problem of the name with which to define the Sapphic circle does not seem truly essential. It could be called

, it could perhaps be called

; recurs three times in Sappho (frs. 126, 142, 169), and there is also the masculine

in the fragment on the marriage of Hector and Andromache (44.5) with which she to a certain degree can make available some "concrete experience"11 of her own time even in the description of a mythic past. Fragment 160, "I shall now sing for my

this beautiful song of joy"12 —

—is a precious testimony of the precise audience to whom Sapphic poetry was originally addressed. Nor do I know if it is simply a coincidence that the feminine

, attested only once in Greek, appears in Corinna,13 a woman poet in whom the influence of Sappho is evident in various aspects.

In another Sapphic fragment (150) the expression

(o

) occurs: "It is not right that there should be a lament in a house of

Our source, Maximus of Tyre, affirms that Sappho here speaks to her daughter Cleis, so there would be no reason to think of other "boarders" of the

. But, by speaking of herself as

, I do not think Sappho is using simply some generic term for designating herself as a "poetess,"14 but shows herself belonging within a cultic association whose members count among their bonds that of the cult of the Muse;

occurs with precise cultic significance in an epigraphic document described by Franz Poland.15 But the divinity that appears with typical prominence in the fragments of Sappho is, as is well known, Aphrodite, who was also, for example, worshiped at Athens and at Ephesus with the appellation

; for

and

, or as Athenaeus attests,

of noble lineage, were joined together in her name.16 If the constant copresence in Sappho's poetry of

the Charites and the Muses (whose ties with Aphrodite are attested ever since the Homeric hymn to Apollo)17 shows that Sapphic eroticism, however intense and "ineluctable,"18 is nevertheless free from the mysterious and relentless frenzy that, for example, Eros connotes in the verses of Ibycus,19 and if in ode 1 Aphrodite appears in order to temper rather than to stir up the "aches of the heart," then the choice of Aphrodite as the divinity typically appropriate and almost unique among the Sapphic circle could not have been fortuitous. Page's anxiousness to deny that Sappho might have had an official role as a "priestess"20 hinders him from then giving a positive evaluation of the place occupied by this divinity in her poetry.

Now, except for a fragment where she is invoked as goddess of the sea (fr. 5), Aphrodite is, in Sappho's poetry as in Homer or in the Hymns , the goddess who subdues with the torment and passion of love.21 And if ode 1 could make us think of a particular and personal type of Sapphic religion, the fragment from the Florentine ostracon (2) brings us back to a precise cultic environment, as is guaranteed by phrases such as the

of lines 1-2, and so also to a precise occasion or circumstance in which Sappho and the

of her circle celebrated the divinity to whom their existence was most closely linked, in the space sacred to her and in the fullness of her attributes.22

Merkelbach has underlined some coincidences, in elements improperly called "descriptive," between the fragment from the ostracon and fragment 5 of Ibycus, where the description of an "untouched garden," where Cidonian apples blossom irrigated by flowing waters, serves as a backdrop to the frenzy of Eros.23 Yet rather than to the "gardens of the nymphs" of which Merkelbach thinks, I believe that fragment 2 of Sappho refers

to a clearly Aphrodisian environment, where elements that in other contexts and other periods would be "landscapist" have a cultic meaning that has already been emphasized by Bruno Gentili with particular reference to the amatory language in Anacreon's poetry and archaic lyric, where the mention of apples or roses always alludes to the presence or power of Aphrodite.24

Besides fragments 4 and 5 K of the Cypria , already cited by Gentili, where the "spring flowers"—crocuses hyacinths violets roses narcissi lilies— embellish the clothes and form the crowns that adorn the

and her

, Nymphs and Charites, I would like to recall the passage of the

25 where, to conceal the embrace of Hera and Zeus, the earth miraculously makes fresh grass and flowers of lotus and crocus and hyacinth shoot up under them. And also in Hesiod's Theogony (1. 279), Poseidon possesses one of the Hesperides "on a soft field and in the middle of spring flowers,"

, a passage to which lines 9-10 in fragment 2 of Sappho bear comparison: "there a field where the horses graze blossoms with spring flowers,"

.26 That, besides the apples and roses of line 6, the "field where the horses graze,"

, ought also to be linked to a sacral Aphrodisian environment, and gains confirmation not only from the image of the "horses of Aphrodite" of the girls ready for love in a new fragment of Anacreon,27 but also from a quatrain of the ephebic collection of Theognis (ll. 124.ff.), where the commentators generally refer to Anacreon, although here, as is often the case, the most notable similarities are with Sappho:

O youth, like a horse, since you are sated with fodder, turn again to my stables, desiring a good rider and a beautiful field and a fresh spring and shady woods.

Here, besides the coincidences of

(Sappho 2.5) and

(Sappho 2.7), we can observe

. (Sappho 2.9). The

will also be noted, which corresponds to the typical

with which Sappho indicates with a nearly formulaic insistence the recurrence of a well-known situation. And I would also like to note that a word so rarely attested in Greek outside of medical literature as

, which is in line of the ostracon fragment to indicate the drowsiness that falls from the rustling leaves, appears significantly in the above-cited section of the

(1. 359)28 to indicate the drowsiness that welcomes Zeus after his embrace with Hera.

Fragment 2, where all the elements allow us to reconstruct a precise sacral environment where everything defines Aphrodite as the goddess who bestows love (and already Page, referring to fr. 96.26ff.,

, underlined the recurrence and typicality of the situations that prescribe poems of this kind in the Sapphic environment),29 can open our understanding for all those fragments, which it is not necessary to cite here in their entirety, where Sappho represents herself and the gifts of her circle who adorn themselves and enjoy the flowers sacred to the goddess. In particular in line 11 of fragment 94, to which I will turn again later, Sappho recalls for a girl who is leaving part of the

of their past life, the crowns of violets and roses, the garlands of flowers, and immediately afterward also the "satisfaction of love's longing" (ll. 21-23); and here Page has clearly shown that the

of line 23 can mean nothing but "you freed yourself from your desire by giving it satisfaction," as the analogy with the Homeric

reveals.30 That

in Sappho takes on a specifically erotic meaning is made clear above all from fragments 48.2 and 102.2, where it is associated with the typical

(I am overcome). So also fragment 126, "sleeping (you would sleep?) on the breast of a tender friend,"

, seems able to be interpreted in the sense of a tender amorous yielding, at least if, in our ignorance of the context (which in the fact of the matter renders every interpretation conjectural), some light is shed for us by its repetition by Theocritus in the Epithalamium of Helen , so rich in Sapphic reminiscences: "Sleep breathing love and passion, one on the chest of the other,"

(ll. 54-55).31

Thus, the

Sappho addresses herself above all to the

united to her both by the ties of the cult of Aphrodite and also sometimes

by ties of a love that cannot in any way be identified with a "maternal tenderness,"32 and who were part of the very life of the

. And once these amorous ties, like those of the cult, became an object of poetry, this ought to have provided an adequate expressive instrument, a language that could respond to the needs of an experience of a new and particular situation. Merkelbach suggests a comparison between the love poetry of Sappho and troubadour or stilnuovo lyric:33 one might be confronted here with an analogous escape into an "impossible love" in environments where, at moments historically, culturally, and socially entirely different, amorous passion did not find satisfying the answer to be had in a relation with a beloved man or beloved woman destined to then become spouse and companion for life. Apart from all the necessary cautions in comparing completely different cultural situations, apart from the "sublimation" of Sapphic eroticism, which Merkelbach starts to introduce in this way but which I cannot share, I believe that this suggestion might be partly used in a different sense. Just as troubadour and stilnuovo lyric develop particular languages typical of these schools and constituting one of the elements distinguishing them from other "styles" of amorous lyric, so in Sapphic lyric one can isolate the elements of a series of amatory representations articulated in a language in which Homeric, Hesiodic, and Archilochean precedents are yoked together to characterize a new situation. In this situation they acquire a new resonance by the unusual frequency with which they are employed to function as thematic words, by the new meanings with which they are invested, and also by the copresence of newer terms dictated by the needs of a changed situation.

A language of this kind naturally finds significant correspondences in Anacreon and in the ephebic lyric of Pindar and Theognis, which accordingly ensure which meanings are to be read in the amorous lyric of Sappho-On the other hand, the "imitations" and later applications of this language, for example by Alexandrian poets, should be examined with greater caution, because in the literary game of allusion, embedding, and citation a twist away from the meaning of the original might always be at work. An analysis of this language should be linked both to the environmental considerations mentioned above and also to a series of researches such as those of Turyn, Treu, Kazik-Zawadzka, and Marzullo, which, even in the diversity of methodological bases and of results, have contributed to defining the historical position of Aeolic poetry, and of Sapphic poetry in particular, in its relations to the epic tradition.34

It is still necessary to warn, in relation to our specific problem, that vague appeals to "universal laws of the human heart," as well as gleanings of loci similes such as those contained in the Studia Sapphica of Turyn, which illustrate the persistence of several topoi up to late Latinity with parallels in the Romance literatures, are insufficient for the aims of a precise evaluation of the amatory lyric of Sappho. Just to present a macroscopic example, one might try to pair the

of Sappho's fragment 31.7-8 with the "ogne lingua deven tremando muta" (every tongue becomes mute in trembling) of the Vita Nova . It will be seen that what might perhaps be thought of as a mere physiological response valid in every case, or in the case of every "sensitive soul," in Dante expresses his reverential inhibition before the terrestrial image of Paradise, while in Sappho it is integrated into a very different framework of "signs" as will be analyzed below.

Likewise, nothing is more frequent in amatory lyric than the topos of "love and death," and even in Sappho it recurs with particular insistence. Yet if the "it seems to me I am almost dead,"

, of the ode handed down by Longinus (fr. 31.15-16) used to appear as the unrepeatable impulse of desperation of a "solitary soul," the Berlin papyrus has since reinstituted two "variations" on the same theme: in fragment 94.1, "truly I wish I were dead,"

, and in fragment 95.11-13, "a longing to die holds me, and to see the dewy banks of Acheron flowering with lotus,"

. But the characteristic expressive "conventionality" with which the motif is handled by Sappho reveals that the relative fixity of its formulation expresses a moment typical of the Sapphic experience of eros, destined to repeat itself more times in analogous situations: to be precise, the

(helplessness; fr. 130) when faced with the necessity of separation, institutionally germane to the Sapphic circle, or when faced with the impossibility of possession, which thus suggests as a solution the desire for death.35 The motif is taken up again, as is well known, by Anacreon, who, perhaps because he uses it outside of a situation or context immediately clear to his listeners, introduces with

a clarification that Sappho does not find necessary: "Might I die, for I can find no other release from these sufferings,"

(fr. 411a P. = 29 Gent.). Similarly, the young gift of the new parthenium of Alcman (3 P.), which even more clearly than the previous example attests to an interlacing of impassioned amorous relations among the instigators,

is gazed at "more consumingly than sleep or than death,"

(ll. 61-62).36

As is the case with a large part or with all the rest of erotic Greek poetry, the amatory language of Sappho has in common with the Homeric-Hesiodic tradition some terms such as

, and

, or for example an adjective such as

(limb-relaxing) to characterize Eros (an epithet attested in this sense beginning with Hes. Theog . 121, 911). These terms were so diffuse that it is superfluous to cite parallel passages; it is more interesting to try to note how they recur with typical frequency in texts that mention analogous situations to those described in Sappho's poetry as in the already-cited parthenium 3 E of Alcman (ll. 61-62): "she gazes at me with passion that loosens my limbs,"

37

, and in the Chalcidian popular song (fr. 873 P.), where love for the

who lack neither nobility of origin nor the favor of the Charites38 is likewise called

. One could also note, with all the caution demanded by the fragmentary state of the testimonies, that in the Sapphic lexicon (in which, to the degree it is known to us, the greater part of the terms are attested to only once) words such as

recur with a significant frequency,39 equal only to the frequency of appearance of terms that connote other characteristic aspects of Sapphic sensuality such as

, and, naturally,

. And it might perhaps be a coincidence ascribable to the tastes and the particular criteria of choice of the later sources, but Sapphic neoformations such as

40 (weaver of wiles) to denote Aphrodite, or

(bittersweet; fr. 130.2),41

(paingiver; fr. 172), or

(weaver of tales; fr. 188) to connote Eros, are also always dictated by this same need to express a particular experience without precise literary precedents.

Moreover, according to the historical process, already amply illustrated by others, that enables words from epic language to assume meanings partly or entirely new in the age of lyric, some terms from epic assume in Sappho a new amatory meaning.

, which in Homer for example can be said of the wind that shakes or stirs the trees, of the pestering that puts heifers to flight, and so on, appears in Sappho 130.1 in its first attestation for the love that "stirs, shakes, upsets the soul"; the meaning recurs in Pindar (Pyth . 4.218-19), where the

(desired Hellas), and so the passion for Jason, upsets (

) Medea "burned in the heart,"

, and in the Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes (l. 954),42 where a young lady, vainly awaiting a man, softly sings a love song in which she invokes her beloved to spend the night with her, "for a love upsets me with trembling,"

K.J. Dover thinks the disposition of this Aristophanic love song, "

" (ll. 952, 960), to be typical of popular song,43 but it is also clear that in this case the popular song was reelaborated by Aristophanes with an intent of literary parody (

, ll. 882-83; "Muses, come here to me, find an Ionian ditty"). This is shown by the interlacing of reminiscences and citations: line 956, "an extraordinary passion is (lies) in me,"

, is to be compared with Archilochus, fragment 104 D.: "he lay miserable from the passion,"

. And the response of the youth, lines 973-74: "Oh my care, covered with gold, offspring of the Cyprian, bee of the Muse, raised by the Charites,"

, is to be compared, as van Leeuwen has already done, with fragment 7 E of Ibycus: "O Euryalus, offspring of the blue-eyed Graces, care of the [8] of the beautiful locks, the Cyprian and Peitho with the soft gaze raised you among flowers of roses,"

. And if line 954 cited above truly contains, as I believe, a Sapphic reminiscence, this would make it equally believable that also in lines 877 ff. and 911 ff. Aristophanes freely echoes the famous

(the moon has

set; 94 D.), as well as assisting the argument of the supporters of the infinitely contested authenticity of the fragment.44

A significant convergence of terms and expressive modules that characterize in no uncertain way the passion of unreciprocated love is naturally found again in the famous ode cited in On the Sublime (31), although I would like to say that, as far as concerns the overall interpretation of this ode, I cannot persuade myself that we are in fact dealing with an epithalamium, even of some less traditional type. For it seems to me that at line 16 the refrain

(it seems to me), now fortunately restored by the new Florentine fragment,45 excludes for the

of the first verse any such meaning as "appear, present oneself as" ("in die Erscheinung treten") that would entail interpreting the arrangement of the ode as a variation of the motif of the makarismos of the spouse, according to the interpretation maintained by Bruno Snell especially.46

The nature of the eros described by Sappho in this fragment should not be identified simply on the basis of the concretely physical or physiological aspect of the well-known sequence of the "signs" of amorous turmoil. The representation of an emotional state or of a cognitive act by means of its ensuing eruption in a concrete physical attitude is normal enough for the Greeks of the archaic age;47 and for this reason, as Hermann Fränkel has aptly noted, a passion that is assessed on the plane of its realization does not then have to add anything such as "so much do I love you."48 Such an addition is even less necessary since all the language of the ode, it seems to me, sets up a precise kind of reading, which later seems to have been that of the ancients generally—such as that of Theocritus in the second Idyll , just to cite from among many possibilities the example of a poet whom we have seen was influenced often by the amatory language of Sappho.

The

(for when I look at you) of line 7 has a precedent in a section of the epic that has already been shown to be important for the interpretation of fragment 2, in the

, where Zeus, facing Hera clothed in all of her seductiveness, is said to "hardly see her, love enwraps his prudent soul,"

; (Il . 14.294).49 It also finds a significant correspondence in the encomium for Theoxenus, in which the old Pindar confesses his melting passion for

the ephebic beauty: "But because of Aphrodite I melt like the wax of the sacred bees beneath the sun, when I see the young limbs of the boys,"

(fr. 123.10-13). This, in Sappho as in Pindar,50 is not the motif of "love at first sight," as one will find it later in its Theocritan reuse,51 but rather the express registration in a nearly formulaic manner of the power of erotic seduction that the "bright" spectacle of beauty exercises on the senses and through the senses. However, "the bright love of the sun and beauty,"

(fr. 58.26) in Sappho are not simply aesthetic longings; the "bright dazzling,"

(fr. 16.18)52 of the face of Anactoria even in memory summons love again, as the "rays that dazzle,"

(Pind. fr. 123.2-3)53 from the eyes of Theoxenus immediately overwhelm in the waves of passion anyone who does not have a heart of iron. In Sappho it is not the image of the wave but that of the "bewilderment of the heart," expressed by a verb such as

of "already ancient erotic specificity,"54 the particular meaning of which has found confirmations in new fragments of Alcaeus and Anacreon,55 but which was already attested earlier by a collage of the collection of Theognis where the turmoil from confronting ephebic beauty is expressed with linguistic elements drawn from Homer, Hesiod,56 and especially Sappho: "Suddenly sweat runs unstoppably under my skin, and I am bewildered by the sight of the flower of youth, pleasant and beautiful together,"

(ll. 1017-19).

The "sweat" that floods the limbs (Sappho 31.13) is, for example, already in the Homeric Hymn to Pan: "The soft desire to unite himself with the love of the nymph of the beautiful braids, daughter of Driope, flowered in him and assailed him,"

(ll. 33-34), while the particular use of

(fire) at line 10 is entirely unique in archaic Greek57 and might have, I believe, a meaning somewhat close to its meaning of "fever" as attested in the medical literature. And this matching with an entirely different technical language need not seem strange; even in ode 1.3, the term

, "agony" (also rather rare, and taken up later with an analogous meaning by Anac. fr. 347.8 P = 71 Gent.) ought in part to be close to the physiological meaning of "nausea" attested in the medical literature, and ought to indicate something more than a "mental discomfort" since, as Page has already noted,58 it recurs, fled as in Sappho to

, in a medical text that speaks of a man who is prey to "torments and agonies,"

, through an alteration that exhibits itself in his physical equilibrium.59 Here then is love as a partial "malady,"60 not in the romantic sense of the term but in the concrete sense of a disturbance that invades the senses. In this sense certain expressions are stiff loaded with all of the expressive violence of their literal meaning, and at the same time are innovators with respect to preceding use even within the ambit of archaic lyric: expressions such as "my soul burned with passion,"

(fr. 48.2,61 where the "soul,"

, that can be "devoured,"

[fr. 96.17], or "tossed about,"

[fr. 47], by Eros as by a wind, is still obviously to be understood in a very concrete sense);62 or the "cooing" of passion,

of fragment 38, which will later be taken up frequency in Alexandrian literature63 —for example, by Meleager, who plays with a rather baroque pointe upon the image of Eros as

"cook" of the soul,64 or employs, in a by then highly stylized manner, the contrast "to burn with love—to find relief in coolness."65 This contrast is attested for the very first time in fragment 48 of Sappho: "You came, and it was a good thing; I was longing for you, and you gave coolness to my soul burned by passion,"

, where it seems to me that the conjecture

66 finds confirmation in a passage of the second book of Theognis (1. 1273), where he laments that the

(boy) that has destroyed his

(good mind) later "gave coolness for a short while,"

. And in the context of fragment 48,

, which in Homer or in Hesiod (as in the rest of Greek poetry) indicates a rather general "going in search, pursuing," assumes, along the lines shown above for

, the specifically erotic meaning of "to long for."67 This meaning is guaranteed by its pairing with

in fragment 36,

, which is known to us through the Etymologicum Magnum but is also found inscribed on one of the wellknown vases with ephebic inscriptions, the one attributed to Euphronius:68

; and notwithstanding the poor accuracy of the transcription, it does not seem doubtful that here we find ourselves in front of a Sapphic citation, and that the author or the commissioner of the vase thus read in the text of Sappho a precise message of love.

Sapphic poetry could thus speak to the common reader who did not close himself to the comprehension of its contents with the same clearness with which it spoke to Pindar or to Theognis. And the selections that Sappho performed within the lexical patrimony of the epic, as the new linguistic means with which she gave expression to a world different from the epic world, were destined in their turn to be "leader of a school" and to become traditional. I have sought to isolate a few elements of this language and, by placing them in the tradition to which even a "marvel" like Sappho has to be associated, to characterize through them some aspects of Sapphic eros, the chorality and the concreteness of a particular erotic experience. I like to hope that the data of this study will also be of use to those who wish to study the poetry of Sappho with different methods.

Two
Critical Stereotypes and the Poetry of Sappho

Mary R. Lefkowitz

Criticism of creative art seems curiously dependent on biography.1 It appears difficult to separate an artist's life from his work, or to regard literature or music or paintings primarily as public statements. Since the act of creation is assumed fundamentally to be an emotional response, the artist is viewed as an active participant in the world he has created. In the case of male writers, the assumption seems always to be that the artist, whether Catullus, Brahms, or Goya, uses the full range of his intellectual powers to come to terms with his problems. It is understood that the methods and the problems vary considerably from artist to artist. But in the case of femme artists, the assumptions on which criticism is based tend to be narrowly defined: (1) Any creative woman is a "deviant," that is, women who have a satisfactory emotional life (home, family, and husband) do not need additional creative outlets . The assumption behind this assumption is that "deviance" in the case of women results from being deprived of men—in other words, women artists tend to be (a) old maids or (b) lesbians, either overt femme homosexuals or somehow "masculine." (2) Because women poets are emotionally disturbed, their poems are psychological outpourings, that is, not intellectual but ingenuous, artless, concerned with their inner emotional lives . As a result, criticism of two such different poets as Sappho and Emily Dickinson can sound remarkably alike.

Dr. John Cody's recent analysis of Emily Dickinson's poem "I had been hungry, all the Years" provides a vivid illustration of the special criticism

applied to female artists. I prefer to begin with Emily Dickinson rather than with Sappho, because Dickinson wrote in English (which I understand better than I do Greek) and because the facts of her life are relatively well documented: she was a recluse, unmarried, wore white, wrote in the bedroom of her house in Amherst poems on little pieces of paper, some of which were published in her lifetime.

I had been hungry, all the Years—
My Noon had Come—to dine—
I trembling drew the Table near—
And touched the Curious Wine—

'Twas this on Tables I had seen—
When turning, hungry, Home
I looked in Windows, for the Wealth
I could not hope—for Mine—

I did not know the ample Bread—
'Twas so unlike the Crumb
The Birds and I, had often shared
In Nature's—Dining Room—

The Plenty hurt me—'twas so new—
Myself felt ill—and odd—
As Berry—of a Mountain Bush—
Transplanted—to the Road—

Nor was I hungry—so I found
That Hunger—was a way
Of Persons outside Windows—
The Entering—takes away—
        (579 Johnson, ca. 1862)

My own impression of this poem is that its primary concern is disappointment: something long-awaited comes; once you have it, it disappears; thus in retrospect the anticipation seems more rewarding than the thing itself. The central thought is expressed in the terminology of food: the narrator of the poem is "hungry"; then "noon" (the dinner hour) has come like a guest, to dinner; there is a table with "Curious Wine" (the narrator doesn't know what it is). The narrator had been like the birds, eating what was left; now he/she leaves the wilds, and his/her exclusion, and enters the house. The hunger then goes away and there is nothing. The bread and wine in the poem may take on additional significance if we think of them as elements in the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist: Dickinson was raised by devout churchgoers and drew much of her subject matter and metrical structure from the hymns she heard as a child.2

Then the poem might also say: after receiving Communion, what does one have?

To our impressions we can compare what Dr. Cody says in After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson . He reads the poem as an analyst would interpret dreams, along canonical Freudian lines: hunger connotes sexual experience, and Emily Dickinson's

imbibing of physical affection quickly becomes a glut and overwhelms her painfully. The experience is novel in an uncongenial way and causes her to sicken and feel strange. She feels that sexuality is too common a territory for her (a "Road") because she is acclimated to an unfrequented and lofty habitat. (She comes of a "Mountain Bush" and feels out of place, perhaps degraded, in the "Road"; one senses in this word unpleasant connotations of too easy accessibility, prosaic purposes, dustiness, and commercial transactions.

Once we accept the premise that the poem primarily concerns sex, it is possible to interpret its imagery more specifically:

It is a commonplace that a woman's introduction to sexual intimacies may be frightening and disappointing. The bruising of delicate membranes may draw blood. Thus, the line "The Plenty hurt me—'twas so new" may refer not only to the overpowering emotion generated by her own and another's passion but also to the overwhelming and painful effects of physical force. The transplanted berry may be the hymeneal blood (the first color commonly associated with berries is red); the "Mountain Bush," the mons veneris; and the "Road," the vagina. We cannot imagine that Emily Dickinson was unaware of these anatomical facts.)3

Whether or not she was more than "dimly aware" of these "unconscious sexual preoccupations" is not the issue: Cody's analysis enables us to see that Emily Dickinson, who "has for so long been thought of as an ethereal other world creature" was in fact "a living flesh-and-blood woman who, Victorian Age notwithstanding, was well aware that whether she liked it or not she had no choice but to share in the physiological reactions of the rest of humanity."4

If we in turn analyze Cody's analysis, we find that it rests on several questionable assumptions: (1) That poems are like dreams, that is, are individual expressions of emotional problems, rather than public statements meant to be understood by and communicated to a large audience who had not read Freud on roads, berries, etc. But Emily Dickinson, as her correspondence shows, was most interested in getting into print and being recognized. (2) That Dickinson's problem is sexual deprivation, specifically, inability to accept or to enjoy men, an interpretation read in from her biography.

The same basic assumptions tend to be made about Sappho's famous poem,

(31 Lobel-Page [L.-P.]), though in less vividly stated forms. Compared to Emily Dickinson's, we know virtually nothing about Sappho's life. We can glean from biographies and passing references written long after her death the names of her family, that she lived in Mytilene at the end of the seventh century, that she wrote nine books of lyric poetry, that she was a female homosexual, short, dark, and ugly, and that she died by throwing herself off the White Rock in west Greece because of her unrequited love for a ferryman named Phaon ("shining"). Much of this information seems to have been derived from interpretations by ancient scholars (all male) of her poetry, some also from caricatures of her in comedy; the story of her death is obviously based on myth.5 Again a portrait emerges of an emotional deviant: deprived because of her ugliness of male attention (like the ferryman's) which she craves.

Thus biography, itself derived from interpretation of the poems, is in turn reapplied to the poems and affects our interpretation of them. In the case of

, especially, much influential criticism has tended to center on the "facts" of Sappho's life:

Wilamowitz saw "that man" in the poem's first stanza as the husband of the girl. The girl is one of Sappho's students, and the poem concerns the man

and schoolmistress Sappho's jealousy of him.6 This interpretation transposes the poem to the realm of sexual normality: there is no evidence at all in the text that "that man" is a husband, or the girl Sappho's pupil, or that Sappho ran a girl's school.7 Page, in what is recognized as the authoritative English commentary on Sappho, is aware of the limitations of Wilamowitz's criticism but still retains the same basic assumptions about the poem. In his analysis, he realizes that the man only appears in the first stanza, but at the same time he is reluctant to take his attention off of him.

But we must not forget that the man was the principal subject of the whole first stanza; and we shall not be content with. any explanation of the poem which gives no satisfactory account of his presence and his prominence in it. If Sappho wishes to describe nothing more than the symptoms of her passion for the girl, what motive could she have for connecting that description thus closely with an occasion when the girl is engaged in merry conversation with a man? Surely that occasion is not devoid of all significance: and then it appears impossible to exclude the element of jealousy from Sappho's emotional response to the scene. Sappho loves the girl: and it is clearly suggested that the girl is not, at least at this moment, particularly interested in Sappho. Sappho is present in the company: but it is the man, not Sappho, who is sitting close by the girl, rejoicing in her laughter and converse. To maintain that Sappho feels no jealousy of the man would be to ignore the certain response of human nature to a situation of the type described, and to deprive the introduction of the man, and his relation to the girl, of all significance. On this point, at least, there is little room for doubt.8

The girl is talking to him, and not to Sappho; the physical symptoms that Sappho describes in such detail result specifically from jealousy. In addition, Page tends to see the poem as a direct outpouring of emotion, in much the same way that Cody read Dickinson. Sappho's language

is realistic, severely plain and candid, unadorned by literary artifice. First, very quietly, "I have no longer any power to speak." Then she says something—we do not know exactly what—about her tongue. Then in simple words, "a subtle fire has stolen beneath my flesh," and still more simply "with my eyes I see nothing;" Then a homely metaphor, "my ears are humming": and the next phrase could not be more bleak and unadorned, whether the words meant "sweat pours down me" or "a cold sweat covers me." Then, without artifice, "a trembling seizes me all over"; thereafter an image which owes nothing to literary tradition, and surely

reflects her own manner of thought and speech, "paler than grass am I"; and finally the homeliest phrase of all, "I seem to fall a little short of being dead." Rarely, if anywhere, in archaic or classical poetry shall we find language so far independent of literary tradition, apparently so close to the speech of every day. Style is in harmony with dialect; both products of nature, not artifice.9

His translation supports his interpretation. Sappho's verbs are attenuated into nouns, "terrifies" (

)10 becomes the conventional love-song term "a-flutter"; "runs under" (

) has become "has stolen" (as in "has stolen my heart away"?); "whirrs," like a spinning rhombos (

) has become "is humming"; pours down (

), "covers"; "hunts" (

) merely "seizes"; the violent "greener" than grass (

) merely "paler." Missing also is a sense of the military terminology in the opening stanza: the Homeric "equal to the gods" has become somehow "fortunate." "Sits opposite" only represents part of the meaning of

, "in opposition," as in battle. In the last stanza, the reassurance "all can be endured" (

) has become a frustrated "all must be endured."

George Devereux, the anthropologist, sees the poem rather as an emotional outpouring of "envy" of "that man," as opposed to simple "jealousy":

The core of the problem can best be stated in somewhat colloquial terms: "What does this man—and indeed any man—have that Sappho does not have?" " What can a man offer to a girl that Sappho cannot offer?" The answer, I think, is obvious (Od . 11.249 ff. [This is the passage where Poseidon says to Tyro: "rejoice lady, in my love, and as the year goes by you shall bear glorious children, etc."]) and leads to a clinically highly documentable and crucial finding: few women are as obsessed with a (neurotic) feeling of incompleteness<->with the clinically commonplace "female castration complex"—as the masculine lesbian. Moreover, the latter experiences her "defect" with violent and crushing intensity particularly when her girl-friend is taken away from her not by another lesbian, but by a man , who has what she does not have and which she would give her life to have.11

According to Devereux, Sappho in the poem is describing the sort of anxiety attack that Devereux has frequently witnessed in homosexual patients.

If Sappho's poem had just been dug out of the sand and if we had never heard of Wilamowitz or looked in Page or read Devereux's article, our interpretation of the poem might be very different. Perhaps it is impossible for any of us to approach Sappho with the same objectivity that we can maintain in reading Emily Dickinson, because we always seem to come to ancient texts with dictionary in hand. But to look at the text itself, without any preconceptions about the identity of the narrator, the poem says: "That man seems to me like the gods (

, a designation that in Homer connotes unusual strength) who sits opposite (or in opposition), who hears you (female) speaking sweetly and laughing passionately.12 This (i.e., hearing you) terrifies my heart in my breast (i.e., the effect of you on me, the narrator, is very different from your effect on 'that man'). For whenever I look at you then I can speak nothing still, but in silence my tongue is broken (

, a verb used to describe broken bones), and immediately a light fire runs under my skin, and with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears whirr, and a cold sweat holds me down, and a shuddering hunts all of me, and I am greener than grass, and from dying little lacking I seem to myself to be (repetition 'to myself' signifies a conclusion, and reference to the narrator, a transition to a new subject).13 But all is endurable, since even a poor man"—does the poem go on to say that god makes even a poor man rich (as in the introduction to the Works and Days ), that is, that there is some hope for change, or eventual triumph?14

Looking at the text, it seems fair to say that quantitatively at least the main emphasis in the poem falls on the narrator's feelings. It is important to remember that what she is describing is an illusion: "he seems to me" (

), "I seem to myself" (

). The time is indefinite, the illusion happens over and over: "whenever I look at you" (

with subjunctive

). The man has no specific identity; he is "whoever (

) sits opposite." The exaggerated terms in which the narrator's reactions are described add to the sense of illusion: the broken tongue, the sweat that grasps, the shuddering that hunts, and being greener than grass do not portray the condition of the narrator in real life. The phrase "greener than grass" at the end of the list of symptoms has particular impact. It translates the Homeric "green fear" for one's life in battle into the context of daily existence. In the same way, the man like the gods in the first stanza is not a

Homeric hero but someone sitting opposite a gift. It is as if Sappho were saying that what happens in a woman's life also partakes of the significance of the man's world of war. When she writes a long narrative poem about Hector and Andromache it is to describe their wedding.15 When she speaks in her poem to "Aphrodite on intricate throne, immortal" of pursuing and fleeing, it is describing not the grim chase of Hector by Achilles, "as in a dream one cannot pursue someone who flees" (Il . 22.200), but the conquest of an unwilling lover, "if she flees now, soon she'll pursue you."16 Her victory is achieved by the intervention of Aphrodite, not through her own powers. In

also, any change that is to come about must take place through endurance. As a woman, she must rely on the special weapons of the oppressed, miracles and patience.

This interpretation may not tell us everything we want to know about the poem, but I think at least it reveals what the poem is not about. There is nothing specifically stated in the poem about jealousy of a rival. What the man has that she (the narrator) doesn't have (malgré Devereux) is not male generatire capacity but physical strength: he seems "like the gods" while she is faint and powerless.17 What she (the narrator) feels is not jealousy but the response of lovers to beauty in their beloved: when the suitors see Penelope in Odyssey 18 "their knees were loosened, and their hearts were beguiled with passion" (212). As for Sappho's style, if being untraditional is artless, then we can agree (in Page's words) that she is "without artifice." But it might be fairer to comment on the dramatic personification "trembling hunts me down" or her conversion of Homeric formulae, e.g., taking "like the gods" from the context of war to the struggles of emotion, and turning the conventional "green fear" into the startling, entertaining "greener than grass am I."18 The sense of illusion that she creates in the opening "he seems" and its echo "I seem to myself" in the fourth stanza is one of the first expressions of what will later become one of the primary concerns of poetry and philosophy: the effects of the imagination.19 The deliberate generality of the poem, the absence of proper names and specific references to time and place, indicate that this poem is meant to bring to mind no particular

place or occasion. It tells of "that man—whoever" and of the narrator's reactions "whenever I look at you."20 It is no more directly representative of the historical Sappho's feeling at any given moment in history than the sonnet "Th' Expense of Spirit" is a transcript of a day in the life of William Shakespeare.21

To recapitulate: biographical criticism, in the case of the women poets Dickinson and Sappho, may keep us from seeing what the poets say. Dickinson's dignified, remote poem about disappointment becomes an outcry of sexual frustration, Sappho's song about the weakness of a woman in love a jealous admission of penis envy. Applying assumptions our society makes about "normal" female psychology to the work of women poets can do little to advance our understanding of their poems. This is not to say that their poems are not different because they are by women; I think perhaps they are. Dickinson writes about her "inner life" and Sappho about her love for her female friends and the pleasures of singing and being together because these activities, not war or games or government, were the experiences that her society and times permitted to women. Those who are secluded in some way from the concerns of the larger society are by necessity thrown onto themselves and thus have time and scope to express what others, in more diffracted contexts, do not have time to articulate or to understand. Such enforced withdrawal has made women's poetry distinctive and influential.

Three
Phaethon, Sappho's Phaon, and the White Rock of Leukas: "Reading" the Symbols of Greek Lyric

Gregory Nagy

In the arcane Greek myths of Phaethon and Phaon there are latent themes that help resolve three problems of interpretation in Greek poetry. The first of these problems is to be found in the Partheneion of Alcman (PMG 1). It concerns a wondrous horse conjured up in a simile describing the beauty of the maiden Hagesikhora, center of attention in the song-and-dance ensemble:

(Alcman PMG 1.45-49)

For she appears
outstanding, as when someone
sets among grazing beasts a horse,
well-built, a prizewinner, with thundering hooves,
from out of those dreams underneath the rock.

So the problem is, what is the meaning of

? I translate it as "underneath the rock" following the scholia of the Louvre Papas, which connect this adjective with

pétra , "rock," and quote the following passage from the Odyssey :

(Od . 24.11-12)

And they passed by the streams of Okeanos and the White Rock [Leukàs pétra ] and past the Gates of the Sun and the District of Dreams.

This interpretation has been rejected by Denys Page, who argues: "The reference to [Odyssey ] xxiv 11f. is irrelevant; nothing is said there about dreams living under rocks."1 Instead, Page follows the Etymologicum Magnum 783.20, where we read

, "sustained by wings," so that the wondrous horse being described would be something "out of winged dreams"; in support of this interpretation, Page adduces passages where dreams are represented as winged beings (e.g., Eur. Hec . 70).2 All the same, Page retains the reading

in his edited text, so that we are left to assume some sort of ad hoc metathesis of

to

as if the local Laconian dialectal pronunciation of the word for "wing" were pert- rather than pter . Other experts, though hesitantly, go along with the interpretation "under rocks," allowing for some vague notion of dreams abiding underneath some mysterious rock in the Laconian poetic imagination.3 In the most accessible chrestomathy of Greek lyric, the editor chooses to take

at face value: "the dreams are those of siestas taken underneath a shady rock."4

The second problem of interpretation, then, is the significance of the White Rock, Leukàs pétra , in Odyssey 24.11. This mysterious place has to be viewed in the overall context of Odyssey 24.1-14, describing the passage of the spirits of the suitors of Penelope, who have just been killed by Odysseus, into the realm of the dead. This description, known as the Introduction to the Second Nekyia, represents a distinct subgenre of Greek epic. It is replete with idiosyncrasies in both theme and diction,5 and its contents afford a precious glimpse into early Greek concepts of afterlife. Nowhere else in Homeric diction do we find the puzzling expressions

, "Gates (púlai ) of the Sun";

"District (demos ) of Dreams"; and

, "White Rock (Leukàs pétra )." On the level of content, however, there do exist Homeric parallels to the first two of the three expressions.

In the instance of

, "Gates (púlai ) of the Sun," there is a thematic parallelism between púlai , "gates," and Homeric Púlos , "Pylos." As Douglas Frame has demonstrated, the royal name Néstor and the place name of King Nestor's realm, Púlos , are based on mythological models.6 I should stress that Frames arguments are used not to negate a historical Nestor and the historical Pylos, but rather to show that the kernel of the epic tradition about Nestor and Pylos was based on local myths linked with local cults. The clearest example is a story, represented as Nestor's own tale within the Iliad , that tells of the hero's retrieving the cattle of Pylos from the Epeians (Il . 11.671-761). Frame argues convincingly that the retrieved cattle are a thematic analogue to the Cattle of the Sun.7 The etymology of Néstor , explained by Frame as "he who brings back to light and life," is relevant.8 We may note the association of words built out of the root nes- , most prominently nóos (mind) and nóstos (homecoming), with the theme of sunrise.9 In fact, the entire plot of Odysseus's travels is interlaced with diction that otherwise connotes the theme of sunset followed by sunrise. To put it more bluntly, the epic plot of Odysseus's travels operates on an extended solar metaphor, as Frame argues in adducing the internal evidence of Homeric theme and diction.10 Likewise, when Nestor returns the cattle to Pylos, it is implicit that Pylos is the Gate of the Sun and an entrance to the underworld.11 There are survivals of this hieratic connotation in the local Pylian lore of classical times (Paus. 4.36.2-3).12 In a Homeric allusion to the myth about Herakles' descent into the underworld and his wounding of Hades (Il . 5.395-404) the name Pylos actually serves to connote the realm of the otherworld rather than any realm of this world:

(in Pylos, among the dead; Il . 5.397). Hades himself is the pulártes , "gate closer" (Il . 8.367, etc.). In short, the thematic associations of Púlos imply that the Gate of the Sun is also the Gate of the Underworld, and thus we have a parallel to the context of

, "Gates (púlai ) of the Sun," in Odyssey 24.12. Accordingly, a

Homeric expression like

, "pass by the gates of Hades" (Il . 5.646; cf. 23.71) implies that the psukhaí (spirits) of the dead traverse to the underworld through the sine passage traveled by the sun when it sets.

In the instance of

, "District demos of Dreams" (Od . 24.12), the concept of a community of dreams situated past the Gates of Hades is the-matically consistent with other Homeric expressions involving dreams. After a person dies, his psukhe* (spirit) flies off

, "like a dream" (11.222). Hermes, who is conducting the psukhaí of the dead suitors (24.1), is also the conductor of dreams,

(h. Hom. Merc . 14). Since it is Hermes who leads the psukhaí of the suitors past the Gates of the Sun (24. 11), it is significant that another of his inherited epithets is puledókos (h. Hom. Merc . 15), to be interpreted as "he who receives [the psukhaí ] at the Gates."13 These are the Gates of Hades, or we may call them the Gates of the Sun. But there is also another name available. Since Hermes conducts dreams as well as the ghosts of the dead, and since dreams move like ghosts, it is not surprising that dreams, too, have gates (Od . 19.562; cf. 4.809).14 Since the

, "Gates (púlai ) of the Sun," are already mentioned in 24.12, we may expect

, "District (demos ) of Dreams," in the same line to be a periphrastic substitute for a redundant concept, "Gates of Dreams."

In the instance of

, "White Rock" (Od . 24.11), we find no parcel in Homeric theme and diction. All we can say about the White Rock at this point is that its collocation with

, "District (demos ) of Dreams" (24.12), seems parcel to the expression

"from dreams underneath a rock," in Alcman's Partheneion (PMG 1.49).

As we begin to examine the attestations of Leukàs pétra , "White Rock," beyond Homer, we come upon the third problem of interpretation, concerning the White Rock and a figure called Phaon:

(Men. F 258 Koerte)15

where they say that Sappho was the first,
hunting down the proud Phaon,
to throw  herself, in her goading desire, from the  rock
that shines from afar . But now, in accordance with your sacred utterance,
lord king, let there be silence throughout the sacred precinct of the headland
     of Leukas.

This fragment, alluding to a story about Sappho's jumping into the sea for love of Phaon, is from a play of Menander's entitled The Leukadia . We infer from Menander's lines that Sappho leaped off the White Rock of Leukas in pursuit of Phaon. It is to Strabo that we owe the preservation of these verses (10.2.9 C452). He is in the process of describing Cape Leukas, a prominent white rock jutting out from Leukas into the sea and toward Kephallenia.16 From this rock Sappho is supposed to have jumped into the sea after Phaon. Strabo goes on to describe a shrine of Apollo Leukatas situated on Cape Leukas and an ancestral cult practice connected with it. Every year, he reports, some criminal was cast down from the white rock into the sea below for the sake of averting evil,

. Wings and even birds would be fastened to him, and men in fishing boats would be stationed below the rock in order to retrieve the victim after his plunge.

As Wilamowitz has convincingly argued,17 Menander chose for his play a setting that was known for its exotic cult practice involving a white rock and conflated it in the quoted passage with a literary theme likewise involving a white rock. There are two surviving attestations of this theme. The first is from lyric:

(Anac. PMG 37608)

One more time taking off in the air, down from the  White
Rock  into the dark waves do I dive,  intoxicated  with lust.

The second is from satyr drama:

(Eur. Cyc . 163-68)

I would be crazy not to give all the herds of the Cyclopes
in return for drinking one cup of that wine
and throwing  myself from the  white rock  into the brine,
once I am intoxicated , with eyebrows relaxed.
Whoever is not happy when he drinks is crazy.

In both instances, falling from the white rock is parallel to falling into a swoon—be it from intoxication or from making love. As for Menander's allusion to Sappho's plunge from a Leukás (white rock), Wilamowitz reasonably infers that there must have existed a similar theme, which does not survive, in the poetry of Sappho. Within the framework of this theme, the female speaker must have pictured herself as driven by love for a certain Phaon, or at least so it was understood by the time New Comedy flourished.19 So the third and the last of the three problems is, why should Sappho seem to be in love with a mythical figure?

About Phaon himself we have no reports beyond the meager fragments gathered in Sappho fragment 211 Voight (v.). It appears that he was an old porthmeús (ferryman) who was transformed into a beautiful youth by Aphrodite herself; also, the goddess fell in love with this beautiful Phaon and hid him in a head of lettuce. Besides specifically attesting the latter myth in Cratinus (fr. 330 Kock), Athenaeus (69d-e) also cites striking parallels in Eubulus (fr. 14 Kock) and Callimachus (fr. 478 Pfeiffer), where we see that Adonis, too, was hidden in a head of lettuce by Aphrodite. This thematic parallelism of Aphrodite and Phaon with Aphrodite and Adonis becomes more important as we come to another myth about the second pair.

According to the account in book 7 of the mythographer Ptolemaios Chennos (ca. C.E. 100; by way of Phot. Bibl . 152-53 Bekker),20 the first to dive off the heights of Cape Leukas was none other than Aphrodite herself, out of love for a dead Adonis. After Adonis died (how it happened is not said), the mourning Aphrodite went off searching for him and finally found him at "Cypriote Argos," in the shrine of Apollo Eríthios . She consults Apollo, who instructs her to seek relief from her love by jumping off the white rock of Leukas, where Zeus sits whenever he wants relief from his passion for Hera. Then Ptolemaios launches into a veritable catalogue of other figures who followed Aphrodite's precedent and took a ritual plunge as a cure for love. For example, Queen Artemisia I is reputed to have leaped off the white rock out of love for one Dardanos, succeeding only in getting herself killed. Several others are mentioned who died from the leap, including a certain iambographer Charinos, who expired only after being fished out of

the water with a broken leg, but not before blurting out his four last iambic trimeters, painfully preserved for us with the compliments of Ptolemaios and Photius as well. Someone called Makes was more fortunate: having succeeded in escaping from four love affairs after four corresponding leaps from the white rock, he earned the epithet Leukopetras . We may follow the lead of Wilamowitz in questioning the degree of historicity in such accounts.21 There is, however, a more important concern. In the lengthy and detailed account of Ptolemaios, Sappho is not mentioned at all, let alone Phaon. From this silence I infer that the source of this myth about Aphrodite and Adonis is independent of Sappho's own poetry or of later distortions based on it.22 Accordingly, the ancient cult practice at Cape Leukas, as described by Strabo (10.2.9 C452), may well contain some intrinsic element that inspired lovers' leaps, a practice also noted by Strabo. The second practice seems to be derived from the first, as we might expect from a priestly institution that becomes independent of the social context that had engendered it. Abstracted from their inherited tribal functions, religious institutions have a way of becoming mystical organizations.23

Another reason for doubting that Sappho's poetry had been the inspiration for the lovers' leaps at Cape Leukas is the attitude of Strabo himself. He specifically disclaims Menander's version about Sappho being the first to take the plunge at Leukas. Instead, he offers a version of the arkhaiologikoteroi* , "those more versed in the ancient lore," according to which Kephalos son of Deioneus was the very first to have leaped, impelled by love for Pterelas (Strabo 10.2.9 C452). Again, I see no reason to take it for granted that this myth concerning historical Leukás had resulted from some distortion of the cults features because of Sappho's literary influence.24 The myth of Kephalos and his dive may be as old as the concept of Leukás , the White Rock. I say "concept" because the ritual practice of casting victims from a white rock such as that of Leukas may be in inheritance parallel to the epic tradition about a mythical White Rock on the shores of the Okeanos (as in Od . 24.11) and the related literary theme of diving from an imaginary White Rock (as in the poetry of Anacreon and Euripides). In other words, it is needless to assume that the ritual preceded the myth or the other way around.

Actually, there are other historical places besides Cape Leukas that are associated with myths about diving. For example, Charon of Lampsakos

(fifth century B.C.E ., FGrH 262 F 7)25 reports that Phobos, of the lineage Kodridai, founder of Lampsakos, was the first to leap

, "from the White Rocks," located apparently on the north shore of the Smyrnaean Gulf, not far from Phokaia.26 We may compare, too, the myth about the death of Theseus. He was pushed by Lykomedes and fell into the sea from the high rocks of the island Skûros (Heraclides by way of Paus. 1.17.6; scholia to Ar. Plut . 627). The island derives its name Skûros from its white rocks (LSJ, s.vv. skûros and skîros/skírros ).27 In fact, the entire Theseus myth is replete with themes involving names derived from skûros/skîros . Even the "grandfather" of Theseus is Skurios (Apollod. 3-15-5), while Theseus himself casts Skíron off the Skironídes pétrai (Strabo 9.14 C391; Plut. Thes . 10; Paus. 1.33.8).28 For the moment, I merely note in passing the ritual nature of the various plunges associated with Theseus and his "father" Aigeus,29 and the implications of agonistic death and mystical rebirth in both ritual and myth.30

A more immediate concern is that the mythological examples I have cited so far do not attest the lovelorn theme as a feature of the plunges from white rocks. There is, however, a more basic sexual theme associated with the Thoríkios pétros , "Leap Rock," of Attic Kolonos (Soph. OC 1595). Kolonos itself, meaning "summit," is proverbially white or shining bright   (

; Soph. OC 670). As for the name Thoríkios , it is formally derivable from the noun thorós , "semen" (e.g., Hdt. 2.93.1), by way of the adjective thorikós ; the noun thorós is in turn built on the aorist thoreîn of the verb throisko* "leap."31 Even the verb can have the side meaning "mount, fecundate" (Aes. Eum. 660 ). From the form Thoríkios itself, it is difficult to ascertain whether the name may connote leaping as well as fecundating. And yet, thematic associations of the formally related name Thórikos suggest that leaping is indeed involved. The provenience of Kephalos, son of Deioneus, the figure who leaped from the white rock of Leukas (Strabo 10.2.9 C452), is actually this very Thorikos, a town and deme on the southeast coast of Attica (Apollod. 2.4.7).32

The sexual element inherent in the theme of a white rock recurs in a myth about Kolonos. Poseidon fell asleep in this area and had an emission of semen, from which issued the horse Skironítes :

33

(scholia to Lycoph. 766)

Others say that, in the vicinity of the rocks at Athenian Kolonos, he Poseidon, falling asleep, had an emission of semen, and a horse Skúphios came out, who is also called Skironítes .

The name Skironites again conjures up the theme of Theseus, son of Poseidon, and his plunge from the white rocks of Skyros.34 This Attic myth is parallel to the Thessalian myth of Skúphios Skyphios:

.
(scholia to Pind. Pyth . 4.246)

Poseidon Petraîos [of the rocks] has a cult among the Thessalians ... because he, having fallen asleep at some rock, had an emission of semen; and the earth, receiving the semen, produced the first horse, whom they called Skúphios .

There is a further report about this first horse ever:

.
(scholia to Pind. Pyth . 4.246)

And they say that there was a festival established in worship of Poseidon Petraîos at the spot where the first horse leaped forth.35

The myth of Skironites/Skyphios, featuring the themes of leaping, sexual relief, and the state of unconsciousness, may help us understand better the puzzling verses of Anacreon already quoted:

(Anac. PMG 376)

     One more time36
taking off in the air, down from the White
Rock into the dark waves do I dive,  intoxicated  with lust.

The theme of jumping is overt and the theme of sexual relief is latent in the poetry,37 while the situation is reversed in the myth. In the poem the unconsciousness comes from what is likened to a drunken stupor; in the myth it comes from sleep.38 As for the additional theme of a horse in the myth, we consider again the emblem of Hagesikhora's charms, that wondrous horse

of Alcman's Laconian fantasy, who is "from those dreams under the Rock,"

(PMG 1.49).

We may note that, just as Poseidon obtains sexual relief through the unconsciousness of sleeping at the white rocks of Kolonos, so also Zeus is cured of his passion for Hera by sitting on the white rock of Apollos Leukas (Ptolemaios Chennos by way of Phot. Bibl . 152-53 Bekker). At Magnesia, those who were hieroí (sacred) to Apollo would leap from precipitous rocks into the river Lethaîos (Paus. 10.32.6). This name is clearly derivable from lethe forgetfulness. In the underworld, Theseus and Peirithoos sat on the

, "throne of Lethe " (Apollod. Epit . 1.24; Paus. 10.29.9). I have already quoted the passage from the Cyclops of Euripides (163-68) where getting drunk is equated with leaping from a proverbial white rock. We may note the wording of the verses that immediately follow that equation, describing how it feels to be in the realm of a drunken stupor:

(Eur. Cyc . 169-72)

where it is allowed to make this thing stand up erect,
to grab the breast and touch with both hands
the meadow39  that is made all ready. And there is dancing
and forgetting  [lestis ] of bad things.

Again, we see the theme of sexual relief and the key concept lestis , "forgetting."

In short, the White Rock is the boundary delimiting the conscious and the unconscious—be it a trance, stupor, sleep, or even death. Accordingly, when the suitors are led past the White Rock (Od . 24-11), they reach the demos oneíron , "District of Dreams" (24.12), beyond which is the realm of the dead (24.14).

Even with the accumulation of this much evidence about the symbolism of the White Rock, it is still difficult to see how it relates to the mythical figure Phaon and how he relates to Sappho. One approach that might yield more information is to study the mythical fignre Phaethon, who shares several characteristics with Adonis and Phaon. For now, I postpone the details and citations, offering only the essentials. Like Adonis and Phaon, Phaethon is loved by Aphrodite, and like them, he is hidden by her. Like Adonis, Phaethon dies. Like Phaon, Phaethon means "bright" (for the morphology of Pháon/Phaéthon , we may compare

Homeric phlégo/phlegétho , "burn").40 Unlike Phaon, however, about whom we have only meager details, the Phaethon figure confronts us with a wealth of testimony, much of it unwieldy and conflicting; we now turn to this testimony.

In the commentary to his edition of the Hesiodic Theogony , Martin West observes that Phaéthon (1. 987), like Huperíon , is a hypostasis of the sun-god Helios* .41 The thematic equation of Helios* with Huperíon and Phaéthon isoo apparent in epic diction, where huperíon , "the one who goes above" (Od . 1.8, etc.) and phaéthon , "the one who shines" (Il . 11.735, etc.) are ornamental epithets of Helios* . The mythological differentiation of identities is symbolized in genealogical terms: in one case, Huperíon is the father of Helios* (Od . 12.176; Hes. Theog . 371-74), while in the other, Phaéthon is the son of Helios* . The latter relationship is a basic feature of the myth treated by Euripides in the tragedy Phaethon .42 What follows is an outline of the myth as found in the Euripidean version.

Phaethon, the story goes, was raised as the son of Merops and Klymene. His real father, however, is not the mortal Merops but the sun-god Helios. At his mother's behest, Phaethon travels to Aithiopia, the abode of Helios, in a quest to prove that the Sun is truly his father. He borrows the chariot of Helios for a day; driving too near the earth, he sets it afire. Zeus then strikes him dead with his thunderbolt, and Phaethon falls from the sky.43

A cross-cultural perspective reveals many myths, indigenous to a wide variety of societies, that are analogous to this Greek myth. There are parallels, for example, in the myths of the Kwakiutl and Bella Coola Indians in British Columbia. From the traditions collected by the anthropologist Franz Boas,44 the following outline emerges. The Sun impregnates a woman who bears him a son (called Born-to-be-the-Sun in the Kwakiutl version). When the boy goes to visit his father, he is permitted to take the Suns place. Exceeding his limits, the boy sets the earth on fire, whereupon he is cast down from the sky.45

It does not necessarily follow, however, that the Phaethon myth merely represents the sunset. I sympathize with those who are reluctant to accept the theory that "Phaethon's fall attempts to explain in mythical terms why the sun sinks blazing in the west as if crashing to earth in flames and yet

returns to its task unimpaired the following day."46 One counterexplanation runs as follows: "Phaethon's crash is an event out of the ordinary, a sudden and unexpected calamity, occurring once and not daily."47 In such matters, however, I would heed the intuitively appealing approach of Lévi-Strauss. A myth, he concedes, "always refers to events alleged to have taken place long ago." Nevertheless, "what gives the myth an operational value is that the specific pattern described is timeless; it explains the present and the past as well as the future."48 Accordingly; I find it unnecessary to entertain the proposal, based only on naturalistic intuition, that the Phaethon myth represents the fall of a meteorite.49 The meteorite explanation, as also the sunset explanation, operates on the assumption that the message of the Phaethon myth is simply a metaphorical expression of some phenomenon that occurs in the sky. I disagree. The Phaethon myth presents a problem, not a solution. Furthermore, this problem addresses the human condition, not just celestial dynamics.

There is another Phaethon myth, preserved in Hesiodic poetry, which is preoccupied with both aspects of the solar cycle, not only with death but also rebirth. In this myth Phaethon is the son not of Helios but of Eos the dawn goddess (Theog . 986-87). In the same context we hear that Eos first mates with Tithonos, bearing Memnon, king of the Aithiopes, and Emathion (984-85); then she mates with Kephalos, bearing Phaethon (986-87); then Aphrodite mates with Phaethon (988-91), having abducted him (990).50 The parallelism between the mating of Eos with Kephalos and the mating of Aphrodite with their son, Phaethon, is reinforced in the Hymn to Aphrodite : when Aphrodite seduces Anchises, the goddess herself cites the abduction of Tithonos by Eos as precedent 218. There are also other parallels, as when a hero called Kleitos is abducted by Eos (Od . 15.250-51). Or again, the nymph Kalypso cites the abduction of the hero Orion by Eos as a precedent for her abduction of Odysseus (5.121-24).51

Let us focus on the association of Phaethon with Aphrodite in Theogony 988-91. It arises, I propose, from a sexual theme implicit in a solar transition from death to rebirth. In the logic of the myth, it appears that the setting sun mates with the goddess of regeneration so that the rising sun may be

reborn. If the setting sun is the same as the rising sun, then the goddess of regeneration may be viewed as both mate and mother.

Such an ambivalent relationship actually survives in the hymns of the Rig-Veda , where the goddess of solar regeneration, the dawn Usas* , is the wife or bride of the sun-god Surya (1.115.1, 7.75.5, etc.) as well as his mother (7.63.3, 7.78.3).52 In the latter instance, the incestuous implications are attenuated by putting Usas* in the plural, representing the succession of dawns; similarly; Usas* in the plural can designate the wives of Surya (4.5.13). Yet even if each succeeding dawn is wife of the preceding dawn's son, the husband and son are always one and the same Surya, and the basic theme of incest remains intact.

This comparative evidence from the Rig-Veda is important for understanding the Greek evidence, because Indic Surya (Sun) and Usas-* (Dawn) are formally cognate with Greek Helios* (Sun) and Eos* (Dawn);53 furthermore, the epithets of Usas* in the Rig-Veda, divá(s) duhitár- and duhitár- divas , both meaning "Daughter of the Sky," are exact formal cognates of the Homeric epithets Dias tfiugáter and thugáter Diós , meaning "Daughter of Zeus."54 The Homeric hexameter preserves these epithets only in the following patterns:

A.

six times

B.

eight times

C.

eighteen times

We see from this scheme that it is cumbersome for the meter to accommodate the name of Eos, '

, in a position contiguous with these epithets. Thus it is not surprising that Eos is not combined with these epithets anywhere in attested Greek epic, despite the comparative evidence that such a combination had once existed, as we see from the survival of the Indic cognates divá(s) duhiár- and duhiár-divás in the Rig-Veda .

Within the framework of the Greek hexameter, we may have expected at least one position, however, where the name of Eos could possibly have been combined with thugáter Diós , "Daughter of Zeus":

D.

And yet, when

(Dawn) occupies the final portion of the hexameter and when it is preceded by an epithet with the metrical shape

this epithet is regularly

, "rosy-fingered" (or "rosy-toed"), not

thugáter Diós , "Daughter of Zeus." I infer that the epithet

thugater Diós , "Daughter of Zeus," in position D must have been ousted by the fixed epithet

, "rosyfingered," as in the familiar verse

(when early-born rosy-fingered Dawn appeared...; Il . 1.477, etc.).

In short, for both metrical and formulaic reasons, Greek epic fails to preserve the combination of Eos* (Dawn) with thugáter Diós , meaning "Daughter of Zeus."55 By contrast, when the name Aphrodite occupies the final position of the hexameter, her fixed epithet is Diós thugáter :

(... Daughter of Zeus, Aphrodite; Il . 3.374, etc.). From the standpoint of comparative analysis, then, Aphrodite is a parallel oleos in epic diction. Furthermore, from the standpoint of internal analysis, Aphrodite is a parallel of Eos in epic theme. Just as Eos abducts Tithonos (h. Hom. Ven . 218), Kleitos (Od . 15.250), Orion (Od . 5.121), and Kephalos (Eur. Hipp . 455), so also Aphrodite abducts Phaethon (Theog . 990). When Aphrodite seduces Anchises, she herself cites the abduction of Tithonos by Eos for an actual precedent (h. Hom. Ven . 218-38), as we have already seen. Throughout the seduction episode, Aphrodite is called Diós thugáter , "Daughter of Zeus" (h. Hom. Ven . 81, 107, 191).

The archaic parallelism of Eos and Aphrodite suggests that Aphrodite became a rival of Eos in such functions as that of Diòs thugáter , "Daughter of Zeus." From the comparative evidence of the Rig-Veda , we would expect Eos to be not only mother but also consort of the Sun. There is no such evidence in Greek epic for either Helios or any hypostasis such as the Phaethon figure. Instead, the Hesiodic tradition assigns Aphrodite as consort of Phaethon, while Eos is only his mother (Theog . 986-91). In other words, the Hesiodic tradition seems to have split the earlier fused roles of mother and consort and divided them between Eos and Aphrodite respectively. This way, the theme of incest could be neatly obviated.

Although the epithet Diòs thugáter/thugáter Diós does not survive in combination with Eos, the goddess herself is in fact likewise ambivalent. Homeric diction features her snatching up youths as if she were some Harpy, and yet she gives them immortality. To review this point, the example of Kleitos will suffice (Od . 15.250-51).56 Such an ambivalence inherent in the Eos figure

is so uncomfortable that it tends to be attenuated in the diction. For instance, the verb used to describe the abduction of Orion by Eos is not the concretely violent herpasen* , "snatched," but the more abstract héleto , "seized" (Od . 5.121).57 Once the wording herpasen* snatched is removed, the connotation of death from Harpies disappears and a new theme is introduced, death from Artemis Od . 5.121-24.

The alternative to a death from Artemis is a violent abduction by a thúella , "gust of wind" (Od . 20.63), the action of which is there described as anarpáxasa , "snatching up." As precedent for being abducted by a gust of wind and plunged into the Okeanos, Penelope's words evoke the story of the daughters of Pandareos, abducted by thúellai , "gusts of wind" (20.66), the action of which is described as anélonto , "seized." This mention of abduction is followed by a description of how the daughters of Pandareos had been preserved by the Olympian goddesses (20.67-72); the preservation of the girls is then interrupted by death, at the very moment that Aphrodite is arranging for them to be married (20.73-74). Death comes in the form of abduction by hárpuiai , "snatching winds" (20.77), the action of which is now described as anereípsanto , "snatched up."58

In this story about the daughters of Pandareos (Od . 20.66-81), we see a sequence of preservation followed by abduction/death .59 In the story about Orion and Eos (5.121-24), by contrast, the pattern is abduction/preservation followed by death , in that Eos abducts and preserves the hero while Artemis arranges for his death.60 Finally, the story about Aphrodite and Phaethon (Hes. Theog . 986-91) presents yet another pattern, that of abduction/death followed by preservation .61 In each of these narrative alternatives, we see various patterns of differentiation in the ambivalent function of Eos as the undifferentiated agent of abduction, death, and preservation.

The abduction of Phaethon by Aphrodite is most directly comparable to the abduction of Kleitos by Eos (Od . 15.251-52), where again we see the patternt abduction/death followed by preservation . The Kleitos figure is represented as son of Mantios 15.249 and grandson of the seer Melampous 15.242. As Frame has shown, the Melampous myth centers on the theme

of retrieving the Cattle of the Sun.62 The solar function of the Melampous figure and his genetic affinity with the Kleitos figure together imply a solar affinity for Kleitos as well. The wording herpasen* for the abduction of Kleitos at Odyssey 15.251 implies that he was taken by a maleficent Harpy and dropped into the Okeanos. This theme of death is parallel to sunset. On the other hand, the subject of herpasen* is Eos herself, and the theme of sunrise is parallel to rebirth. Since the abductor of Kleitos is represented as the Dawn, it is at least implicit that Kleitos is to be reborn like the Sun and thus preserved.

So long as the Dawn is present, the day waxes. Once the Sun reaches noon, however, the Dawn ceases and the day wanes. This vital role of Eos is explicit in Homeric diction (e.g., Il . 20.66-69). Implicitly, the Sun is united with the light of Dawn until noon; afterward, the Sun descends into the Okeanos, only to be reborn the next day. In the story of Eos and Kleitos a parallel death and rebirth are implied. The sequence of events, to repeat, is abduction/death followed by preservation .63 In the Orion story (Od . 5.121-24), on the other hand, the sequence is the inverse: abduction/preservation followed by death .64 We may note that Orion's relation to the Dawn is the inverse of the Suns. Translated into the symbolism of celestial dynamics, Orion's movements are accordingly astral, not solar, and we see an astral representation of the Orion figure already in Homeric poetry (Od . 5.174; II . 18.488).65 Like the Sun, the constellation Orion rises from the Okeanos and sets in it (Od . 5.275; Il . 8.489), but, unlike the Sun, it rises and sets at nighttime, not daytime. In the summer, at threshing time, Orion starts rising before Dawn (Hes. Op . 598-99). In the winter, at ploughing time, Orion starts setting before Dawn (Op . 615-16). In summer days the light of Dawn catches up with the rising Orion, and he can be her consort in the daytime.66 In winter days the light of Dawn arrives too late to keep Orion from setting into the Okeanos. One related star that does not set, however, is Arktos (Od . 5.275 Il . 18.489). The Arktos Bear watches Orion, dokeúei (Od . 5.274 Il . 18.488), and the verb dokeúei implies doom. In Homeric diction it is used when marksmen or savage beasts take aim at their victims (Il . 13.545, 16.313, 20.340).67 As for Arktos as "Bear," the name implies the goddess Artemis.68 In other

words, the astral passages of Odyssey 5.273-75 and Iliad 18.487-89 implicitly repeat the theme of Orion's dying at the hands of Artemis, explicit in Odyssey 5.121-24.69 The latter passage involves two goddesses, a beneficent Eos and a maleficent Artemis.70 We may contrast the passage about Kleitos, involving an ambivalent Eos who is both maleficent and beneficent (Od . 15.251-52).71 The theme of death is implicit in herpasen* , "snatched" (251), while the theme of preservation is explicit in

, "so that he may be with the immortals" (252).

Similarly, Aphrodite is ambivalent in the Hesiodic passage about Phaethon (Theog . 989-91). Again, the theme of death is implied in anereipsaméne , "snatching up" (990). The epithet daímon , "supernatural being" (991), on the other hand, implies divine preservation, as we see from the context of daímon in Works and Days 109-26.72

To sum up: like Eos, Aphrodite is both maleficent and beneficent in the role of abductor, since she confers both death and preservation. When Phaethon's parents are Helios and Klymene, the stage is set for his death, implicit in the Klymene figure. When his parents are Kephalos and Eos, the stage is set for both his death and his preservation, implicit in the Eos figure as well as in her alternate, Aphrodite. Thus, I disagree with the spirit of the claim that "on the evidence available to us the son of Helios and the son of Eos and Cephalus must be pronounced entirely different persons."73 Such an attitude is overly prosopographical. We are dealing not with different persons but with different myths, cognate variants, centering on the inherited personification of a solar child and consort.

Since the epithet múkhios (secreted) as applied to Phaethon in Theogony 991 implies that he was hidden by Aphrodite, we see here an important parallelism with Phaon and Adonis, who were also hidden by Aphrodite.74 Just as Phaethon implicitly attains preservation in the cult of Aphrodite, so also Adonis in the cult of Apollo Eríthios .75 As for Phaon, he explicitly attains preservation in the myth where he is turned into a beautiful young man by Aphrodite (Sappho fr. 211 V.). From the myths of Phaethon, we see that the themes of concealment and preservation are symbolic of solar behavior, and

we may begin to suspect that the parallel myths of Phaon and Adonis are based on like symbolism.

The very name Pháon , just like Phaéthon , suggests a solar theme.76 His occupation too, that of ferryman (Sappho fr. 211 V.), is a solar theme, as we see from the studies of Hermann Güntert on other mythological ferrymen.77 As an interesting parallel to Phaon, I single out a solar deity in the Rig-Veda , Pusan* ,78 who regularly functions as a psychopomp and who is at least once featured as traveling in golden boats (6.58.3); he is the wooer of his mother (6.55.5) and the lover of his sister (6.55.4, 5). A frequent and exclusive epithet of Pusan* is ãghrni- , "glowing, bright," comparable in meaning to Pháon and Phaéthon .

Let us pursue our current center of attention, the solar figure Phaon, in the poetics of Sappho: another solar theme associated with Phaon is his plunge from a white rock, an act that is parallel to the solar plunge of Phaethon into the Eridanos. The Eridanos is an analogue of the Okeanos, the boundary delimiting light and darkness, life and death, wakefulness and sleep, consciousness and unconsciousness.79 We have also seen that the White Rock is another mythical landmark delimiting the same opposites and that these two landmarks are mystical coefficients in Homeric diction (Od . 24.11). Even the Phaethon figure is connected with the White Rock, in that his "father" Kephalos is supposed to have jumped off Cape Leukas (Strabo 10.2.9 C452) and is connected with the place name Thórikos (Apollodorus 2.4.7).80 The theme of plunging is itself overtly solar, as we see from Homeric diction:

(and the bright light of Helios plunged into the Okeanos ; Il . 8.485). In the Epic Cycle the lover of Klymene is not Helios but "Kephalos son of Deion" (

; Nostoi fr. 4 Allen),81 a figure whose name matches that of Kephalos son of Deioneus, the one who leaped from the white rock of Leukas (Strabo 10.2.9 C452) and who hails from Thorikos (Apollod. 2.4.7).82

If indeed the Phaon and Adonis myths operate on solar themes, it remains to ask about the relevance of Aphrodite. Most important of all, how do we interpret Aphrodite's plunge from the White Rock? We hear of her doing so out of love for Adonis Ptolemaios Chennos by way of Phot. Bibl . 152-53

Bekker,83 and the act itself may be connected with her known function as substitute for the Indo-European dawn-goddess of the Greeks, Eos. As we have seen, Aphrodite has even usurped the epithet of Eos, Diòs thugáter , "Daughter of the Sky," as well as the roles that go with the epithet. From the Homeric standpoint, Aphrodite is actually the Diòs thugáter par excellence, in that even her "mother's" name is Dione* (Il . 5.370, 381). It still remains, however, to explain Aphrodite's plunge, from the White Rock as a feature characteristic of a surrogate Indo-European dawn-goddess.

Here we may do well to look toward Aphrodite's older, Near Eastern, heritage. As the Greek heiress to the functions of the Semitic fertility goddess Ištar, Aphrodite has as her astral symbol the planet of Ištar, better known to us as Venus.84 The planet Venus is of course the same as Hésperos the Evening Star and Heosphóros "dawn-bearer," "Eos* bearer" the Morning Star. In the evening Hesperos sets after sunset; in the morning Heosphoros rises before sunrise. We have the testimony of Sappho's near contemporary; Ibycus (PMG 331), that Hesperos and Heosphoros were by this time known to be one and the same. From the Indo-European standpoint, on the other hand, Hesperos and Heosphoros must be Divine Twins, as represented by the Dioskouroi, the Greek "Sons of Zeus" who are cognates of the Indic Asvin-s.85 At the battle of Aigospotamoi, there is supposed to have been an epiphany of the Dioskouroi in the form of stars, on either side of Lysander's admiral ship; after their victory the Spartans dedicated to the Dioskouroi two stars of gold at Delphi (Plut. Lys . 12, 18).

In the poetics of Sappho, the Indo-European model of the Morning Star and Evening Star merges with the Near Eastern model of the Planet Aphrodite. Sappho's Hesperos is a nuptial star, as we know directly from the fragment 104 V. and indirectly from the celebrated hymenaeus (wedding song) of Catullus 62, Vesper adest . Since Hesperos is the evening aspect of the astral Aphrodite, its setting into the horizon, beyond which is Okeanos, could have inspired the image of a plunging Aphrodite. If we imagine Aphrodite diving into the Okeanos after the sun, it follows that she will rise in the morning, bringing after her the sun of a new day This image is precisely what the Hesiodic scholia preserve to explain the myth of Aphrodite and Phaethon:

(the star of Eos, the one that brings back to light and life [verb an-ágo ] the day and Phaethon, Aphrodite;86 scholia to Hes. Theog . 990). For the mystical

meaning of an-ágo as "bring back the light and life from the dead," I cite the contexts of this verb in Hesiod Theogony 626 (

, "into the light"), Plato Republic 521c (

, "to light"), Aeschylus Agamemnon 1023 (

, "from the realm of the dead"), and so on.87

From Menander fragment 258 K., we infer that Sappho spoke of herself as diving from the White Rock, crazed with love for Phaon. The implications of this image are cosmic. The "I" of Sappho's poetry is vicariously projecting her identity into the goddess Aphrodite, who loves the native Lesbian hypostasis of the Sun-God himself. By diving from the White Rock, the "I" of Sappho does what Aphrodite does in the form of Evening Star, diving after the sunken Sun in order to retrieve him, another morning, in the form of Morning Star. If we imagine her pursuing the Sun the night before, she will be pursued in turn the morning after. There is a potential here for amor versus , a theme that haunts the poetry of Sappho elsewhere:

(Sappho fr. 1.21 V.)

for even if she now flees, soon she will pursue.

Sappho's special association with Aphrodite is apparent throughout her poetry. The very first poem of the Sapphic corpus is, after all, an intense prayer to Aphrodite, where the goddess is implored to be the súmmakhos battle ally of the poetess fr. 1.28 V.. The "I" of Sappho pictures herself and Aphrodite as parallel rather than reciprocal agents:

(Sappho fr. 1.26-27 V.)

and however many things my spirit  [thumós  yearns to
accomplish [verb  teleo* , active ], I pray that you [Aphrodite]  accomplish [verb  teleo* ,
           active ]

I draw attention to the wording

, "to accomplish," an active infinitive instead of the expected passive

, "to be accomplished."88 If someone else needs something done by Aphrodite, Sappho's poetry opts for the passive infinitive

, not active

:

(Sappho fr. 5.1-4 V.)

Aphrodite and Nereids, grant that my brother
come back here unharmed,
and that however many things he wishes in his  spirit  [thumon ] to happen for him
may all be accomplished [verb  teleo* , passive ]

The figure of Sappho projects mortal identity onto the divine explicitly as well as implicitly I cite the following examples from one poem:

(Sappho fr. 96.2-5, 21-23 V.)

Many times turning your attention [nóon ] in this direction

you, a likeness of the well-known goddess.
And it is in your song and dance that she delighted especially.

It is not easy for us
to become equal in lovely shape
to the goddesses.

An even more significant example is Sappho fragment 58.25-26 V., two verses quoted by Athenaeus 687b. Sappho is cited as a woman who professes not to separate tò kalón (what is beautiful) from habrótes luxuriance:

(Sappho fr. 58.25-26 V.)

But I love luxuriance  [(h )abrosúuna ] ... this,
and lust for the sun has won me brightness and beauty.90

From Oxyrhynchus Papyri [787 we can see that these two lines come at the end of a poem alluding to mythical topics. According to Lobel and Page, lines 19 and following refer to Tithonos fr. 58 L.-P.. Be that as it may, we do see images about growing old, with hair turning white and the knees losing their strength

(Sappho fr. 58.13-15 V.). The fragmentary nature of the papyrus prevents certainty about the speaker and the speaker's predicament, but somebody is feeling helpless, asking rhetorically what can be done, and bemoaning some impossibility (58. 17-18). Also, the Lesbian Eos is mentioned:

, "rosy-armed Dawn" (58.19).

As a coda to this poem, the last two verses, which I interpret as proclaiming Sappho's "lust for the sun," amount to a personal and artistic manifesto. The (h)abrosúna (luxuriance) of Sappho transcends the banal discussion of Athenaeus, who quotes these two verses. For Sappho, (h)ábros (luxuriant) is the epithet of Adonis (fr. 140 V.), as also of the Kharites, "Graces" (128 V.), on whose chariot Aphrodite rides (194 V.). At Sappho fragment 2.13-16 V., (h)ábros (14) is the adverb describing the scene as Aphrodite is asked to pour nectar. The use of (h)ábros (luxuriant) and (h)abrosúna (luxuriance) in Sappho reminds us of the Roman neoterics and their allusive use of lepidus/lepos in expressing their artistic identity. As for Sappho's "lust for the sun" and "love of (h)abrosúna (luxuriance)," these themes combine profound personal and artistic ideals. In verses preceding the coda, the words of Sappho perhaps alluded to Phaon as an old man, compared with Tithonos. Or perhaps Phaon was son of Tithonos. We do hear a myth where Phaethon is son of Tithonos (Apollod. 3.14.3); just as Phaethon was son of Eos* (Dawn), perhaps Phaon was son of the Lesbian cognate, Aúos (Dawn) mentioned in the same poem, Sappho fragment 58.19. The expression

, "[she], taking to the ends of the earth," in line 20 of this poem, along with

, "snatched," in the following line 21, remind us of Okeanos/Eridanos and Harpies.

In any case, the fact remains that there is a Lesbian myth about Phaon as an old man (Sappho fr. 211 V.); significantly, in this same myth Aphrodite herself assumes the form of an old woman, whom the old Phaon generously ferries across a strait (ibid.) I suspect that the figure of Sappho identifies herself with this figure of an old woman. Similarly, we may compare the myth of the mourning Aphrodite's plunge from the White Rock out of love for the dead Adonis (Ptolemaios Chennos by way of Phot. Bibl . 152-53 Bekker) as pertinent to the poetics of Sappho, where the explicit theme of mourning for Adonis (fr. 168 V.) may be connected with the latent theme of Sappho's self-identification with Aphrodite.91

In short, there is a mythical precedent for an aging lady to love Phaon. The implicit hope is retrieved youth. After Aphrodite crossed the strait, she, became a beautiful goddess again, conferring youth and beauty on Phaon, too (again, Sappho fr. 211 V.). For all these reasons, perhaps, Sappho loves Phaon.

Four
Eros and Incantation: Sappho and Oral Poetry

Charles Segal

Five
Sappho and Helen

Page duBois

Denys Page seems unimpressed with Sappho's fragment 16 Lobel-Page (L.-P). He complains of line 7: "The sequence of thought might have been clearer.... It seems inelegant then to begin this parable, the point of which is that Helen found

in her lover, by stating that she herself surpassed all mortals in this very quality."1 Of the whole: "The poem opens with a common device2 ... In a phrase which rings dull in our doubtful ears, she proceeds to illustrate the truth of her preamble by calling Helen of Troy in evidence.... And the thought is simple as the style is artless. The transition back to the principal subject was perhaps not very adroitly managed...."3 Of the end, "The idea may seem a little fanciful: but this stanza was either a little fanciful or a little dull."4

I will argue that the very elements with which Page finds fault—the catalogue, the example of Helen, the return to the catalogue at the poem's end—structure it firmly while permitting its center to open into a moment of radiant presence. In addition, the poem is extraordinary in its rhetorical strategy, its attempt to move from the particularity of narrative discourse to a more general, logical, philosophical language. I see also in this poem, one of the few texts which break the silence of women in antiquity, an instant in which women become more than the objects of man's desire. Sappho's fragment 16 reaches beyond the confines of the lyric structure, looks both

forward and backward in time, expresses the contradictions of its moment in history.

Here is the full, reconstructed text:

Some say a host of horsemen, others of infants,
and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing
on the dark earth: but I say, it is what you love.

Full easy it is to make this understood of one and all:
for she that far surpased all mortals in beauty,
Helen, her most noble hushed

Deserted, and went sating to Troy, with never a
thought for her daughter and dear parents. The
[Cyprian goddess] led her from the path...
...(Which) now has put me in mind of Anactoria far away;

Her lovely way of walkng, and the bright radiance
of her changing face, would I rather see than
your Lydian chariots and infantry full-armed.

The poem beans with a brief cathlogue, a listing of horsemen, infantry, ships. The

of line 2 is ambiguous in in position; it refers back to the cathode and forward to the infinitive construction

in line 3. The dark earth is the basis for this host of warriors, and

warships, perhaps, and recalls the diction of the Homeric poems. Sappho sets

against this background of choices, against the dark earth, and then she makes the declaration which is the logical heart of the poem, "I say it

is what one loves."

The next stanza overpowers the doubter; she asserts the ease of proof of her statement and moves immediately into an example. The poet's strategy here is rhetorically subtle; at first the reader associates the abstract

above with Helen herself. But the epic heroine has another function within the poem; she is not herself "the most beautiful thing." She moves toward it, drawn by desire.6 Helen stands at first, set up by

the hyperbole of which is echoed by

of line 8; her name is surrounded by superlatives, masculine and feminine. In line 7, which begins with

the quality for which she is immortal in men's memory, she is surrounded by

and

She surpasses all mankind with respect to beauty. Sappho's proof is for a moment deferred, but the force of her example, the superiority of Helen to all, is stressed.

The third stanza begins with

the line ends with

The first letters of the first participle echo the

of

, and link the leaving behind, her act of desertion, with her beauty. The line expresses motion: we see Helen leaving, going, sailing; the

the aorist, anchors her action in a single past moment. The participles catch her endlessly moving, taking steps, sailing away on a ship which recalls the third element of the catalogue at the poem's beginning. The following line sets her motion against the static force of that which she left behind, all those who should have been dear to her, who ought to have satisfied her. She forgets all; the

perhaps plays on the root

suggesting madness. (Alcaeus, in his poem about Helen, calls her

)7 The stanza ends with a sentence that is lost; someone, something, leads the heroine astray.

There follows a fragmentary passage that is legible again at

we have moved from the world of legend back to the

of line 3, and to the present, the singer's time. The next word is

If the logical center of the poem is the generalizing statement of lines 3 and 4, the moment of presence, the phenomenological center, arrives with the name of Anaktoria. We are made aware of her absence only with

the participle allows us to imagine her presence as well. Sappho's memory creates her; the act of making poetry becomes the act of making here, now, the absent loved one.

The last stanza completes the process of memory and finally returns the listener to the wider world. The

of line 17 echoes

of line 4,

makes whatever is lovely about Anaktoria partake of the general statement at the beginning. The

is linked to

of line 9 and stresses the connection of Helen with all desire, with Anaktoria. Sappho would rather see her way of walking, her shining face, than the Lydian chariots, than the armed foot soldiers. The last two substantives return us to the "prooïmion," to the level of generalizing statement.

The poem works on the tension between desire, love, presence, and absence, and on the threat of war outside, the drama of pursuit in love. In each of the three parts of the lyric Sappho refers to the world of war, the world of men and heroes—in the catalogue of warriors and ships, in the mention of Helen, where the Trojan War is suppressed but present behind the text, in the mention at the end of chariots and foot soldiers. The notion of desire shimmers through the tripartite rhetorical structure, through the allusions to war; Sappho's choice of Anaktoria takes place in the context of a refusal of alternatives.

Lattimore mistranslates this poem in a way which reveals the consequences of its compactness, its far-reaching compression. He translates lines 3 and 4 thus: "but I say she whom one loves best is the loveliest."8 In fact, the Greek

does not mean that:

is neuter;

also does not show gender. Lattimore's translation, however, brings out an important aspect of the poem, a confusion between things and people which is essential to its logic. Lattimore makes the poem exclusively a love poem, a poem about Anaktoria. Sappho is writing something more, a sketch on the abstract notion of desire. At least as important as Anaktoria is the poet's attempt to universalize her insight, to move toward logical thought. She is defining desire with the vocabulary at hand.

Sappho wants to answer the question: what is

Her answer is a type of definition, a general statement—

is whatever one desires. The catalogue which precedes the general statement is not meant to be exhaustive; it is a "doublet" which includes kinds of men and ships, which transcends both these classes. Helen is a particular case, and her action proves the general statement; her beauty and fame are enlisted only to give weight to the general definition. Anaktoria is another particular, for Sappho the most beautiful thing on earth, in the poem another element in a proof. The partial listing at the end of the poem simply closes the "ring."

All the elements of the poem, which establish the opposition love/war, men/women, men/things, work also to create a definition, a logical summary under a heading that subsumes them all. Sappho is concerned to say new

things with the old vocabulary as we see if we read the poem juxtaposed with this passage from the Nicomachean Ethics , where Aristotle is attempting to define

, the end at which human actions aim:

.
(1.5, 1095b14-17)9

Bruno Snell says of Sappho's fragment 16, "That one man should contrast his own ideas with those of others is the theme of [this] poem by Sappho."10 Yet elsewhere I think he comes closer to the real consequences of the type of thinking exemplified in this poem, which is not simply about personal taste. "But both of them [Archilochus and Sappho] are evidently concerned to grasp a piece of genuine reality; to find Being instead of Appearance."11 Although she might have done so, Sappho is not saying that Anaktoria =

Much of the energy of the poem comes from the force of her personal preference, her ability to make Anaktoria walk before us, but Anaktoria's presence is straining to break out of a structure which gives her existence wider meaning.

Helen is an element of the old epic vocabulary, yet she means something new here. Sappho subverts the transitional interpretation of her journey to Troy. And in so doing she speaks of desire in new terms, circling down on a definition of the abstract force. Eros as a term is insufficiently abstract; Eros is a god, Aphrodite a personification. Sappho moves toward the abstract by employing the substitutability of things, people, ships. She achieves a representation of desire by the accumulation of detail, examples, personal testimony.

The problem is very different from that which the Homeric poet sets himself, and Sappho's use of example fits into a more hypotactic structure. Homer's Phoenix tells the Meleager story as an example to persuade Achilles to return to battle. He is not concerned to describe, to define the nature of anger or withdrawal. The story works rhetorically to put Achilles' action in a context, to convince Achilles to act further, to ensure the outcome of his wrath in terms of heroic pattern.

Homer uses this kind of example rarely; he describes more often by means of simile, sets next to some action on the battlefield an event from the pastoral

world outside the poem's supposed space. The one scene seems equivalent to the other. Sappho is defining an abstraction, and she operates by citing several particulars which are logically subordinate to a whole, working by addition toward that whole.

The move from mythical to rational thought, from religion to philosophy, is caught here in a moment of transition. Sappho is progressing toward analytical language, toward the notion of definition, of logical classes, of subordination and hypotactic structure. Her ability to do so coincides in time with the invention in the eastern Mediterranean, in nearby Lydia, of coined money, a step which Aristotle sees as enabling abstract thought, as permitting the recognition of abstract value. The exchange between persons who are different but equal requires an equalizer:

....
(Eth. Nic . 5.5, 1133a19-21)12

The invention of money allows things, even men, to be measured by a common standard. Sappho measures men and women and things not by setting them in a hierarchy, in a situation of relative value, but against a common standard, that of "the most beautiful thing on the dark earth."

Before the invention of coined money, men exchanged valuable things. The Homeric world is characterized by an exchange of gifts; women too are exchanged, as gifts, as valuable prizes of war. The Trojan War is caused by a violation of proper exchange, since Menelaos, the recipient of Helen, loses possession of her. The Iliad begins with the return of Chryseis to her father and Agamemnon's seizure of Briseis. Sappho's Helen is very different from Homer's. In the Iliad Helen is caught within the walls of Troy; we see her weaving a web which is like the war, pointing out the Greeks heroes to Priam. She is forced by Aphrodite to go to Paris's bed when the goddess snatches him from danger on the plain below. She mourns for Hektor, and laments her coming with Paris to Troy. Because of Aphrodite's promise to the shepherd, Helen has been traded for the apple of discord; she has become a thing, passively waiting to be reclaimed.

In the Odyssey , Helen greets Telemachos along with Menelaos; she is a contented queen, and Homer alludes to her stay in Egypt. According to an alternate version of the story, her

(image) was at Troy; she gives her guest nepenthe, which she received in Egypt. We hear her story of

Odysseus's spying trip within the walls, and she claims to have assisted him. In an ironic juxtaposition, her husband immediately recounts the tale of the wooden horse and Helen's treacherous behavior, when she called to each warrior, imitating the voice of his wife. Only Odysseus kept them from crying out and betraying their mission.

Women in the Homeric world are exchanged, given as prizes, stolen, sold as slaves. The narrative structure of the Odyssey works on the passage of Odysseus from one woman to another, from the beautiful Kalypso to his faithful wife Penelope; he moves across the epic landscape defining himself, encountering fixed female creatures and moving beyond them. George Dimock, in a fine example of what Mary Ellmann would call "phallic criticism,"13 says of the initial situation of the poem: "Leaving Calypso is very like leaving the perfect security of the womb; but, as the Cyclops reminds us, the womb is after all a deadly place. In the womb, one has no identity, no existence worthy of a name. Nonentity and identity are in fact the poles between which the actors in the poem move."14 Odysseus, the only actor in sight, defines himself by leaving the womb—Kalypso; and the other boundary of his journey, from which he will depart again with his oar, is the bed of Penelope, another fixed, static place on the map of the poem, set like Kalypso's island as a landmark by which the hero marks out his direction, his existence.

The goddesses of the Odyssey act, but they too—except for Athena the virgin warrior, not born of woman, half-female—are static figures. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment , Horkheimer and Adorno speak of the sirens who tempt Odysseus, and of the circular, mythic creatures like them in the poem, figures which belong to the past which Odysseus is transcending in his nostos , in his trajectory through the landscape from Aia to Ithaka:

The mythic monsters whose sphere of power he enters always represent ossified covenants, claims from pre-history. Thus in the stage of development represented by the patriarchal age, the older folk religion appears in the form of its scattered relics: beneath the Olympian heavens they have become images of abstract fate, or immaterial necessity.... Scylla and Charybdis have a right to whatever comes between them, just as Circe does to bewitch those unprepared with the gods' antidote.... Each of the mythic figures is programmed always to do the same thing. Each is a figure of repetition, and would come to an end should the repetition fail to occur.5

Odysseus moves away from Kalypso's island, away from Nausikaa and the Phaeacians, learning from Circe and leaving her, past the Sirens, past Scylla

and Charybdis. The cyclical female forms mark the landscape and cannot themselves move within it; Odysseus returns to Penelope and then moves past her too, deeper inland. Women in the world of the Odyssey are trapped in cyclical, mythic time; except for Athena, they belong to an age which Odysseus leaves behind as he makes himself, discovers himself through his journey.

The study of narrative structure, which has been a focus of recent literary criticism, seems unable to see beyond the type of text exemplified by the Odyssey . Women appear to have a static, fixed quality in oral literatures, and structuralists generalize from oral texts to describe women as objects, things to be exchanged, markers of places, geographically, textually. Lévi-Strauss discusses women almost as words exchanged in a conversation among men.16 In the analysis of narrative which Vladimir Propp began with his study of the folktale, woman is a princess, the object of the hero's quest, a prize.17 A.J. Greimas, in presenting his "actantial model," applies categories appropriate to oral literature to any conceivable love story:

Par example, dans un récit qui ne serait qu'une banale histoire d'amour, finissant, sans l'intervention des parents, par le mariage, le sujet est à la fois le destinataire, tandis que l'objet est en même temps le destinateur de l'amour:

18

The attempt to univcrsalize models of structure denies the historicity of the models: women may be exchanged like words in some cultures, according to anthropologists, but every love story is not accurately represented by the narrative shapes of these cultures. Women are not always objects, sending love. Oral cultures have patterns of exchange and marriage very different from those of literate societies, and the diagram, the insistence on the subjectobject duality, fail to take into account the possibility of women's status as subjects in their own right.

Sappho's poem, although not a narrative, in fact reverses the pattern of oral literature, of the Homeric poems—men trading women, men moving past women. She sees Helen as an "actant" in her own life, the subject of

a choice, exemplary in her desiring. Sappho's idea of Helen is different even from that of her contemporary Alcaeus; he registers strong disapproval of Helen, in his narration of her story, by comparing her to the more virtuous Thetis.19 Alcaeus insists on the destructive aspects of Helen's love, her responsibility for the perishing of the Trojans and their city.

Sappho does not judge Helen, and she does not make the epic heroine the victim of madness. Helen is one who acted, pursuing the thing she loved, and for that action Sappho celebrates her. Even the simple reversal of Greimas's model, which would make Helen "subject," is inadequate. Perhaps the failure of women to write narrative poetry, the silence which Sappho did not break, is linked to the invisible pressure of models like this one, patterns which insist on women's receptivity, passivity.

Sappho acts, as did Helen, in loving Anaktoria, in following her in her poem, in attempting to think beyond the terms of the epic vocabulary. Her action is possible because the world of oral culture, of a certain type of exchange, a type of marriage characteristic of such societies, is no longer dominant. The Greek world is, in the seventh century, in a stage of transition.20 The institutions of the democratic cities have not yet evolved. The lyric age, the age of the tyrants, is a period of confusion, turbulence, and conflict; it is from the moment, this break, that Sappho speaks.

Louis Gernet, in his "mariage des Tyrans," analyzes the anachronistic features of the marriage of the tyrants, the elements of their alliances characteristic more of the legendary past, the age of the magical kinds, than of a society moving toward urbanization.21 J.-P. Vernant's study of Greek marriage also helps to explain the peculiar situation of women in the seventh and sixth centuries:

On peut parler d'une coupure entre le marlage archaïque et celui qui s'instaure dans le cadre d'une cité démocratique, à la fin du VI^e siécle athénien. Dans l'Athènes post-clisthenienne les unions matrimoniales n'ont plus pour objet d'établir des relations du puissance ou de services mutuels entre de grandes families souveraines mais de perpetuer les maisons, les foyers domestiques qui constituent la cité....22

The return of the tyrants to incest reveals a need at this time to redefine, to restructure the institution of marriage, so important in the lives of women in such cultures, to make it correspond to the new demands of urban, democratic life.

During the seventh century the old institutions which perpetuated the dominance of the aristocracy, the system of noble oikoi , the rural economy, premonetary exchange, were being challenged by growing mercantile, commercial, artisan groups which were clustering around the acropoles.23 The conflict which Alcaeus documents in his political poems emerged at this time, when new definitions, new loci of power were being established, and as the aristocrats, the families of Sappho and Alcaeus among others, fought for survival.

The transitional nature of Sappho's society, the possible lack of definition for her class, for women, freed her from the rigidity of traditional marriage, or from the identity which arose from that fixed role. They permitted her to make poetry like the Anaktoria poem, a love poem which is at the same time an extension of the possibilities of language, and they enabled her to see Helen as an autonomous subject, the hero of her own life.

Six
Gardens of Nymphs: Public and Private in Sappho's Lyrics

Jack Winkler

Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig in their Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary devote a full page to Sappho.1 The page is blank. Their silence is one quite appropriate response to Sappho's lyrics, particularly refreshing in comparison to the relentless trivialization, the homophobic anxieties, and the sheer misogyny that have infected so many ancient and modern responses to her work.2 This anxiety itself requires some analysis. Part of the explanation is the fact that her poetry is continually focused on women and sexuality, subjects that provoke many readers to excess.3 But the centering on women and sexuality is not quite enough to explain the mutilated and violent discourse which keeps cropping up around her. After all Anakreon speaks of the same subjects. A deeper explanation refers to the subject more than the object of her lyrics—the fact that it is a woman speaking about women and sexuality. To some audiences this would have been a double violation of the ancient rules which dictated that a proper woman was to be silent in the public world (defined as men's sphere) and that a proper woman accepted the

administration and definition of her sexuality by her father and her husband. I will set aside for the present the question of how women at various times and places actually conducted their lives in terms of private and public activity, appearance, and authority. If we were in a position to know more of the actual texture of ancient women's lives and not merely the maxims and rules uttered by men, we could fairly expect to find that many women abided by these social rules or were forced to, and that they sometimes enforced obedience on other women; but, since all social codes can be manipulated and subverted as well as obeyed, we would also expect to find that many women had effective strategies of resistance and false compliance by which they attained a working degree of freedom for their lives.4 Leaving aside all these questions, however, I simply begin my analysis with the fact that there was available a common understanding that proper women ought to be publicly submissive to male definitions, and that a very great pressure of propriety could at any time be invoked to shame a woman who acted on her own sexuality.

This is at least the public ethic and the male norm. It cannot have been entirely absent from the society of Lesbos in Sappho's time. What I want to recover in this paper are the traces of Sappho's own consciousness in the face of these norms, her attitude to the public ethic and her allusions to private reality. My way of "reading what is there"5 focuses on the politics of space— the role of women as excluded from public male domains and enclosed in private female areas—and on Sappho's consciousness of this ideology.6 My analysis avowedly begins with an interest in sexual politics—the relations of power between women and men as two groups in the same society. My

premise is that gender consciousness is at least as fundamental a way of identifying oneself and interpreting the world as any other class membership or category. In some sense the choice of a method will predetermine the kind and range of results that may emerge: a photo camera will not record sounds, a nonpolitical observer will not notice facts of political significance. Thus my readings of Sappho are in principle not meant to displace other readings but add to the store of perceptions of "what is there."

There are various "publics and privates" which might be contrasted. What I have in mind for this paper by "public" is quite specifically the recitation of Homer at civic festivals considered as an expression of common cultural traditions. Samuel Butler notwithstanding, Homer and the singers of his tradition were certainly men and the Homeric epics cannot be conceived as women's songs.7 Women are integral to the social and poetic structure of both Iliad and Odyssey , and the notion of a woman's consciousness is particularly vital to the Odyssey .8 But Nausikaa and Penelope live in a male-prominent world, coping with problems of honor and enclosure which were differentially assigned to women,9 and their "subjectivity" in the epic must ultimately be analyzed as an expression of a male consciousness. Insofar as Homer presents a set of conventional social and literary formulas, he inescapably embodies and represents the definition of public culture as male territory.10

Archaic lyric, such as that composed by Sappho, was also not composed for private reading but for performance to an audience.11 Sappho often seems to be searching her soul in a very intimate way, but this intimacy is in some measure formulaic12 and is certainly shared with some group of listeners. And yet, maintaining this thesis of the public character of lyric, we can still propose three senses in which such song may be "private": first, composed in the person of a woman (whose consciousness was socially defined as

outside the public world of men); second, shared only with women (that is, other "private" persons;

, "and now I shall sing this beautiful song to delight the women who are my companions," fr. 160 L.-P.13 ); and third, sung on informal occasions, what we would simply call poetry readings, rather than on specific ceremonial occasions such as sacrifice, festival, leave-taking, or initiation.14 The lyric tradition, as Nagy argues,15 may be older than the epic, and if older perhaps equally honored as an achievement of beauty in its own fight. The view of lyric as a subordinate element in celebrations and formal occasions is no more compelling than the view, which I prefer, of song as honored and celebrated at least sometimes in itself. Therefore I doubt that Sappho always needed a sacrifice or dance or wedding for which to compose a song; the institution of lyric composition was strong enough to occasion her songs as songs . Certainly Sappho speaks of goddesses and religious festivities, but it is by no means certain that her own poems are either for a cult performance or that her circle of women friends (hetairai ) is identical in extension with the celebrants in a festival she mentions.16 It is possible that neither of these latter two senses of "private" were historically valid for Sappho's performances. Yet her lyrics, as compositions that had some publicity, bear some quality of being in principle from another world than Homer's, not just from a different tradition, and they embody a consciousness both of her "private," woman-centered world and the other, "public" world. This essay is an experiment in using these categories to unfold some aspects of Sappho's many-sided meaning.

Poem 1 is one of the passages in Sappho that has been best illuminated in recent criticism. Several analyses have developed the idea that Sappho is speaking in an imagined scene which represents that of Diomedes on the battlefield in Iliad 5.17 Sappho uses a traditional prayer formula, of which Diomedes' appeal to Athena at Iliad 5.115-17 is an example ("Hear me,

Atrytone, child of aegis-bearing Zeus; if ever you stood beside my father supporting his cause in bitter battle, now again support me, Athena"), and she models Aphrodite's descent to earth in a chariot on the descent of Athena and Hera (5.719-72), who are coming to help the wounded Diomedes (5.781). Sappho asks Aphrodite to be her ally, literally her companion in battle, summachos .

Intricate, undying Aphrodite, mare-weaver, child of Zeus, I pray thee,
do not tame my spirit, great lady, with pain and sorrow. But come to me
now if ever before you heard my voice from afar and leaving your
father's house, yoked golden chariot and came. Beautiful sparrows swiftly brought
     you
to the murky ground with a quick flutter of wings from the sky's height
through clean air. They were quick in coming. You, blessed goddess,
a smile on your divine face, asked what did I suffer, this time again,
and why did I call, this time again, and what did I in my frenzied heart
most want to happen. Whom am I to persuade, this time again ...
to lead to your affection? Who, O Sappho, does you wrong? For one who flees will
soon pursue, one who rejects gifts will soon be making offers, and one who
does not love will soon be loving, even against her will. Come to me even
now, release me from these mean anxieties, and do what my heart wants done,
you yourself be my ally.18

One way of interpreting the correspondences that have been noticed is to say that Sappho presents herself as a kind of Diomedes on the field of love, that she is articulating her own experience in traditional (male) terms and showing that women too have arete .19 But this view, that the poem is mainly about eros and arete and uses Diomedes merely as a background model, falls short. Sappho's use of Homeric passages is a way of allowing us, even encouraging us, to approach her consciousness as a woman and poet reading Homer. The Homeric hero is not just a starting point for Sappho's discourse about her own love; rather Diomedes as he exists in the Iliad is central to what Sappho is saying about the distance between Homer's world and her own. A woman listening to the Iliad must cross over a gap that separates her experience from the subject of the poem, a gap which does not exist in quite the same way for male listeners. How can Sappho murmur along with the rhapsody the speeches of Diomedes, uttering and impersonating his appeal for help? Sappho's answer to this aesthetic problem is that she can only do so by substituting her concerns for those of the hero while maintaining the same structure of plight / prayer / intervention. Poem 1 says, among

other things, "This is how I, a woman and poet, become able to appreciate a typical scene from the Iliad. "

Though the Diomedeia is a typical passage, Sappho's choice of it is not random, for it is a kind of test case for the issue of women's consciousness of themselves as participants without a poetic voice of their own at the public recitations of traditional Greek heroism. In Iliad 5, between Diomedes' appeal to the goddess and the descent of Athena and Hera, Aphrodite herself is driven from the battlefield after Diomedes stabs her in the hand. The poet identifies Aphrodite as a "feminine" goddess, weak, analkis , unsuited to take part in male warfare (331, 428). Her appropriate sphere, says Diomedes exulting in his victory over her, is to seduce weak women (analkides , 348-49). By implication, if "feminine" women (and all mortal women are "feminine" by definition and prescription) try to participate in men's affairs—warfare or war poetry—they will, like Aphrodite, be driven out at spear point.

Poem 1 employs not only a metaphorical use of the Iliad (transferring the language for the experience of soldiers to the experience of women in love) and a familiarization of the alien poem (so that it now makes better sense to women readers), but a multiple identification with its characters. Sappho is acting out the parts both of Diomedes and of Aphrodite as they are characterized in Iliad 5. Aphrodite, like Sappho, suffers pain (

; 354), and is consoled by a powerful goddess who asks "Who has done this to you?" (373). Aphrodite borrows Ares' chariot to escape from the battle and ride to heaven (358-67), the reverse of her action in Sappho's poem.20 Sappho therefore is in a sense presenting herself both as a desperate Diomedes needing the help of a goddess (Athena/Aphrodite) and as a wounded and expelled female (Aphrodite/Sappho) seeking a goddess's consolation (Dione/Aphrodite).

This multiple identification with several actors in an Iliadic scene represents on another level an admired feature of Sappho's poetics—her adoption of multiple points of view in a single poem. This is especially noteworthy in poem x where she sketches a scene of encounter between a victim and a controlling deity. The intensification of pathos and mastery in the encounter is due largely to the ironic double consciousness of the poet-Sappho speaking in turn the parts of suffering "Sappho" and impassive goddess. Such many-mindedness is intrinsic to the situation of Greek women understanding men's culture, as it is to any silenced group within a culture that acknowledges its presence but not its authentic voice and right to self-determination. This leads to an interesting reversal of the standard (and oppressive) stricture on women's literature that it represents only a small and limited area of the

larger world.21 Such a view portrays women's consciousness according to the social contrast of public/private, as if women's literature occupied but a small circle somewhere inside the larger circle of men's literature, just as women are restricted to a domestic sanctuary. But insofar as men's public culture is truly public, displayed as the governing norm of social interaction "in the streets," it is accessible to women as well as to men. Because men define and exhibit their language and manners as the culture and segregate women's language and manners as a subculture, inaccessible to and protected from extrafamilial men, women are in the position of knowing two cultures where men know only one. From the point of view of consciousness, we must diagram the circle of women's literature as a larger one which includes men's literature as one phase or compartment of women's cultural knowledge. Women in a male-prominent society are thus like a linguistic minority in a culture whose public actions are all conducted in the majority language. To participate even passively in the public arena the minority must be bilingual; the majority feels no such need to learn the minority's language. Sappho's consciousness therefore is necessarily a double consciousness, her participation in the public literary tradition always contains an inevitable alienation.

Poem 1 contains a statement of how important it is to have a double consciousness. Aphrodite reminds "Sappho" of the ebb and flow of conflicting emotions, of sorrow succeeded by joy, of apprehensiveness followed by relief, of loss turning into victory. This reminder not to be singlemindedly absorbed in one moment of experience can be related to the pattern of the Iliad in general, where the tides of battle flow back and forth, flight alternating with pursuit. This is well illustrated in Iliad 5, which is also the Homeric locus for the specific form of alternation in fortunes which consists of wounding and miraculous healing. Two gods (Aphrodite and Ares) and one hero (Aineias) are injured and saved. Recuperative alternation is the theme of poem 1, as it is of Iliad 5. But because of Sappho's "private" point of view and double consciousness it becomes not only the theme but the process of the poem, in the following sense: Sappho appropriates an alien text, the very one which states the exclusion of "weak" women from men's territory; she implicitly reveals the inadequacy of that denigration; and she restores the fullness of Homer's text by isolating and alienating its very pretense to a justified exclusion of the feminine and the erotic.

Sappho's poetic strategy finally leads to a rereading of Iliad 5 in the light of her poem 1. For when we have absorbed Sappho's complex re-impersonation of the Homeric roles (male and female) and learned to see what was marginal

as encompassing, we notice that there is a strain of anxious self-alienation in Diomedes' expulsion of Aphrodite. The overriding need of a battling warrior is to be strong and unyielding; hence the ever-present temptation (which is also a desire) is to be weak. This is most fully expressed at Iliad 22. 111-30, where Hektor views laying down his weapons to parley with Achilles as effeminate and erotic. Diomedes' hostility to Aphrodite (the effeminate and erotic) is a kind of scapegoating, his affirmation of an ideal of masculine strength against his own possible "weakness." For, in other contexts outside the press of battle, the Homeric heroes have intense emotional lives and their vulnerability there is much like Sappho's: they are as deeply committed to friendship networks as Sappho ("He gave the horses to Deipylos, his dear comrade, whom he valued more than all his other age-mates"; 5.325-26); they give and receive gifts as Sappho does; they wrong each other and reestablish friendships with as much feeling as Sappho and her beloved. In a "Sapphic" reading, the emotional isolation of the Iliadic heroes from their domestic happiness stands out more strongly ("no longer will his children run up to his lap and say 'Papa' "; 5.408). We can reverse the thesis that Sappho uses Homer to heroize her world and say that insofar as her poems are a reading of Homer (and so lead us back to read Homer again) they set up a feminine perspective on male activity that shows more clearly the inner structure and motivation of the exclusion of the feminine from male arenas.

I return to the image of the double circle—Sappho's consciousness is a larger circle enclosing the smaller one of Homer. Reading the Iliad is for her an experience of double consciousness. The movement thus created is threefold: by temporarily restricting herself to that smaller circle she can understand full well what Homer is saying; when she brings her total experience to bear she sees the limitation of his world; by offering her version of this experience in a poem she shows the strengths of her world, the apparent incompleteness of Homer's, and finally the easily overlooked subtlety of Homer's. This threefold movement of appropriation from the "enemy," exposure of his weakness, and recognition of his worth is like the actions of Homeric heroes who vanquish, despoil, and sometimes forgive. Underlying the relations of Sappho's persona to the characters of Diomedes and Aphrodite are the relations of Sappho the author to Homer, a struggle of reader and text (audience and tradition), of woman listening and man reciting. A sense of what we now call the sexual politics of literature seems nearly explicit in poem 16:

Some assert that a troupe of horsemen, some of foot soldiers, some a
fleet of ships is the most beautiful thing on the dark earth; but I
assert that it is whatever anyone desires. It is quite simple to make
this intelligible to all, for she who was far and away preeminent in
beauty of all humanity, Helen, abandoning her husband, the ..., went

sailing to Troy and took no thought for child or dear parents, but
beguiled ... herself ... for ... lightly ... reminds me now of Anaktoria absent:
whose lovely step and shining glance of face I would prefer to see than Lydians'
chariots and fighting men in arms ... cannot be ... human ... to wish to share
... unexpectedly.

[This is a poem of eight stanzas, of which the first, second, third, and fifth are almost intact, the rest lost or very fragmentary.]

It is easy to read this as a comment on the system of values in heroic poetry. Against the panoply of men's opinions on beauty (all of which focus on military organizations, regimented masses of anonymous fighters), Sappho sets herself—"but I"—and a very abstract proposition about desire. The stanza first opposes one woman to a mass of men and then transcends that opposition when Sappho announces that "the most beautiful" is "whatever you or I or anyone may long for." This amounts to a reinterpretation of the kind of meaning the previous claims had, rather than a mere contest of claimants for supremacy in a category whose meaning is agreed upon.22 According to Sappho, what men mean when they claim that a troupe of cavalrymen is very beautiful is that they intensely desire such a troupe. Sappho speaks as a woman opponent entering the lists with men, but her proposition is not that men value military forces whereas she values desire, but rather that all valuation is an act of desire. Men are perhaps unwilling to see their values as erotic in nature, their ambitions for victory and strength as a kind of choice. But it is clear enough to Sappho that men are in love with masculinity and that epic poets are in love with military prowess.

Continuing the experiment of reading this poem as about poetry, we might next try to identify Helen as the Iliadic character. But Homer's Helen cursed herself for abandoning her husband and coming to Troy; Sappho's Helen, on the contrary, is held up as proof that it is right to desire one thing above all others, and to follow the beauty perceived no matter where it leads. There is a charming parody of logical argumentation in these stanzas; the underlying, real argument I would reconstruct as follows, speaking for the moment in Sappho's voice. "Male poets have talked of military beauty in positive terms, but of women's beauty (especially Helen's) as baneful and destructive. They will probably never see the lineaments of their own desires as I do, but let me try to use some of their testimony against them, at least to expose the paradoxes of their own system. I shall select the woman whom men both desire and despise in the highest degree. What they have damned her for was, in one light, an act of the highest courage and commitment, and their own poetry at one point makes grudging admission that she surpasses all the

moral censures leveled against her—the Teichoskopia (Il . 3.121-244). Helen's abandonment of her husband and child and parents is mentioned there (139, 174), and by a divine manipulation she feels a change of heart, now desiring her former husband and city and parents (139) and calling herself a bitch (180). But these are the poet's sentiments, not hers; he makes her a puppet of his feeling, not a woman with a mind of her own. The real Helen was powerful enough to leave a husband, parents, and child whom she valued less than the one she fell in love with. (I needn't and won't mention her lover's name: the person—male or female—is not relevant to my argument.) Indeed she was so powerful that she beguiled Troy itself at that moment when, in the midst of its worst suffering, the senior counselors watched her walk along the city wall and said, in their chirpy old men's voices, 'There is no blame for Trojans or armored Achaians to suffer pains so long a time for such a woman' (156-57)."

So far I have been speaking Sappho's mind as I see it behind this poem. There is an interesting problem in lines 12 ff., where most modern editors of Sappho's text have filled the gaps with anti-Helen sentiments, on the order of "but (Aphrodite) beguiled her ..., for (women are easily manipulated,) light (-minded ... )." We do not know what is missing, but it is more consistent with Sappho's perspective, as I read it, to keep the subject of

', "beguiled," the same as in the preceding clause—Helen. "Helen beguiled—itself (or herself)," some feminine noun, such as "city," "blame" (nemesis), or the like. What is easily manipulated and light-minded (kouphos ) are the senior staff of Troy, who astonishingly dismiss years of suffering as they breathe a romantic sigh when Helen passes. Perhaps Sappho's most impressive fragment is poem 31:

The one seems to me to be like the gods, the man whosoever sits facing you and listens nearby to your sweet speech and desirable laughter—which surely terrifies the heart in my chest; for as I look briefly at you, so can I no longer speak at all, my tongue is silent, broken, a silken fire suddenly has spread beneath my skin, with my eyes I see nothing, my hearing hums, a cold sweat grips me, a trembling seizes me entire, more pale than grass am I, I seem to myself to be a little short of dead. But everything is to be endured, since even a pauper ....

The first stanza is a makarismos , a traditional formula of praise and well-wishing, "happy the man who ...," and is often used to celebrate the prospect of a happy marriage.23 For instance, "That man is far and away blessed beyond all others who plies you with dowry and leads you to his house; for I have never seen with my eyes a mortal person like you, neither man

nor woman. A holy dread grips me as I gaze at you" (Od . 6.158-61). In fact this passage from Odysseus's speech to Nausikaa is so dose in structure (makarismos followed by a statement of deep personal dread) to poem 31 that I should like to try the experiment of reading the beginning of Sappho's poem as a re-creation of that scene from the Odyssey .

If Sappho is speaking to a young woman ("you") as Nausikaa, with herself in the role of an Odysseus, then there are only two persons present in the imagined scene.24 This is certainly true to the emotional charge of the poem, in which the power and tension flow between Sappho and the woman she sees and speaks to, between "you" and "I." The essential statement of the poem is, like the speech of Odysseus to Nausikaa, a lauding of the addressee and an abasement of the speaker which together have the effect of establishing a working relationship between two people of real power. The rhetoric of praise and of submission are necessary because the poet and the shipwrecked man are in fact very threatening. Most readers feel the paradox of poem 31's eloquent statement of speechlessness, its powerful declaration of helplessness; as in poem 1, the poet is masterfully in control of herself as victim. The underlying relation of power then is the opposite of its superficial form: the addressee is of a delicacy and fragility that would be shattered by the powerful presence of the poet unless she makes elaborate obeisance, designed to disarm and, by a careful planting of hints, to seduce.

The anonymous "that man whosoever" (

in Sappho,

in Homer) is a rhetorical cliché, not an actor in the imagined scene. Interpretations which focus on "that someone (male)" as a bridegroom (or suitor or friend) who is actually present and occupying the attention of the addressee miss the strategy of persuasion that informs the poem and in doing so reveal their own androcentric premises. In depicting "the man" as a concrete person central to the scene and godlike in power, such interpretations misread a figure of speech as a literal statement and thus add the weight of their own pro-male values to Sappho's woman-centered consciousness. "That man" in poem 31 is like the military armament in poem 16, an introductory setup to be dismissed: we do not imagine that the speaker of poem 16 is actually watching a fleet or infantry; no more need we think that Sappho is watching a man sitting next to her beloved. To whom, in that case, would Sappho be addressing herself? Such a reading makes poem 31 a modern lyric of totally internal speech, rather than a rhetorically structured public utterance that imitates other well-known occasions for public speaking (prayer, supplication, exhortation, congratulation).

My reading of poem 31 explains why "that man" has assumed a grotesque prominence in discussions of it. Androcentric habits of thought are part of the reason, but even more important is Sappho's intention to hint obliquely at the notion of a bridegroom just as Odysseus does to Nausikaa. Odysseus the stranger designs his speech to the princess around the roles which she and her family will find acceptable—helpless suppliant, valorous adventurer, and potential husband.25 The ordinary protocols of marital brokerage in ancient society are a system of discreet offers and counteroffers which must maintain at all times the possibility for saving face, for declining with honor and respect to all parties. Odysseus's speech to Nausikaa contains these delicate approaches to the offer of marriage which every reader would appreciate, just as Alkinoos understands Nausikaa's thoughts of marriage in her request to go wash her brothers' dancing clothes: "So she spoke, for she modestly avoided mentioning the word 'marriage' in the presence of her father; but he understood her perfectly" (Od . 6.66-67). Such skill at innuendo and respectful obliquity is one of the ordinary-language bases for the refined art of lyric speech. Sappho's hint that "someone" enjoys a certain happiness is, like Odysseus's identical statement, a polite self-reference and an invitation to take the next step. Sappho plays with the role of Odysseus as suitor extraordinary, an unheard-of stranger who might fulfill Nausikaa's dreams of marriage contrary to all the ordinary expectations of her society. She plays too with the humble formalities of self-denigration and obeisance, all an expansion of

, "holy dread grips me as I gaze on you" (Od . 6.161).

"That man is equal to the gods": this phrase has another meaning too. Sappho as reader of the Odyssey participates by turn in all the characters; this alternation of attention is the ordinary experience of every reader of the epic and is the basis for Sappho's multiple identification with both Aphrodite and Diomedes in Iliad 5. In reading Odyssey 6 Sappho takes on the roles of both Odysseus and Nausikaa, as well as standing outside them both. I suggest that "that man is equal to the gods," among its many meanings, is a reformulation of Homer's description of the sea-beaten Odysseus whom Athena transforms into a godlike man:

, "but now he is like the gods who control the expanse of heaven" (6.243). This is Nausikaa's comment to her maids as she watches Odysseus sit on the shore after emerging from his bath, and she goes on to wish that her husband might be such.26 The point of view from which Sappho speaks as one struck to the heart is that of a mortal visited by divine power and beauty, and this

is located in the Odyssey in the personas of Odysseus (struck by Nausikaa, or so he says), of Nausikaa (impressed by Odysseus), and of the Homeric audience, for Sappho speaks not only as the strange suitor and the beautiful princess but as the Odyssey reader who watches "that man" (Odysseus) face to face with the gently laughing girl.

In performing this experiment of reading Sappho's poems as expressing, in part, her thoughts while reading Homer, her consciousness of men's public world, I think of her being naturally drawn to the character of Nausikaa, whose romantic anticipation (6.27) and delicate sensitivity to the unattainability of the powerful stranger (244 f., 276-84) are among the most successful presentations of a woman's mind in male Greek literature.27 Sappho sees herself both as Odysseus admiring the nymphlike maiden and as Nausikaa cherishing her own complex emotions. The moment of their separation has what is in hindsight, by the normal process of rereading literature in the light of its own reformulations, a "Sapphic" touch:

, "Farewell, guest, and when you are in your homeland remember me who saved you—you owe me this." These are at home as Sappho's words in poem 94.6-8: "And I made this reply to her, 'Farewell on your journey, and remember me, for you know how I stood by you."'28

The idyllic beauty of Phaiakia is luxuriously expressed in the rich garden of Alkinoos, whose continuously fertile fruits and blossoms are like the gardens which Sappho describes (esp. frs. 2, 81b, 94, 96), and it reminds us of Demetrios's words, "Virtually the whole of Sappho's poetry deals with nymphs' gardens, wedding songs, eroticism." The other side of the public/private contrast in Sappho is a design hidden in the lush foliage and flower cups of these gardens. There are two sides to double consciousness: Sappho both reenacts scenes from public culture infused with her private perspective as the enclosed woman and she speaks publicly of the most private, woman-centered experiences from which men are strictly excluded. They are not equal projects; the latter is much more delicate and risky. The very formulation of women-only secrets, female arheta , runs the risk not only of impropriety (unveiling the bride) but of betrayal by misstatement. Hence the hesitation in Sappho's most explicit delineation of double consciousness:

, "I am not sure what to set down, my thoughts are double," could mean "I am not sure which things to set down and which to keep among ourselves, my mind is divided" (51).

Among the thoughts which Sappho has woven into her poetry, in a way which both conceals and reveals without betraying, are sexual images. These are in part private to women, whose awareness of their own bodies is not shared with men, and in part publicly shared, especially in wedding songs and rites, which are a rich store of symbolic images bespeaking sexuality.29 The ordinary ancient concern with fertility, health, and bodily function generated a large family of natural metaphors for human sexuality and, conversely, sexual metaphors for plants and body parts. A high degree of personal modesty and decorum is in no way compromised by a daily language which names the world according to genital analogies or by marriage customs whose function is to encourage fertility and harmony in a cooperative sexual relationship. The three words which I will use to illustrate this are numphe, pteruges , and melon . The evidence for their usage will be drawn from various centuries and kinds of writing up to a thousand years after Sappho; but the terms in each case seem to be of a semitechnical and traditional nature rather than neologisms. They constitute the scattered fragments of a locally variegated, tenacious symbolic system which was operative in Sappho's time and which is still recognizable in modern Greece.

Numphe has many meanings: at the center of this extended family are a "clitoris" and "bride." Numphe names a young woman at the moment of her transition from maiden (parthenos ) to wife (or "woman," gune ); the underlying idea is that just as the house encloses the wife and as veil and carriage keep the bride apart from the wedding celebrants, so the woman herself encloses a sexual secret).30 "The outer part of the female genital system which is visible has the name 'wings' (pteruges ), which are, so to speak, the lips of the womb. They are thick and fleshy, stretching away on the lower side to either thigh, as it were parting from each other, and on the upper side terminating in what is called the numphe . This is the starting point (arche ) of the wings (labia), by nature a little fleshy thing and somewhat muscular (or, mouse-like)."31 The same technical use of numphe to mean clitoris is found in other medical writers and lexicographers,32 and by a natural extension is applied to many

analogous phenomena: the hollow between lip and chin,33 a depression on the shoulder of horses,34 a mollusk,35 a niche,36 an opening rosebud,37 the point of a plow38 —this last an interesting reversal based on the image of the plowshare penetrating the earth. The relation of numphe , clitoris, to pteruges , wings/labia, is shown by the name of a kind of bracken, the numphaia pteris , "nymph's wing," also known as thelupteris , "female wing"; by the name of the loose lapels on a seductively opening gown;39 and by the use of numphe as the name for bees in the larva stage just when they begin to open up and sprout wings.40

This family of images extends broadly across many levels of Greek culture and serves to reconstruct for us one important aspect of the meaning of "bride," numphe as the ancients felt it.41 Hence the virtual identity of Demetrios's three terms for Sappho's poetry: nymphs' gardens, wedding songs, eroticism. Several of Sappho's surviving fragments and poems make sense as a woman-centered celebration and revision of this public but discreet vocabulary for women's sexuality. The consciousness of these poems ranges over a wide field of attitudes. The first can be seen as Sappho's version of male genital joking (which she illustrates in 110 and 111),42 but when applied to the numphe Sappho's female ribaldry is pointedly different in tone:

Like the sweet-apple [glukumelon ] ripening to red on the topmost branch,
on the very tip of the topmost branch, and the apple pickers have overlooked it—
no, they haven't overlooked it but they could not reach it.
(105a)

Melon , conventionally translated "apple," is really a general word for fleshy fruit—apricots, peaches, apples, citron, quinces, pomegranates. In wedding customs it probably most often means quinces and pomegranates, but for convenience sake I will abide by the traditional translation "apple." Like numphe and pteruges, melon has a wider extension of meanings, and from this we can rediscover why "apples" were a prominent symbol in courtship and marriage rites.43 Melon signifies various "clitoral" objects: the seed vessel of the rose,44 the tonsil or uvula,45 a bulge or sty on the lower eyelid,46 and a swelling on the cornea.47 The sensitivity of these objects to pressure is one of the bases for the analogy; I will quote just the last one. "And what is called a melon is a form of fleshy bump (staphuloma , grapelike or uvular swelling), big enough to raise the eyelids, and when it is rubbed it bothers the entire lid-surface."

Fragment 105a, spoken of a bride in the course of a wedding song, is a sexual image. We can gather this sense not only from the general erotic meaning of "apples" but from the location of the solitary apple high up on the bare branches of a tree,48 and from its sweetness and color. The verb

, "grow red," and its cognates are used of blood or other red liquid appearing on the surface of an object that is painted or stained or when the skin suffuses with blood.49 The vocabulary and phrasing of this fragment reveal much more than a sexual metaphor, however; they contain a delicate and reverential attitude to the exclusive presence-and-absence of women in the world of men. Demetrios elsewhere (148) speaks of the graceful naïveté of Sappho's self-correction, as if it were no more than a charming touch of folk speech when twice in these lines she changes her mind, varying

a statement she has already made. But self-correction is Sappho's playful format for saying much more than her simile would otherwise mean. The words are inadequate—how can I say?—not inadequate, but they encircle an area of meaning for which there have not been faithful words in the phallocentric tradition. The real secret of this simile is not the image of the bride's "private" parts but of women's sexuality and consciousness in general, which men do not know as women know. Sappho knows this secret in herself and in other women whom she loves, and she celebrates it in her poetry. Where men's paraphernalia are awkwardly flaunted (bumping into the lintel, fr. 111, inconveniently large like a rustic's feet, fr. 110), women's are protected and secure. The amazing feature of these lines is that the apple is not "ripe for plucking" but unattainable, as if even after marriage the numphe would remain secure from the husband's appropriation.50

Revision of myth is combined with a sexual image in fragment 166:

, "They do say that once upon a time Leda found an egg hidden in the hyacinth." As the traditional denigration of Helen was revised in poem 16, so the traditional story of Helen's mother is told anew. Leda was not the victim of Zeus's rape who afterward laid Helen in an egg; rather she discovered a mysterious egg hidden inside the frilly blossoms of a hyacinth stem, or (better) in a bed of hyacinths when she parted the petals and looked under the leaves. The egg discovered there is

(1) a clitoris hidden under labia

(2) the supremely beautiful woman, a tiny Helen, and

(3) a story, object, and person hidden from male culture.51

The metaphor of feeling one's way through the undergrowth until one discovers a special object of desire is contained in the word

, "I feel

for," "I search out by feeling" It is used of Odysseus feeling the flesh of Polyphemos's stomach for a vital spot to thrust in his sword (Od . 9.302), of animals searching through dense thickets for warm hiding places (Hes. Op . 529-33), of enemy soldiers searching through the luxurious thicket for the hidden Odysseus (Od . 14.356), of Demeter searching high and low for her daughter (h. Hom. Cer . 2.44), of people searching for Poseidon's lover Pelops (Pind. Ol . 1.46). The contexts of this verb are not just similar by accident: maiomai means more than "search for," it means "ferret out," especially in dense thickets where an animal or person might be lurking. In view of the consistency of connotations for this verb there is no reason to posit a shifted usage in Sappho 36, as the lexicon of Liddell, Scott, and Jones does. As these lexicographers read it, Sappho's words

are redundant— "I desire you and I desire you." Rather they mean "I desire and I search out." I would like to include the physical sense of feeling carefully for hidden things or hiding places.52 In the poetic verb maiomai there is a physical dimension to the expression of mutual passion and exploration. Desire and touching occur together as two aspects of the same experience: touching is touching-with-desire, desire is desire-with-touching.

The same dictionary that decrees a special meaning for maiomai when Sappho uses it invents an Aeolic word

(B)

, "I walk," to reduce the erotic meaning of a Lesbian fragment of uncertain authorship, Incert. 16: "The women of Krete once danced thus—rhythmically with soft feet around the desirable altar, exploring the tender, pliant flower of the lawn."

is a recognized Aeolic equivalent of

, akin to

. The meanings "ferret out," "search through undergrowth," "beat the thickets looking for game," "feel carefully" seem to me quite in place. Appealing to a long tradition, Sappho (whom I take to be the author) remarks that the sexual dancing of women, the sensuous circling of moving hands and feet around the erotic altar and combing through the tender valleys, is not only current practice but was known long ago in Krete.

I have been able to find no simple sexual imagery in Sappho's poems. For her the sexual is always something else as well. Her sacred landscape of the body is at the same time a statement about a more complete consciousness, whether of myth, poetry, ritual, or personal relationships. In the following

fragment, 94, which contains a fairly explicit sexual statement in line 23,53 we find Sappho correcting her friend's view of their relation.

... Without guile I wish to die. She left me weeping copiously and said, "Alas, what fearful things we have undergone, Sappho; truly I leave you against my will." But I replied to her, "Farewell, be happy as you go and remember me, for you know how we have stood by you. Perhaps you don't—o I will remind you ... and we have undergone beautiful things. With many garlands of violets and roses ... together, and ... you put around yourself, at my side, and flowers wreathed around your soft neck with rising fragrance, and ... you stroked the oil distilled from royal cherry blossoms and on tender bedding you reached the end of longing ... of soft ... and there was no ... nor sacred ... from which we held back, nor grove ... sound ...

As usual the full situation is unclear, but we can make out a contrast of Sappho's view with her friend's. The departing woman says

, "fearful things we have suffered," and Sappho corrects her,

, "beautiful things we continuously experienced." Her reminder of these beautiful experiences (which Page calls a "list of girlish pleasures")54 is a loving progression of intimacy, moving in space—down along the body—and in time—to increasing sexual closeness: from flowers wreathed on the head to flowers wound around the neck to stroking the body with oil to soft bedclothes and the full satisfaction of desire. I would like to read the meager fragments of the succeeding stanza as a further physical landscape: we explored every sacred place of the body. To paraphrase the argument, "When she said we had endured an awful experience, the ending of our love together, I corrected her and said it was a beautiful experience, an undying memory of sensual happiness that knew no limit, luxurious and fully sexual. Her focus on the termination was misplaced; I told her to think instead of our mutual pleasure, which itself had no term, no stopping point, no unexplored grove."

Poem 2 uses sacral language to describe a paradisal place55 which Aphrodite visits:

Hither to me from Krete, unto this holy temple, a place where there is a lovely grove of apples and an altar where the incense burns, and where is water which ripples cold through apple branches, and all the place is shadowed with roses, and as the leaves quiver a profound quiet ensues. And here is a meadow where horses graze, spring flowers bloom, the honeyed whisper of winds.... This is the very place where you, Kypris ..., drawing into golden cups the nectar gorgeously blended for our celebration, then pour it forth.

The grove, Page comments, is "lovely," a word used "elsewhere in the Lesbians only of personal charm."56 But this place is, among other things, a personal place, an extended and multiperspectived metaphor for women's sexuality. Virtually every word suggests a sensuous ecstasy in the service of Kyprian Aphrodite (apples, roses, quivering followed by repose, meadow for grazing, spring flowers, honey, nectar flowing). Inasmuch as the language is both religious and erotic, I would say that Sappho is not describing a public ceremony for its own sake but is providing a way to experience such ceremonies, to infuse the celebrants' participation with memories of lesbian sexuality. The twin beauties of burning incense on an altar and of burning sexual passion can be held together in the mind, so that the experience of either is the richer. The accumulation of topographic and sensuous detail leads us to think of the interconnection of all the parts of the body in a long and diffuse act of love, rather than the genital-centered and more relentlessly goal-oriented pattern of lovemaking which men have been known to employ.

I have tried to sketch two areas of Sappho's consciousness as she had registered it in her poetry: her reaction to Homer, emblematic of the male-centered world of public Greek culture, and her complex sexual relations with women in a world apart from men. Sappho seems always to speak in many voices—her friends', Homer's, Aphrodite's—conscious of more than a single perspective and ready to detect the fuller truth of many-sided desire. But she speaks as a woman to women: her eroticism is both subjectively and objectively woman centered. Too often modern critics have tried to restrict Sappho's eros to the straitjacket of spiritual friendship. A good deal of the sexual richness which I detect in Sappho's lyrics is compatible with interpretations such as those of Lasserre and Hallett,57 but what requires explanation is their insistent denial that the emotional lesbianism of Sappho's work has any physical component. We must distinguish between the physical component as a putative fact about Sappho in her own life and as a meaning central to her poems. Obviously Sappho as poet is not an historian documenting her own life but rather a creative participant in the erotic-lyric tradition.58 My argument has been that this tradition includes pervasive allusions to physical eros and that in Sappho's poems both subjects and

object of shared physical love are women. We now call this lesbian.59 To admit that Sappho's discourse is lesbian but insist that she herself was not seems quixotic. Would anyone take such pains to insist that Anakreon in real life might not have felt any physical attraction to either youths or women? It seems clear to me that Sappho's consciousness included a personal and subjective commitment to the holy, physical contemplation of the body of Woman, as metaphor and reality, in all parts of life. Reading her poems in this way is a challenge to think both in and out of our time, both in and out of a phallocentric framework, a reading which can enhance our own sense of this womanly beauty as subject and as object by helping us to unlearn our denials of it.

Seven
Sappho's Group: An Initiation into Womanhood

Claude Calame

Eight
Sappho and Her Social Context: Sense and Sensuality

Judith P. Hallett

The poetic personality of Sappho and the poetic phenomenon of Sappho have proven difficult for both ancients and moderns to understand. Later generations of ancients—Greeks of the fourth century B.C.E . and thereafter, Romans, and Byzantines—were unaccustomed to supreme lyric talent in a woman who wrote about seemingly private passions. Several ancient sources thus class the late seventh-/early-sixth-century B.C.E . Sappho not among the leading male poets of her time, as the ninth great Greek lyric genius, but as tenth of the female Muses.1 In so doing, they may have suggested that she had not earned literary stature through toil and competition, as did the men of her field (and, according to some, as had the female poet Corinna). But by calling her a Muse they ranked her an inspired and immortal figure to whom poetic self-expression and success came

naturally.2 Various works from the fourth century onward also represent Sappho as a mythic heroine, driven by her love for a younger man, Phaon, to a dramatic suicide.3

The ancients' belief in Sappho's superiority was so strong that it prevented them from ascribing to her conduct which, by the third century B.C.E ., was viewed as disgraceful for a female.4 Although a number acknowledge the existence of rumors that she participated, physically, in homosexual activity, none lends credence to the charge. Our earliest such source, a biography from the Hellenistic period (third/second centuries B.C.E .), remarks that "she has been accused by a few of being undisciplined and sexually involved with women."5 In the fifteenth of Ovid's Heroides , a fictive epistle from Sappho to Phaon, she is portrayed as discomfited by allegations that she enjoyed erotic attachments with other women; at line 201 she complains that her love for the women of her native Lesbos has made her infamous.6 A scholiast to Horace (Ep . 1.19.28) accounts for the application of the epithet mascula to Sappho by asserting that she "is maligned as having been a tribade."7 And the first biographical entry on Sappho in the tenth-century C.E . lexicon known as the Suda simply states that "she was slanderously accused of shameful intimacy with certain of her female pupils."8

The shamefulness which these writers impute to women's participation in homosexual acts apparently explains their unanimous suspension of belief where Sappho's alleged practices are concerned. Three of these sources— the Hellenistic biography, the first-century B.C.E . Ovidian epistle, and the entry in the Suda —oncomitantly insist that Sappho's primary erotic allegiances were heterosexual, citing as evidence that she was infatuated with Phaon, was married, and had a daughter.9 By comparison, the homosexual liaisons attributed to the male poets of Sappho's time do not meet with similar disbelief or disapproval. A number of these same authorities refer to the homosexual involvements of Greek male lyric poets as established facts; like virtually all ancient testimony on the lives of Greek poets, they do not give the impression that male pederasty, at least for the "active" partner, was thought cause for shame.10 The Suda 's comment on Anacreon—"his life was spent on sexual relationships with boys and women, and on poems"—stands in sharp contrast to its words on Sappho. These ancient sources do not even entertain the notion that Sappho was, as they suggest Anacreon may have been, a well-adjusted bisexual. Rather than sanction female homosexual activity they retreat to incredulity.

Modern critics share the ancients' view of Sappho as an extraordinary individual. Yet they do not idealize her as a mythic figure but reckon her a flesh-and-blood human being. Recent scholars even assume that Sappho's homosexuality is an ascertained, or at least ascertainable, fact and try to come to terms with her homoeroticism instead of analyzing and appreciating her poetry. A 1966 essay typifies the customary approach. It claims to focus on the two special difficulties confronting students of Sappho's fragmentary remains: "the moral question" (i.e., involving "the view of Sappho as a homosexual") and the "aesthetic question" ("is Sappho worth reading?").11 In a 1974 book on Greek lyric poetry, the chapter on Sappho begins by labeling as "crucial" her "relationship to her friends," examines whether the tradition of her homosexuality is a "correct inference," devotes its discussion of her most famous verses, fragment 31 Lobel-Page (L.-P.), to the obvious fact that Sappho is apparently describing her physical response to the attractions of another woman, and finally calls attention to Sappho's "disappointing aspects" while ostensibly summarizing the distinctive features of her poetry.12

Fragment 31 L.-P. has, of late, even undergone dissection as a clinical record of acute symptoms suffered by a "masculine lesbian" during an anxiety attack.13

Modern criticism of supposedly homosexual, or at least bisexual, Greek male lyric poets, however, does not reflect the same obsession with their sexual preferences to the neglect of their poetry. The same critical study of Greek lyric poetry which accords key importance to the nature of Sappho's relationship with her friends relegates the topic on Anacreon's sexual tastes to a few brief comments, and carefully scrutinizes several of his erotic fragments without agonizing over the gender of their dramatis personae .14 (Interestingly, the one possible reference to homosexuality in the poems of Anacreon which seems to trouble commentators most [fr. 358.5-8 Page (P.)] involves female homosexual behavior: his portrayal of a girl from Lesbos who ignores him to gape pros allen tina , "after another person [or thing] of feminine gender." Several scholars have taken elaborate pains to prove that Anacreon is not characterizing the gift as homosexual in her preferences.)15 As disturbing as many moderns, nurtured on Judaeo-Christian values, find the idea of male homosexuality, they still seem less disturbed by unmistakable references to male homoeroticism than by possible allusions to its female equivalent. They are also far better able to appreciate works containing male homoeroticism as literary art.

The negative reaction which female homosexuality has aroused from the Hellenistic period onward has, it would seem, caused Sappho to receive different (and increasingly inequitable) treatment from that given Greek male lyric poets. It is my view, however, that the sensual conduct in which the first-person speaker of Sappho's verses often engages With other women may not truly merit the label of "female homosexuality" at all. It is also my thesis that Sappho should not be read merely as a confessional poet who voices private feelings to the female objects of her desire. Rather, I believe that she should be regarded primarily as a poet With an important social purpose and public function: that of instilling sensual awareness and sexual self-esteem and of facilitating role adjustment in young females coming of age in a sexually segregated society. Furthermore, I believe that she should be regarded as an artist voicing sentiments which need not be her own. I should like to establish the validity of this thesis through an examination of Sappho in her social context. For such an examination demonstrates that her concerns were shared by other individuals, and entire institutions, in

the archaic and classical Greek world, and that these concerns adhere to previously established literary tradition.

Revulsion at female homosexuality has, as I have noted, largely inspired past efforts to discredit belief in Sappho's physical homoeroticism.16 Yet the view that Sappho not merely indulged in, but exhibited an exclusive preference for, homosexual acts has only gained widespread currency in the past few years. Indeed, the modern sense of the words "Sapphic" and "Lesbian" is largely responsible for popularizing the view of Sappho as an exclusive, and physically practicing, homosexual. The terms "Sapphism," "sapphist," and "sapphic" were formally introduced into English only in the last decade of the nineteenth century, when British medical authorities eagerly labeled what they judged to be psychopathological behavior exhibited by the licentious French and accepted the tradition about Sappho's sexual preferences which was accredited in fin de siècle France.17 The more colloquial word "Lesbian" has a more interesting history. In fifth-century B.C.E . Greek comedy the verb lesbi[a]zein , "to act like one from Lesbos," serves to denote fellatio performed by females, probably because of the renown of Sappho's island women for sensual, although apparently heterosexual, expertise.18 Both the first-century B.C.E . Roman poet Catullus and his first-century C.E . imitator Martial attribute to women whom they call "Lesbia" varied exploits of a sexual, but

never a homosexual, nature; the former in poem 51, a translation of Sappho fragment 31 L.-P., and the latter at 2.50, a pasquinade on female fellatio. According to standard reference works, the English adjective "Lesbian" denoted intensely erotic, hetero- more than homoerotic, individuals and feelings until only a few decades ago.19 But its medical and "underground" meaning, first attested in 1890, has gradually taken over as the existence of female homosexual liaisons has become more widely acknowledged among the educated, Anglo-American public.20

Whatever the history of the terms may be, the prevalent modern impression that Sappho was a Lesbian, that she herself took part in homosexual practices, is not based on ancient testimony. As we have seen, the ancient sources who as much as mention Sappho's reputation for physical homoerotic involvement (the earliest of which postdates her lifetime by at least 300 years) describe this reputation as nothing more than a wholly disgraceful accusation. This denial is all the more noteworthy when compared with other comments about female homosexual relations in classical antiquity. At 1916 of the Symposium —a work which precedes Sappho's Hellenistic biography by over a century—Plato's Aristophanes speaks matter-of-factly of women who are attracted to other women, the hetairistriai : these, he claims, are halves of an originally all-female whore, and analogous to men who love other males.21 A poem written over 400 years later by the Roman epigrammatist Martial graphically lampoons a masculine female homosexual. In his Lift of Lycurgus , the second-century C.E . Greek writer Plutarch ascribed homoerotic liaisons to the women of archaic Sparta, Sappho's

veritable contemporaries.22 And Lucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans , composed in the late second century C.E ., portrays women of Corinth and Lesbos who shun intercourse with men in favor of relations with other females.23

In addition, the surviving fragments of Sappho's poetry do not provide any decisive evidence that she participated in homosexual acts. Many of Sappho's lyrics written in the first person imply an involvement in acts of heterosexual love. It must not be forgotten, after all, that some of her poems make reference to a beloved daughter. In fragment 132 L.-P., its first-person speaker even applies to her daughter, her only child, the adjective agapetos , a word used in the Homeric epics exclusively for a family's male hope and heir: "I have a lovely child, whose form is like / gold flowers. My heart's one pleasure, Cleis, for whom I'd not give all Lydia..."24 Yet her first-person lyrics never depict the speaker as engaging in acts of homosexual love. To be sure, a fragmentary lyric ascribed by some to Sappho (fr. 99 L.-P.) has been interpreted as containing part of a word—olisbos —meaning an artificial phallus. Still, even if one accepts Sappho as the author, and olisbos as the reading, here the poetic context fails to clarify Sappho's relationship to it, and its to Sappho.25

More significantly, there are no references in Sappho's lyrics to any physiological details of female homoerotic involvement—neither when she is writing in the first person nor when she is describing the actions of other women.26 To be sure, this may be nothing more than tasteful reticence, the literary counterpart of a scene on an archaic vase from Thera dated to Sappho's time (ca. 620 B.C.E ): the vase depicts two females affectionately performing the chin-chucking gesture which served as a prelude to heterosexual and homosexual lovemaking among the Greeks, and leaves the rest to the imagination.27 It may well be that Sappho wrote more explicitly about

her own, and others', participation in homosexual acts in verses which have been accidentally, or even deliberately, lost. So, too, the surviving lyrics may contain implicit, or euphemistic, allusions to specific homosexual practices which readers today, ignorant of what sexual connotations certain words carried to an ancient Greek audience, have been unable, or unwilling, to perceive.28 But from the evidence we do have we can only conclude that she did not represent herself in her verses as having expressed homosexual feelings physically.

Nevertheless, when writing in the first person, Sappho does evince a "lover's passion" toward other women and give utterance to strong homosexual feelings. In fragment 31 L.-P., for example, Sappho depicts herself as responding to a female friend's charms with violent physical reactions—"My tongue freezes silent and stiff, light flame trickles under my skin, I no longer see with my eyes, my ears whirring." Later classical authors, moreover, drew on these verses when delineating the symptoms not only of overpowering (heterosexual) passion, but of fear, drunkenness, and epilepsy as well.29 In other lyrics, too, the speaker, presumably Sappho herself, is portrayed as sensually attracted and aroused by other women. Most notable of these is fragment 49 L.-P., addressing a women named Atthis. Its speaker states: "I adored you, once in the past, when you seemed to me to be a small, graceless child." Fragment 96 L.-P., which avows desire for Atthis, and fragment 1 L.-P., the hymn to Aphrodite, merit note in this context as well.30

It is poems of this sort which lead her modern readers to surmise that Sappho must have actually engaged in physical relationships with the women she found sensually appealing, or might as well have done so if she in actuality did not. The psychoanalytical and biographical orientation of recent literary criticism encourages such a conclusion by its tendency to regard the impulses that artists reveal in their work as essentially identical

with their realization in behavior, be they acknowledged by or unknown to the individual.31 This supposition is also fostered by contemporary notions about male and female sexual behavior. For in our society, we assume that men who express sensual appreciation for women desire (or at least would not object to) physical involvement with them. Furthermore, we are conditioned to view as unfeminine any woman who openly expresses sensual attraction for another human being; she is taking the "sexual initiative" and behaving as only men are supposed to. Indeed, when that object of allure is a woman, as in Sappho's poems, the aggressive female is considered doubly masculine.

Our modern Western social and sexual categories and expectations, however, differ considerably from those of Sappho's milieu. Archaic Greek society was for the most part sexually segregated. A well-born young gift, so far as we can tell, had little contact with males before and after marriage. A bride simply accepted the spouse, often a stranger, her father selected for her.32 After marriage, a woman in this (as in later periods of Greek) society was excluded from the worldly pursuits which occupied most of her husband's time and life; her sexual charms and needs were, it would seem, neglected and often feared by him.33 Thus she could hardly have expected her husband's esteem and devotion to sustain her emotionally. Even the union of Hector and Andromache, who were celebrated in early and later Greek literature as the model married couple, is depicted as a highly asymmetrical and rather unaffectionate relationship, in which she is bound to him by dependency more than anything else and chastised for the merest show of independence.34 The archaic and classical Greeks, however, do not appear to have accorded the state of matrimony or the sexual role of wife much social prestige or respect. Marriage itself was viewed simply

as a socioeconomic (and sometimes political) institution,35 necessary for the orderly transfer of property and for the perpetuation and strengthening of family and state; it was not deemed necessary for either partner's emotional well-being. Archaic Greek social institutions attempted to undermine, and archaic Greek poets to disparage, the bonds of marriage.36 Significantly, the only writer of the archaic and classical periods who delights in the details of marriage rites for their own sake, and who in fact regards the marital union as an important and equal source of pleasure to bridegroom as well as bride, is Sappho. Fragment 115 L.-P., for example, celebrates a bridegroom's sensual beauty: "To what, O beloved bridegroom, should I properly liken you? I should liken you most closely to a slender sapling." Fragment 141b L.-P. describes prayers for "nothing but blessings" to the bridegroom.37

Sappho's wedding poems, moreover, indicate that the female members of her milieu were profoundly concerned with their physical desirability as brides and the prospect of losing their maidenhood.38 The nuptial ceremonies she represents in her lyrics focus on the bride's sexual initiation and its attendant joys. Yet these young women could not have received sexual attentions from their suitors or hoped to find emotional gratification within marriage itself. They could only have turned to other women to become sensually aware, in order to perform adequately in the role to which their society assigned them and to find the sexual validation that could satisfy their needs. Women were the sole individuals with whom they socialized and by whom they were socialized. Other women would also have experienced feelings identical with those of a young woman and been more sensitized to her concerns. In this perspective Sappho's sensually expressive verses may be viewed as an institutional force in and a reflection of her social setting—a social vehicle for imparting sensual awareness, and sexual self-esteem, to

women on the threshold of marriage and maturity.39 For in the male sector of archaic and classical Greek society, as well as among females in various · Greek locales, an array of sociocultural institutions, including the production and performance of highly personalized poetry, appears to have served this precise function.

Admittedly; the behavior and culture of males and females in the sexual apartheid of archaic and classical Greece were very different. The cultural pursuits esteemed by the upper-class Greeks of preclassical and classical times were exclusively male ones: warfare, politics, athletics, worship of the great male deities, art, even the quest for wisdom.40 These activities, which were formally organized and conducted in accordance with well-defined rules, operated as elaborate and prestigious social institutions. They provided competitive situations for a man to surpass others and achieve the recognition by which he would be known as agathos , superior. Along with shrewdness, skill at speaking, strength, and stamina, these institutions put to the test sensual attractiveness, being kalos .41 As virtually all of Greek art from the archaic and classical periods attests, a young man's appearance often determined how other men judged him, whether as an athlete, citizen of his polis , artistic inspiration, or intellectual protégé.42 To be sure, observers or judges may have often complimented a young male on his physical beauty in order to advertise their desire for a physical relationship. Short-lived physical liaisons between older men and youths were a socially sanctioned and much-documented phenomenon in the upper classes, one which thrived to some extent because of women's lowly social state and exclusion from men's affairs. For a young male such a relationship gave emotional satisfaction and the narcissistic gratification of being appreciated as an equal sexual partner.43 But publicly voiced sensual appreciation of a handsome youth might mean no more than would approbation of his calisthenic or cognitive talents.

Throughout ancient Greece festivals glorified the beauty of boys simply as a religious and aesthetic ideal;44 the period in which Sappho lived also began to pay artistic homage to the youthful male nude figure.45 In their victory odes, poets such as Pindar and Bacchylides extol the comeliness of a victorious competitor at the great games as matter-of-factly as they do his lineage or agility; in fragment 108, an encomium to the youth Theoxenus, Pindar claims to react strongly—"melting like bee-stung wax"—to the physical presence of young males.46 Yet these religious, aesthetic, and poetic tributes cannot be interpreted as "sexual overtures"; rather, they seem to be conventional public gestures intended to enhance the aesthetic appeal of their objects in a culture which placed a high premium on male physical beauty. Greek men of the archaic and classical periods seem to have observed a distinction between sensual appreciation and sexual appetite, as is perhaps best illustrated by Plato's portrayal of Socrates. At 155d3-4 of the Charmides , Socrates makes no bones about his immediate response to the physical attractions of this young disciple—"I caught a glimpse of what was inside his clothes, and caught on fire." But, notwithstanding this and other Platonic dialogues in which Socrates enthusiastically remarks upon the beauty of other young men, Plato characterizes Socrates as refusing to succumb to (homo)sexual temptation and as actively dissuading other males from engaging in physical relations with desirable young men.47

It only stands to reason, therefore, that Greek society would have similarly institutionalized the sensual education and affirmation of upper-class young women. Since women's social value and contribution were defined mainly in physical, sexual terms, and since daughters were as a rule less educated than sons (their acculturation period terminated upon their marriage and hence considerably earlier than that of men),48 it also stands to reason that

Greek female institutions would have focused far more intensively than their male counterparts on fostering sensual consciousness and confidence. The better known and more accessible ancient Greek sources seem more interested in criticizing the "gossiping" networks and domestic associations of married women and express apprehension about women's socializing and sharing sexual knowledge with one another. The seventh-century B.C.E . poet Semonides' "Essay on Women" praises the type of wife who "takes no pleasure in sitting among women when they talk about sexual matters"; a speech delivered by the self-reproachful Hermione in Euripides' Andromache castigates other women whose gatherings corrupted her personally, and endanger the domestic tranquility of all husbands, with their "Siren talk"; Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae and Ecclesiazusae caricature women's groups as composed of wives excessively interested in sex and drink, and consequently as threatening to marriage.49 Yet positive portrayals of other ancient Greek female institutions survive as well—portrayals which provide evidence that these institutions supplied well-born women with the same sort of sensual enlightenment and self-validation which Greek men of their class derived from their associations, and did so without either undermining Greek male society or challenging its view of women's place.

Most prominent among these institutions are, of course, female religious cults. Those which featured the worship of a female divinity often concerned themselves with different aspects of women's experience and its correspondences in nature. Hera, for example, was associated with matrimony, maternity, and the fertility of domestic flora and fauna; Artemis with human childbirth and the fecundity of wild creatures.50 One of Hera's holy festivals, held on Sappho's native Lesbos, was devoted to a female beauty contest and, like similar celebrations elsewhere, was comparable to the festivals which glorified male beauty.51 By emphasizing and placing a competitive value on young women's physical appearance, these contests served the

specific purpose of bolstering women's pride in their looks. Furthermore, marriage preparations and ceremonies, which seemed to have prefigured, or reenacted, the nuptials of each female participant, were organized into an institution of their own, one that allowed all to share, vicariously, the attention bestowed upon the bride.52

In addition, Greek lyric poetry for and by women also appears to have functioned as a type of institution. Like all ancient Greek lyric verse, monodic (i.e., lyric ostensibly for solo performance) and choral, it directs itself at a public; a recent critic has sensibly questioned the applicability to early Greek monody of "the modern sensibility that understands the 'lyric' poem as the essence of personal expression, the private voice that is meant not so much to be heard as overheard."53 From what one may determine, archaic Greek "women's poetry" spoke to females committed to the same goals, and conditioned by the same experiences,54 glorifying both the sensual charms of women and those aspects of their lifestyle which they found sensually gratifying and charming. What remains of Greek "women's" poetry—poems by females such as Sappho and Corinna, poems for females such as Alcman's maiden songs—celebrates, in strikingly affirmative fashion, not only female beauty but also the loveliness of nature and all things divine, the pleasures residing in day-to-day living, the emotional rewards deriving from close companionship.

In this context, the role of Sappho herself as a "sensual consciousness-raiser" falls within a common and culturally important tradition in archaic and classical Greece.55 Like Sappho, male lyric poets and plastic artists routinely exalt the beauty of the human form, sharing her conception of physical and sensual graces as a reflection of divine favor which contribute to earthly fulfillment. Furthermore, Sappho's subject matter and manner of self-expression in one major respect more closely resemble those of sculptors and vase painters than those of other male poets. Her female subjects are mostly defined by, and limited to, their physical being and states of emotion;

they are not immortalized, as are the subjects of male poetry, for glory achieved by doing. The nature of Sappho's material in fact helps explain her frequent emphasis on visual appearance and human feelings.56 Nevertheless, to communicate the beauty of what she portrays, especially when writing in the first person, she must verbalize what may be construed as her personal judgment, feelings, and passions, and thereby render herself vulnerable to misconstruction. For such statements may be determined merely, and primarily, by the exigencies of her material. One should not, therefore, assume that Sappho's poems in the first person arc autobiographical, even if our ancient authorities on Sappho's life often do just that.57 A distinction between Sappho and her poetic persona may well often exist, as it so often exists in the verses of her male poetic colleagues.58

That Sappho's verses were basically intended as public, rather than personal, statements, that they aimed at instilling sensual awareness and sexual self-esteem in young women, and that even those written in the first person may not express her own feelings seem more obvious if we consider other examples of poetry from a similar social and cultural milieu written in the generation prior to hers. The maiden songs of Alcman, a Spartan male poet of the mid-seventh century B.C.E .,59 were composed for delivery by a chorus of young unmarried women in a sexually segregated society which, like Sappho's Lesbos, apparently encouraged greater sensual expressiveness for females than did other societies in ancient Greece.60 One of these maiden songs, fragment 3 P., written in the feminine first-person singular, though

clearly recited by a group of young females, appears to have been performed in honor of the goddess Hera; it pays homage to the physical allure, and the responses it evokes, of a woman, Astymeloisa. The speakers compare her to a shooting star, golden sprig, and tender down; they refer to her as "causing longing which loosens the limbs" and casting "glances more melting than sleep and death."61 A distinguished commentator on these lyrics, which were discovered only in the 1950s, has the distinct impression "that the whole company is in love" with Astymeloisa.62 Yet critics for two decades have veered away from facing the poem's female "homosexual" sentiments, obviously because the author was a man,63 and have either dissociated him personally from these lyric statements or maintained that he was voicing his own passion for Astymeloisa. Resemblances between this and Sappho's verses largely pass unnoticed, resemblances which include actual, uncommon words. These lyrics call to mind Sappho's "limb-loosening love makes me tremble—bittersweet, irresistible, surreptitious" (fr. 130 L.-P.) and "now she stands out among the Lydian women like the rosy-fingered moon, after the sun has set, surpassing all the stars" (fr. 96.6-9 L.-P.).64 They suggest that Alcman's maiden songs may have influenced Sappho's "personal" poems and at least belong to the same literary tradition.

Alcman's other, longer and better known, maiden song (fr. 1 P.) is presumably connected with a festival of (Artemis) Orthria, Spartan goddess of fertility and vegetation65 who, like Hera, was thought to preside over a girl's transition to married life. Here several female chorus members acclaim, in both first-person singular and first-person plural verb forms, one another's outstanding physical qualities graphically and lavishly; here, too, they avow, in sexually charged language, an emotional investment in each other.66 A recent article has used parallels from Sappho's wedding songs to argue, persuasively, that this poem was also meant as an epithalamium, a marriage

hymn, delivered by girls whose own nuptials are imminent to honor the wedding of another "fellow debutante."67 Should this be the case, these verses may have even influenced Sappho's renowned choral wedding poems. Its tone and content at least allow us to infer that many of Sappho's fragments thought to be personal, autobiographical statements might in fact be part of public, if not marriage, hymns sung by other females. Fragment 82 L.-P., "Mnasidika, of fairer form than soft Gyrinno," and fr. 16 L.-P., which praises Anactoria's step and face as more desirable than the armaments of Lydia, are but two examples of such fragments.68 They recall passages from Alcman's poem in which the girls receive individual compliments on their attractive features: "The streaming hair of my kinswoman Hagesichora blooms like pure gold; her face, like silver—but what can I say openly?" (ll. 51-56), or "Abundance of purple dye does not suffice as aid, nor the all-golden, many-hued snake bracelet, nor the Lydian headpiece, glorious divine offering of softly glancing young girls, nor the hair of Nanno, nor Areta with godlike beauty, nor Sylakis nor Gleesisera" (ll. 64-72). Furthermore, Sappho's comparisons between beautiful young women in such fragments as 82 and 96 L.-P.—which suggest that the "agonistic" nature of male Greek culture to some extent permeated women's institutions as well—also have parallels in this poem by Alcman.69

Scholars in the past, both Greek literary critics and ancient social historians, have ignored the similarities between Alcman's maiden songs and Sappho's lyrics, largely because they regard the former as choral, public works by a serious male artist, the latter as personal, privately voiced statements by an eccentric female. Even Sappho's verses known to be choral epithalamia are frequently dismissed as overrepresented among her fragments, as exaggerated in importance for such undistinguished poetry.70 Yet recent literary scholarship arguing that even Sappho's apparently monodic

lyrics were designed to be presented—perhaps by more than one person—at some sort of cultic ceremony, and recent studies in women's social history, which have likened the role of women in archaic Lesbos to that of women in archaic Sparta, provide further reasons for considering the work of Alcman and Sappho together.71 And the knowledge that Alcman's maiden songs were written by a man who played no part in the actual performance of his lyrics has crucial implications for an understanding of Sappho, a member, and perhaps a follower, of Alcman's literary tradition. For the fact that Alcman's maiden songs, although written in the first person, probably do not express his personal feelings for the girls they portray but merely purport to represent those of their speakers argues for a similar distinction between Sappho and the emotions expressed in her poems. After all, the fact that Alcman's Sparta promoted the display of intimate appreciation for female beauty in public, to the extent that it was "scripted" by artists who did not personally engage in the display, and assigned high value to these testimonials (doubtless because they made women better able to accept their socially and sexually defined role) suggests that Sappho's Lesbos did the same. No evidence indicates that Sappho was any more involved with the women whose charms she praises in her lyrics than was Alcman with Astymeloisa or Hagesichora. No evidence, that is, despite later attempts to make sense of her sensually expressive verses, out of their social and literary context.72

Sappho's homosexual image may, of course be an accurate one. The emotional intensity of Sappho's poems, the eros , passionate love, which figures prominently in her verses but barely in Alcman's maiden songs,73 certainly allows the possibility that Sappho did engage in homosexual acts as a private person. So, too, the women portrayed in Sappho's verses, and in Alcman's maiden songs, may well have expressed their homosexual sentiments physically. But whether or not she or they did so may not be germane to a basic understanding of Sappho as a creative individual, of the literary tradition in which she worked, or of her role in her society.

Nine
Romantic Sensuality, Poetic Sense: A Response to Hallett on Sappho

Eva Stehle

Sappho is, as Judith Hallett observes, a difficult poet to write about. Sappho seems straightforward, personal, honest—"confessional," in Hallett's term. But any lyric poet writing in the first person requires a special critical attitude. One must keep in mind that the "I" of a poem is not necessary the "I" of the poet at all. The poet may put into another's mouth words he or she would not speak in propria persona . The "I" may be generalized, as in folksong,1 or a poet may be writing with a specifically personal voice, as Sappho does when she uses her own name in a poem, but describing events that did not necessarily ever take place. The description of events is the poet's setting (like a stage set) for the play of emotions which he or she wishes to expose. The original emotions themselves must have their stimulus in the poet's experience, but the process of clarifying them requires the poet to refine, transform, extrapolate experience imaginatively, perhaps beyond recognition.

This tantalizing paradox—what looks most like a window into the life of the poet may be least true to the events of that life—is enormously complicated in Sappho's case by the fact that she seems to espouse lesbianism. Many react first to this, which they feel compelled to deny, denounce, celebrate, or somehow judge. They then read the poetry accordingly: On the other hand, those who do try first to distinguish poet from persona seem faced with a confused choice of explaining away the eroticism or discussing Sappho's putative "psychopathology." Hallett is absolutely right that the issue of homosexuality intrudes on, if it does not dominate, almost every discussion of Sappho in a way that does not happen with male poets. Hallett's

article suggests an approach that, trying to avoid all of these traps, has some good claims to consideration. Her idea of using Greek male treatment of young men and Alcman's two maiden songs as converging context for Sappho is very suggestive. I do have disagreements with her over both her method of argument and her conclusions.

First, I think Hallett underestimates the real complexity of the question of Sappho's poetic persona. If Sappho's purpose was sexual affirmation of young women preparatory to marriage, questions of the interaction of the persona with the public arise. Was Sappho's stance of lover designed to fit with a ritual role played by the actual woman? Or could erotic admiration via poetry be effective if the author dissociated herself from it? If the poetry was treated as coming not from Sappho but from the community, would the strong personal focus and introspective quality not be subversive to the communal solidarity of praise? Would Sappho's reiterated wish to die not appear ill-omened in a public celebratory setting, a rite of passage? In short, Hallett's discussion of the Greek social structure makes the possibility of institutionalized affirmation of girls appear most plausible, but she still must show that Sappho's poetry fits the bill, appearances to the contrary: Detaching the persona from the poet does not make it automatically an impersonal or communal voice, as Hallett seems to assume. Nor does this view of Sappho illuminate the artistry of the poems at all, throw light on, for example, the interconnected themes of beauty and absence, or the tendency to displace the sensuality of the desired woman onto the surroundings.

With respect to evidence for lesbian practice in Sappho's poetry, Hallett argues that Sappho never pictures the speaker as engaging in acts of homosexual love or mentions physiological details, and that "many of Sappho's lyrics written in the first person imply an involvement in acts of heterosexual love" (131). The last line of 94 Lobel-Page (L.-P.) she dismisses as "too vague" to be definite evidence. The point Hallett is making is that the text of Sappho's poems will not support any great insistence that Sappho was a practicing homosexual lover, which is true. Yet Hallett falls into the biographical trap herself with the remark that many lyrics imply heterosexual love. She seems to assume that indications of sexual activity (or lack of them) will be biographical, even if nothing else is, an assumption which leads Hallett to write as though all the fragments were equally good indicators of Sappho's personal sexuality. In fact, the "many" fragments must be mainly the scraps of wedding hymns and bits of "folksong" (e.g,, 102 L.-P.), in which the persona, the "I" of the poem, is communal or generalized, as well as the references to Cleis, Sappho's daughter. None of the major fragments, in which the persona is some manifestation of the poet, breathes a hint of sexual interest in a man. The points to be made, it seems to me, are two. First, Sappho's

sexual activity, whatever it was, was integrated with the institution of marriage (which may not have been sexually very demanding).2 Second, we must pay attention to the direction of erotic intensity of Sappho's persona, that is, consider the emotional reality of the poems, without trying to deduce anything about the restriction or range of her enjoyment of sexual activity—and without attributing psychological abnormality or social maladjustment to her.

I think one implicit purpose of Hallett's whole paper is to combat the general supposition that Sappho was emotionally abnormal. Certainly the standard picture of Sappho is of a woman falling unreservedly in love with a girl, being crushed at the girl's departure, falling unreservedly for the next girl, who will also depart, becoming ever more exhausted but never more intelligent in her loving.3 Hallett's answer is to say that Sappho's poetry has an institutional erotic function but not private emotional reality. The idea should, rather, be met head on. Sappho was "abnormal," perhaps, in being unusually open to romantic impulse, unusually aware of the human urge for union and the inevitable separateness. When she wished to explore and clarify these impulses through poetry she chose female homosexual love as the vehicle because lesbian love offered the most receptive setting for romantic eros. Escape to a realm of beauty, illusion of perfect union, inevitability of parting: these could be expressed through union with another woman because such love was separate from daily domestic life with a husband; because the other woman could seem to match, reflect, make the emotional connection far more easily than a man; and because separation, if only by virtue of the inevitability of marriage, was inevitable. The poems of absence and longing need not record—each and every one—a parting or failure in love.4 By placing her persona in such settings Sappho could explore the interacting realities of psychological openness to and distance from a lover. Sappho must have known enough of both the romantic yearning for transcendent union and the different quality of lesbian intimacy from heterosexual intimacy to create a romantic, alternate female world.

Before looking at 94 L.-P. in this light, let me say that I disagree with Hallett over the way in which the Greek disposition to praise young men should be taken. I think she is right in seeing that the admiration is an

important validation of a youth at puberty and is directed at the whole personality, not just the young man's looks. It makes a good analogy with what Sappho's effect on young women around her may have been. But the praise of young men was undeniably based on sexual attraction.5 That does not mean that everyone who admired a youth felt the immediate urge to possess him sexually. But it is misleading in emphasis to say; as Hallett does (135), that "sensual appreciation of handsome youth might mean no more than approbation of his calisthenic or cognitive talents" (italics mine). For the reason why other qualities could be expressed through language of sexual appreciation is that sexual attractiveness in a young man was highly valued. Desire to possess a young man was socially acceptable. Therefore even those who had no designs on a young man could praise, for example, intellectual capacities via the powerful medium of sexual evaluation.

Likewise, validation of one woman by another in sexual terms must have relied on the social acceptability of one woman as object of sexual interest on the part of another. People in general are, if anything, too little inclined to distinguish between a person's statement of sexual attraction to a forbidden group and that person's likelihood of acting on it. So Sappho's poetic expressions of desire and love would have aroused hostiliy, not affirmation, if they were directed at a group with whom physical expression of desire was ruled out by the society.

Let us now look at 94 L.-P., the poem which may refer to actual homosexual activity.6 The poem opens (after a missing line), "Really, I wish to die; weeping she left me." The next three stanzas record a conversation in which Sappho comforts the distraught girl. The comfort turns into a reminiscence of the good things they shared, of which four stanzas are occupied by one occasion: "you adorned yourself with flowers at my side, you put round yourself garlands of flowers, you anointed yourself with oil, on a soft bed you expelled desire" (to paraphrase). The atmosphere is one of segregation in sensuous surroundings. With each stanza the focus is more directly on the body of the other woman. The first contains no mention of it (unless in a lacuna in the text). In the second stanza Sappho refers to her "tender neck." In the third the woman anoints herself (typically done while nude after a bath).7 And in the fourth she expels longing (someone else's longing,

according to the verb form). The whole movement of the recollection is toward erotic culmination.

In these four stanzas Sappho's only reference to herself is the "at my side" of line 14, though the detail implies that Sappho pictures herself as present throughout. The concentration is entirely on the sensuousness of the other woman. Its effect could be sexual affirmation of the addressee, and Sappho may have intended, among other things, to create that effect. But there is an artistic reason for focus on the other woman through the four stanzas. Sappho is dramatizing her (or rather her persona's) complete openness to the other woman, her loss of self-consciousness in absorption with the other. Yet this is now memory, and the other woman does not share it. The unity previously so complete is now suddenly, irretrievably dissolved. The persona's (not the poet's) wish to die is a wish to halt the flux, preserve the perfect moment of emotional fusing with another.

Keeping the romantic quality of 94 L.-P. in mind, we can consider Sappho in comparison with Alcman's two maiden songs (1 and 3 Page [P.]). Alcman's tone is similar to Sappho's in some ways, but Hallett's discussion skirted the essential difference that Alcman's poems refer to their own context, a celebration and an appeal to the gods. And the method of praise is different. Alcman draws on the standard imagery of praise found in Homer and applied to both men and women. His picture of human, including erotic, interactions is male. Sappho avoids both. Her imagery and description of personal dynamics differentiate the female from the male.

The most prevalent image in Alcman's first maiden song is of the horse. Four times a girl is compared with a horse, a particular breed of horses, or a trace-horse (Il. 47, 50, 59, 92). In one instance our lack of information about breeds means that we do not catch the point of a comparison: a girl compared in beauty with Agido is a Colaxaean horse running against an Ibenian. There may be a ritual reason for the emphasis on horses; they seem to have figured in the worship of Ortheia.8 But the references to breeds dearly come from the area of male interest in breeding and racing horses. The image has a tradition in literature also. Paris is compared with a horse in Iliad 6.506-11. Ibycus compares himself with a prizewinning racehorse in a love poem (287 P.). Anacreon uses the image for a girl whom he threatens to ride (417 P.). Sappho, in the extant fragments, never uses any such comparison for a woman. When horses do appear in her poetry they are associated with men, implicitly dissociated from women. In the priamel 16 L.-P., for instance, Sappho chooses "what one loves" as most beautiful rather

than an army of horsemen. In 2 L.-P. a "horse-pasturing meadow" is located within the bounds of a shrine where it will not be open to pasturing animals.9 A late reference to Sappho's wedding hymns says she compared the grooms to prizewinning horses, the brides to the delicacy of roses (117a L.-P.).

In Alcman's second maiden song Astymeloisa is compared with a "golden shoot" (1. 68). The image of a shoot or sapling is found in the Iliad (18.56) of Achilles and in the Odyssey (6.163) of Nausicaa. The term is similar to one Sappho herself uses in a wedding hymn to describe the groom (115 L.-P.). But Sappho does not use it of a woman. Instead we find comparisons of women to fruit or flowers. In a wedding hymn a woman is an apple high on a tree (105a L.-P.). Sappho's daughter has an appearance like golden flowers (132 L.-P.).10

Again, Alcman compares Agido to the light of the sun in the first maiden song (l. 41). Connection with the ceremony is possible; it took place before sunrise. But there are Homeric parallels: Hera's seductive veil is white like the sun (Il . 14-185); Achilles in armor is like the shining sun (Il . 19.398). And in both Alcman's songs girls are compared with stars. The image in 3 P. is the more elaborate: Astymeloisa is "like some shining star in flight through the heavens" (ll.66-67). The star image is used in the Iliad of men; Athena is compared with a shooting star (Il . 4.75-77).11 Both sun and star have the masculine gender in Greek. Sappho uses neither image, but twice compares a woman with the moon eclipsing the surrounding stars (34, 96 L.-P.). The moon is female in gender and a goddess in mythology. Sappho, I think, consciously wished to connect women with the mysterious rhythms of the moon as separate from the sharp, bright male world of sun and stars. We owe the preservation of one of these fragments to the commentator who noted the contrast with a passage of the Iliad .12

But Sappho's images for women's appearance are few, despite her emphasis on vision. Similes are noticeably more frequent in the wedding-hymn fragments, particularly for men. A groom is like Ares or Achilles (105b, 111 L.-P.), or has a honeyed face (112 L.-P.). The disproportion may be accidental, but perhaps Sappho is less concerned to provide praise of the woman

on whom she turns her attention than to explore the effect of that woman's presence or absence. Description implies separation between observer and observed. For Sappho another woman's presence rather generates a sensuous environment, figured as flowers, fabric, perfume, sacred precinct, which encloses them both, erasing the separation.

Alcman has the chorus in 1 P. talk of fighting, probably because they are competing with another chorus. Alcman's chorus thinks of it as a battle, one in which they denigrate their own ability to prevail without the aid of the leader, who commands their obedience (ll. 92-95). In 3 P. the chorus describes Astymeloisa, perhaps the leader, in passionate terms but describes her as not answering. Later, as the fragment tails off, the chorus says, "I would become a suppliant of hers" (1. 81). Male assumptions about competition and about dominance and submission have determined the form of erotic expression: love and beauty are contests. Sappho does not picture love relations as domination by one partner over the other. In 94 and 96 L.-P. desire is mutual. In 1 L.-P., the only combative love poem, either Sappho or the other woman is free to initiate the relationship. Dover notices the difference from the style of male homosexual relations but does not pursue the subject.13

Finally, Astymeloisa in Alcman 3 P. is known to the army and is a darling of the people (ll. 73-74), while Sappho's encounter with or fantasy of a desired woman is always in an environment isolated from men (except in 31 L.-P.).

Detailed comparison of Alcman with Sappho illuminates Sappho's special romantic quality. Alcman's girls are imagistically and ceremonially integrated with the whole Spartan culture, participating in its values. Sappho used the special conditions of lesbian love to create an alternative world in which male values, those same values which denied Greek women an outlet for erotic fantasy, are not dominant, and within which mutual desire, rapture, and separateness can be explored as female experience.

Ten
Who Sang Sappho's Songs?

André Lardinois

In recent years the traditional division of Greek lyric into exclusively choral or monodic poets has been called into question. The main subject of inquiry has been the choral poets, like Pindar, Stesichorus, and Alcman. It has been argued that some or even most of their poetry was not performed by choruses, but by the poets themselves or other soloists.1 In this article I want to focus attention on one of the allegedly monodic poets: Sappho. I will argue that there are among her fragments more chorally performed songs than so far has been acknowledged.

Other scholars already have voiced some uneasiness with the traditional picture of Sappho as a monodist. Hermann Fränkel believed that "among the Lesbians too, then, there were songs fairly close to choral lyric," like

Sappho fragment 16, "which meditates and argues like choral poetry." More recently, Claude Calame has suggested that Sappho's circle was organized as a young girls' choir which sang or danced to songs composed by Sappho, and Judith Hallett has declared that "many of Sappho's fragments thought to be personal, autobiographical statements might in fact be part of public, if not marriage, hymns sung by other females."2 Yet, overall the traditional picture has prevailed that Sappho composed songs, essentially about herself (her own emotions), to be performed by herself.

I will first take a look at some of the evidence about Sappho's work. Next I will discuss the applicability to her work of the traditional distinctions between choral and monodic poetry. Special attention will be given to the use of the first-person singular and plural in early Greek poetry, which will also allow us to take a closer look at some of Sappho's fragments (frs. 94 and 96). In a final section I will review the other major fragments and show that they can be interpreted as being performed with the help of choruses.

Eleven
Woman and Language in Archaic Greece, or, Why is Sappho a Woman?

Marilyn B. Skinner

The challenge posed by French theory to received ideas of female consciousness and self-representation has emerged during the past decade as the most urgent intellectual problem confronting feminist literary critics on this side of the Atlantic. Historically, American feminist criticism has been based on an empirical notion of authorship and a concomitant view of literary texts as repositories of gender ideology. During its earliest phases, then, practitioners sought to expose the misogyny of male-authored literature and to posit an alternative female poetics, as contained in a new canon of recovered women writers. Emanating from the Continent, radical attacks on the liberal humanist creed now seem to call that "fundamental feminist gesture" into question.1 The threat is all the more insidious for being incorporated

in critiques of patriarchal discourse undertaken by Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—thinkers who, insofar as they themselves are reckoned as "feminists," might be presumed sympathetic to an engaged feminist enterprise.2

Although Cixous, Irigaray; and Kristeva differ considerably with respect to other issues, they jointly insist that woman is excluded from dominant structures of representation.3 Taking Lacanian psychoanalysis as their methodological point of departure, all three contend that sexual difference is inscribed into Western symbolic systems at the most rudimentary level. Language in a patriarchal culture originates with man, who locates himself as discursive subject and positive reference point of thought; woman is relegated simultaneously to the negative pole of any conceptual antithesis and to a subordinate object position. She can be defined only in terms of her alterity, named in a way that inevitably reduces itself to "not-man." Linguistic transgression, then, must necessarily precede and facilitate her political resistance.

What shape female linguistic transgression might take is, however, a contested matter. Kristeva's formulation is the least oppositional. Rejecting the possibility of a biologically based female identity, she argues instead that subversion of the rational symbolic process occurs only through irruption of a repressed linguistic core, the "semiotic"—affiliated, though not explicitly identified, with the cultural category of the feminine.4 Cixous, for her part, advocates the active production of écriture féminine , a mode of writing informed by sexual difference yet not absolutely restricted to women. Characterized by a lyric openness and a lack of conventional, logical organization—qualities also imputed to the tender utterances of the lost pre-Oedipal mother— the texts of écriture féminine are intended to challenge the "phallogocentric" symbolic order directly.5 Lastly, Irigaray postulates an exclusively female

discourse (parler femme ) grounded in women's specific libidinal economy. Only by speaking (as) woman, in a language that, like female sexual pleasure itself, is "plural, autoerotic, diffuse, undefinable within the familiar rules of (masculine) logic"6 can women affirm a bodily desire e?F?luded from standard patriarchal speech.

Of the three positions summarized above, Irigaray's is obviously the most immediately vulnerable to charges of "essentialism," that is, the questionable presupposition of an ontological essence or nature in which all women participate by virtue of their sex.7 Leading exponents of feminist theory are consequently more and more inclined to treat her assertions nonreferentially, not as factual pronouncements but as rhetorical ploys for displacement of fixed conceptual schemes.8 Due, however, to her polemic interrogation of Platonic epistemology, which we will examine below, Irigaray has won an unexpected following among feminist students of Greco-Roman culture. With classicists her declarations tend to take on literal force. Adopted as investigative premises, they in turn give rise to tediously homogeneous readings of the Greco-Roman literary tradition, readings whose consequences for the study of women in antiquity are potentially disastrous. In this essay, I attempt both to alert my colleagues to the danger of arriving, via Irigaray, at such a theoretical impasse and to outline a more positive way of conceptualizing the ancient literary record, using Sappho as my exemplary text.

Alone among Continental feminists, Irigaray glances back to the temporal origins of patriarchal discourse, seeking to expose its roots as well as its controlling principles. In Speculum of the Other Woman , she grapples with the foundation legend of male linguistic hegemony.9 Western cultural erasure of woman as speaking subject commences, according to her, in fourth-century B.C.E . Greece, receiving primary metaphysical expression in Plato's "Myth of the Cave" (Resp . 7.514a-517a). In that authoritative text the cave is a "metaphor of the inner space, of the den, the womb or hystera , sometimes of the earth" (243) and thus linked, by extension, to infancy and prelogical symbiosis with the mother. In Socrates' eyes, it is the prison from which one escapes in order to ascend to the full light of masculine Being and Truth, the abode of the Father. That initiatory pilgrimage once accomplished, return to the dark female abyss is unthinkable: in future, the sole licit relationships will be those between father and son, or philosopher and pupil. "But what becomes of the mother from now on?" asks Irigaray (315). She vanishes

from sight, for "man has become blind by dint of projecting (himself) into the brilliance of that Good, into the purity of that Being, into that mirage of the Absolute" (362). Obsession with the abstract ideal banishes woman's specificity to the void of the unintelligible.

What results from male abolition of female presence is an underlying "sexual indifference" in the putative representation of gender relations.10 In a second treatise, This Sex Which Is Not One , Irigaray elucidates that notion. Statements purporting to describe an encounter between male and female subjects in fact record the mere interaction of a male subject with externalized and objectified aspects of himself projected onto "woman," a counterfeit token of dissimilarity. Woman's actual subjectivity is ineffable, since in the male "sexual imaginary" she can be no more than "a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man's fantasies."11 Later it is stated categorically that "the feminine occurs only within models and laws devised by male subjects . Which implies that there are not really two sexes, but only one. A single practice and representation of the sexual" (86; Irigaray's italics). Irigaray's perception of an intrinsic uniformity underlying representations of pseudo-heterosexual congress between man and his manufactured "opposite" is encapsulated in her well-known pun hom(m)osexualité . As Gallop concludes: "Irigaray has discovered that phallic sexual theory; male sexual science, is homosexual, a sexuality of sames, of identities, excluding otherness."12

Irigaray's portrayal of Platonic idealism, and post-Platonic Greek discourse in general, as a unitary thought system from which the female is summarily excluded resonates powerfully with the misgivings of feminist classical scholars, long accustomed to apologize for the "male-centeredness" of surviving primary sources.13 It should come as no surprise, then, that recent important work on Greco-Roman gender ideology betrays a deep indebtedness to her ideas. Page duBois, although undertaking what she herself labels "a critique of psychoanalytic theory and its ahistorical, universal claims about gendering," finally revamps Irigaray's contentions into a quasi-historical scenario in which Plato's texts become the instrument whereby woman's distinct metaphorical role in pre-Socratic discourse is usurped by masculinity.14 Similarly, Georgia Nugent discovers beneath Ovid's facile play with the titillating figure of the hermaphrodite a hom(m)o-sexual "reflection

of the (masculine) Same."15 As the most conspicuous application of Irigaray's ideas by a trained classicist, though, David Halperin's essay "Why Is Diotima a Woman?" merits lengthier consideration.16

The Diotima of Plato's Symposium is, Halperin argues, a rhetorical trope. Plato puts the Socratic model of philosophical intercourse into the mouth of a prophetess in order to call attention to this model's novel qualities of reciprocity and procreativity. Within the male-structured Greek gender system, those elements had formerly been excluded from masculine eroticism and subsumed wholly under female sexuality. In the Symposium , that culturally prescribed feminine "difference" is reappropriated, in an intellectualized and sanitized form, for males. What is true for Diotima, Halperin concludes, also obtains for any other Greek inscription of "woman": in the ancient representational economy the female serves as "an alternate male identity whose constant accessibility to men lends men a fullness and a totality that enables them to dispense (supposedly) with otherness altogether."17 For Halperin, then, as for anyone else who takes Irigaray's account of Plato's myth literally, it is impossible to find any hint of authentic female reality in the Greek signifier "woman." When an Athenian man speaks to his fellow symposiasts, Woman , the universal, does not exist—as Irigaray's mentor Lacan disquietingly asserted.18

One dubious effect of this line of reasoning about language is that studies of female literary production are rendered otiose. Gynocritics , defined by Elaine Showalter as the investigation of the "history, themes, genres, and structures of literature by women,"19 was, as I have previously stated, a driving preoccupation of Anglo-American feminist criticism in its earlier developmental stage, during the middle to late 1970s. What energized and justified that sociohistorically based method of inquiry was the assumption that texts composed by women reflect the peculiar conditions of women's lived experience within given cultures, ordinarily the shared experience of a "subculture" marginal to the male public world.20 According to this hypothesis, female subcultures, especially in preindustrial societies, are wholly occupied with the vital activities customarily assigned to women by a cultural division of labor—the tasks of domesticity, including sexuality, reproduction, and nurturing, and the ceremonies surrounding the human life cycle. On an emotional level, the energies of participants are meanwhile channeled

into female bonding networks, primarily ties among blood and marriage kin, and into attachments, sometimes passionate, between friends.21 Discourses originating in the female subculture address such concerns, which are separate and distinct from those of males in the same society. Real-life female experience therefore engenders a "female perspective" encapsulated in women's texts. This entire set of commonsense propositions has now been called into question by apostles of French theory.22 If the Western symbolic system is a male-ordered construct, as they believe, the feminine specificity putatively contained in women's writing must be an illusion.

Let us consider a practical application of that skeptical postulate. Despite its patriarchal bent, Greek society nurtured a lively and continuous tradition of female authorship, extending from the archaic age well into the Hellenistic period.23 A canonical roster of major women poets, arguably compiled by the learned scholars of Alexandria, was in circulation by Augustan times.24 Sappho of Lesbos, who flourished approximately 600 B.C.E ., headed the list as Homer's counterpart, a complementary model of excellence for her sex (AP 7.15). Hellenistic women writers like Erinna and Nossis expressly looked back to Sappho as their exemplar.25 Applying gynocritic methods to these texts readily illustrates how books by women "continue each other."26

Feminist classical scholars have just begun to direct intense critical attention toward Sappho's neglected followers. Continuing that scholarly project would help to validate the creative ventures of contemporary women. It is no secret that texts signed by females are habitually targeted for ideologically motivated suppression. To contemplate the numbers of women thus far silenced is utterly disheartening27 But if ancient female poets did sustain a distinct creative tradition, no matter how minor, within such a male-dominated society as that of ancient Greece, patriarchal discourses evidently do not always succeed in drowning women out. Conversely, if the Greek conceptual system is construed as inherently masculine, one must necessarily concede that no Greek woman, not even Sappho, was ever able to transcend androcentric cultural categories.28 The "female voice" in antiquity would turn out to be a male voice with a slight foreign inflection. Under such circumstances, work on the female literary tradition might well be abandoned as useless, insofar as women's texts could no longer claim

to reflect a separate, gender-specific sensibility. This would surely be a discouraging outcome for a feminist scholar seeking to uncover scanty traces of ancient women's subjectivity. For the aspiring woman writer, its corollary implications are even more disturbing.

Before acquiescing in such methodological injunctions, however, we ought to scrutinize French feminist theory more intently. First of all, readers otherwise favorably disposed to a psychoanalytic approach are increasingly troubled by its resolute ahistoricism. Despite her ostensible recourse to origins in setting up Plato as the ktistes of Western metaphysics, Irigaray elsewhere repudiates history as just another hom(m)o-sexual construct (This Sex 126, 171-72), a move harshly criticized by Moi.29 In more sweeping terms, Wee-don protests that an investigation of gender confined to the level of textual analysis, "irrespective of the discursive context and the power/knowledge relations of the discursive field within which textual relations are located," is simply inadequate as feminist practice. Similarly, Todd charges that French theory's abstraction of sexual difference from historical flux and change entails a de facto "erasing of the history of women which we have only just begun to glimpse." The argument is taken one step further by Jane Flax, who contends that women's obvious exclusion from public discourse is actually the pragmatic result of a political inequality shaped by material conditions: "culture is masculine, not as the effect of language but as the consequence of actual power relations to which men have far more access than women."30

Under pressure of these critiques, the denial of history implicit in French feminist theory emerges as both reductionist and perverse. We classical scholars ought to ask ourselves, then, whether adoption of such a timeless model of linguistic gender asymmetry is not so much at odds with our own disciplinary mission as to involve us in embarrassing self-contradiction. For we are students of Greco-Roman civilization, that is, of a given sociotemporal milieu; and we are consequently bound to address the issue of language and gender (or any other issue, for that matter) with proper attention to the conditions of life in particular ancient environments, as far as we are able to ascertain them. History is, by definition, what we are mandated to do.

Second, even within that psychoanalytic model, language itself is not entirely monolithic. Though they place control of logic and normative discourse on the side of the male, Kristeva, Cixous, and Irigaray all make some provision for a disruptive impulse stemming from the female—or from whatever passes for "female" within their respective systems. We have seen that for Kristeva "woman" can be reintroduced into language as that which

escapes signification, while for Cixous she resurfaces as the pre-Oedipal mother making fond inarticulate noises. For Irigaray; at least in one chapter of This Sex Which Is Not One , she materializes in a surprisingly familiar form: as embodied women speaking among themselves.31 Responding to an interviewer's question about the possibility of evolution within the masculine cultural and political realm, Irigaray cites the new discourses—marginal, to be sure—created by women's liberation movements: "Something is being elaborated there that has to do with the 'feminine,' with what women-among-themselves might be, what a 'women's society' might mean" (This Sex 127). At a slightly later point in the interview (135), she expands on that suggestion:

There may be a speaking-among-women that is still a speaking (as) man but that may also be the place where a speaking (as) woman may dare to express itself. It is certain that with women-among-themselves ... in these places of women-among-themselves, something of a speaking (as) woman is heard. This accounts for the desire or the necessity of sexual nonintegration: the dominant language is so powerful that women do not dare to speak (as) woman outside the context of nonintegration.

Tentative as this formulation may be, Irigaray in my opinion has cleared a space within her own Lacanian cosmos for real-life women interacting as speaking subjects. And though she has contemporary liberation movements in mind, her notion of "places of women-among-themselves" can surely be extended to other communities of women, especially those sheltered to some degree, as a result of unusual cultural circumstances, from patriarchal modes of thought.

I therefore propose to negotiate the restoration of "woman" into the Greek literary tradition as the historical consequence of "women-among-themselves speaking (as) woman," that is, producing woman-specific discourses. In the poetry of Sappho, semiotic analysis has uncovered an elaborate complex of coding strategics differing perceptibly from those of the dominant symbolic order.32 Open, fluid, and polysemous—and hence conspicuously nonphallic—those strategies are employed to convey the passionate sexual longing felt by a woman—the first-person speaker designated as "Sappho"—for a female companion, who is often but not always physically absent.33 To me they supply fragmentary but nevertheless arresting evidence

that on archaic Lesbos a socially segregated group of girls and women devised its own symbolic system and set of discursive conventions, formally adapted to the expression of female homoerotic desire and exercised in the composition and delivery of oral poetry.

That repertory of poetic discourses has been assumed throughout antiquity and down to the present day to be wholly Sappho's own invention, designed to articulate private feelings; for convenience's sake, it may even yet be termed a "Sapphic" voice.34 One need not deny the poetic genius of the flesh-and-blood singer capable of handling her material with such artistic economy that it rapidly passed from mouth to mouth throughout the Greek world and survived intact for many centuries. Yet, given the normal function of the archaic Greek poet as appointed spokesperson for his or her community, it is far more likely that Sappho's self-stylization as desiring ego , along with her extensive stock of themes, verse forms and melodies, tropes and imagery, was largely traditional, a product of many generations of local creative endeavor. Thus Sappho would have inherited both her social role and her craft from a long line of female predecessors.33

By approaching these songs as social discourses, we avoid the sticky problems of representation involved in treating a text as the faithful mirror of an author's unique subjectivity. To redeploy Showalter's concept, then, Sappho's poetry will here be presumed to distill the shared impressions of a historically contextualized "subculture," refracting to some degree women's lived realities, their confrontations with experience, albeit only in synthetic and highly idealized form. Yet in affording us insights into patterns of social ideology promulgated among a group of elite Greek women on

sixth-century B.C.E . Lesbos, this body of texts may still prove immeasurably valuable for feminist historical inquiry.36

Sappho's friends were able to "speak (as) woman among themselves" precisely because they were not readers. In contemporary postindustrial societies, where males are educationally advantaged, control of electronically based information systems is guarded, and writing is still the primary mode of communication, the ordination of "man" as unmarked subject of discourse is probably inevitable. In predominantly oral societies, on the other hand, women do have readier access to the cultural tradition insofar as it is conveyed by word of mouth. The nucleus of a cultural heritage is, according to Goody and Watt, "the particular range of meanings and attitudes which members of any society attach to their verbal symbols."37 But that collection of meanings is always open to modification. Within tightly integrated nonliterate societies, then, women can verbally intervene in dominant symbolic systems and append additional "feminine" values to signifiers, provided they have first had occasion to invent their own ways of encoding those values. Given a culture endowed with the custom of female musical performance before same-sex audiences, such occasions do arise: having positioned herself as speaking subject, the singer will tailor her presentation to her listeners' interests, imbuing it, as Showalter has argued, with "women's experience," as that is commonly understood by her society.38

Now if, within the oral tradition, a female perspective has thus secured a claim to validity, that perspective could well assume a legitimate, albeit subordinate, place in a subsequent written tradition, so as ultimately to provide readers with an alternative subject position available to either sex. By "subject position" I mean an organized way of seeing the world, constituted through language, that permits the individual to impose a coherent meaning on the circumstances and events of his or her life, simultaneously enjoining practices based on that meaning.39 Once incorporated into a discursive system, a subject position may be adapted to various ends, long-term or immediate, serious or playful—utilized as a set of practical strategies for

living in the world or, in contrast, appropriated as a vehicle for escapist fantasy. In the ancient literary tradition, the "Sapphic voice" seems to have become just such an alternative subject position.

From the archaic period to the early Hellenistic era, the Greek world experienced a slow transition from orality to literacy.40 Available evidence, chiefly from Athens, indicates that the capacity to write, with a corollary dependence on written records, spread through the population only gradually, coexisting for a long time with the time-honored mnemonic skills of a nonliterate society.41 Though women are decoratively shown as readers on fifth-century B.C.E . Athenian vases, in practice they remained disproportionately illiterate, not only in Greece but in all parts of the ancient world and at all historical periods. On the other hand, women storytellers perhaps contributed a great deal to preserving and handing on oral traditions, even after the dissemination of literacy.42

Though this societal transformation was already well advanced in his lifetime, Plato in his last treatise still singles out song and dance, rather than books, as the basic medium for transmitting an awareness of cultural values to the young (Leg . 2.653c-656c). From time immemorial, oral instruction in the knowledge necessary to survive in Greek society—including an understanding of theology, history, politics, law, and even agriculture, as well as practical training in poetry, music, and rhythmic movement—had been made available to all upper-class youth, girls as well as boys, through their attendance at public festivals and their own parts in cult and ritual. For girls in particular, socialization was achieved by membership in a chorus composed of age-mates, beginning in childhood and continuing until marriage. The anomalous phenomenon of women poets in a rigidly gender-stratified society is plausibly explained by their function as poet-educators for adolescent groups of female initiates.43 Sappho, it is widely believed, was just such an educator, composing cult songs for the young women enrolled in her sodality or thiasos and training them in oral performance.44

Responsibility for instructing Greek girls in music and dance was not, however, confined to women. The genre of partheneia , or "maiden songs," was extremely popular, and a number of famous male poets—Alcman, Pindar, Simonides, Bacchylides—are credited with producing such works ([Plut.]

De mus. 17.1136 f.). Lengthy fragments of two partheneia by Alcman, active in Sparta in the mid-seventh century B.C.E ., are frequently compared to Sappho's verses because his speakers, like hers, express a strong homoerotic attraction to the beauty of their companions.45 This generic resemblance has prompted the suggestion that Sappho was herself a follower of Alcman.46 At the very least, it proves that her function as socializer of young female initiates could elsewhere be undertaken by men, and thus leads us to wonder about the authenticity of her female perspective. Could Sappho be imposing upon her young charges a cognitive structure derived from, and intended to reinforce, patriarchy? If so, this would be but one more instance of women choosing "to inhabit the space to which they are already assigned" by a male "logic of domination."47

I do not believe, though, that that is the case. While Sappho's manipulation of verbal devices like diction, figures of speech, and imagery is clearly indebted to the mainstream tradition,48 her modes of subjectivity differentiate her to an extraordinary degree from her male counterparts—particularly those working within the same genre, whether partheneion or erotic monody. Specifically, her model of homoerotic relations is bilateral and egalitarian, in marked contrast to the rigid patterns of pursuit and physical mastery inscribed into the role of the adult male erastes , whatever the sex of his love object.49 The distinction between these two ways of constituting homoerotic passion can be illustrated by juxtaposing Alcman's representations of girls in love with the desiring speakers portrayed in numerous Sapphic texts, most notably her fragment 31.50 The chorus's admiration of their leaders Hagesichora and Agido in Alcman fragment 1 is permeated with a spirit of eager rivalry, since they are competing with another chorus.51 Such agonistic tensions emulate the mindset of a male warrior society. Meanwhile, the yearning for Astymeloisa expressed in Alcman fragment 3 betrays an abject dependency quite foreign to Sappho herself.52 In contrast, Sappho's declarations of passions are a subtle means of awakening the beloved to the

mutual pleasures of sexuality. Thus fragment 31 is no anguished confession, but instead a virtuoso display of seductive poetic control: by making her vividly conscious of her own power to captivate others, the speaker draws the addressee into a dense web of sensual serf-awareness and so encourages in her a reciprocal erotic response.53

There are corresponding differences, too, in each poet's stance toward members of the opposite sex and concomitant portrayal of gender relations. Though Alcman's singing girls are center stage, the gaze fixed upon them is unmistakably male, for in their sweet naïveté and emotional vulnerability they present themselves as unsuspecting objects of heterosexual desire. In Sappho's poetic universe, however, men are hardly a focus of female interest; as Joan DeJean deflatingly remarks, they are "relegated to a peripheral, if not an intrusive, role."54 Masculine ideology, on the other hand, is present as inescapable background noise, representing both the power of the cultural system to enforce its demands on women55 and a privileged conceptual framework to which Sappho counterposes her own antithetical outlook. For example, in rebuking the transgressions of her errant brother Charaxus and his mistress Doricha (frs. 5, 7, 15), she seems to be censuring a male economy of desire: erotic obsession, the impulse to possess the object undividedly, has brought public disgrace upon Charaxus himself and provoked unseemly arrogance in his paramour (fr. 15.9-12). Again, the first stanza of fragment 16 confirms the speaker's superior insight into what is "the most beautiful" (to kalliston ) by opposing her comprehensive and relativistic definition of beauty to a series of overtly male, and patently limited, foils. Lastly, the violence of Sappho's reaction to the sight of her beloved in fragment 31 is enhanced by an indirect contrast with masculine impassivity. While the man sitting opposite the girl must be taken as a hypothetical rather than a concrete figure,56 his intrusion into this intimate conversation warns of the crass indifference of the great world outside the thiasos , less inclined to appreciate the addressee's singular loveliness.

In none of these texts does Sappho close her eyes to the ontological reality of the masculine order. She recognizes it, instead, as a prior and controlling presence, but still avows the ethical superiority of her nonnormative subject position, her radically woman-centered approach to existence. Whenever her texts trope difference by an appeal to gender, then, the female stance affords a posture of resistance to prevailing male attitudes and practices. But the resulting polarity is not inversely "hom(m)o-sexual," in Irigaray's

sense: rather than conjuring up male alterity as the mere negative projection of itself, the speaker's perspective defiantly locates itself against patriarchy, the pre-extant condition. One might state, paradoxically, that Sappho's poetry is literally "heterosexual," for it affirms the availability of distinct, gender-specific modes of subjectivity and directs its audience to choose what is identified as the better, though less advantaged, of two real alternatives.

It appears, then, that the subject position extracted from Sappho's monodies and choral compositions does not replicate patriarchal modes of awareness but rather affords a substitute basis for organizing female experience. Through imaginative identification with the first-person speaker, a girl would have absorbed survival tricks for living within a patriarchal culture: formulas for resisting misogynistic assumptions and so protecting self-esteem, for expressing active female erotic desire, for bonding deeply with other women, and for accepting the underlying ambiguities and absences of full closure inherent in both human discourse and human life. Consequently, she would be, in her adult years, an energetic and wholly socialized participant in female communities—those into which she was born and those she would join upon her marriage. The ultimate purpose of Sapphic song, we may conclude, was to encode strategies for perpetuating women's culture.

But would it really have been possible for a girl who internalized a female subject position to preserve it after leaving the thiasos and reentering a patriarchal milieu? Again, let us observe the peculiar epistemic processes of oral cultures. In passing information from one generation to the next, nonliterate societies exhibit "structural amnesia": aspects of the past no longer relevant to present concerns are sloughed off from the record and forgotten.57 Susan Schibanoff suggests that illiterate women respond to directives from the dominant culture in similar fashion.58 With no concept of a fixed, unyielding written text to deter them, they can "mishear" utterances in conflict with their own values and thereby resist immasculation. If Schibanoff is right, it follows that adult women in archaic and early classical Greece, segregated from the larger public sphere except on ritual occasions and having little or no exposure to reading or writing, could easily have retained a woman-centered perspective—more easily, no doubt, than their literate great-granddaughters.59 At separate cult gatherings such as the Adonia and the Thesmophoria, to say nothing of daily private interaction in their own homes, these women had abundant opportunities to speak and joke

among themselves, to chant and dance, to adapt a flexible mythic heritage to their purposes—in short, to propagate their own discourses in relative isolation.60 We know, for example, that women sang folk songs, because scraps of them have been preserved, including one (PMG 869) that may have originated on Lesbos in Sappho's own lifetime: its reference to Pittacus, a ruling tyrant, is suspiciously familiar and quite possibly obscene.61 It is reasonable to surmise, then, that compositions of Sappho and other women poets also formed part of a widespread female oral tradition handed down from mother to daughter, and that those compositions served, in effect, as a mechanism for opposing patriarchy.

Considered in such a way, Sappho's poetry offers an intriguing parallel to Luce Irigaray's own demonstration of parler femme , "speaking (as) woman," in "When Our Lips Speak Together," the essay that concludes This Sex Which Is Not One (205-18). There, troping speech as lesbian erotic play, Irigaray gives substance to her conception of a polysemous feminine language enacted through the female body. Communication between her lovers takes place on a timeless, almost wordless plane beyond patriarchal "compartments" and "schemas" (212), where only the body's truths are valid. "You," the addressee, and "I," the speaker, meld into one composite being through simultaneous jouissance , and this interchange of inexhaustible orgasmic pleasure constitutes a sharing of consciousness. Because Irigaray's model of female language depends upon corporeal contact, however, the subject is forced to seek a way of embracing across distances and can only appeal, in the end, to a vague notion of mystical somatic fusion (215-16). Yet it seems obvious that a connection with the absent partner cannot be sustained, in practice, without recourse to writing—which poses the danger of reinscription as object within a prefabricated patriarchal account.

Song, Sappho's medium of communication, avoids this pitfall because it is memory based. In oral societies, memory is the repository of all knowledge and the matrix of the collective as well as the individual consciousness. Thus an idealized experience captured in song and committed to memory can surmount the physical limitations of space and time. Meanwhile, song as performance art also provides scope for idiosyncratic self-expression by prescribing that every successive rendition will be unique, produced by one singer at a particular moment in time. The song text is both infinitely repeatable and infinitely varied.62 Patterns of intimacy forged by erotic

encounters within the Sapphic thiasos would consequently have survived a patriarchally enforced separation by marriage, for the searing intensity of the love affair could be rekindled through verses associated with that affair and later performed over and over again during the singer's lifetime.63 By the same means, the moving lessons learned from her adolescent experience of desire might be imparted to outsiders—women of another community, or her own children and grandchildren.64 Long after the composer's death and long after the death of her last companion, then, this poetry would have continued to offer generations of women an authentic female subject position. That in turn explains the emergence, century after century, of yet other Greek women poets, for whom their archaic foremother served as enabling prototype and fount of inspiration.

But we should not forget that Sappho's songs would not have gained fame in the wider world, or eventually circulated as written texts, had they not offered something to men as well as to women. Divorced from their primary cultural context, artistic works produced by female communities are subject to marginalization or distortion precisely because they exhibit disturbing deviations from normal social ideology. Thus, to cite an already familiar example, Alcman in his maiden songs is most likely appropriating a Spartan femme initiatory discourse akin to the one Sappho herself inherited and making it conform to a masculine symbolic order. Sappho's poetry is, as we have seen, undeniably deviant; yet it was still preserved, transcribed, and ultimately enshrined within the androcentric literary tradition as a special category of discourse. Had men used it solely for voyeuristic gratification, converting its femme subjects into erotic objects, they would have drastically modified its content, as we have observed Alcman doing, and excised in the process its woman-oriented elements. Clearly, then, Greek male listeners must have found another, peculiar application for it, one that required its survival intact and unchanged.

Sappho's great poetic achievement, I believe, was to articulate a female desire so compellingly as to make it at once emotionally accessible to men as well as women—although men's responses to it were shaped by far different relations of gender and power. The diffused eroticism that taught female auditors in the sheltered atmosphere of the thiasos how to transcend linear symbolic systems was perceived within the masculine sphere

as delightfully idyllic and romantic. Consequently, as we learn from ancient critical pronouncements, anecdotal evidence, and visual representations of the poet as cultural icon, male listeners and readers cherished Sappho's work as a socially permissible escape from the strict constraints of masculinity.65 In the symposium, singing one of these compositions—songs charged with the comforting presence of benign divinity and flooded with aching but sweet reciprocal desire—would have allowed men momentarily to "play the other," in Zeitlin's phrase, and so to release themselves from the necessity of being at all times publicly competitive and self-controlled.66

By logical extension, allusion to Sappho became an obvious tactic for projecting metaphoric "difference" upon one or two antithetical male-structured categories, particularly during the long process of conversion to a writing-based system of literary production. Yet the Sapphic texts still stayed in play as a locus of real differentiation, continually reinscribing into mainstream Greek discourse a set of gender assumptions radically free from male bias. Pace Irigaray, woman accordingly maintained a toehold in the Western symbolic order for as long as those texts remained intact. Pace Halperin, there is a dash of actual female subjectivity even in Diotima: when he argues persuasively that the Platonic image of reciprocal intellectual eroticism is derived from earlier ideas of female homoerotic relations,67 Halperin overlooks the fact that Plato's audience would have obtained its artistic impressions of female homoeroticism chiefly from the poetry of Sappho.

If metanarratives like Irigaray's are to serve as frameworks for profitable scholarly inquiry; they must be pliant enough to admit a blurring of polarities, to incorporate pronounced exceptions to their rules. Confronting a gargantuan heap of male-authored texts, feminist classical scholars have understandably perceived sexual/textual oppression everywhere and so have written off the Greco-Roman literary tradition as a blank page of canonical female silence. But, as Cicero informs us, silenced voices do cry out (Cat . 1.21) and, according to Susan Gubar, blank pages can tell tales.68 While we may accurately describe Western culture as masculine in orientation, we must refrain from subscribing to paradigms of cultural construction that obliterate women's historical contribution to art and learning, for to do so is to do patriarchy's work.

In conclusion, then, I submit that the female-specific discourse known as Sappho's poetry is not so marginal to the Greek, or to the western European, literary tradition as to be readily excluded from consideration as an influential cultural factor, no matter how absolute and totalitarian the grip of the patriarchal symbolic system might appear. As many honorific allusions by later women writers suggest, this discourse did provide generations of ancient women with a (m)other tongue and a basis for constructing a positive account of their own experiences. More important for its perpetuation (and, one might add, for the overall mental health of the culture), Greco-Roman males benefited from the opportunity afforded by Sappho's texts to enact a woman's part, if only in play; and so to enter imaginatively into states of awareness foreign to them. In the innovative Hellenistic period, literary representation itself gained new vitality from incorporating additional elements of the female perspective preserved in Sapphic poetry. Finally, we should not forget that, exactly like their predecessors in antiquity, women taking up the pen at the beginning of the modern era invoked Sappho as a heroic authorizing presence.69 Thus all contemporary women who write, within the Western tradition at least, may call themselves daughters of Sappho. As we reread her scanty fragments, we consequently do much more than rediscover the woman's voice in ancient literature. We are glimpsing the other shattered surface of what was once a two-sided glass. That no comparable glass has existed until recently for modern man has been his loss, no less than woman's.

Twelve
Sappho's Gaze: Fantasies of a Goddess and Young Man

Eva Stehle

In the fragments of Sappho's poetry and notices about its contents, references to four myths which belong to a common pattern can be detected. These are the stories oleos and Tithonos, Selene and Endymion, Aphrodite and Adonis, and Aphrodite and Phaon. The last is complicated by "biographical" descriptions of Sappho's own thwarted love for Phaon. Given that Sappho does not seem to have referred to mythological stories very often, these myths form a significant group.1 Yet, frustratingly, none of the poems survives well enough to reveal what use Sappho made of any of the myths. It is the purpose of this essay to show why Sappho may have been interested in the pattern to which this set of stories belongs and to suggest the use she made of it. I will begin by describing the four stories as known from elsewhere and the evidence that Sappho used them.

The story oleos and Tithonos is known from the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (218-38): Eos (Dawn), enamored of the beautiful Tithonos, snatched him off to her home at the end of the earth. She asked Zeus for immortal life for him, but forgot to ask for immortal youth. Once he had grown old, Eos shut him up in her palace and left him to his fate.2 In a papyrus fragment

which preserves the right-hand half of a poem of Sappho's (58 v.) appears the two lines: "... rosy-armed Eos ... carrying to the ends of the earth." The name of the person whom she is carrying is lost in the lacuna. But in the five lines directly preceding, the speaker complains about old age, grey hair, and weak limbs. Old age was Tithonos's trouble, and he is the only one of her lovers whom Eos is said to have carried off to her palace at the edge of the world. It seems very probable, then, that the allusion is to the known story.3

That Sappho told the second myth, that of Selene (Moon) and Endymion, we know only from a scholium, or marginal comment, on Apollonios's Argonsutica : "It is said that Selene comes down to the [Latmian] cave to Endymion; Sappho and Nikandros ... tell the story concerning Selene's love."4 The story has not survived, so we cannot tell whether Selene abducted Endymion in Sappho's version. Sappho's is not the usual tale of Endymion: she may have used a local story of Asia Minor or created this version herself.5

The story of Aphrodite and Adonis is known in several variants.6 According to the best-known version, Adonis was the child of Myrrha's incest with her father: Aphrodite loved the supremely beautiful youth, and they hunted together; Adonis fell, however, gored in the thigh by a wild boar, and died, leaving Aphrodite to mourn him.7 There are other variants (one is given below). In some it is recorded that Aphrodite laid Adonis down in a lettuce bed as he was dying. What makes the detail interesting is that lettuce was said to cause impotence.8 Attributed to Sappho is a two-line fragment

(140 V.): "Tender Adonis is dying. Aphrodite, what shall we do? / Beat your breasts, maidens, and tear your garments." Dioskourides calls Sappho a "fellow mourner" to Aphrodite grieving over Adonis, and Pausanias also says that Sappho sang of Adonis.9 The fragment quoted may be from a cult song, for there was a festival for Adonis celebrated by women, the Adonia: the appearance of reposition in the fragment supports that view of it. But we cannot be sure. Sappho used the hymn form for personal poetry, so she may have used other ritual forms as well. If Aphrodite herself speaks the second line, we may see rather evocation of a mythic scene than a ritual form.

The fourth myth, Aphrodite and Phaon, is much harder to reconstruct. Late sources have it that Phaon was a ferryman of Lesbos who one day ferried Aphrodite, disguised as an old woman, between islands. In gratitude she changed him from an old man into a young and beautiful one. He seduced the women of the island, and met his fate in various ways.10 Sappho, the Byzantine commentator Palaiphatos tells us, often sang of her love for Phaon.11 But one of the earliest sources, the comic poet Kratinos, says that Aphrodite loved Phaon and hid him in the "lovely lettuce."12 The best explanation of the evidence is that Sappho sang of Aphrodite's love. The reference to lettuce implies that Phaon was a figure who could be confused with Adonis.13

The pattern which the stories have in common is that of a goddess desiring a young, beautiful, mortal man whom she hides away in an enclosed place far from civilization. The young man is or becomes incapacitated sexually

and never leaves his condition of dependence and confinement to return to human society. The moment of impotence seems to be the one chosen by Sappho: the man is sleeping, aged, or breathing his last; the narrator joins Aphrodite in expressing love or grief. How was Sappho using this pattern, what connection did it have with her poetry for and about other women? It is a question that we cannot answer directly, both because Sappho's poetry is so largely missing and because such mythic patterns must be understood in context.

I will therefore approach Sappho's myths through a study of the pattern elsewhere in early Greek literature. The liaison of a goddess with a mortal man (young or not) is a recurring theme in this period. There are numerous other examples besides the ones just given. Why were such stories popular and what possibilities did they offer to Sappho? These will be my preliminary questions, before returning to Sappho's use of them. My investigation has two stages, the first determining what structural and ideological characteristics all such myths have in common, the second how they open space for erotic fantasy.

Thirteen
The Justice of Aphrodite in Sappho

Anne Carson

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the earliest recorded critic of Sappho's first poem, praised it for its cohesion and smoothness of construction.1 Since that time the poetic quality of the poem has not, I think, been doubted but controversy has arisen about the meaning of the poem. Much of the controversy has focused upon the penultimate stanza, lines 21-24. Recent scholarship provides us with several decades of debate about this stanza— particularly about its tone.2 There has been no debate about the actual events to which the stanza alludes. It is assumed that the events are obvious. I think that this assumption is untrustworthy, and that debate about the tone of the stanza could be eliminated, or at least radically simplified, if we were to clarify our notion of what is going on in these verses.

Lines 21-24 present the words of Aphrodite to Sappho. Sappho has suffered an injustice at the hands of her beloved, and has called upon Aphrodite to alleviate the pain of this injustice. The girl with whom Sappho is in love has apparently fled from Sappho's advances, rejected her gifts, and refused her love. Aphrodite therefore makes three promises or predictions to Sappho concerning the fate which lies in store for the unresponsive girl. Aphrodite says: "For in fact if she is fleeing, soon she will pursue. And if she is rejecting gifts, instead she will give them. And if she does not love, soon she will love, even if she does not want to."

Although interpreters have differed about the tone of these words of Aphrodite, they have universally agreed about the situation being described. Aphrodite is promising, it is generally held, an ideal erotic revenge in the form of a mutual reversal of the roles of lover and beloved. She is promising to reverse the situation that exists between Sappho and her beloved, to turn the tables, so that the girl who is now indifferent to Sappho will experience a change of heart and will pursue Sappho with gifts and love. This standard view is recently expressed, for example, by Sir Kenneth Dover in his book Greek Homosexuality . Dover says: "The other person, who now refuses gifts and flees, will not merely yield and 'grant favours' but will pursue Sappho and will herself offer gifts."3

This is a plausible interpretation, but it is not what the Greek words say. Aphrodite's statements contain no direct object. She does not say that the girl will pursue Sappho, she does not say that the girl will give gifts to Sappho, she does not say that the girl will love Sappho. She merely says that the girl will pursue, give gifts, and love.4 There is an interpretation of these words available to us which imposes no assumptions on the grammar and which, furthermore, is in better agreement with the traditions of Greek erotic poetry. For it is not the case generally in Greek poetry that scorned lovers pin their hopes on a mutual reversal of erotic roles. In general, forlorn lovers console themselves with a much less fantastic thought: namely, that the unresponsive beloved will one day grow up and become a lover himself, or herself, and in the role of lover will pursue an unresponsive beloved and will come to "know what it feels like" to be rejected. Within the strict conventions of Greek homosexual Eros such a revenge is fairly certain. There are clearly defined ages of life appropriate to the roles of lover and beloved.5 In the course of time the beloved will naturally and inevitably become a lover, and will almost

inevitably experience rejection at least once. This idea recurs repeatedly in Greek poetry and surely reflects a common human experience.6 A vivid example of it is furnished by a graffito from Stabiae:7

The poet Theognis expresses the same thought. Theognis says to his beloved:

(1331-34)

Respect me, oh lad, and grant me favor, if ever in your turn you will come to another to crave the gift of the violet-crowned Cyprus-born. May the divinity grant that you meet with the same words that I meet now.

This theme becomes a topos in Hellenistic poetry. We meet it, for instance, in the seventh Idyll of Theocritus, in an epigram attributed to Callimachus and in many poems of the Anthology ,8 from which I have drawn the following two examples:

(AP 12.12)

Just as he is getting his beard, Lado, the fair youth, cruel to lovers, is in love with a boy. Nemesis is swift.

(AP 12.16.3-4)

But give me a taste of a happy kiss. The time will come when you will beg such favor from others.

If this line of interpretation can be applied to Sappho's poem, it considerably deepens the impact of her words, for she is not daydreaming about imaginary reversals but looking forward to a concrete and inevitable revenge. This interpretation also gives more point to the phase

, (even against her will) in line 24. This phrase has provoked much comment and some emendation of the manuscripts' reading.9 The interpretation which I am proposing confirms the reading of the manuscripts on grounds of sense, for, if the beloved is to become a lover, she will naturally take on a lover's state of mind. To find oneself doing things against one's will is the perennial condition of the lover. It is an axiom of Greek love poetry that Eros is

(necessity) for the lover but not for the beloved.10 Greek lovers describe their experience as that of being coerced by a force outside oneself. In Archilochus, love is a force which "subdues" the lover (

; fr. 196 West [W.]). Ibycus sees himself as an old horse compelled (

) by Eros to line up for another race with love (PMG 287). Theognis speaks of the "compulsions" imposed on him by a boy's love, using the phrase

, "many violent things that go against my will" (1343), and echoes Sappho's

with

(1342). A typical lover in the Anthology complains:

(AP 12.85.4-6)

Violent love caught me and drags me here, here where I saw the boy go through the gate; and I am borne swiftly by my feet moving of their own will.

The beloved, traditionally, does not participate in the emotions that move the lover and hence has no occasion to experience love as a coercion.11 Xenophon compares the paidika confronting his lover's desire with a sober man watching a drunk (Symp . 8.21) The beloved is the cool and indifferent fulcrum of a magnetic attraction which draws the lover to itself by force.12

So, if the beloved girl in Sappho's poem is to leave behind the role of beloved and take on, properly and completely, the role of lover, this will necessarily involve a coercion of her will. As lover, she will, by definition, find herself acting

.

The interpretation I am proposing also mitigates a certain harshness of transition between the fifth and sixth stanzas, which has been criticized by commentators on the poem.13 The fifth stanza ends with an emphatic request from Aphrodite for the identity of the unjust beloved. "Who is it who is wronging you?" Aphrodite asks Sappho. This question is never answered. Instead we pass immediately to the sixth stanza and its series of predictions about the future of the beloved. The connective is

which permits a translation "for in fact if she is fleeing, soon she will pursue," and so on.14 This transition becomes easier if we understand Aphrodite as putting forward not a specific program of revenge tailored to Sappho, but a general theory of lover's justice. For, in the latter case, Aphrodite's line of thought may be seen to be something like "Who is it who is wronging you? Well, whoever it is, you are absurd to worry about it, for in fact if she is now fleeing, soon she will pursue," and so on. In other words, the ellipse of an answer to Aphrodite's question

is deliberate: a deliberate dramatization of the universal law of justice on which lovers can rely as surely as they can rely on the passage of time. Aphrodite's words imply that, from the point of view of justice, it does not matter who the unjust girl is: in time everybody grows too old to be pursued. "Brigitte Bardot will never be sixty," said Brigitte Bardot in an interview with Time magazine in 1974. In making this statement Mlle Bardot was referring not, I think, to the likelihood of a tragedy in her fifty-ninth year but rather to the fact that the persona or role called "Brigitte Bardot" would not be compatible with sixty years of life. Similarly in the Greek context, no one can play the beloved forever. That is part of the justice of Aphrodite.

Aphrodite's tone, then, is one of brisk and reassuring dismissal, as the goddess of love disclaims the possibility that Sappho's beloved, no matter who she is, will remain an object of desire forever. Controversy about the tone of the poem was stirred in 1955 with Sir Denys Page's imputation of irony to this passage.15 Aphrodite speaks in tones of amused reproof, Page

felt, smiling at Sappho "as a mother with a troublesome child," while Sappho reports the words and smile of the goddess "not without amusement at her own expense." Page further insisted that in Greek it is impossible

(to pursue) an object which does not

(to flee).16 He therefore took line 21 to predict that the beloved girl would pursue Sappho whereupon Sappho would run away. Since Sappho herself is the narrator of Aphrodite's words, this puts the poet in the position of praying passionately for an object which, at the same time, she declares she will reject. The nimble psychology of such an attitude is, in Page's view, an example of the "remarkable detachment" with which Sappho manages her own emotions, a detachment which dictates the amused irony of Aphrodite's tone and the unserious mood of the whole poem. This interpretation of the poem's tone, and the controversy aroused by it, have been based on a misunderstanding of the events of stanza 6. Once we have adjusted our notion of who is chasing whom in lines 21-24, the possibility of irony becomes irrelevant.

If the interpretation of these verses which I have put forward is tenable, it adds a dimension to Sappho's conception of erotic justice. The dimension is time. Sappho imagines that time itself, given the nature of things, will enact the justice of Aphrodite upon the unjust beloved

(quickly). The idea that time is the enactor of justice is not an unfamiliar one in archaic and early classical thought. It is implied in the Aeschylean notion of a family curse, as well as in Hesiod's belief that justice and injustice are rewarded by natural occurrences like plague, famine, or the birth of children. Pindar tells us that

(force and arrogance stumble in time; Pyth . 8.15). Solon summons the Earth to witness his justice

(in the justice of time; 36.3 w.). Anaximander speaks of the order of the universe in terms of dike which is judged

(according to the order of time; DK B 1). Sappho's assumption, that justice is an enactment of time in erotic contexts, fits in with the belief of other archaic poets that justice is in general so enacted. Her language emphasizes, especially by repetition of the adverbs

(15, 16, 18) and

(21, 23), the rhythm of time which orders erotic experience, creating and recreating the same impasse (

) and ever proposing the same consolation (

).

The question remains, what difference does this interpretation make to the sense of Sappho's poem as a whole? The poem begins and ends with a request that Aphrodite release Sappho from the pain, grief, and anxiety that

she feels as a rejected lover. Aphrodite's words in lines 21-24 presumably address themselves in some way to this request. How do they do so?

Aphrodite is reassuring Sappho that her anguish over this particular girl is almost at an end. It is a commonplace of homosexual relations between men in the Greek tradition that the lover's desire fades sharply as soon as the boy's beard begins to grow. Plutarch cites a dictum of Bion the sophist to the effect that the beard making its appearance on the face of the beloved "liberates the lover from the tyranny of Eros."17 It is plausible that there were parallel sentiments among Greek women who engaged in homosexual relationships, and that Sappho could expect to be liberated from her desire for this particular girl as soon as the girl became obviously too old to play the role of beloved. Aphrodite's words in lines 21-24, then, are a promise to Sappho of release from erotic tyranny. Her promise is based on the principle of her justice. If we have interpreted it correctly, this is an eternal principle which can be relied on as confidently as can the fact that time passes and young people grow old and lovers love without return,

.

The reinterpretation here proposed for the sixth stanza of Sappho's first poem permits clarification of the text, grammar, syntax, choice of words, tone, and overall sense, as well as integrating the stanza much more satisfactorily with the rest of the poem, and integrating the poem more satisfactorily with the traditions of Greek erotic verse and with archaic currents of thought on the subject of justice. The poem is seen to unfold unironically on one plane of sentiment and expression in a way which vindicates the assessment of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and undercuts modern controversies about irony. Sappho is saying exactly what she means—no less, no more. She is not praying to Aphrodite for a reconciliation with her beloved. She is praying for justice.

Fourteen
Apostrophe and Women's Erotics in the Poetry of Sappho

Ellen Greene

One of the most compelling issues in Sappho criticism during the last two decades has been the question about how Sappho's gender has shaped or determined the nature of her poetic discourse. Recent scholars have provided powerful arguments for showing how Sappho's poetry is not merely the spontaneous effusion of a passionate woman. These scholars have pointed up the many formulaic and conventional aspects of Sappho's poems that link Sappho to rather than separate her from the poetry of her male counterparts.1 As Jack Winkler argues, however, Sappho redefines the cultural norms expressed in the social and literary formulas of archaic poetry from the perspective of her "private" woman-centered world. Winkler does not deny the public, performative character of Sappho's poetry and her use of the emblems of male, public culture, but he defines, aptly, how Sappho's poetry may be regarded as "private":

And yet, maintaining this thesis of the public character of lyric, we can still propose three senses in which such song may be "private": first, composed in the person of a woman (whose consciousness was socially defined as outside the public world of men); second, shared only with women (that is, other "private" persons ...;

and third, sung on informal occasions, what we would simply call poetry readings, rather than on specific ceremonial occasions such as sacrifice, festival, leave-taking, or initiation.2

Although Winkler argues for the gender-specificity of Sappho's poetic discourse and cultural attitudes, he nonetheless attributes to her a "double consciousness"—an ability to speak bilingually, that is, in the languages of both the male public arena and the excluded female minority. I believe, however, that Winkler does not take his views far enough about how Sappho's marginal status as a woman produced a version of desire significantly different from male archaic poets. Recent feminist scholars, while acknowledging Sappho's indebtedness to Homer and to the traditions of archaic poetry, contend that Sappho's poetry presents what Marilyn Skinner calls a "woman-specific discourse[,] ... an elaborate complex of coding strategies differing perceptibly from those of the dominant symbolic order." Skinner describes those strategies as "open, fluid, and polysemous—and hence conspicuously nonphallic."3 Similarly, Eva Stehle compares Sappho's erotic poems with those of Archilochus, Ibycus, and Anacreon and argues that a pattern of mutuality emerges in Sappho's poetry in sharp contrast to an hierarchical mode of eroticism that is prevalent in male patterns of erotic discourse. Like Skinner, Stehle maintains that by creating an "open space for imagining unscripted sexual relations ... Sappho can represent an alternative for women to the cultural norms."4

My own argument in this paper will attempt to further the views put forth by Stehle and Skinner by providing a theoretical framework for understanding Sappho's fragments as offering an erotic practice and discourse outside of patriarchal modes of thought. I hope to show how Sappho constructs erotic experience outside male assumptions about dominance and submission through a close reading of fragment 94. I will pay particular attention to the apostrophic structure of the poem and show how it dramatizes an experience of desire as mutual recognition. I will also discuss the last two stanzas of fragment 1—a poem that is thought by some critics to deviate from patterns of mutuality in Sappho and contradict the view that Sappho's mode of discourse represents female homoerotic desire with its own symbolic systems and conventions.

In her book The Bonds of Love , Jessica Benjamin's analysis of gender and domination and her concept of "intersubjectivity" offer a theoretical perspective that, I believe, helps clarify a women's erotics in Sappho. Benjamin offers

an illuminating, feminist analysis of the psychological underpinnings of erotic domination; her discussion of the relation between gender and domination demonstrates the complex intertwining of sexual and social domination. In her analysis, Benjamin identifies the unequal complementarity in which "one is always up and the other down" not only as the basic pattern of erotic domination, but also as a specifically masculine mode of thought and practice that permeates all social organization. It is masculine because, as Jane Flax observes, "culture is masculine, not as the effect of language but as the consequence of actual power relations to which men have far more access to women."^s Benjamin's concept of intersubjectivity—"that space in which the mutual recognition of subjects can compete with the reversible relationship of domination"—describes a mutuality between lover and beloved based on a subject position for women that defies cultural norms and furnishes an alternate basis for categorizing female experience.6

As Skinner suggests, it is from Sappho's position of marginality that she is able to construct an alternative to the phallic representation of desire. In the segregated female world of the hetairia ,7 Sappho could express active female erotic desire and claim an authentic subject position—what Teresa de Lauretis calls an "eccentric discursive position outside the male ... monopoly of power," a "form of female subjectivity that exceeds the phallic definition" of woman as object or Other.8 Furthermore, de Lauretis maintains the premise that women's difference is a consequence not of biology but of their specific condition of exploitation and gender oppression, which affords them a position of knowledge and struggle that gives rise to possible alternative modes of structuring erotic discourse and practice. Thus, the Sapphic subject, because it speaks from a place of discourse located outside patriarchy, can construct a model of erotic relations that is as Marilyn Skinner puts it "bilateral and egalitarian, in marked contrast to the rigid patterns of pursuit and physical mastery inscribed into the role of the adult male erastes , whatever the sex of his love object."9 The model to which Skinner refers is undeniably homoerotic. De Lauretis, as well, posits the "eccentric" female

subject as one that refuses the terms of the heterosexual contract. Indeed, in a society as male dominated as Sappho's most likely was, one can easily see that the expression of active female desire was most accessible in the context of an autonomous and homoerotic woman's culture. I believe, however, that it is possible for contemporary readers of Sappho—both men and women—to discover in Sappho's articulation of female desire an alternative to the competitive and hierarchical models of eroticism that have dominated Western culture.

Fifteen
Sappho and the Other Woman

Margaret Williamson

Reading Sappho is a seductive project for a feminist. Although not the only woman poet known from antiquity, she is certainly the most significant.1 Her poetic achievement was so legendary that a poem attributed to Plato calls her the tenth Muse2 —an indication also of how transgressive was the role of woman poet. Another aspect of her fascination is her position in history—around the turn of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E ., in a world still dominated by aristocratic power, contested though that power already was: she thus escapes the radical exclusion of women from public life that was a by-product of fully developed democracy in city-states like Athens. She also precedes by two centuries the discourse of fourth-century philosophy, to which many recent theorists have allotted a privileged role in the genealogy of Western ideas of sexual difference.3

This essay attempts to address what must be the fundamental question about Sappho: in what ways, if any, can she be said to be writing as a woman, even though she shares many aspects of poetic tradition with male writers? I shall approach it through a comparison of some of her poems with those of a male author of love poetry, Anacreon, who wrote a few generations later than Sappho. It must be said at the outset, though, that the difficulties entailed in reading her are formidable. The tantalizing fragments of her poems reach us through over two and a half thousand years of neglect, random selection, and censorship, and through the reconstructions of scribes, textual critics, and papyrologists. And some of the accidents that have befallen her text seem simply too bad to be true. What accident was it, for example, that garbled the one word in the ode to Aphrodite, Sappho's only complete surviving poem, that tells us whether the singer is in love with a man or a woman—and that in a poem where Sappho herself is, unusually, named as the singer?4 At this point, as at many others, the would-be critic of Sappho cannot avoid the sense of peering through a series of fragmented and distorting prisms at a fragile and ever-receding text.

Two further factors adding to this sensation are, at one end of the process, our ignorance of the social circumstances in which Sappho wrote and sang and, at the other, the iconic status she has acquired for many twentieth-century readers. If the weight of previous centuries bears heavily on her texts so, in the twentieth century, do the desires of many of their women readers today: to discover the originary voice of female poetic consciousness and, perhaps, of lesbian sexuality.

Even if many of them must now be put on one side,5 these questions are worth mentioning for positive as well as negative reasons. One of the effects of the last twenty years or so of critical theory is liberation from some versions of empiricism: an acceptance of the desires motivating all reading. I make no apology, therefore, for subjecting the iconic figure of Sappho to an explicitly motivated reading that takes up one of the central questions of feminist theory: the relationship between language and gender.

Within classical studies Sappho has increasingly been identified as a crucial (though not the only) figure in debates about gender in the ancient world. I single out three treatments in particular. For Jack Winkler, Sappho's exclusion from mainstream, masculine culture gives her a privileged, and paradoxically more inclusive, perspective on its dominant paradigms.6 Thus, in the ode to Aphrodite, Sappho can write in counterpoint to Homer's epic epiphanies, embracing them from an ironic vantage point. Eva Stehle, on the other hand, following Simone de Beauvoit, seems to indicate female biology as the basis in Sappho of an erotic reciprocity which evades the structures of phallic domination that elsewhere pervade archaic poetry. In a more recent piece, she draws on film theory to analyze the gaze in Sappho as a means of dissolving hierarchy.7

My reading of Sappho, though in some measure influenced by both these writers, attempts to consider the question from a slightly different, and explicitly linguistic, angle. It involves looking at a feature of her writing that, though touched on by both Winkler and Stehle,8 merits further exploration: the subject positions mapped out in her poetry. I shall be considering the different voices in her poetry, and the way in which they seem to construct the positions of subject and object, self and other, the "I," "you," sometimes "she," and occasionally "he" positions. My concentration will be mainly on love poetry and the configurations of individual desire: this is, therefore, a partial sampling of her corpus.

The background to my discussion is provided through a challenge issued by Plutarch. In the introduction to his essay on the virtues of women, Plutarch both opens and forecloses the question under consideration when he puts forward the proposition that "the art of poetry or of prophecy is not one art when practiced by men and another when practiced by women, but one and the same" (De mul. vir . 243b). The truth of this statement can, he suggests, be tested by setting alongside each other the poems of Sappho and of Anacreon. Although Anacreon was not an exact contemporary of Sappho, the accidents of survival mean that we have more of his love poetry than of any other archaic lyric writer, making him an especially rewarding subject for comparison with Sappho. Following Plutarch's suggestion I begin, therefore, with an analysis of self-other relationships in Anacreon, even though many of the

erotic structures identifiable in his work are paralleled in other male love poets.9