PART IV
WOMEN'S EROTICS

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

[1] Jardine, Gynesis 50-64. On the French challenge, see Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism"; Draine, "Refusing the Wisdom"; on traditional American feminist criticism, see Todd, Feminist Literary History .

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

[2] Key passages from the writings of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva were conveniently selected and translated by Marks and de Courtivron, New French Feminisms . The difficulties French feminist theory poses for an Anglo-American feminist criticism that regards the text as the representation of an author's personal subjectivity and experience are explored in the classic debate between Kamuf, "Replacing Feminist Criticism," and Miller, "The Text's Heroine." For subsequent elaborations, see, among others, Weedon, Feminist Practice 165-66; J. Butler, Gender Trouble 1-34; Flax, Thinking Fragments 168-78; and Hekman, Gender and Knowledge 144-51. Strategies for transcending the ensuing dilemma are put forward by Homans, "Feminist Criticism and Theory"; Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism"; and de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't , "The Essence of the Triangle," and "Eccentric Subjects." For further insight into the relevance of French feminist theory to feminist criticism of classical texts, the reader is directed to Gold, '"But Ariadne Was Never There."'

[3] Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics .

[4] Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics 163-67; cf. Hekman, Gender and Knowledge 87-90.

[5] A. Jones, "Writing the Body."

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

[6] Burke, "Irigaray" 289.

[7] Fuss, Essentially Spearing 56-58; Butler, Gender Trouble 9-13.

[8] Gallop, Thinking through the Body 92-99; Fuss, Essentially Speaking 71-72; Schor, "This Essentialism."

[9] Irigaray, Speculum 243-364. Further citations will be given in parentheses in the text.

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

[10] Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction 58; de Lauretis, "Sexual Indifference."

[11] Irigaray, This Sex 25. Further citations will be given in parentheses in the text.

[12] Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction 84.

[13] Culham, "Ten Years after Pomeroy" 15-17; cf. Culham, "Decentering the Text," and responses.

[14] DuBois, Sowing the Body 3, 169-83.

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

[15] Nugent, "This Sex" 176.

[16] Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality . 13-51.

[17] Ibid., 151.

[18] Lacan, "God and the Jouissance " 144.

[19] Showalter, "Toward a Feminist Poetics" 128.

[20] Ibid., 131-32

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 disheartening^[27] 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

[21] Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World."

[22] Jardine, Gynesis 40-41; Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics 75-80.

[23] Snyder, The Woman and the Lyre .

[24] Antipater of Thessalonica AP 9.26; cf. Baale, Studia in Anytes 7-9.

[25] Rauk, "Erinna's Distaff "; Skinner, "Sapphic Nossis."

[26] Woolf, A Room of One's Own 84.

[27] See Ross, How to Suppress Women's Writing ; Olsen, Silences .

[28] DuBois, Sowing the Body , 29.

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

[29] Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics 147-49.

[30] Weedon, Feminist Practice 166; Todd, Feminist Literary History 84; Flax, Thinking Fragments 103.

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

[31] For an excellent analysis of the scheme of practical politics outlined in this passage, see Fuss, Essentially Speaking 66-70.

[32] Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World"; Burnett, Three Archaic Poets ', Rissman, Love as War , Stehle, "Sappho's Gaze"; Winkler, The Constraints of Desire 162-87.

[33] Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World" 47-48; Snyder, "Public Occasion and Private Passion."

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

[34] For an important reading of Sappho as spokesperson for a group, rather than an individual, consciousness, see Hallett, "Sappho and Her Social Context." In a new study (Hallett, in progress), subsequent Roman appropriations of Sappho's mode of homoerotic discourse are surveyed and comprehensively identified as a "Sapphic tradition." While I am deeply indebted to Hallerr for the concept of an ancient gender-specific style of literary expression capable of articulating female desire, my purpose here is not primarily to defend her revisionist approach to Sappho nor to trace out the poet's impact on later literature, but rather to urge my colleagues to forgo constructions of ancient literary history that eradicate Sappho's achievement and its continuing influence.

[35] Plausible arguments for a continuous Greek lyric tradition extending as far back as the eighth century B.C.E . are supplied by R.L. Fowler, The Nature of Early Greek Lyric 9-13. It is worth recalling Virginia Woolf's observation that "if you consider any great figure of the past, like Sappho, like the Lady Murasaki, like Emily Brontë, you will find that she is an inheritor as well as an originator, and has come into existence because women have come to have the habit of writing naturally" (A Room of One's Own 113). Though I would question the use of the term "writing" in Sappho's case, I believe Woolf's intuitive perception of her as heir to a female poetic tradition is probably accurate.

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

[36] Here I follow the lead of Homans, "Feminist Criticism and Theory" 173, who holds out to feminist critics a possible route of escape from the liberal humanist/poststructuralist quarrel over individual subjectivity: turning one's attention to collective female discourses.

[37] Goody and Watt, "The Consequences of Literacy" 28.

[38] In contemporary sex-segregated Middle Eastern cultures, women still create oral poetry and employ it for precisely this purpose: see Joseph, "Poetry as a Strategy of Power"; Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments 171-271. The overall effectiveness of female poetic discourse as a power tool depends on its acceptance by men: when memorized and quoted by males, women's songs indirectly provide their composers with a strong voice in the larger community (Joseph 427). As we will see, this modern parallel illuminates the reception of Sappho's songs in antiquity.

[39] Weedon, Feminist Practice 21-27.

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.]

[40] Havelock, Preface to Plato , and "The Preliteracy of the Greeks"; Harris, Ancient Literacy .

[41] Thomas, Oral Tradition .

[42] On women's illiteracy, see Cole, "Gould Greek Women Read and Write?" and Harris, Ancient Literacy 106-8; on women storytellers, see Thomas, Oral Tradition 109.

[43] Dowden, Death and the Maiden 103. On the girls' chorus, see Calame, Les chœurs .

[44] Merkelbach, "Sappho und ihr Kreis"; Calame, Les chœurs 1:385-420; Gentili, Poetry and Its Public 72-89.

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

[45] Calame, Les chœurs 1:420-39; Dover, Greek Homosexuality 179-82; Rissman, Love as War 119-21.

[46] Hallett, "Sappho and Her Social Context" 139-42.

[47] DuBois, Sowing the Body 29.

[48] B. Fowler, "The Archaic Aesthetic."

[49] See Foucault, The History of Sexuality 2:38-93. On Sappho's model, see Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World."

[50] For the convenience of nonspecialists, the numeration of the fragments of both Sappho's and Alcman's poems is that found in the most recent Loeb editions (Campbell, Greek Lyric vols. 1 and 2, respectively).

[51] Page, Alcman 52-57.

[52] Stehle, "Romantic Sensuality, Poetic Sense" 147-49.

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 women^[55] 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 3^[1] 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

[53] O'Higgins, "Sappho's Splintered Tongue."

[54] DeJean, "Fictions of Sappho" 790.

[55] Stehle, "Sappho's Gaze" 224-25.

[56] Winkler, The Constraints of Desire 179.

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

[57] Ong, Orality and Literacy 46-49.

[58] Schibanoff, "Taking the Gold" 87-91.

[59] On the increased availability of formal education for women from the fourth century B.C.E . onward, see Pomeroy, "Technikai Kai Mousikai."

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

[60] Winkler, The Constraints of Desire 188-209.

[61] Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry 448-49.

[62] For a theoretical analogy, compare de Lauretis's several arguments for redefining personal subjectivity as an ongoing "process of engagement" with externally formulated social discourses. According to de Lauretis, the agent exercises a considerable degree of self-determination in adapting those discourses to serve her private needs and even combining them into more complex vehicles of consciousness that escape conventional categories (de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't 182-86; cf. "Feminist Studies/Critical Studies" 8-10, and "Eccentric Subjects" 144-45).

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

[63] Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 277-313.

[64] Segal, "Eros and Incantation."

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.

[65] The psychological spell Sappho exerted over a male listener's imagination is implied at [Longinus] Subl . 10.1-3, where the author marvels at her ability to select and combine "the most extreme and intense" (ta akra ... kai hypertetamena ) emotions in her descriptions of love. Praise of the charm (kharis ) and pleasure (hedone ) of her subject matter points to a general perception of her poetry as emotionally enthralling; see Demetr. Eloc . 132, and Hermog. Id . 2.4 (p. 331 Rabe). Portrayals of Sappho on red-figure pottery (for example, the kalathos by Brygos on which she appears with Alcaeus [Munich 2416, ARV^[2] 385/228] and the hydria [Athens 1260, ARV^[2] 1060/145] showing her reading in the presence of three female companions, one of whom crowns her with a wreath) hint at widespread use of her songs as entertainment at symposia in fifth-century B.C.E . Athens; cf. the apocryphal tale of Solon's reaction to one such performance (Ael. apud Stob. Flor . 3.29.58; Campbell, Greek Lyric 1:13, no. to), which, though admittedly late, nevertheless provides insight into how male listeners responded to Sappho and how her songs were transmitted orally. That cultural image of Sappho explains why the musical theorist Aristoxenus attributed to her the invention of the poignant and affecting mixolydian mode ([Plut.] De mus . 16. 1136d; for its character, see Plato Resp . 3.398e).

[66] On Greek mirnesis of the female as a theatrical device for affirming elements excluded from ordinary male experience, consult Zeitlin, "Playing the Other." For the pattern of "the Greek male's fascination with and gradual appropriation of the socially suppressed female other," see duBois, Sowing the Body 176-77; and, on the symposium as privileged space for the assumption of a "tempered alterity," see Frontisi-Ducroux and Lissarrague, "From Ambiguity to Ambivalence."

[67] Halperin, One Hundred Years 126-37.

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.

[68] Gubar, "The Blank Page."

[69] Kolodny, "The Influence of Anxiety,"

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

[1] The exception is the Trojan War, to which Sappho does refer relatively often: 16, 17, 23, 44, and one could add 166 and 105b (Voigt [V.]). Apart from figures connected with the Trojan War, I count eleven references to mythical characters, excluding divinities, whose stories may have been told or at least alluded to. In addition to those discussed here, there are the Tyndaridai, Niobe and Leto, Medea, Theseus, Achelous, and Prometheus.

[2] In Homer (Il . 9.1, Od . 5.1), Eos is said to rise from her bed beside Tithonos to bring light to mortals. Homer may think of him as a god. See Escher in PW under Eos, col. 2658: for other versions of the myth of Tithonos, see P. Smith, Nursling of Morality 82-86.

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

[3] Eos is similar to Aphrodite in some ways: Boedeker, Aphrodite's End , has argued that Aphrodite is a hypostasis of Eos (10-17).

[4] Scholia to Ap. Rhod. 4-57 f. (264 Wendel), partly quoted in Voigt, Sappho et Alcaeus 199.

[5] See n. 4 and cf. Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 273-74, who analyzes the myths into two traditions. The "western" version is that Endymion was king of Elis. Eternal sleep is usually part of his story (but Selene is not): Zeus gave him the right to choose his time of death; or Zeus agreed to grant a wish, and Endymion chose eternal sleep without aging; or Endymion tried to rape Hera, and the sleep was a punishment. The "eastern" version is less well-known: a grave in the Latmian cave is reported by Strabo 14.1.8 and an inscription shows that Endymion was a local hero in that area: cf. Paus. 5.1.5. Of. also Gebelmann Ackerman and Gisler, LIMC , under Endymion, cat. 726-28; Bethe in PW under Endymion, cols. 2557-60, for collected evidence. Sappho could have created her version out of this material, adding the goddess to the story of Endymion's sleep.

[6] The best collection of sources for the myth and cult of Adonis, together with extensive discussion, is Atallah, Adonis .

[7] Ovid Met . 10.298-559, 708-59, gives the fullest treatment. Adonis becomes an anemone after death in this telling on which metamorphosis (into a flower without scent) see Ribichini, Adonis 76-78.

[8] See Euboulos fr. 13 (Kassel-Austin) and Callim. fr. 478 (Pfuhl) for the statement that Aphrodite laid Adonis in the lettuce: both authors connect the anaphrodisiac nature of lettuce with Adonis's feebleness. Winkler, Constraints of Desire 20, attributes this statement to Sappho by mistake. Cf. also Ath. 2.68f-70a on lettuce. Détienne, Gardens of Adonis 67-71, calls attention to the significance of these references.

(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

[9] Dioskourides AP 7.407 (18.1585 Gow-Page); Paus. 9.29.8 (214 V.). The phrase, "Oh, Adonis," is also quoted from Sappho (117Bb: 168 V.). A suggested restoration of 96.23 V. includes a reference to Adonis: West, "Burning Sappho" 328.

[10] Sappho is said to have leaped from the Leucadian rock (an act that cured passion, if one survived it) for love of Phaon. The story probably developed in fourth-century comedy, for it is attested from comic fragments. See Stoessl in PW under Phaon, cols. 1791-93, on its development. See Wilamowitz, Sappho und Simonides 25-40, and Nagy, "The Symbols of Greek Lyric," on the complicated question of the relationship between Phaon and the Leucadian rock. Wilamowitz thinks that Phaon was localized at Lesbos only after he became attached to Sappho, Stoessl that Phaon may have been a Lesbian mythic figure of whom Sappho's poetry spread knowledge. The "leap" may originally have been a metaphor for swooning in love.

[11] See 211 V. for collected references to the Phaon story, 211a for Palaiphatos.

[12] Kratinos was an older contemporary of Aristophanes: Eq . 526-36. A scholiast to Lukianos (211c V.) remarks that Aphrodite changed Phaon from old to young because she was in love with him.

[13] Cf. Burn, The Meidias Painter 40-44, and Beazley; "Some Inscriptions" 320-21, for vase paintings that depict Adonis and Phaon as similar figures. For the two famous vases by the Meidias Painter, one depicting Adonis, one Phaon, see Burn pls. 22-25a, 27-29.

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.

I

In order to study the pattern as a whole, I must describe some of the other realizations of it known from early Greek literature. To begin with, it lies behind Helen and Paris in the Iliad .^[14] Aphrodite "snatched" (ex-herpax ') Paris from the battlefield and took him to an enclosed place, his bedroom (3.380-82): the verb is the one used of goddesses carrying off beloved youths.^[15] There he remains, beautiful, compliant, apparently immobile until she returns to him (with Helen). Aphrodite then goes to find Helen, who is so close to Aphrodite that, as Helen herself implies, she and Aphrodite can replace each other in love relationships.^[16] Helen says to Aphrodite, when summoned to the side of Paris: "You go sit by [Paris], leave the way of the gods and no longer tread Olympus with your feet, but always worry over him and guard him until he makes you his wife—or his slave" (3.406-9). In the Odyssey , Kirke and Kalypso enact the pattern with Odysseus.^[17] Kalypso holds Odysseus captive, desiring him for her

[14] Helen was a heroine (i.e., a figure whose grave was worshiped) or a goddess at Sparta: Hdt. 6.61; cf. Od . 4-561-69; Theoc. Id . 18. Calame, Les chœurs 1:334-44; West, "Immortal Helen," and Clader, Helen , argue for her being a goddess,

[15] The plates in Kahil, Les enlèvements , show the increasingly sexualized representation of both Paris and Helen in vase painting in the course of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E .

[16] Cf. Clader, Helen , esp. 58-62, 69-80.

[17] Od . 10.203-574, 5.55-261. The Kirke and Kalypso episodes are generally thought of as duplicates: cf. Od . 9.29-32.

husband, and has offered him immortality. She also mentions two more examples in the course of her protest to Hermes about being forced to let Odysseus go:

You are harsh, you gods, supremely jealous, you who begrudge goddesses' sleeping openly with men, if one would make him her proper consort. Thus when rosy-fingered Eos chose Orion, the lightly living gods resented it, until chaste, golden-throned Artemis killed him, assailing him with her gentle arrows. Thus when Demeter, yielding to her desire, mingled in love with Iasion in a thrice-plowed field, Zeus was not ignorant but killed him, striking him with a flashing thunderbolt.

The Theogony , or rather its pseudo-Hesiodic continuation, offers a list specifically of goddesses who slept with mortal men and of their offspring (965-1020). Included are Demeter and Iasion, Harmonia and Kadmos, Kallirhoe and Chrusaor, Eos and Tithonos, Eos and Kephalos, Aphrodite and Phaethon, Medea and Jason, Psamathe and Aiakos, Thetis and Peleus, Aphrodite and Anchises, Kirke and Odysseus, and Kalypso and Odysseus.^[18] Phaethon, whom Aphrodite carried off to be her immortal temple-keeper, is here the son of Eos and Kephalos.^[19] In the case of Aphrodite and Phaethon, unlike the others, no issue is mentioned. Finally, the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite tells the story of Aphrodite's seduction of Anchises. Aphrodite appears before Anchises' hut, claiming to be a mortal virgin who was snatched by Hermes from the dance and brought to Mount Ida to be Anchises' wife. Persuaded, Anchises takes her to bed on the spot. Afterward, when Anchises learns who it is that he has just slept with, he cowers and begs not to be made impotent: "Don't let me live strengthless among men, but take pity. For not flourishing of life is the man who sleeps with immortal goddesses" (188-90).^[20] In the final conversation between them, Aphrodite reassures him and promises him a son but warns him not to speak of the encounter. To explain why she cannot make him immortal she narrates the story of Eos and Tithonos and, a variation on the pattern, of Zeus and Ganymedes (202-38).^[21] If we range down through the fifth century we find the first attested narration

[18] It is striking that only one of the heroes born to a goddess in this list is central to Greek heroic legend. That is Achilleus, and it has long been noted that Achilleus is a misfit in the Greek genealogical system. Two of the heroes, Aineias and Memnon, are Eastern. Three— Latinos, Agrios, and Geryones—belong to the Far West, and Geryones is more monster than hero. The famous heroes do not come from such unions.

[19] Cf. also Eur. Hipp . 454-56, who mentions Eos's snatching Kephalos.

[20] Cf. Giacomelli [Carson], "Aphrodite and After," for a discussion of the meaning of amenenos , "strengthless."

[21] Ibycus PMG 289 mentioned Tithonos and Ganymedes as young men of great beauty. Tyrtaeus 12.5 (West) referred to Tithonos's supreme beauty.

of Adonis's life in Panyassis's poetry, as Apollodoros records.^[22] The reference runs thus:

Panyasis [sic] says that [Adonis] was a son of Theias, king of Assyria, who had a daughter Smyrna .... [She commits incest with her father, then flees and is changed by the gods into a myrrh tree.] In the tenth month thereafter, the tree having burst, the one called Adonis was born, whom Aphrodite, in secret from the gods, hid in a chest on account of his beauty while he was still an infant and entrusted to Persephone. But when [Persephone] saw him, she refused to give him back. Judgment being in the hands of Zeus, the year was divided into three parts, and [Zeus] ordained that Adonis should remain under his own cognizance for one part of the year, with Persephone for one part, and with Aphrodite for the third part. Adonis assigned to [Aphrodite] his own share also. Later, however, while hunting Adonis was gored by a boar and died. (3.14.4)

While there is no way to know how far the summary draws on Panyassis, it can be argued, on the basis of the coherence of the plot, that the whole summary except the last clause should be attributed to him.^[23] Apollodoros may have borrowed the detail of being gored from the better-known version given above.

The Adonis story stands out among the others because it is associated with a festival, the Adonia. Sappho's lines of lament for the dying Adonis may have been meant as a song for the ritual mourning of Adonia. The festival was kept at Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries, and later at Alexandria, as well as elsewhere. The Athenian festival has been reconstructed largely from vase paintings, with help from remarks in Plato and comic writers.^[24] It was celebrated by women, who planted seeds of lettuce, fennel, perhaps wheat and barley in pottery vessels or large shards. Once the seeds had sprouted, the pottery pieces were carried to the roofs of the houses, where the sprouts shriveled in the sun and the women lamented. The pots were thrown into the sea or into streams. At some point in the festival incense was burned, fruit was heaped up in baskets, and women danced to flute and tambourine.^[25]

[22] See, in addition to works cited above, the notes in Frazer's Loeb edition of Apollodorus ad 83-89.

[23] This is the solution of Atallah, Adonis 53. Ribichini, Adonis 133 n. 82, on the other hand, thinks that Panyassis told of Adonis's death after a life of cycling between earth and Hades.

[24] In addition to Atallah, Adonis chaps. 3-6, see Weill, "Adoniazousai," and Servais-Soyez in LIMC under Adonis, nos. 45-49 and cat. 227-28. Ar. Lys . 389-96 and Plato Phdr . 276b are the most informative contemporary literary sources.

[25] At Alexandria, as we learn from Theoc. Id . 15, Queen Arsinoe set up a display of Aphrodite and Adonis stretched out together on a banquet couch surrounded by fruit. A singer told Adonis's story. Then with lamenting the image of Adonis was thrown into the sea. Cf. Gow, ed., Theocritus , esp. 2:262-66. See Weill, 'Adoniazousai" 674, for the possibility that it was celebrated at Argos in the mid-fifth century.

The same mythic pattern of a goddess with a mortal man lies behind Pindar's narrative of Jason and Medea in Pythian 4. as well. Euripides' Hippolytus and Phaethon have links to it. Other examples of the story pattern exist—Kybele and Attis, for instance, Eos and Kleitos, Hylas and the nymphs, the story of Hermaphroditus found in Ovid.^[26] The story of Aktaion and Artemis is a negative inversion of the same pattern: she destroys him after he has seen her in the nude.^[27] Bacchylides 17 has a deflected example: the young Theseus leaps into the sea and comes to the home of his father Poseidon, where he sees his stepmother Amphitrite: "She put around him a shimmering purple robe and set on his curly hair a faultless wreath that guileful Aphrodite had given her once at her wedding, dark with roses" (112-16): then she sends him back to his ship.^[28] A cup by Onesimos shows a youthful Theseus, dressed in a short filmy chiton, standing before Amphitrite. Athena stands between them as if to chaperon Theseus.^[29] It is evident that the pattern was popular and generative.

No recent interpretive approach has considered all these stories together, a procedure that may appear too reminiscent of Frazer's.^[30] But various strategies have been used on individual myths or subsets of this group.^[31]

[26] The narratives of Kybele and Attis are late and divergent, e.g., Ovid Fasti 4.223-44 and Paus. 7.17, although his story was known much earlier: it is indirectly attested by Hdt. 1.34-45. Cf. Vermaseren, The Legend of Atthis , esp. chaps. 3-4. Eos and Kleitos: Od . 15.250-51. Hylas and the nymphs: Theoc. Id . 13: this story too was connected with a ritual, a search for the boy (Ap. Rhod. 1.1354). The figure of Hylas is attested by Hellanikos FGrH 4 F 131. Hermaphroditus: Ovid Met . 4.285-388. Similar is Stesich. PMG 279' (placed among the spuria by Page), which sketches the story of the shepherd Daphnis, loved by a nymph, unfaithful to her, and blinded in consequence. On young men as victims of rape and on the fear of sexuality as feminizing, see Zeitlin's excellent discussion, "Configurations of Rape."

[27] In the earliest extant version, Eur. Batch . 339, Aktaion is punished because he boasted that he was a better hunter than Artemis. But cf. Stesich. PMG 256 (from Paus. 9.2.3), the well-known version, though conflated with one in which Aktaion is killed to prevent his marrying Semele.

[28] See Segal, "Myth," for the scene as an erotic initiation of Theseus.

[29] For the cup (Paris Louvre G104 and Florence Museo Archeologico PD321), see LIMG under Amphitrite no. 75: ARV 318.1 It is dated to ca. 300 B.C.E . Cf. also no. 76, where Athena is not present.

[30] Frazer, Adonis , esp. chaps. 1-3, 9-10, of course, saw in Adonis a paradigmatic case of the vegetation god who yearly dies and is reborn. The pattern is universal, according to his rendition.

[31] Boedeker, Aphrodite's Entry , argues for an Indo-European background for the myths involving Aphrodite, Eos, Kirke, on the grounds that these goddesses are descendants of Eos, who is cognate with the goddess Ushas of the Rig Veda : she distinguishes them from Near Eastern goddesses (chap. 3). Helen as a tree-goddess who withdraws periodically has been claimed for the Indo-Europeans by West, "Immortal Helen." Nagler, "Dread Goddess," using Jungian categories, finds an old pattern of a goddess who lives near the still center of the world and who is maleficent until resisted or overcome, when she becomes a helper, providing information or sending the hero to one who can provide it. Sowa, Traditional Themes , treats the patterns in a Jungian framework (esp. chaps. 2-3.5). Segal, "Homeric Hymn," does a structuralist reading of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and finds that the child Aineias is a mediation of the contradictions between mortal and immortal, city and wild. E Smith, Nursling of Mortality , follows his method but throws the emphasis on the justification for mortality.

Of these, the structuralist approach of Marcel Détienne, with its emphasis on the logic of culturally specific symbolism, has been the most productive; consideration of its results will be my starting point. Détienne argues that Adonis represents the extremes of sensuality and sterility, as expressed by his connection with spices and lettuce. In the Adonia (which he claims was celebrated at Athens only by courtesans and their friends) erotic but unfruitful sexuality is negatively contrasted with marriage and reproduction as they were celebrated in the Thesmophoria, a festival of Demeter. The courtesans, on this interpretation, would be enacting their own marginality.

Détienne's work on the Adonis myth and ritual is stimulating because it has shown the way to ideological interpretation of apparently apolitical myth and ritual complexes. A particular myth or ritual can take on meaning from its contrast with other myths and rituals. Narrative details can be read as codes carrying oppositional meaning.^[32] Others have combined structuralist techniques with a historical perspective. Ribichini, for one, undertaking an interpretation that takes the Near Eastern material into account, proposes that Adonis is the Greek conception of the effeminate, ineffectual Near Eastern man, marked by all that the Greek man considers to be antithetical to himself.^[33] Adonis is a failed hero. The meaning of the Adonis festival for Athenian men is that by not celebrating it they mark their masculine effectiveness.^[34] Ribichini assumes an implicit contrast with the normative Greek male self-image as recorded in the figures of the hero and the citizen.

John Winkler criticizes Détienne from a different perspective: in drawing one message from the myth-ritual complex, Détienne assumes a homogeneous social fabric with the citizen males' point of view as the only source

[32] Piccaluga, "Adonis e i profumi," criticizes Détienne for his handling of the evidence. Lévèque, "Un nouveau décryptage," wishes a more historical approach had been integrated into the analysis.

[33] Ribichini, Adonis 13-20, esp. 17 ff. Adonis is consistently identified as an Easterner, from Assyria, Arabia, Syria, or Cyprus. Hesiodic fr. 139 (Merkelbach-West) says his father was Phoenix ("the Phoenician"). He is therefore a fantasy figure of the "effeminized" other in a geographical as well as bodily sense. Sex-role reversal is typical of figures from the Near East in Greek thought: see Ribichini's list, which includes Paris, 69-70.

[34] Ribichini, Adonis 85-86.

of meaning.^[35] The inattention to the question of "meaning for whom?" is especially culpable because Détienne is not using a strict Lévi-Straussian model of contradictions and mediations but positing a contrast of values: one pole is affirmed, the other rejected. Winkler poses the question of the meaning of the Adonia for the participants , who, as he correctly points out, are not just courtesans. His reading of the juxtaposition of the Adonia with the Thesmophoria is that the women are enacting the differential involvement in sexual union and reproduction between men and themselves:

If any contrast is to be drawn between the respective roles of the sexes in cultivating these natural processes, men must be placed squarely on the side of Adonis, Aphrodite's eager but not long enduring lover. What the gardens with their quickly rising and quickly wilting sprouts symbolize is the marginal or subordinate role that men play in both agriculture (vis-à-vis the earth) and human generation (vis-à-vis wives and mothers).^[36]

In other words, the gardens are a women's joke about male sexuality. What Winkler has done is to shift the oppositional terms from legitimate and illegitimate sexual union (in Détienne's analysis) to male and female implication in sexual union, as described by the women. Out of the complex of terms used by the ritual, different interpreters have singled out different terms as the significant oppositional ones. Ribichini, concentrating more on the mythic assemblage and less on the ritual, finds the controlling opposition to be the one between the Greek male and the Near Eastern man as constructed in Greek popular culture.

Comparison of Détienne's and Ribichini's readings as if from the hegemonic position of a Greek (especially fifth-/fourth-century Athenian) man and Winkler's as if from that of a Greek (fifth-/fourth-century Athenian) woman exposes the dependence of the analysis on the position assumed by the interpreter, that is, on the social position in whose terms the myth is perceived. Détienne and Ribichini unproblematically adopt the position of the hegemonic male as the place from which to determine the meaning of

[35] De Lauretis, Alice Doesn't 103-6, likewise criticizes the early forms of narratology, which developed under the stimulus of structuralism: "More often than not, however, those efforts all but reaffirm an integrative and ultimately traditional view of narrativity. Paradoxically, in spite of the methodological shift away from the notion of structure and toward a notion of progress, they end up de-historicizing the subject and thus universalizing the narrative process as such" (105-6).

[36] Winkler, Constraints of Desire 205. In his discussion, Winkler makes use of my interpretation of the myth pattern in Sappho's poetry, which I first put forward in a paper entitled "Sappho and the Enclosing Goddess" at the Berkshire Conference on Women's History in 1981. This paper is a reworked version of that one with different emphases, but its reading of Sappho supports Winkler's very suggestive connection between Sappho's use of the pattern and the women's joking at the Adonia.

the myth and ritual.^[37] Winkler constructs the possibility of a different set of shared views among women as the matrix for attributing meaning. The Adonia may indeed have had separate meanings for the female participants and the citizen male observers. The reading strategy of positionality— awareness that interpretation always comes from a specific social, sexual, and intellectual place—allows the modern interpreter to suggest the gist of other discourses besides the hegemonic one.^[38] It allows the modern interpreter to escape from the view that myths as ideological formulations work their power to shape thought in undifferentiated fashion within a culture.

I will follow Détienne's lead in seeking an ideological dimension to the set of myths I have singled out, while observing the interpretive position from which the ideology is discerned. However, as soon as one examines this set of myths, including the Adonis myth, for significant codes, it becomes clear that in their emphasis on the sexual code of male and female, Détienne and Ribichini have ignored another code, an equally potent (in symbolic terms) hierarchical opposition, that between divine and human. Adonis's lover is a goddess. Furthermore, in these myths as viewed from the position of a hegemonic male, the two codes produce a contradiction, a point at which cultural logic collapses. The pairing of a goddess and a human man poses, within Greek hegemonic discourse, an irreconcilable conflict between the two established hierarchies, the hierarchy of male and female and that of divine and human. In human relations the female is "tamed" by sexual intercourse, and the subordinate position is identified with the female one. But in divinehuman relations the human is subordinate to divine desire. Sexual intimacy between a human male and a goddess is therefore impossible to think in simple terms because the relative status of the two cannot be determined. The relationship must be adjusted somehow to make it conceivable.^[39]

[37] I do not mean to imply that the modern interpreter can align her- or himself fully with an ancient figure or social position. Détienne analyzes the myth and ritual from the modern construction of the place of an adult citizen man. The idea of positionality is a useful reminder that one is working with a modern construction of a "Greek" social construction.

[38] Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism" 428-36, argues the usefulness of an idea of positionality in feminist discussion. It is a valuable interpretive frame in any attempt to move between a work of literature and the society that produced it.

[39] Cf. below, n. 65, on hierarchical sexual relations. The practical effect of the two hierarchies on daily life would seem to be quite different. However, the gods were a conceptual form used to think about power relations. Alkman warns the male members of the audience, "Do not attempt to wed Aphrodite" (1.17 PMG ). The line probably encodes a warning not to seek above one's station, not to seek an enthralling woman as a bride: the thought is cast in terms of divinity and human. Cf. the separation of the two in Pind. Nem . 7.1-7. The problematic of the human place vis-à-vis the divine was real.

In the public discourse of early Greece, where these myths are found, the adjustment is the work of narrative. In each telling of each myth the narrative must resolve the conundrum by adjusting the hierarchies and shaping the outcome of the encounter, or, in other words, by assigning a location to the phallus. Given this need for resolution, observation of static codes is not sufficient to discover the ideological working of these myths: we must follow the movement of the narrative. My second source of inspiration, then, is a sentence of Teresa de Lauretis's. Speaking of film, de Lauretis says "the very work of narrativity is the engagement of the subject in certain positionalities of meaning and desire."^[40] I must also observe the effect of narrative positioning in creating ideological harmony in these myths.^[41]

From the point of view of hegemonic culture, the most conservative move is to ensure that the male/female hierarchy ultimately predominates. There are other possible resolutions that also preserve the male/female hierarchy (without elevating it over the divine/human one), as I will point out below. Not all adjustments, however, would reinforce hegemonic values. If the divine/human hierarchy is emphasized at the expense of the male/female one, an autonomous, sexually active female figure, one who controls the phallus, is created. Thus, cultural logic, through this myth pattern, can potentially offer narratives that subvert male dominance. In fact, public narratives from early Greece avoid this outcome. Using the narratives described above I will show how male/female hierarchy is protected.

The Kalypso episode in the Odyssey details the impossible situation that results when neither hierarchy gives way to the other. Odysseus is held captive by Kalypso, who would like to shut Odysseus up forever on her island in a state of emotional and physical dependency. In this condition Odysseus is forced to make love with her: "At night he would lie beside her under compulsion in the hollow cave, an undesiring man beside a desiring [woman]" (5. 154-55). The act that defines him as a "man" also defines him as subordinate, for his sexual activity "under compulsion" is the clear sign of his submission to Kalypso.^[42] Yet his refusing immortality is his refusal to accept definition as her paramour and the subordinate sexual status implied. Kalypso had no intention of accepting his refusal, as her speech to Hermes makes clear (5.118-36, quoted in part above), while Odysseus's "sweet life was flowing away as he mourned for his homecoming, for the nymph no

[40] De Lauretis, Alice Doesn't 106.

[41] See Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions , on the use of closure in ideological fiction to emphasize the point being made. Closure functions in the myths I will discuss to establish the definite status of the paradigmatic figures.

[42] The verb used, iauein , does not mean "to make love." It means "to spend the night," but it is used to refer to lovemaking elsewhere in the Odyssey , e.g., 11.261, 22.464.

longer pleased him" (5.152-53). According to Athena, Odysseus wants to die (1.59). This impasse in their relationship and in the narrative is dissolved only by displacing the problem upward.^[43] Zeus exercises his patriarchal dominion and commands Kalypso (via Hermes) to send Odysseus on his way.

Structurally, then, both hierarchies remain in force. Odysseus's status is preserved, though only because Kalypso lets him go. However, the audience's desire for the narrative to continue means that the audience is positioned to identify Odysseus's autonomy, his sexuality, with narrative movement and to wish for it to prevail over hers. His escape can therefore be read as his triumph. Narrative in this case requires male predominance over the immobilizing goddess.^[44]

In the case of Kalypso and Odysseus control of the phallus is contested. Most of the narratives I mentioned resolve the conflict by revising the status of one of the figures. Odysseus's encounter with Kirke points up the contrast. On this occasion Hermes intervenes beforehand to protect Odysseus from Kirke. Not only does Hermes give him the mold that inhibits Kirke's magic: he also instructs him to pull his sword on Kirke. When she asks him to her bed, he is not to refuse, "but ask her to swear a great oath of the gods that she will devise no other evil pain for yourself so that she not make you worthless and unmanned when you are disarmed/naked" (10.299-301; cf. 336-44). By neutralizing Kirke's power, the gods arrange it so that the male/female hierarchy will predominate from the start and Kirke accommodate herself to Odysseus.^[45]

The Theogony continuation elevates the male/female hierarchy by other methods. It chooses, apart from the Aphrodite- and Eos-stories, those stories in which the female has been compelled by another god rather than desiring the young man (Thetis), has been at least partly humanized into a mortal woman (Medea, Harmonia), or is a minor nymph. The unions mentioned, except for Aphrodite and Phaethon, are all fertile. Eos and Tithonos have two sons in the Theogony (whereas none is mentioned in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite ). Odysseus and Kirke have two children, Agrios and

[43] Without the gods' intervention Odysseus's story can neither end nor move forward. The narrative signals the impasse by repeating the description of Odysseus's state: 1.11-15, 48-59; 5.11-17.

[44] See de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't 113-24, on the male as subject, the female as obstacle in myth as analyzed by Lotman. In the complementary fashion, Devercux, Femme et mythe 36, citing the myth of Pirithoos—who went to Hades to seduce Persephone, but sat down and found himself immobilized, stuck to his seat—equates immobility with castration and impotence.

[45] Kirke too threatened to interrupt Odysseus's journey, although the narrative moves past the threat so rapidly as to neutralize it: after a year Odysseus's men remind him that they should be on their way (10.469-74).

Latinos: Odysseus and Kalypso's son is Nausithoos. The offspring may be metaphorical, for instance, Demeter giving birth to Ploutos (Wealth) and Eos giving birth to Phaethon (the Shining One). This representation minimizes the conflict of hierarchies without acknowledging its existence. From the perspective of the Theogony as a whole, these goddesses (except Aphrodite) are hardly powerful, and the production of sons is the only story they are given. For the audience this bareness is satisfying because the lines are attached to a narrative in which Zeus establishes patriarchy by asserting his control over reproduction. These lines link the cosmic order (expressed through the distribution of divinities) with human history and tie the audience, placed in history, into Zeus's plan. Because of their narrative position, the lines can assimilate the sexual power of the female to her reproductive activity and thereby stabilize the location of the phallus, the location of control over the erotic situation, with the man. The goddess is placed within patriarchy and subsumed in the category "mother."

In the one instance of the union of Aphrodite and Phaethon, as told by the author of the Theogony continuation, a different resolution is found. The author says of Phaethon, "When he was young, in the tender bloom of glorious youth, a child with light thoughts, laughter-loving Aphrodite darting down snatched him up and made him an enclosed temple-keeper, a shining daimon , in her holy shrine" (988-91).^[46] The abduction is not said to have been followed by sexual union.^[47] Only in Aphrodite's epithet "laughter-loving" is the phallus indirectly and unspecifically signaled via a pun.^[48] This vignette settles the status conflict unequivocally in favor of the goddess but deprives Phaethon of all activity, including sexual activity: immortalized and enclosed, he has no further story. As in the case of the Odyssey , generation, histors; and narrative require male dominance. Phaethon's fate indirectly

[46] West, Hesiod: Theogony , points out ad loc. that daimon is a term used of men who have lived on earth and after death have a limited sort of divine power. The adjective dios (shining) is applied to goddesses but not to the higher male gods. (It is also applied to human men.) The text implicitly marks Phaethon's limited and subordinate divinization.

[47] In Apollod. 3.14.3 Tithonos is the son of Eos and Kephalos, and his son is Phaethon (by what mother is not said); Adonis is Phaethon's great-great-grandson. The notice indicates both the fluidity of these stories and the fact that the young men were felt to be linked as well as interchangeable. It is remarkable that in Euripides' partly preserved play Phaethon the young man is about to marry a goddess on the day that he goes to find Hellos, drives the chariot, and is struck down by Zeus's lightning. Diggle, Euripides: Phaethon 10-27, 155-60, thinks that the goddess is a nymph, one of Heliades. He denies any connection between the Phaethon of this myth and the one in Hesiod, but the pattern seems to exert its pull.

[48] Hesiod puns on Aphrodite's epithet "laughter-loving," philomeides , and a term for genitals, media , saying that Aphrodite is laughter-loving because she was born from the severed genitals of Ouranos (Theog . 200).

points to the significance of the other couples, whose offspring are part of the audience's "historical" past.

By calling as much attention as it does to Phaethon's youth, the Theogony continuation also points to another way to escape from impasse in a re-assertion of male dominance. A narrative may explicitly mark the man as subordinate within the human hierarchy: his status may be clarified by making him the object of homosexual love.^[49] If a man who is subordinate to a goddess is also subordinate to another man, then his position with respect to the goddess does not establish a model of female control that would threaten the male/female hierarchy.^[50] Thus in various tellings Dionysos, Apollo, and even Heracles are said to have been Adonis's lovers.^[51] Adonis is thereby assimilated to the category of youths who fail to make the transition to adulthood.^[52] The fourth-century comic poet Plato emphasizes the humorous results produced by this resolution of the conflict. In four lines quoted from a lost play, Adonis , Adonis's father receives a prophecy:

Oh, Kinyras, king of the Cyprians, hairy-assed men,
Your child has become most beautiful and most marvelous
Of all humans, but a pair of deities will destroy him,
She being rowed with clandestine oars, he by rowing:
        (fr. 3 Kock)

The deities are Aphrodite and Dionysos. Adonis, caught between extremes as beloved of a male god and lover of a goddess, will perish of status ambiguity. We cannot tell about narrative positioning in the case of Adonis, but Plato Comicus seems to have presented Adonis as ambiguous and marked for

[49] For analysis of the unequal status of the two partners in a male homosexual relationship, see Dover, Greek Homosexuality 100-109, and Foucault, The History of Sexuality 2: chap. 4, esp. § 3. Public norms, not behavior, are in question.

[50] One version of the tale of Eos and Kephalos makes explicit Kephalos's submissive character. In a story that may come from Pherekydes, Kephalos's wife Prokris, disguised as a man, came to hunt with him, bringing a javelin that never missed and a dog that always caught its prey. Kephalos wished for these: Prokris set the condition that Kephalos should submit to "him" in sexual intercourse. When they lay down Prokris revealed herself to him and either accused him or was reconciled with him: Ant. Lib. 41.6-7; Hyg. Fab . 189, See Fontenrose, Orion 91-94. Eos does not occur in this version as the rival of Prokris, but Fontenrose suggests that "Nephele" (Cloud) represents her.

[51] In addition to Plato Comicus (below), see Ptolemy Hephaistion in Phot. Bibl . 190, 147b.9-12 (Henry) for Herakles; 146b.41-42, 147a.1-3, for Apollo. He calls Adonis "androg-ynous." Atallah, Adonis 50-51, calls this a late "deformation" of the myth, adding that the "slender, equivocal ephebe" is an Alexandrian preoccupation. It seems to me rather that the fantasy potential of the myth pattern is increasingly overtly expressed.

[52] E.g:, Hyakinthos and Narkissos: cf. Ribichini, Adonis 128-29. Ribichini stresses that Adonis does not seduce but is seduced, except in one late pastiche found in Servius ad Verg. Ecl . 10.18, in which, pressured by Juno, he violates Erinome, beloved of Jupiter.

failure from the beginning, in contrast to his father, king of hairy-assed men. Adonis is also a failed hunter, whose death from the wound inflicted by the boar makes him a victim of male aggression.^[53]

From this perspective, it is clear that to mark Adonis as an "effete Easterner" is one more mode of achieving a resolution that preserves (Greek) male sexual control; Ribichini's analysis of Adonis's meaning reveals a strategy for resolving the contradiction in status hierarchies created by the story. The possibility of yielding to a woman is acknowledged, but rejected as non-Greek. And the spices (Adonis's mother Myrrha) and lettuce, whose opposition in the myth Détienne studies, mark the two ends of the narrative (birth and death) and trace Adonis's demasculinization. Adonis is overloaded with markers of his subordinate status, for he is the most prominent mortal lover of Aphrodite.^[54] Attis castrates himself, driven mad by Kybele, when he undertakes to marry a nymph (and thus assume adult male status). His sexual subjection is clarified at the moment when he tries to escape from it. Hylas drowns, pulled down into a pool of water by the nymphs—an image of surrender to sensuous passivity. Anchises' statement in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite that men who sleep with goddesses do not flourish and Hermes' fear that Kirke might unman Odysseus fit in here. In these cases the goddess's control of the phallus is taken literally; it is lost to the man. The man is marked as a non-man: thus there is no question of an otherwise dominant man's yielding sexually to a female.

The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite itself does not make use of the simple resolution suggested by Anchises. Instead it explores at great length the ironies created by the confusion of hierarchies.^[55] Zeus shames Aphrodite among the gods by causing her to fall in love with the mortal Anchises. But Aphrodite's desire leads her to exercise her power over the human man, deceiving him while causing him to desire her. Yet her deception is to

[53] The boar was sent by Apollo or Ares; in later tellings Apollo himself, Hephaistos, Heracles, Persephone, the Muses, or Artemis kills Adonis: Atallah, Adonis chap. 2, esp. 63-74; the earliest extant reference is fourth century B.C.E . (unless it was in Panyassis). Discussion in Ribichini, Adonis 108-44, who points out that Adonis is associated with other hunters who are overcome, e.g., Aktaion, Hippolytos, Perdikkas, Kephalos (108). Piccaluga, "Adonis, i cacciatori falliti," concentrates on this aspect of Adonis, believing him to represent a preagricultural life that had been left behind and was therefore coded in myth as inadequate.

[54] I do not mean to suggest that my interpretation overrides Ribichini's and Détienne's, that the operation of status hierarchies is the only point of these stories. The need to adjust hierarchies is a constraint, one of various pressures that act on material of diverse origin to produce similar stories.

[55] Bergren's excellent discussion of the Hymn , "The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite," takes a different approach—rhetorical analysis—and pays special attention to the distribution of power among the gods. She too emphasizes the ambiguities in the narrative.

cast herself as a mortal woman, an innocent virgin submitting to others' directives. Only so can she be the recipient of Anchises' uninhibited desire. Anchises says to her, "If you are a mortal woman ... as you say, and come here through the agency of the immortal messenger Hermes and will be called my wife for all time, then no one of the gods or mortal men will restrain me here from mingling in love with you right now" (145-51).^[56] Once they have made love she pours sleep over Anchises. Then, dressed again, towering in height to the roof of the hut, and shining with her immortal beauty unveiled, she wakes him. Anchises cowers in the bedclothes, seeing in her swelling figure a portent of his impotence and cries, "Do not let me live strengthless among men"; she now controls the phallus. Yet Aphrodite assures Anchises that she will not only do him no harm but will give him a child, as though she were a mortal woman. In her final statement, however, she explains that she cannot make him divine. Furthermore, he must not mention or boast of the encounter. If he uses it to enhance his male status among humans, Zeus in anger will strike him with a thunderbolt (that is, reduce him to the "strengthlessness" that is his proper lot). Male/female hierarchy has been restored among the gods: Aphrodite is subordinate to the will of Zeus. Between Aphrodite and the human the situation is more ambiguous. Aphrodite, in her desire, provoked Anchises' desire: both desires have been satisfied. Aphrodite's threatening stature at the end is counterbalanced by the fact that she is pregnant.

The Hymn closes with Anchises unscathed and a father-to-be but warned of his merely human status: the hierarchies, no longer suspended, are delicately balanced. Yet the Hymn also points to a resolved closure, projected beyond its own text. Aphrodite's emphatic warning to Anchises not to speak of the encounter activates the audience's knowledge that Zeus did thereafter strike him with lightning.^[57] Anchises must have been unable to keep silent about his encounter with Aphrodite, unable to renounce the glory or resist naming his son's mother. Once the tale exists in public discourse, Anchises must take on the status of a non-man.^[58] Narrative positioning here is complex. The

[56] Anchises' doubt over whether Aphrodite is mortal or goddess in itself sums up the conflict of hierarchies: if she is a goddess he will worship her, if a mortal woman he will take her to his bed. Cf. Bergten, "The Homeric Hymn" 16-17, 20-22, on Anchises' effort to test her with logical alternatives and his eros -induced blindness to flaws in his logic.

[57] This statement assumes that the audience for the Hymn was already familiar with the tradition: the earliest extant reference is Soph. Laocoon fr. 373 (Pearson). E Smith, Nursling of Mortality 142 n. 129, and Rossbach, in PW under Anchises, col. 2107, discuss the evidence; Anchises has an "eldest daughter" in Il . 13.428-33, but she may be an invention out of Homer's need for names.

[58] I assume that the lightning strike symbolizes unmanning and that the portrayal of Anchises as crippled is both a decorous and an overt representation of his condition. For the phallic quality of lightning, cf. the story of Semele: e.g., Eur. Bacch . 6-9, and Dodds's notes on the subject in Euripides .

audience notes what Aphrodite wishes to keep hidden and also knows (or guesses) Anchises' fate. But the audience's desire is for Aphrodite's desire to be revealed; it is complicit with Anchises' failure to keep silent, and so replays Aphrodite's shame, but also her desire. We will return to this situation.

These narratives resolve the contradiction in such a way as to preserve the male/female hierarchy. The story pattern calls forth this closure so consistently that the story's potential for subverting the male/female hierarchy must have been felt. The two tales that refuse to reduce the relationship between goddess and man to a simple hierarchy. Odyssey 5 and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite do in fact make use of the contradiction in interested fashion: the contradiction supports a positive evaluation of mortality from the point of view of an adult man. The goddesses Kalypso and Aphrodite consider immortalizing Odysseus and Anchises, but in each case immortality would have as its price subordination and/or confinement. Thus the tradeoff for immortality is presented as a loss of sexual autonomy and evaluated as not worth it. Kalypso offers to immortalize Odysseus if he will stay with her even though he does not desire her (5.206-10), so it is conditional on confinement and relinquishing of desire. Aphrodite herself rejects the desirability of immortalizing Anchises because there are only two models for doing so: Ganymedes', with its eternal subordination and passivity (absence of desire), and Tithonos's, which includes (temporary) desire but also aging and confinement as its necessary correlate.^[59] So in these two stories the sexual hierarchy of male/female is called on to reconcile the man to his mortal lot.

In a series of instances from the Greek literary canon, we have seen that the self-contradictory notion of a goddess and a man in sexual union is imagined and narrativized in such a way as to protect the adult man's claim to sexual dominance. Narrativity, at work engaging the subject in positionalities of meaning, reproduces the cultural norm for male/female relations. However, other narratives with other resolutions are possible. The story of Demeter and Iasion, of which no early version has survived, may have been told by women (who need not have agreed with Kalypso's interpretation of it) in

[59] P. Smith, Nursling of Mortality 87-90, and Bergren, "The Homeric Hymn" 33-35, have posed the question why Aphrodite does not ask Zeus for immortality and eternal youth for Anchises, as the paradigm of Eos and Tithonos would suggest. Smith argues that Anchises' mortality is taken for granted, or rather, insisted on by the poem, so the thought that it might be otherwise is not entertained. Bergren points out that Zeus's will requires Aphrodite's grief, so the poem does not permit Aphrodite to seek satisfaction. In an article in process I am working out at greater length the argument that the Ganymedes and Tithonos models between them exhaust the possibilities.

connection with the festival for Demeter, the Thesmophoria. Demeter's treatment of Demophon—the baby she started to immortalize, rejected when his mother caught her at it, but continued to favor as he grew up—has affinities with our pattern.^[60] In this story and perhaps in the women's version of the Adonis story, whatever it was, divinity is the source of a female power that exposes the imitations of the male. Sappho's narratives may likewise have rewritten the males'—but if so, no hint of it survives in the fragments and notices. If women produced versions that subvert the male/female hierarchy, they have been lost.

By attentiveness to the contradiction and to the requirement that the narrative resolve it somehow, we can see how these narratives are inflected so as to preserve the male/female hierarchy. We can imagine how women might have made a different use of them. Yet I have not answered either of the questions I posed, namely why the pattern is so popular and what its appeal to Sappho was. Male dominance could be asserted directly without the aid of these tales, and for Sappho they appear peripheral to her emotional attachment to other women.

II

Perhaps we should look for the tales' popularity rather than to their (partial) ideological failure. The ideological meaning conferred on these myths by narrative closure cannot always completely contain them. Before closure, the myths may already have suggested images of eroticism whose hold on the imagination the resolution cannot necessarily cancel. As long as the narrative holds the contradiction in suspense, unresolved in favor of either hierarchy, it keeps a space open for fantasies of sexual encounter not controlled by the location of the phallus. So long as the contradiction is unresolved, the phallus is a symbol of domination; the Freudian/Lacanian phallus that imposes definition on the relationship is an indeterminate presence in the envisioned union. The goddess is both desiring and desirable, the man young, pliant, neither clearly possessor nor clearly object of the phallus. Desire and initiation of the affair may belong to the goddess, but the youth may be imagined as a responsive participant. The meeting of these two figures is not pre-scripted: it must be played out according to the dictates of individual fantasy. It can be staged in the imagination according to the script of male dominance, but also from the position of a woman's desire to

[60] For Iasion cf. scholia to Od . 5.125: "he was a farmer, and the earth would give him exceptional harvest, always abounding, and he was rich: therefore they said that he slept with the earth and on this account she gave him good return." For Demophon, see h. Hom. Cer . 231-91 and Richardson, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter 231-36.

"possess" the man, from a position of narcissism, voyeurism, or fetishism, of refusal of the Oedipus resolution, of a woman's refusal of compulsory heterosexuality. The collapse of cultural logic and the prohibition against condemnation of a divinity emerge as the enabling conditions for imagining women and men in other than their culturally prescribed sexual roles.^[61] According to de Lauretis, the work of narrativity is to engage the subject in positionalities of meaning and desire . We have asked only about desire for narrative, not yet about how desire is figured into these narratives.

Fantasy works in the visual imagination through the processes of gaze and identification. The idea of analyzing the operation of the gaze was proposed by Laura Mulvey as a way to understand the visual engagement of a viewer with a film narrative. It has been taken up by feminist film critics, including de Lauretis. Mulvey argues that classical Hollywood films reproduce the sexual construction of the man and the woman as described by Freud.^[62] The hero is active: he is the one who gazes. The heroine is displayed and aestheticized, the object of the gaze. The man watching the film can identify with the hero as the "bearer of the look" and can gaze possessively at the heroine. The woman as woman can only identify masochistically with the heroine's ability to attract the gaze.^[63] The possessive gaze, then, is aligned with the phallus: the act of gazing defines the desired sexual object. Through gaze and identification the viewer takes up in fantasy a sexual position in relation to figures presented visually or to the imagination. Though Hollywood films may reinscribe the cultural norms, the processes of gaze and identification can support other positions and other fantasies.^[64] This approach, treating

[61] The goddess who desires cannot be censured as were, e.g., Phaidra and Stheneboia, mortal women who wished to initiate affairs with young men.

[62] Here is a summary of the Freudian basis of Mulvey's analysis ( Visual and Other Pleasures 14-26): the processes of scopophilia and of identification with an ego-ideal structure initial pleasure in looking, according to Freud. Within the post-Oedipal order this pleasure is conditioned by differing relations to castration: the man's an active, possessive looking, the woman's a masochistic desire to be looked at. In film, therefore, male pleasure in looking is served by both ego identification and possessive gazing at the female star. The female, however, always threatens to signify castration, so provokes the further mechanisms of fetishism and voyeurism: she is either objectified or examined and exposed. See further Willemen, "Voyeurism," who adjusts some of Mulvey's terms.

[63] Mary Ann Doane (personal communication) stresses that Mulvey's analysis applies to a specific historically located and material medium. I make use of the question Mulvey raises about the spectator's relationship to the gaze and the phallus but should emphasize that the differences in economic investment, cultural positioning, level of discourse between Mulvey's material and mine are great and the results of analysis different.

[64] Consider this rumination by Barthes: "Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?" (The Pleasure of the Text 47).

the figures as visual images, will permit us to suggest some of the erotic configurations invited by narratives of goddess and mortal man.^[65] I will begin with two representations of myths from Athenian vase paintings, since in these cases the visual appeal is explicit and the scene has been detached from the narrative whose closure determines it is ideological shape. In each case the painting is sexually suggestive and permits more than one response—that is, the process of gaze and identification may be variously deployed.

The first is a scene of Eos carrying off a youth, perhaps Kephalos.^[66] On a skyphos by the Lewis Painter dated to ca. 450-40, Eos, fully clothed, runs to the right and looks behind her. Her hair is covered by a sakkos except for a curl in front of her ear. She wears no jewelry. She carries the youth on her left arm, supporting his legs with her right hand. He has his arm around her neck and seems perfectly acquiescent. His left arm is flung out in a gesture which tilts his nude body slightly outward,

[65] Mulvey grounds her approach in Freudian analysis, which cannot be applied unproblematically to Greek culture. However, the phallus was the central signifier of sexual relations as constructed in social norms and in language in ancient Greece. One was positioned in relation to the phallus: one was penetrator, penetrated, neither, or both. A woman or a boy could only be penetrated or not: a youth might occupy any of the four positions: a hegemonic adult man was (by definition) a penetrator but not penetrated. The difference was enshrined in vocabulary: one was a lover (erastes ) or a beloved (eromenos/-e ). The phallus and the act of penetration defined power relations. Cf. Dover, Greek Homosexuality , esp. 49-54, 98-99, and Cantarella, Pandora's Daughters 24-37; also see Dean-Jones, "The Politics of Pleasure," on the absence of a female erotic gaze in medical writing. Zeitlin, "Configurations" 124, points out that "there is an ideological value to representing the aggressive exercise of phallic power as the physical and concrete sign of male supremacy and potency," but she goes on to discuss the conflicted character of sexuality: it is cultural and natural, tender and violent.

[66] Florence, Museo Archeologico 4228: LIMC under Eos no. 272: ARV 975.35. Two nude youths fleeing are on the back. Kalos or kale (beautiful) is written beside each figure. The youth has been variously identified as Kephalos and Tithonos. Eos and a youth is a well-attested subject in ancient art: see LIMC catalogue and illustrations 46-288. In one scheme found on Athenian vases, Eos pursues Kephalos, who is in flight. For a scheme similar to the one on this vase, cf. nos. 267-82, esp. 268-70, 274. Cf. also Kaempf-Dimitriadou, Die Liebe 16-24, esp. 16, on the popularity of the theme from ca. 490, 20-21 on the schema of our vase. Her no. 198 (pl. 11, 3) is our vase: contrast the youth's resistance in her nos. 193, 194. Eos with Kephalos in her arms appears in earlier art. Paus. 3.18.12 records that Hemera (Day) snatching Kephalos was pictured on the throne of Amyklai, apparently a sixth-century work whose decoration included a great compendium of the major myths. A sixth-century B.C.E. terra-cotta akroterion from Caere in Etruria shows Eos carrying a Kephalos who looks like a child and has his arms around her neck: Andrèn, Architectural Terra-Cottas 36-37, pl. 11, no. 40. In the late fifth century the pair formed a terra-cotta akroterion on the Stoa Basileios at Athens: Pausanias 1.3.1; cf. Kaempf-Dimitriadou 63 n. 130.

exposing it to the viewer. In his left hand he holds a lyre. His hair is long and falls in stiff ringlets. Eos has obviously snatched the youth, yet he is complicit. He is a youth, almost equal in size to her, yet the positions are those of mother and child.^[67] The vase painting, in fact, seems to suggest simultaneously lovers and mother with child. Gaze and identification can play freely here. The gaze fastens on the youth: Eos is not sexually displayed. The one who gazes with desire sees a youth who is both yielding and "innocent." Omission from the picture of the phallus as the location of power permits the youth's submissiveness to be naturalized as childlike and renders the male status hierarchy irrelevant. At the same time, the parallel placement of the two heads with their similar profiles signals an equality between them. Submissiveness is equated with equality and allows the fantasy of a stabilized homosexual relationship.^[68] On the other hand, identification with the youth allows a narcissistic focus on one's own body as the object of the mother's desire. Identification with Eos elicits the fantasy of possessing the child as sexual fulfillment. The pair is eluding unseen pursuers. Escape from society and the son's return to the mother in erotic union are revealed visually as a possible inflection of the myth pattern. Phaidra would find it an engrossing image: so, perhaps, would Aktaion.

A passage from Euripides suggests that the fantasy of return to the mother was recognized, so we can say that a viewer might have identified with Kephalos as a child in its mother's sexually possessive arms. In the Bacchae , Dionysos begins to work on Pentheus's suppressed sexual fantasy by offering to take him to the mountains to gaze on the women who are (Pentheus thinks) making love in the thickets. Dionysos's final enticement is that Pentheus will be carried home in his mother's arms:

[67] Devereux, Femme et mythe , treats the myth pattern of a goddess and mortal man as a covert allusion to the son's incestuous desire for his mother (chap. 2, esp. 29). The very thought of such union is censured within the myth by representing symbolic castration as the result of even aborted encounters.

[68] Plato later theorizes a stabilized and equalized male homosexual relationship based on the conversion of eros into philia and the eroticizing of philia . See Halperin, "Plato and Erotic Reciprocity."

Pentheus's language in his last two half-lines has overtones both erotic and "effeminate."^[69] Dionysos elicits Pentheus's desire to see the women, to be a woman, to be the object of his mother's love. His mother, although not divine, is possessed of more than human power by agency of Dionysos. The same image of luxuriant yielding to a sexual mother-figure is sketched by the vase painting.

Then again, the vase might be viewed from the position of the mother as voyeur, as suggested by the strange version of the Aktaion myth found in Nonnos.^[70] As the first stage of his revenge on the house of Kadmos, Dionysus maddens Antonoe, then tells her that her son Aktaion is married to Artemis: the story of his death was a fabrication. The two go out into the wild, where they see Artemis and Aktaion sitting together. The mother spies on her son as he escapes the city to consort with a forbidden woman. Euripides and Nonnos present these respective desires as ones that emerge under Dionysiac dissolving of conscious control: they show us instances of what Greek culture designed as hidden fantasies.

Iconographically; this scene is distinguishable from one version of the scene in which Eos carries her dead son Memnon from the field at Troy only by virtue of the limpness of Memnon's body.^[71] In this version Memnon is, like Kephalos, very youthful. Eos was said to have carried off the youthful dead, an appeal to morbid eroticism that assimilates the young man to both Kephalos and Memnon, to child and beautiful hero, as Eos is ambiguously mother and desiring woman.^[72]

In sum, the vase painting seizes a moment in the narrative of Eos and the youth when the youth's fate is open and uses it to create an appeal to submerged fantasies. The youth here is both submissive to Eos and an object of the gaze, yet his position in the human hierarchy is not explicit, and the alignment of the heads hints that they are doubles of one another. Furthermore, if the youth is taken as Kephalos, then his depiction here exists in tension with stories of Kephalos as a hunter and husband of

[69] On the language cf. Dodds, Euripides .

[70] Nonnos Dion . 44.278-54.3; discussed by Fontenrose, Orion 34-40, who has other arguments for a close relationship between Artemis and Aktaion. Nonnos is no evidence for early Greek views. But stories such as his illustrate the suggestiveness of the pattern of goddess with young man.

[71] See Paris, Louvre 0232 (LIMC under Eos no. 332: ARV 250.24) by the Syleus Painter, dated to ca. 480. In no. 324 Memnon has a beard. An unbearded Memnon is less common than the bearded type but not rare.

[72] Scholia to Od . 5.121 and Eust. ad loc. say that the youthful dead were buried before dawn and said to be stolen by Eos. Cf. Vermeule, Death in Early Greek Art chap. 5, esp. 162-65. Kaempf-Dimitriadou, Die Liebe 62 n. 97, on depictions of a winged female daimon who chases a youth.

Prokris.^[73] The resulting ambiguity about the youth's status leaves open the painting's "meaning" to the play of fantasy.

The second vase painting is from the end of the fifth century. A fragment of hydria painted by the Meidias Painter shows Aphrodite and Adonis.^[74] Aphrodite is seated. Her clinging dress outlines her breasts and nipples. She wears a necklace, and her hair is done up in an elaborate headdress. Adonis, nude, leans back between Aphrodite's knees with his head thrown back in "une attitude d'extase amoureuse."^[75] She has her hands on his shoulders. They are surrounded by Erotes and female figures: the woman sitting facing them plays with a bird that perches on her finger. Here the disappearance from history remarked in the case of Phaethon is seen from the inside as immersion in sensuality and ease. Neither figure monopolizes attention as the focus of the scene: the gaze rather takes in the scene as a whole. In this case a dominant figure is absent, excised as unnecessary to the erotic scene. The person positioned as hegemonic male can thus supply the phallus, can gaze on the couple as the embodiment of alternative desires, woman or youth, almost collapsed together in total erotic spectacle. But the scene also invites multiple identifications. The postures and the contact between the figures can suggest to the viewer tactile sensations to be imaginatively reproduced in the viewer's body: the "ecstatic" yet relaxed muscle positions, the implied warmth, the softness of hands and hair. The viewer is both figures, drawn into a fantasy in which desire and sensation are diffused over whole bodies.^[76]

Both vase paintings depict the goddess with a young man in such a way as to suggest the attractions of "illegitimate" patterns of sexual intimacy. In the first case, the power granted the female figure led to overlay of the erotic relationships with a mother-child relationship, a doubling that invites fantasies of regression or of reclaiming the child, fantasies formed around Oedipal issues. The second vase painting makes both figures objects of the gaze and/or identification and invites fantasies of loss of gender identity and immersion in sensuality.

[73] For the confused set of stories about Kephalos, see Fontenrose, Orion 86-100.

[74] Florence, Museo Archeologico 81948: LIMC under Adonis no. 10: ARV 1312.1. Aphrodite and Adonis appear on Athenian vases toward the end of the fifth century at the same time as other scenes showing an interest in romance and women's lives: cf. Brendel, "The Scope and Temperament" 37-42; Servais-Soyez in LIMC under Adonis, cat. 229.

[75] Servais-Soyez in LIMC under Adonis, cat. 224.

[76] Cf. Silverman's conclusion, "'Suture"' 235, in her analysis of the female role in Gilda : "Vidor's film thus poses a temptation ... the temptation to refuse cultural reintegration, to skid off course, out of control, to prefer castration to false plenitude." In the myth of a goddess with a young man castration enables a different kind of plenitude.

The open space of sexual relations thought "otherwise" can be found in narratives of the literary canon as well. The narratives shape configurations in passing that their endings will deny. They can momentarily position the audience so as to gaze in imagination and identify with characters in a noncanonical way. The most overt example is the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite in its complex play with the pattern. The audience hears Anchises' speech of determination to make love to her (quoted above) from Aphrodite's perspective, for this is the effect we have seen her create. Right after Anchises' speech the text continues. "So saying, he took her hand: laughter-loving Aphrodite came slowly, turning her face aside and casting down her lovely eyes...." The sentence anchors the audience's attention on her. "Laughter-loving" (whether or not the pun mentioned above is felt) expresses Aphrodite's subjectivity, her delight in erotic joy. But the delight in her eyes is hidden as she turns her head away. Positioned by knowing her desire and Anchises' ignorance, by sharing her deceit, the audience "sees" Anchises undressing Aphrodite from her perspective. As he proceeds through four lines the audience's anticipation is aroused by the imminence of Aphrodite's fulfillment of her desire. Nor does the text switch to make her the object of the gaze. Although her body is revealed, the text reveals nothing about it. Thus the audience is put in the position of imagining the scene of lovemaking as expression of the woman's subjectivity. When Aphrodite discloses her identity, she reestablishes distance between the scene and the audience. She speaks of her shame from this distance, so it is detached from the preceding scene. The effect of female subjectivity as the audience's position is canceled by the narrative, but remains as an imaginative possibility.

Panyassis's account of the Adonis myth (of which we have only the synopsis) may have resisted its own closure: instead, Adonis cycles between the upper and lower worlds. His extreme, childish youthfulness and his beauty as an object of the gaze are overemphasized by the detail that Aphrodite and Persephone fall for him when he is still a baby. Adonis gives his allotted portion of the year to Aphrodite, a gesture signifying mutual desire, his yielding to her, or both. The final third of the year is allotted to Persephone, to be spent in the underworld. In this segment of the cycle Adonis's beauty condemns him to be in thrall to a female who extinguishes him. Adonis's passivity, the absence of the phallus, means that he cannot survive as a sexual being. Yet Adonis's return undoes the closure and reestablishes sexual intimacy. If the final line of the synopsis referring to Adonis's death from the boar's wound was not in Panyassis's text, then Panyassis left his narrative undecided between rendering Adonis "impotent" (so as to recuperate the male/female hierarchy) and joining him with Aphrodite (so as to imply the irrelevance of the phallus).

The Adonia festival suggests that women may have used the opportunity created by a narrative like Panyassis's to shape their own eroticism in a ritual setting. Winkler's construction of the women's interpretation of the Adonia emphasizes their part in reproduction: they celebrate their female power over life and sexuality. In this way the women give a different emphasis to their established role. Behind that shared focus on nurturance may lie other imagined roles. The Adonia combined dancing and mourning, use of incense, display of fruit, as well as the "gardens" that withered. It was celebrated, at least in part, at night and on the roofs of the houses. Its iconography suggests plentitude as well as loss. The mourning implies identification with Aphrodite. But the celebration was also for her. Was it open to women to imagine themselves as substitutes for Adonis? Did the women take both positions in fantasy, Aphrodite and her lover, and collapse the cycle found in Panyassis: Adonis is already gone, already replaced? And was Adonis the child who is lost as well as the lover? This complex set of possibilities—desiring (goddess or youth), mourning, being desired—results in a diffused sexuality, not centered around the phallus, without overtly specified object. The sensuous surroundings (incense, fruit), company of other women, and physical expression in dancing provide multiple gratifications.^[77] Vase paintings of the festival show a seated woman lost in contemplation as others carry objects to or from the roof or play the flute and dance, while baskets of fruit and incense burners stand nearby.^[78] This is the public face of the festival, the women's activities viewed as spectacle but closed off from the viewer.

In this emotional complex, both normalization of the pattern (Adonis's death) and disguise of the eroticism by mourning protect the festival from suppression: the festival does not confront the hegemonic male with the possibility that women might embrace an eroticism in which he was replaced. The use of fruit and incense and "gardens" further obscures and diffuses the eroticism behind a vegetable code. Détienne's analysis allows us to see how the cult was explained (away) by the dominant culture: by joking about courtesans and their lovers enjoying it, mainstream discourse at once acknowledged curiosity, claimed control (for courtesans live at the mercy of men), and dismissed the cult as marginal.^[79]

[77] Farwell, "Toward a Definition" 212-13, quotes Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich on the erotic in women as "diffuse and omnipresent energy" created in women's "presence to one another." This description fits the Adonia.

[78] LIMC under Adonis, nos. 45-49. Cf. also the plates in Atallah, Adonis .

[79] For association of the Adonia with courtesans, see, e.g., Diphilos fr. 42.38-41.49 (Kassel-Austin); Pherekrates 170 (Kock); Men. Sam . 35-50. Later Alidphron, probably inspired by New Comedy, composed letters purportedly by courtesans to their friends: in two of these, 4.10.1 and 4.14.8, the Adonia is mentioned: in the latter a woman is invited to bring her "Adonis" (her lover) and a garden for the celebration. Adonis is called Aphrodite's beloved (enomenos ).

Diffused eroticism and perhaps the same story of a cycle between the upper and lower worlds are indicated by Praxilla's lines on Adonis (PMG 747). According to her Hymn to Adonis , Adonis, when asked by those below what the loveliest thing that he has left behind was, said, "Loveliest [of all the things] I leave are the light of the sun, next the shining stars and the face of the moon and also ripe cucumbers and apples and pears." This list, judged inane by the world at large, gave rise to the saying, "Sillier than Praxilla's Adonis." One might guess at a connection with the Adonia and perhaps Adonis's parting from the upper world during the festival. In that case the disguise mentioned in the previous paragraph is at work. Praxilla's lines have an interesting resonance with two lines of Sappho's: "I love luxuriance ... this light of the sun and beauty eros assigned as share to me also."^[80] These are the last two lines of the fragment in which she mentions Tithonos.

As we have seen, the pattern produces images of the desiring woman, the sexual mother with her son, the submissive but responsive man—all figures censored by the dominant culture. These emerge as the phallus is displaced within the text from its centrality as the signifier of desire. How the gazer views these figures created within but against the narrative depends on how she or he positions her- or himself in relationship to the phallus. The viewer may supply the phallus. Or the one gazing from the position of hegemonic male may disavow the phallus in order to identify with both figures, or with one of the figures, with the woman as lover of the beautiful boy or the reverse, in fantasies of passivity, transvestism, youthfulness.^[81] From the position of the female, gaze and identification with the goddess are not disjunctive: that is, from this position one can both look at and "be" the goddess. Notice the difference from the woman's gaze in the description of film theory: this is not the woman's constituting herself as the object of mother's gaze, but identification with the one who controls the relationship.^[82] The masochistic

[80] Voigt, Sappho et Alcaeus 58.

[81] Willemen, "Voyeurism" 212-13, points out that male scopophilia should have the man as its object since its origin is in autoeroticism. But scopophilia would be directed at the mother as well, to determine her status. It is perhaps worth noting that the two most important objects of the boy's initial scopophiliac interest, the mother and the child himself, can be reproduced in the pair goddess and young man.

[82] Modern film theorists have had trouble theorizing a woman's gaze. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn't , extends Mulvey's original notion, that the woman shifts between identification with the (male) gaze and with the screen image, to the idea of a double identification with both simultaneously, as well as with the mythic subject and the narrative image, with movement and closure (134-56, esp. 141-44). Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures 29-38, later suggests that the woman regresses to a never-fully-represented active phallic stage. Doane, The Desire to Desire 6-13, discusses the difficulty that various discourses have in providing an account of woman's subjectivity. She suggests that the projected female spectator is divided unbridgeably between "masculinity" and narcissism.

narcissism of the female spectator is not called out because the story does not construct a possessive male gaze. A woman is free in fantasy of the male figure whose look identifies her to herself. The male is available on the contrary as an object of her gaze, a man younger (if she will), not older, compliant, not "superior." The evidence for women's inflection of this pattern is of course almost impossible to come by. That women were engaged with it is shown by the fact that they celebrated the Adonia festival and that a young man figures in Demeter myths.

III

If one reason for the popularity of the mythic pattern of goddess with young man is that it opened space for fantasies of uncodified erotic relationships, then Sappho's interest in the pattern may begin to appear more intriguing. The discussion so far also suggests that the way to approach Sappho's use of the myths is by examining the processes of gaze and identification in her poetry.

Sappho often describes a woman gazing. A notice tells us, "Sappho says she saw 'a child too tender picking flowers"' (122 V.). A line reads, "[When] I look at you [it seems to me] that you [are not] Hermione, but to compare you to light-haired Helen [is not out of place]" (23 V.).^[83] In the scrappy end of 96 V. we can read, "It isn't easy to look like a goddess. [but] you ..." Furthermore, Sappho describes the gaze as having a powerful, even physiological effect on the gazer. In 22 V. the narrator observes that the dress of another woman caused the addressee to "quail" when she saw it.^[84] In 31 V. the narrator describes the violent effects of the sight of another woman on her: "When I look at you briefly, then I can no longer speak, but my tongue is broken, at once light fire has run under my skin ..." (7-10).

In describing the effect of the gaze on the gazer as overwhelming, Sappho does not differ from other Greek writers.^[85] However, Sappho does part company from them in her articulation of the experience: she avoids or breaks down the opposition between viewer and viewed that is created by the gaze. At the end of 31 V. (partially quoted above), the narrator says:

[83] This translation is based on the supplements printed by Campbell, Creek Lyric vol. 1: Voigt's text, Sappho et Alcaeus , is more conservative, but the idea is dear enough.

[84] The narrator of Sappho's fragmentary poems is often not demonstrably female. I assume, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that it is a female voice.

[85] Examples are legion. See, e.g., Il . 14.294; Plato Chrm . 155d-e, Phdr . 251a-e. On seeing and being seen in the Hippolytus of Euripides, see Luschnig, Time Holds the Mirror 3-15; on tragedy generally Dump, "L'espressione tragica" 144-50.

"I am greener than grass and I seem to myself to be little short of death" (14-16). The narrator's gaze has shifted from the other woman to herself. With her new focus she observes herself both from within and from without. The audience too must shift from the simple position of "looking" at another to the ambiguous position of both sharing the narrator's experience and watching her. By contrast, the gaze that remains focused on the object is correlated with lack of erotic effect; the poem sharply distinguishes the narrator's unmoved gaze at the man in the opening two lines ("That man seems to me to be the equal of the gods") from the disruptive gaze at the woman.^[86] Similarly, in 1 V. "Sappho" describes Aphrodite's smile and repeats Aphrodite's speech from "Sappho's" own point of view, then takes on Aphrodite's voice. The switch is sudden, and the audience must simply shift perspective to suit. The narrator of 96 V. describes the beauty of the absent woman and the woman's desire for the addressee: the narrator's relationship to the absent woman is characterized by both gaze and identification. In 95 V. the narrator's desire to see the lotus-filled dewy banks of Acheron may be a displacement from her desire for a woman, but the poem is too fragmentary to tell for sure.

Sappho has other techniques for blurring gaze and identification. Description in her poetry is often both very sensuous and very unspecific.^[87] A woman's beauty is displaced onto the surroundings: song, scents, flowers, rich cloth, enclosed places all reflect the woman's erotic attractiveness. 94 V. is full of flowers and scent, and in 96 V. the woman's beauty is deflected onto the landscape.^[88] Dika is asked in 81 V. to weave garlands so that the graces will look on them. The very fragmentary 92 V. seems to be a list of different colored robes, plus garlands. Aphrodite is invited to come to a shrine in a seductive landscape in 2 V. Sappho often refers to singing and music. Replacing the "look" at a woman by atmosphere, hearing, smell means that the distinction of self and other inherent in gazing is dissolved. Sometimes Sappho offers the addressee/audience a mirror for self-reflection. In 94 V. the narrator describes to the addressee, who is leaving, the addressee's own sensuous ways of adorning herself. In 22 V. the narrator tells the addressee of her (the addressee's) own desire for

[86] Likewise, the man's gaze at the woman is unmoved. Race argues that "godlike" must mean "strong" (rather than, e.g;, "happy") and refer to his self-possession in looking on her: he compares Pind. fr. 123 (Snell-Mahler). Robbins, "'Every Time I Look at You,"' likewise contrasts the man's gaze with Sappho's. Hierarchy is operative between man and woman—his is a phallic gaze—and Sappho invokes the divine/human hierarchy to emphasize it. The two hierarchies are additive here.

[87] Cf. Winkler, "Gardens of Nymphs," on Sappho's metaphoric language for the body.

[88] Cf. McEvilley, "Sappho, Fragment 94," who calls the scene in 94 V. a dream landscape, an idealized past.

another.^[89] The adjective "lovely," which opens the second stanza, could refer either to the addressee or to the woman she desires.^[90]

In all of these instances the audience's gaze is given no object of desire to focus on except a self-reflective one, an image of the addressee's own desirability. Both within the poetry and for the audience the two processes of visual fantasy, gaze and identification, are blurred. This practice means that the gaze cannot be aligned with the phallus. Sappho would have reinstated the operation of the male/female hierarchy by analogy had she used the gaze to objectify the one desired. Instead she constructs poetry in and through which the gaze opens the self to disintegration, shifting position, identification with the other, or mirroring of the viewer's desiring self.^[91] Through her use of the gaze to dissolve hierarchy, Sappho creates the same kind of open space for imagining unscripted sexual relations that the mythic pattern of goddess with young man makes possible. By this means Sappho can represent an alternative for women to the cultural norms.^[92]

The long fragment (or possibly a complete poem) 16 V. is important because it shows clearly the connection between Sappho's treatment of the gaze and her depiction of women's erotic life as separate from the dominant culture. A translation follows:

[89] See Di Benedetto, "Il tema della vecchiaia" 146, for a suggested thematic contrast between this fragment and 21 V.

[90] This statement is tentative since it is not clear where the poem began and the preserved part is too fragmentary to be sure that the reference of the adjective was not unambiguous.

[91] Doane, The Desire to Desire , points out that she analyzes the merger of identification and desire in the "woman's film" of the 1940s as problematic for women (esp. 22-33) and remarks that what is missing in the Greek period is commodification of the woman. I would add that Sappho's poetry presumes the possibility of sexual desire between women, so that blurring (it is not merger in the case of Sappho) of gaze and identification does not replace but rather permits a relationship with another.

[92] Cf. Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World," on Sappho's depiction of mutual (rather than dominant and subordinate) love relations among women.

(The tortuous translation of the second and third stanzas preserves approximately the original word order, for I wish to make a point about it.) The poem works out a contrast between conventional assessments, those supporting the social construction, or what one might call the public gaze, and the narrator's view of the location of women's emotional lives. Helen is by conventional agreement the "most beautiful." For Helen, to accept this social role would be to remain narcissistically focused on herself as the object of the gaze. Instead, as a subject, possessor of a desire that she has defined for herself, she finds the "most beautiful" elsewhere.^[94] Yet Paris, the object of her gaze, is not named or even mentioned in the poem. Helen's name is juxtaposed in the second stanza with the words, "the man/who was the best." The juxtaposition suggests Paris, but the very meaning of the words "man" (husband) and "best" depends on whether Paris or Menelaos is meant. The momentary ambiguity reveals the arbitrary character of the epithet "best." The man's identity is not revealed until the beginning of the following stanza: there the verb "abandoned" establishes that Menelaos is the man referred to. The adjective "best" is therefore another conventional epithet, but its public character eclipses Helen's individual choice of Paris. That is, the narrator can "see" Menelaos, who has a fixed public status, but not Paris, whose quality is conferred by Helen's love and is therefore invisible to others. On the other hand, Menelaos appears in the poem as a consequence of Helen's abandoning him: his only role is to be not "what one loves." Again in line 11, the audience will be reminded of Paris by the verb "led her astray," but again he is not named. The subject is lost in the

[93] There h a large bibliography on this poem. See the annotated bibliography through 1985 in Gerber, Studies in Greek Lyric Poetry .

[94] Some have been disturbed that Helen, who is introduced as a judge of beauty, is herself described as exceeding all humans in beauty. On Helen's significance for the logic of the primal, see esp. duBois, "Sappho and Helen"; Most, "Sappho Fr. 16"; Thorsen, "The Interpretation of Sappho's Fragment 16"; Wills, "The Sapphic 'Umwertung.'" Wills notes the opposition between conventional and personal evaluations in the poem (440-41). DuBois, unlike the others, considers that Sappho meant to oppose male and female stories. Thorsen has a good discussion of the logic of the poem as a whole. Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 277-90, takes a different approach and focuses on memory.

lacuna of line 12 or 13: the most likely possibility is that it was an epithet of Aphrodite.^[95] The object of the woman's gaze is invisible, unnamed, not objectified. The result of eliding mention of Paris is that the relationship between Helen and Paris remains unspecified, the phallus unlocated, hierarchy suspended. Helen's gaze does not create a distinct object for the audience, nor does Helen slip back into her old role by becoming the object of Paris's gaze or guidance. The concretized male figure is left behind in the world of armies and conventional assessments.

If the subject of the verb "led astray" was Aphrodite, then she replaces Paris in desiring and conferring beauty on Helen. By virtue of naming Aphrodite, the poem transforms the relationship into one between women, one in which Helen is both the subject who desires and also responsive to Aphrodite. This complex paradigm (Helen/unnamed Paris, Helen/Aphrodite) allows the narrator to find loveliest—not Helen—but a woman unknown to epic, Anaktoria. Like Helen, who left her parents and daughter, the narrator rejects conventional expectations linked with epic on the one hand and marriage and family on the other for a love of her own choosing. The logic of the poem illustrates the relationship of female desire to the public world of prescribed social relations. Aphrodite both represents the woman who chooses her love and offers divine affirmation of love that contravenes the cultural norm.

But because Anaktoria is absent, the narrator's gaze must reconstruct her in fantasy. The separation of the narrator from Anaktoria produces the straightforward gaze that is not attributed to Helen. Helen sailed off to Troy rather than suffer separation, but the narrator must construct an imaginative image through the gaze of fantasy. Yet even in imagination the narrator does not offer simply an objectified Anaktoria to the audience. By referring to Anaktoria's way of walking and the sparkle of her face, she creates rather an image of light and movement.^[96]

Helen and Paris in 16 V. adumbrate the pattern of a goddess with a young man: the poem shows how Sappho could inflect the pattern to create open space for fantasy. Since Aphrodite doubles both Helen and Paris, the interplay of relations among them permits multiple configurations of gaze and desire. In a more complex way than on the Adonis vase discussed earlier,

[95] Scansion h against the possibility that "Paris" stood in the lacuna of either line. A god or quality is more likely to be the subject of the verb "lead astray" than a human: "love" is a possibility. See Voigt's critical apparatus ad loc.

[96] Both Rissman, Love as War chap. 2, and Wills, "The Sapphic 'Umwertung,'" think that Anaktoria's "light" and "movement" imply a comparison with the armies, that Sappho assimilates love and war rather than opposing them. Rissman argues that this poem is a recusatio of epic (48-54).

eroticism blurs gender identity. Sappho could have used the four myths in question to the same effect, treating the young man's gender as irrelevant (since he is not a dominating figure). In fact, in two of the myths the narrator is (apparently) associated or identified with the goddess. The maidens in 140 V. lament with or as Aphrodite for the loss of Adonis. The confusion over whether Sappho or Aphrodite loved Phaon implies that Sappho adopted Aphrodite's voice, singing of Aphrodite's love for Phaon, perhaps as an analogy to a love of her own. The story of Selene and Endymion may have been similarly used. The pattern also provided an image of a separate emotional space where female desire might express itself, for in the myths the young man is hidden in the wild or at the end of the earth.

However, what most forcibly strikes one about the fragments and notices is that the young man is portrayed at the point of impotence. Endymion is sleeping, Adonis dying.^[97] By portraying the man's "strengthlessness," Sappho reinstates hierarchy: the young man is demoted to passivity, and the goddess prevails. The goddess can gaze at the young man with a possessive look. Selene's gaze on Endymion must have been straightforward, the gaze that Sappho's poetry usually avoids constructing. The maidens perhaps watch Adonis as he fades. But the goddess and youth cannot be a couple because he is succumbing or has succumbed to the fate that destroys him in the canonical narrative. Sappho invokes narrative closure as it enervates the mortal, assimilates him to a non-man, in order to preserve the male/female hierarchy.

These figures are parallel to Paris in 16 V. Conversely, his absence from the text becomes even more significant when aligned with these stories. As argued above, not naming him means that the poem avoids reinstating hierarchy and conventional assessment, while indicating the invisibility of an object's loveliness to those who do not love it. But ultimately Paris becomes an absence for Helen herself. He was killed in battle toward the end of the Trojan War, and she returned to live with Menelaos. The hierarchy-scrambling relationship based on desire is lost, and the relationships prescribed by the social structure triumph. 16 V. can be seen as both imitating Helen's choice and pointing to its evanescence. In that case, the military forces that some find loveliest become more significant: they are the means by which the dominant

[97] In 58 V., the only case where the narrator seems to have compared herself to the human member of the mythic pair (Tithonos), she seems to be lamenting her age and feebleness. In this case the point may be rather the goddess's care for a human despite her mortality. It may also be the survival of song, for Tithonos's voice runs on unquenchably, and a reference to a lyre appears just above the lines on Tithonos in Sappho's text. Cf. Di Benedetto, "II tema della vecchiaia" 152-63, who conjectures, on the basis of the last two lines (quoted in connection with the Adonia), that Sappho is claiming love of life in spite of age, in contrast to Tithonos.

culture is enforced against individual desire, so are rightly aligned with the conventional assessments. The narrator's desire for the absent Anaktoria is perhaps also longing for one who has been reclaimed by her family and her role in the social structure.

Sappho seems to have used the mythic pattern of goddess and young man not to picture nonhierarchical sexual intimacy but rather to reflect the fragility of her ideal of mutual desire under the pressure of the dominant culture. We can guess that she chooses the moment of closure in order to represent the closure that social demands forced on women's love lives. Many of Sappho's poems are about departure and absence: the women she knew seem to have been obliged to marry and leave or follow families elsewhere. However, the resolution in these particular myths in favor of the divine/human hierarchy (over the male/female one), in favor of the goddess, means that Sappho could at least use them to support women's claim to subjectivity in the face of objectification by others. A woman's subjectivity, like the goddess's, is represented as surviving the destruction of her love life.^[98] The pattern of a goddess with a young man is thus a model for women's loves: it validates the location of love and desire apart from the established social structures, analogizes the woman to a goddess to support her claim to subjectivity and active desire, and acknowledges the impossibility of retaining the relationships formed there in the face of social demands on the woman. The young man of the myth, then, may have represented both the fantasy of escape from cultural definition and the power of cultural demands to reclaim the individual.

In these myths, in sum, Sappho perhaps saw a reflection of the working of the dominant ideology: through its own internal contradictions it opened space briefly for mutual erotic relationships, which it then closed down in its insistence that a woman's life follow the canonical narrative. Yet in Sappho's subversive logic, the straightforward gaze, the narrator's gaze in imagination at Anaktoria in 16 V., Selene's gaze at Endymion, is what is left to the woman when the desired other is lost. The absence of the other that transforms the gaze into projection also transforms the woman into a subject and possessor of the gaze.

[98] Compare 96 V., in which the woman who has departed now shines like the moon when it causes the stars to fade. Though separated from Lesbos and/or Atthis, the woman continues to stand out from her surroundings. Hague, "Sappho's Consolation for Atthis," thinks that the simile is left hanging because it is an art image of the woman's loneliness: this too is an aspect of it.

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."

[1] Dion. Hal. Comp . 173-79.

[2] Bibliography can be found in Saake, Zur Kunst Sapphos and Sapphostudien ; Stanley; "The Role of Aphrodite." To these may be added Gentili, "Il 'letto insaziato' di Medea"; Bonnano, "Osservazioni"; Bonaria, "Note critiche al testo di Saffo"; Lasso de la Vega, "La oda primera de Safo"; Marry; "Sappho and the Heroic Ideal."

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

[3] Dover, Greek Homosexuality 177. Ll. 18-19 in particular are generally understood to support such an interpretation since, despite the uncertainty of the text, it is dear that these verses contain a reference to someone coming into someone's philotata . The various readings which have been suggested are cited and discussed by Bonaria, "Osservazione." Most plausibly, these verses refer to Sappho's beloved and the fact that she is not reciprocating Sappho's love. Whether the girl once reciprocated and now refuses, or never reciprocated at all, depends on the reading of 18-19. But even if reconciliation of some kind is involved here, this need not affect the explanation of ll. 21-24, for Aphrodite appears to begin a new line of thought with her question "Who is wronging you?" With this question Aphrodite passes from the specific injustice at hand to the general principle of justice that governs such cases.

[4] Schadewaldt, Sappho 89, and Privitera, "La rete di Afrodite" 47 n. 44, remark on the absence of a direct object. Both assume that, if it were expressed, the object would be "you."

[5] Plato Symp . 183d-e, 190d-e; Alexis fr. 70 Kock; Theoc. Id . 7.120 and Gow ad loc.; AP 12.22, 31, 32, 33, 46, 176, 186, 195, 224, 228, 229; Theopompus Comicus fr. 29 Kock and Dover's comments in Greek Homosexuality 87 n. 48; Plut. Mor . 770b-c; Licht [Brandt], Sexual Life in Ancient Greece 4166 f.; Flacelière, L'amour en Grèce 43-70; Devereux, "Greek Pseudo-Homosexuality" 82.

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)

[6] See Gow ad Theoc. Id . 7.118; Dover, Greek Homosexuality 58; Jones, "Tange Chloen semel Arrogantem" 81-84; Fraenkel, Horace 414.

[7] This obscene graffito is published by D'Orsi, "Un graffito di Stabia," and cited by Jones, "Tange Chloen semel Arrogantem" 82.

[8] Theoc. Id . 7.118; [Callim.] Epigr . 63 Pfeiffer; AP 5.21, 27, 92, 164, 273, 280, 298; 11.73, 374; 12.35, 109, 160, 186, 193; Nonnus Dion . 16.297. Professor E. Robbins has drawn my attention to a parallel in Ovid Met . 3.405. Hor. Carm . 3.26, properly interpreted, presents a scenario similar to that of Sappho fr. 1. C. P. Jones, "Tange Chloen semel Arrogantem," has rightly proposed that Horace here prays for Chloe to fall (unhappily) in love with same third person. Jones draws upon the Hellenistic tradition to demonstrate that the typical rejected lover, having resigned his own suit, trusts the course of time m impose upon his beloved the nemesis of an unrequited passion. Cf. Hor. Carm . 1.25, with the parallels collected by Nisbet and Hubbed, A Commentary on Horace 289-301, esp. AP 5.298, in which Dike is asked to punch the beloved's haughtiness with grey hair and wrinkles.

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]

[10] On ananke in erotic contexts see Dover, Creek Homosexuality 60-61; Schreckenburg, Ananke 59-60; Loraux, "Sur la race des femmes" 84 n. 157; Gerber, "Varia Semonidea" 20-21.

[11] "In a homosexual relationship ... the eromenos is not expected to reciprocate the eros of the erastes" (Dover, Creek Homosexuality 52).

[12] Sappho's fr. 31 is perhaps the clearest evocation in literature of this situation. Ibycus takes for granted that his beloved is unaware of and indifferent to the effect he is having (PMG 360). Plato gives us several images of a beautiful young man as the cool center of a magnetic field of attention in a room of men, e.g, Chrm . 154c-155e; Euth . 274c. Sophocles may be comparing the beloved to a lodestone in fr. 886 Pearson (cf. AP 12.152). See also Dover, Greek Homosexuality 55-56, and the comments of Fränkel, Early Greek Poetry 524, on the "force-field of love."

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

[13] Cameron, "Sappho and Aphrodite" 238.

[14] Denniston, The Greek Particles 108-9.

[15] Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 12-18.

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.

[17] Plut. Mot . 770b-c. See also Pind. Ol . 1.67-71; Theog: 1327-58; Plato Syrup . 183d-e, Prot . 309a; AP 11.36, 51; 12.22, 26, 27, 30, 39, 41, 174, 191, 215; Dover, Greek Homosexuality 86.

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 ...;

[1] For exponents of this view, see Calame, Les chœurs ; Canon, "The Justice of Aphrodite"; Lasserre, "Ornements érotiques"; Nags "The Symbols of Greek Lyric," and Pindar's Homer , Svenbro, "Death by Writing," in Phrasikleia .

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

[2] Winlder, "Double Consciousness" 165.

[3] Skinner, "Woman and Language" 182.

[4] Stehle, "Sappho's Private World" 108.

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

[5] Flax, Thinking Fragments 103.

[6] Skinner, "Woman and Language" 184-85.

[7] See Parker, "Sappho Schoolmistress," for his compelling argument against the modern construction of a thiasos —with Sappho as a sort of cult leader. I agree with Parker that there is no evidence of a ritual or cultic function for Sappho's poems or that Sappho's social role was anything other than that of poet. Thus, Parker argues that Sappho "should be seen, not in a thiasos (whatever that might be) but, like Alcaeus, in a hetairia , an association of friends[,] ... a group of women tied by family, class, politics, and erotic love." I concur with Parker's view that a hetairia rather than a thiasos is a more appropriate construction of Sappho's "society."

[8] De Lauretis, "Eccentric Subjects" 126-27.

[9] Skinner, "Woman and Language" 186.

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.

II

One of the most striking features of Sappho's poetry is her use of apostrophe to play out the conflicts of her erotic drama. In his essay on poetic apostrophe, Jonathan Culler points out that literary critics have largely considered apostrophe a meaningless convention that is taken for granted as an inherited, accidental characteristic of the genre.^[10] . But indeed studying the role of apostrophe is crucial to an understanding of poetic discourse itself. As Culler argues, "Apostrophe is different in that it makes its point by troping, not on the meaning of a word, but on the circuit or situation of communication itself."^[11] In other words, what Culler calls "the vocative of apostrophe" is a device that the poetic voice uses to dramatize its own calling, its ability to summon images of its own power so as to establish, with an object, a relationship that helps to constitute an image of self.

Thus, apostrophe poses the problem of the poetic subject as a problem of the addressee's relation to it. The addressee becomes a live presence only when poetic voice constitutes itself. The "figure of voice" dramatizes both its own speaking and its power to give life to inanimate objects or to make present an absent addressee. As Barbara Johnson puts it, "Apostrophe is a form of ventrioquism through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness."^[12] Apostrophe raises the question of whether the sheer act of utterance can animate lifeless objects and heal the pain of separation and loss. By conferring presence on an absent addressee, the lover transforms the beloved from an object into a subject, effecting in the process a discourse between two subjects. The idea that the vocative posits a relationship between two subjects is greatly intensified in the context of erotic

[10] Culler, The Pursuit of Signs 136-54. This chapter, "Apostrophe," is one of the most influential studies of the use of poetic apostrophe and has drawn attention to its importance as a literary device.

[11] Ibid., 43.

[12] B. Johnson, "Apostrophe" 185.

poetry. The erotic subject is faced with the beloved's absence and with self-dissolution.^[13] Not only does the act of apostrophe make present the absent object of desire, but it also is the mechanism through which the erotic subject constitutes itself.

Sappho's dramatic use of address and invocation in her erotic fragments shows the paradoxical relationship between the debilitating and fragmenting effects of eros on the self and the reconstruction of the self in the poetic act. In Sappho's poems, the speaker often associates the diminishing of verbal power—attendant on separation from the beloved—with a kind of death. Apostrophe—the recuperation of voice through memory—reanimates the "I" through a reinscription of an individual poetic voice into a communal discourse. I shall argue that fragment 94 shows a progression from third-person narrative to second-person address to the emergence of first-person "we" and that this progression is inextricably bound up in the performative and communal context of Sappho's poems. That Sappho's narrator reconstitutes her fragmented self by establishing a relationship with her addressee in the time of the apostrophe refers us to the transforming and animating activity of the poetic voice. However, the inclusion of an audience (the "we") in the grammar of the poem—in the present moment of discourse—moves the speaker outside a radical interiorization and narcissism whereby the other is merely a projection of self.^[14]

Fragment 94 illustrates how Sappho's apostrophizing voice affirms the eroticism of her narrator by erasing the distinction between self and other, speaker and addressee, and creates an intimacy based, in Luce Irigaray's words, on a "nearness so pronounced that it makes all discrimination of identity, and thus all forms of property, impossible."^[15] Sappho doesn't fantasize about the beloved as separate from herself, as an object either to gaze at or describe.^[16] Irigaray's assertion that "the predominance of the visual ... is particularly foreign to female eroticism"^[17] seems consistent with the way Sappho pictures love relations in 94 as an environment of mutual enclosure and reciprocity. The speaker's erotic fulfillment comes not from making the beloved a beautiful object of contemplation, but by drawing the

[13] From Homer through the early Greek lyric poets, erotic experience is closely associated with a loss of vital self, and even death. For an insightful discussion of this, see Carson, Eros the Bittersweet .

[14] Culler, The Pusuit of Signs 146.

[15] Irigaray, This Sex 31. Irigaray's work has been extremely influential in articulating ideas about the question of woman's essence and of a female sexuality. Irigaray's view of feminine sexuality, which supplants the logic of the gaze with the logic of touch (22-33), seems especially relevant to a discussion of the mutuality of desire in Sappho's poetry.

[16] Stehle, "Sappho's Gaze."

[17] Irigaray, This Sex 25-26.

beloved to her by making the beloved a part of the lover's interior world of memory and imagination.

	2
	5
	8
	11
	14
	17
	20
	26
	29

Honestly, I wish I were dead.
Weeping she left with many tears,

And said; "Oh what terrible things
we endured. Sappho, truly,
against my will I leave you."

And I answered: "Go, be
happy, and remember me;
For you know how we cared for you.

And if not, then I want
to remind you ... of the wonderful
things we shared.

For many wreaths of violets and
roses ...
you put on by my side,

And many woven garlands
fashioned of flowers,
you tied round your soft neck,

And with rich myrrh,
fit for a queen, you anointed ...

And on a soft bed,
tenderly,
you satisfied [your] desire.^[18]

And there was
no sacred place
from which we were absent,

no grove,
no dance,
no sound...."^[19]

The fragment opens with the expression of a wish to die. Since the beginning of the poem is missing, the poem does not tell us who speaks the first extant line—the speaker or the other woman. Scholars who attribute the line to the speaker interpret the poem as "a complex picture of longing and pain" and view the speaker as a woman overcome by frenzy and grief. Burnett argues persuasively that the other woman rather than the speaker utters the wish to die in the fragment's opening line. As Burnett shows, "The disconsolate girl thinks that parting is the end of life and love, but her wiser mistress commands her to go her way rejoicing."^[20] In accord with Burnett's view, Snyder argues that "[t]he poem, then, is hardly a 'confession,' but rather a recapturing of past pleasures through memory, by which the 'dreadful things' mentioned by the girl—that is, the impending separation—are transformed into Sappho's 'beautiful things' beginning in stanza 4."^[21] I concur that it is the other woman who speaks the first line of the fragment—a line that plunges the poem into the realities of separation and loss. Moreover, attributing the opening line to the other woman heightens the

[18] L. 23 is usually translated with your desire . But the verb in the line is active rather than middle, so it may refer to someone else's desire. The ambiguity may well be intentional since, in the context of mutual desire, it does not matter who is satisfying whom.

[19] The Greek text of fr. 94 comes from Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry . The English translation of the poem is my own.

[20] Burnett, "Desire and Memory" 23.

[21] Snyder, The Woman and the Lyre 26.

tension in the poem between the two speakers—whose different approaches toward the separation are reflected in their correspondingly different modes of discourse.

Indeed, the stark wish to die is expressed baldly, without the embellishment of poetic images. The use of the word initiates a conversational diction and tone that accentuate the contingencies of circumstance. The time-bound world of circumstance evoked here is reinforced by the speaker's use of third-person narrative to describe a past event that is irreversible—the painful departure and loss of her beloved. The vocative in line 5, although framed within a narrative in the past tense in which the beloved addresses "Sappho," introduces an apostrophic element into the narrative. This apostrophe in the narrative creates a sense of dramatic immediacy that begins to bridge the gap between the past of narration and the now of discourse.

The drama of separation unfolds as we hear the distinct voices of the speaker and her departing lover shift back and forth in nearly ritualized responsion to one another.^[22] The speaker's direct recollection of the time of departure locates both the narrator and the woman who is leaving in a temporal sequence of events in which they are each distinct characters within the narrative reported by the speaker. The predominantly descriptive mode of discourse here preserves the sense of separateness between the two lovers. This separateness is reinforced by the parallel structure of the first four stanzas, which all end in verbs that function in responsion to one another.

The speaker's request in line 8 that the woman remember ( ) draws the poem away from the dramatic portrayal of the woman leaving to the more inward situation of remembering. And although we are still in the narrative frame, the speaker's verbal imperatives to the woman (go and remember) are spoken as second-person address. The speaker has moved from reporting a past event in the third person to reporting the reciprocal apostrophes spoken by the two lovers. These two modes of discourse—third-person narrative and the reporting of second-person address—both remain within a temporal frame. It is not until the "we" emerges at line 8 that the speaker begins to turn away from narrative altogether. The "we" of initiates a shift from reported speech to a detemporalized mode of discourse in which the individual voices of the two lovers are no longer clearly differentiated. Furthermore, "we" in (we cared) connects the "I" and the "you" of the poem to a communal context. There is much debate and speculation in Sappho criticism about how and under what conditions Sappho's poems were performed. But many

[22] See McEvilley, "Sappho, Fragment 94," for an insightful discussion of the way responsion between the two lovers works in the poem.

scholars believe that her fragments were performed either by Sappho herself or by a chorus of women to an audience comprising a community of other women.^[23] Thus, the audience becomes implicated in the poetic enactment of eros as the speaker includes the group in a communal discourse that both proclaims and provokes desire.

In stanza 4, the pattern of shifting voices changes as the speaker's own point of view and poetic voice take over. The speaker's assertion at line 9 that she will remind her beloved if she doesn't remember focuses attention on the poetic voice and its ability to activate the past and make it come alive in the present. The word (I wish) at the end of line 9, expressing the speaker's wish to remind her departing lover about their past happiness, echoes the earlier wish to die in the opening line of the fragment. The repetition of in the parallel contexts of death and memory suggests the active transformative power of the poetic voice as it replaces the will to die with the will to create.

In fact, it doesn't seem to matter whether the woman remembers or not. (and if not), at the beginning of the fourth stanza, conjoined to the emphatic (I wish), suggests a negation of narrative temporality, by making the evocativeness of the speaker's own apostrophizing voice the central issue. The speaker turns away from narrative and addresses the beloved as a presence in a "time of discourse rather than story."^[24] The speaker's clearly delineated voice offering her beloved an abstract consolation about how great the past was gives way to the dissolution of both their voices—voices that become subsumed within a detemporalized, intersubjective space inclusive of speaker, addressee, and an audience of women. As Culler points out, apostrophes displace the temporal sequences of narration by "removing the opposition between presence and absence from empirical time and locating it in a discursive time."^[25] The move from empirical to discursive time is heightened in stanza 4, which brings about a transition to a more remote time and introduces a use of language that abounds in poetic images.

The picture in stanzas 5 through 10 is one of idyllic beauty and blissful satisfaction. As against the clearly delineated voices and personalities at the beginning, here the "I," "you," and "we" of the poem are all linked in the aura of sensations and erotic stimulation. Boundaries of person, object, and place seem to break down as everything in the environment dissolves into a totality of sensation. The speaker's erotic vocabulary—images of

[23] See Calame, Les chœurs ; Nagy Pindar's Homer ; and Lardinois, "Subject and Circumstance," for arguments that support a view of Sappho's poetry as choral.

[24] Culler, The Pursuit of Signs 149.

[25] Ibid., 150.

violets, roses, woven garlands, perfume, and soft beds—creates a song of seduction that enacts both the mesmerizing spell of desire and the power of the poet's voice to suspend time and draw the poem's audiences into what Dolores O'Higgins calls "the dangerous felicity of listening.^[26] This atmosphere of sensual stimulation, however, does not seem to be placed in any actual environment; rather, the images of flowers, soft couches, perfumes, the shrine, and the grove all have a generalizing force that suggests remoteness from the world. Even the long series of flower images seems to function in isolation from nature and does not seem to refer to any specific ritual function or purpose except for the sensual enjoyment of the lovers and its poetic enactment.^[27] What is emphasized about the flowers is the way they are artfully fashioned into beautiful garlands for the lovers to wear.

In spite of the speaker's rapt absorption in the woman whose presence she invokes, there is no emphasis on describing the woman independent of the effect she has on the narrator herself, or separate from the atmosphere their shared erotic experience generates. In the last two stanzas of the fragment, the sense of fullness, expressed in the repetition of negatives that negate the lovers' absence at the shrine, the grove, and the dance, contrasts with the emptiness implicit in the earlier verbs of abandonment and departure. The negation of place to denote presence suggests that it is the mutual experience of the two lovers that gives form to the world. The implication is that place comes alive only in the presence of the other.

Jessica Benjamin sees woman's sexual grounding in intersubjective space as her solution to the problem that woman's desire is not localized in space— not linked to phallic activity and its representations: "When the sexual self is represented by the sensual capacities of the whole body, when the totality of space between, outside, and within our bodies becomes the site of pleasure, then desire escapes the borders of the imperial phallus and resides on the shores of endless worlds."^[28] Indeed, in Sappho's fragment the space inhabited by the two lovers expands outward to the seemingly endless spaces of streams, temples, and groves. The movement from the interior space connoted by the "soft bed" to the exterior space of the temple, the grove, and the dance reinforces the earlier link between the speaker, her addressee, and the circle of listening, perhaps singing, women. The effortless motion from interior to exterior space that suggests the dissolving of spatial boundaries correlates with the breakdown in clearly distinct positions of self and other, subject and object. Moreover, the connections in the poem between the

[26] O'Higgins, "Sappho's Splintered Tongue" 162.

[27] See Stehle, "Retreat from the Male," for a discussion of Sappho's use of flower imagery in an erotic context.

[28] Benjamin, The Bonds of Love 130.

personal and collective discourses of women suggests an intersubjectivity that embraces a cultural system significantly different from male models of competitive and hierarchical self-other relationships.

III

It may be argued that fragment 1 departs from a pattern of mutuality in Sappho's poems. Anne Carson, for example, holds that in fragment I Sappho portrays erotic relations as an endless game of flight and pursuit, thus presenting a model of erotic relations that involves the dominance of one over the other.^[29] This view is based largely on the famous lines in the next-to-last stanza spoken by Aphrodite to console the rejected or abandoned "Sappho": "For if she flees, soon she will pursue; and if she does not receive gifts, soon she will give them. And if she loves not, soon she will love even against her will" (21-24).

Carson sums up what she takes to be the usual interpretation of these lines: "Aphrodite is promising ... an ideal erotic revenge in the form of a mutual reversal of the roles of lover and beloved." Carson, however, argues that Aphrodite is offering not a "specific program of revenge tailored to Sappho, but a general theory of lover's justice."^[30] Carson believes that Aphrodite is not reassuring Sappho that she will eventually be reconciled with her beloved; rather, Aphrodite suggests to Sappho that her beloved will outgrow her position as beloved, become a lover herself (of some younger beloved, not Sappho), and experience the state of mind of the pursuer, the one taken by eros against her will. Moreover, Carson argues that Aphrodite's consoling words to Sappho dramatize the universal law of justice which guarantees, through the passage of time, that the beloved will grow too old to be pursued as an object of desire.

Carson's argument hinges on her observation that Aphrodite's statements to Sappho contain no direct object. In other words, Carson contends that Aphrodite does not say that Sappho will be the object of the girl's pursuit or the recipient of her gifts, only that the gift will someday pursue, give gifts, and love. Thus, from the "observation" that Aphrodite is not offering Sappho reconciliation with her beloved, Carson infers that Sappho is not asking Aphrodite to turn the affections of the gift toward Sappho—rather Sappho is merely asking Aphrodite for justice or revenge.

Carson's observation of the importance of the lack of a direct object in Aphrodite's consolation of Sappho is, I believe, quite astute. But I think she has misunderstood its significance. The mere fact that Aphrodite does

[29] Carson, "The Justice of Aphrodite."

[30] Ibid., 230.

not explicitly mention a direct object does not exclude the possibility that Aphrodite is reassuring Sappho that her beloved will eventually desire her, Sappho, in particular. Indeed, Aphrodite's question to Sappho in lines 18-19 (; "Whom, again, am I to persuade to come back into friendship with you?") seems to imply that Sappho wants Aphrodite's help in turning the girl's love in Sappho's direction (). The in line 19 suggests this specificity.

I think that the real significance of the lack of direct objects (of fleeing, pursuing, and loving) in these lines is that Sappho is suggesting that neither she nor her beloved are objects of each other's love. The speaker does not imagine that the consummation of (her) love involves either domination or submission. The beloved is figured as a subject whether she is fleeing or pursuing, giving or receiving. Indeed, it may be argued that the subject "she" in these lines can be either the speaker or her beloved. The speaker is describing, in general terms, the reciprocal movements of desire in which she and her beloved both participate in the process of giving and receiving, loving and being loved—a process that, according to the grammar of the poem, involves only subjects. Moreover, the incantatory quality of the lines evokes what Charles Segal calls the "hypnotic effect of love's thelxis ." Segal argues that "the rhythmical echo between the first and third lines ... almost seems to assure the success of this spell-like promise."^[31] If it is true, as Segal argues, that the fulfillment of love means thelxis , then surely both lover and beloved must both fall under the same spell for love to be fully realized. By definition, it seems, the "magic of eros" implicates both lovers in a circularity of desire that requires reciprocity.

Moreover, in the context of the whole poem it seems much more likely that Sappho seeks reconciliation rather than revenge. The initial and final stanzas frame the poem with Sappho's invocation of Aphrodite in the present . But the body of the poem is in the past tense. Sappho is remembering an earlier occasion when she called to Aphrodite and Aphrodite came to her. The body of the poem narrates that past encounter. We learn through Sappho's narration of the encounter that Sappho has called on Aphrodite before for the same purpose: to ask Aphrodite's help in persuading Sappho's beloved to turn her affections back in Sappho's direction. If it is merely erotic justice Sappho wants, then once Sappho recalls Aphrodite's "words of justice" from that earlier encounter she would have no reason to continue to call on Aphrodite again to enact the same revenge, the same universal law of justice; there would be no reason for Sappho to continue the invocation of Aphrodite in the last stanza. If, however, Sappho is asking for Aphrodite's

[31] Segal, "Eros and Incantation" 67.

aid in turning her beloved's affections toward her, then it makes perfect sense that Sappho should invoke Aphrodite once again. The present invocation differs from past invocations in that it involves a different woman whom Sappho wants Aphrodite to persuade.

The language of the last stanza of the poem reinforces this reading. It returns to the present moment of discourse and reminds us of Sappho's original prayer to Aphrodite in the first and second stanzas. Although the imperative (come) in line 25 recalls the in line 5, the fact that the qualifying is absent here, that the verb is in the emphatic first position, and that there is a repetition of imperatives () suggests a far more powerful voice than the voice of helpless supplication we hear at the beginning of the poem. The narrator speaks with a confidence in the fulfillment of her desires; (release) along with (to fulfill) and (fulfill) stresses this sense of release and fulfillment. There are no negative verbs here, as in the previous stanza, to suggest the possibility of defeat.

Sappho's use of military terminology in her request to Aphrodite to be her ally () in the last line of the poem may seem to identify Sappho with masculine values of conquest and militarism.^[32] I believe, however, that Sappho appropriates aspects of dominant cultural values for purposes that establish her resistance to such values. In asking Aphrodite to be her cofighter or fellow soldier in the "battle" of love, Sappho asks Aphrodite to come into an alliance of mutuality with her. Although as allies they are not equals, "Sappho" becomes capable of imagining herself eliciting desire in her beloved through her contact with Aphrodite. Thus, Aphrodite's descent in the third stanza of the poem may be regarded as a description of the speaker's ascent. The swiftness and rapid movement of Aphrodite's descent and its empowering effect on "Sappho" suggest that, through the power of her voice (her invocation), the speaker herself is taking flight and bringing heaven down to earth.

As Winkler notes, Aphrodite's descent in fragment 1 recalls the scene in the Iliad where Aphrodite enters the battlefield and ends up retreating to Olympus to heal the stab wound inflicted on her by Diomedes. It may seem that by referring to Aphrodite as the speaker's potential , Sappho transfers masculine values of conquest to the sphere of love. But in light of Aphrodite's (Homeric) reputation for ineffectual, obstructive conduct in martial affairs and her clearly inappropriate presence in the exclusively male world of the battlefield, it would seem that Aphrodite's role as "Sappho"'s ally would not follow the male model for . Thus, we cannot assume

[32] See Rissman's analysis of military imagery in Sappho's poetry, Love as War .

that an alliance between the speaker and Aphrodite involves the attempt to conquer an adversary: In addition, it is interesting to note that sparrows, instead of horses, drive Aphrodite's chariot as it makes its descent. This deviation from the Iliadie model reinforces the poem's resistance to values of militance and conquest.

Moreover, in line 3 "Sappho" asks Aphrodite not to subdue her with cares. Sappho uses the word (subdue)—a word often associated with conquest and domination—to express what she does not want from Aphrodite. It seems that Sappho negates the values associated with and substitutes in its place an alliance with Aphrodite that turns the domination of one over the other into persuasion—the power to seduce another into a relationship of mutual desire.^[33] The identification with Aphrodite implied by the speaker's ability to imagine herself as Aphrodite's "ally" shows a change in the way the speaker sees herself. Here, as in fragment 94, the operations of memory—recalling a past experience in which the speaker's desires were fulfilled—bridge the gap between speaker and goddess and between the lover and her beloved. In lines 21-24, the voices of Aphrodite and the speaker "Sappho" are no longer clearly differentiated. That Sappho does not clearly identify the speaker in these lines suggests a dissolving of the boundaries between the speaker and the goddess—and an incorporation within the speaker of Aphrodite's persuasive powers.

The speaker's assertive tone in the last stanza expresses a confidence in her own ability to conjure longing in the beloved. The ability to imagine herself in an alliance with Aphrodite elevates the speaker to a position of greater empowerment. The speaker asks Aphrodite to be her not in order to conquer or dominate the beloved, and certainly not to make the beloved passively accept "Sappho's" affections. Rather, "Sappho" calls on Aphrodite to help stir the beloved from passive indifference into active affection. The speaker imagines a situation where her beloved actively pursues. And we should not assume that "Sappho" has to become passive if her beloved is to become active. That would be simply to assume the male model of dominance and submission. The poem itself in no way suggests this. On the contrary, the purpose of "Sappho's" alliance with Aphrodite is to rouse her beloved, so that each is to be both lover and beloved, active participants in a reciprocity of desire—both of them active, desiring subjects.

In her study of the historical and cultural context of homosexuality in ancient Greece, Eva Cantarella points to a sharp contrast between the social roles of male and female homosexual bonds. The male pederastic model, with its distinct roles of dominance and submission, served as an instrument

in the educational and political development of young men. Sex between man and boy symbolized the transfusion of political power from the superior older man to his younger beloved.^[34] By contrast, although homosexual erotic relations among women may also have had an educational and social role, those relations were not linked to the institutional structures of power as male pederastic relations were. As Cantarella puts it: "But what symbolic and social significance could be attached to love between women? Sex between women takes place on an equal basis, it does not involve submission, it cannot symbolize the transmission of power (not even the power of generation, the only power held by women)."^[35]

Constructing the love between women expressed in the circumscribed context of an hetairia on the model of pederasty assumes an access to institutional power women did not have, and more importantly; assimilates female homoeroticism to male power relations. Thus, the discursive position of even the most educated and cultured of women (e.g., Sappho) in the context of the male-dominated public sphere must surely have been outside the center , as de Lauretis puts it.^[36] Perhaps it is the position of eccentricity that allows the Sapphic subject to resist the eroticization of woman as "Other"^[37] and thus to construct a language of desire beyond the binaries of self and other, a language that reinterprets categories of gender and reinscribes a place for women in cultural discourse.

[34] See Dover, Greek Homosexuality , and Foucault's highly influential analysis of sexuality and power relations in ancient Greece, The History of Sexuality vol. 2.

[35] Cantarella, Bisexuality 83.

[36] See de Lauretis, "Eccentric Subjects."

[37] See MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified . MacKinnon responds to de Beauvoir's assertion that "[h]umanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being.... He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other" (The Second Sex xviii). MacKinnon argues that gender is less a matter of sexual difference than an instance of male dominance and the appeal to biology as the determining "fact" of women's sexual specificity is an ideological consequence of the male epistemological stance of objectivity that reflects not only control through objectification, but also its eroticization of the act of control itself. Thus, "the eroticization of dominance and submission creates gender.... The erotic is what defines sex as inequality, hence as a meaningful difference.... Sexualized objectification is what defines women as sexual and as women under male supremacy" (50).

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 Muse^[2] —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]

[1] Other ancient women poets are now receiving increasing attention: for an overview, see Snyder, The Woman and the Lyre , with references.

[2] AP 9.506. Despite its traditional attribution this is probably among the many epigrams written in the Hellenistic period and passed off under the names of classical authors: see Page, Further Greek Epigrams 125-27. The "tenth Muse" label rapidly became a cliché in allusions to Sappho.

[3] Two particularly relevant to this essay are Foucault (see The History of Sexuality ), whose genealogy of modern sexuality goes back only to the fourth century B.C.E ., and Irigaray (especially Speculum ), on whom see further below, nn. 16, 27.

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.

[4] Only one word in poem I indicates the gender of the beloved. The manuscripts on which modern texts are based give three variant readings of the text at this point, none of which can be correct because none both makes sense and fits the meter and dialect. The currently accepted reading, which makes the beloved female, depends on an emendation that was proposed only in the nineteenth century. It is defended in his edition by the German philologist Bergk (Poetae Lyrici ad loc.) with the simple statement that "we are dealing with the love of a girl (de puellae amore agitur)": he reaches this conclusion mainly on the basis of Sappho's other poems.

[5] I address the textual transmission of Sappho's poems and the question of whether she can be described as lesbian in the modern sense in chaps. 2 and 4 of Sappho's Immortal Daughters .

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

[6] Winkler, "Double Consciousness."

[7] Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World"; Stehle, "Sappho's Gaze."

[8] See, e.g., Winkler, "Double Consciousness" 167: "Sappho's poem ... contains several personal perspectives, whose multiple relations to each other set up a field of voices [my emphasis] and evaluations."

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

Self and Other in Anacreon

The relationship between self and other where desire is concerned in Anacreon can often be seen to follow one of two distinct patterns. In the first, Love is personified as an adversary who either subdues the speaker or seeks to do so. One boxes with Love, as in 396, flees him (400), or gives thanks for having escaped his bonds (346). The mildest version of his effect seems to be his summons to the speaker in 358 to daily with a girl from Lesbos ("golden-haired Love strikes me with his purple ball and summons me to play with the girl in the fancy sandals"): other accounts of his impact represent it as violent, as in the image of Eros as a smith (413) who strikes the speaker with a bronze hammer and dips him in freezing water. Occasionally, as in the poem about the girl from Lesbos, the object of the speaker's passion is alluded to (see also 378), but the primary relationship is one between Eros and the lover, who experiences himself as either the victim or the adversary of a powerful external force.

In another equally common pattern, the speaker addresses the object of his passion: the relationship is between the speaker and an addressee, an "I" and a "you." What is noticeable here too is the tendency for the imagery to reflect an adversarial relationship; but this time it is the speaker who takes the dominant role. A good example is a well-known poem addressed to a sexually inexperienced girl, in which, by a common erotic metaphor, she is compared to an untamed foal whom the speaker imagines himself bridling and riding (417). This scenario of erotic domination is clearly also present in 346, which is again addressed to a youthful love object, a beautiful but fearful boy (or possibly girl); the poem goes on to allude to the hyacinth meadows in which Aphrodite tied her horses. It reappears, in wittily inverted form, in 360, in which the boy with girlish looks holds, says Anacreon, the reins of his soul. Here, therefore, Love's domination of the speaker has been replaced by the speaker's wished-for mastery of the addressee: even when, as in 360, the relationship is humorously inverted, the basic pattern is one in which one side or the other must end up in control, and the integrity of the "I" position is either completely secure or completely at risk.

[9] See Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World," who gives examples also from Archilochus and Ibycus and comments, "The man is helpless, stricken by the power of Eros or Aphrodite, but toward the particular boy or girl who attracts him the man is confident and prepared to seduce" (46). She attributes these patterns to "male sexual psychology" (50).

We have, therefore, two main patterns, one involving Eros and the speaker, the other the speaker and a beloved. Both, however, are structured in essentially the same way: the self-other relationship is essentially one of domination. The frequent repetition of this pattern suggests an overriding concern with establishing the boundaries between subject and object, and then with establishing the subject's control, in a kind of zero-sum competition of the erotic.^[10] A few brief observations about this structure are called for. First, this concern with maintaining the boundaries and the supremacy of the "I" makes particular sense when related to the likely context of performance of these poems. The symposia, drinking parties attended by aristocratic males for which this poetry was almost certainly destined, had a markedly political function: that of consolidating bonds between members of the group and of asserting their political dominance over those outside it. Recent work, inspired by Foucault, on male homosexual roles in classical Athens has demonstrated that the articulation of sexual roles in a public context has a political dimension: a male citizen's assumption of an active, dominant role in his sexual life is an index of his capacity as a citizen.^[11]

The situation of aristocratic symposiasts in the archaic period resembles in some ways that of citizens in classical Athens. They too were members of an elite whose privileges distinguished them sharply from other members of the community and were jealously guarded. Studies of symposiastic groupings have emphasized their importance as a defensive formation against the threat to aristocratic power and privilege posed by hoplite warfare and the wider distribution of wealth.^[12]

It has long been accepted by critics of archaic lyric that at least some symposiastic poetry is directly related to the political aspirations of its audiences: that exhortations to military virtue and patriotism, for example, express a collective ideal. Love poetry, though, has traditionally been interpreted as belonging to a more individual, confessional mode.^[13] The patterns sketched above, however, suggest that its rhetoric of exclusivity and supremacy is employed in the interests of a collective, rather than an individual, identity. It is the aristocratic group as a whole whose identity in relation

[10] There is another group of poems suggesting a more equal, negotiated relationship between erastes and eromenos . see, e.g, 359, 378, 402c, 467 I discuss the relationship between this and the other two groups in "Eros the Blacksmith."

[11] See in particular Halperin, One Hundred Years , and Winkler, "Double Consciousness." Both draw on Foucault's work on sexuality, especially on The History of Sexuality . See also Dover, Greek Homosexuality .

[12] On symposia, see Murray, "The Greek Symposium," "The Symposium as Social Organisation," Early Greece, and Sympotica , Rossi, "Il simposio"; Vetta, ed., Poesia e simposio .

[13] For an overview of current critical positions, see Slings, "The 'I' in Personal Archaic Lyric," with references.

to an other is figured in the structures of love poetry. The performer of a song ostensibly addressed to his beloved sings about his erotic mastery of another, but necessarily to that other; and sometimes the youthful object of his passion appears to be fictional. In these cases in particular, it is clear that his audience consists of those occupying the same subject position as himself, and his gesture of mastery is one in which all of this audience are implicated.

Second, this analysis of the ways in which social context informs love poetry also helps make sense of the other pattern of subject-object relations in Anacreon: that between the speaker and Eros. The shattering effect of Eros on the "I" is tolerable only if the agent, rather than being an individual other, is a personification or deity. To regard this threat as the effect of another human individual would be unacceptable for the community of aristocratic subjects to which singer and audience both belong. We shall return to this question of singer and audience in relation to Sappho.

The last point to note before embarking on a comparison with Sappho is that in the pattern involving two human individuals, subject and object positions are gendered, but their relation to biological sex is a mediated one. Thus, though the "I" is always an adult male, the other is always younger but can be either male or female. The subject-object polarity is articulated both with gender and with relations of power, so that to occupy the position of love object is also to occupy the weaker, feminine position, regardless of one's sex.

Sapphic Voices and the Other

To turn to Sappho at this point is to enter a completely different world, in which the range of voices, positions, and self-other relationships in the expression of desire is far wider and far more subtly modulated. To illustrate this I shall look first at a very damaged poem, fragment 22. The parts of this text that are legible, including editorial supplements, are, in translation, as follows:^[14]

... task ... lovely face ... unpleasant ... otherwise winter ... pain(less?) ... I bid you, Abanthis, take (your lyre?) and sing of Gongyla, while desire once again flies around you, the lovely one—for her dress excited you when you saw it; and I rejoice: for the holy Cyprian herself once blamed me for praying ... this (word?) ... Iwish ...

At the point at which these fragments begin to be intelligible, the speaker commands a second woman, Abanthis, to celebrate in song her desire for

[14] This poem survives only in a badly damaged version on papyrus, and some of the readings translated here depend on editorial supplements which are controversial. The main trend of my argument can, however, be defended even without conjectural supplements.

a third. This is evidently not the first time Abanthis has felt such desire, as the adverb "once again," traditionally used of the renewed onset of love, suggests: this is confirmed in the next strophe by the description of Gongyla as "the lovely one," and an account of the way in which her appearance excited Abanthis's longing. The speaker then, with the explicit statement "and I rejoice," takes up for the first time her own stance in relation to this scenario.

But is it really the first time? A closer look at the poem suggests that "once again" haunts this entire scene in a way that has from the beginning drawn in the speaker too, and that begins to open up some of the differences between this and the erotics of Anacreon. In this poem there is a subtle process of association between different subject positions in operation throughout, which has the effect of eliding them, blurring without removing their boundaries. The person I have so far called a speaker is in fact, of course, a singer (this is, after all, literally lyric poetry): it is in song that she bids Abanthis sing. The process of elision between the "I" and "you" positions is compounded further when the speaker proceeds herself to name Abanthis's desire: she is doing, in that second strophe, what she has commanded Abanthis to do in the preceding one. It is significant too that, just as desire is distributed among different speakers, so too it is distributed through different moments in time: the desire which was excited (repeatedly, apparently) in the past is to be spoken in the future as well as the present. The positions from which desire is articulated and the moments of its articulation, therefore, constantly shift and merge into one another: what is constant is the movement of desire itself through the poem.

In fragment 96, of which we have much more, a similar process can be traced. The least damaged part of the text translates as follows:

... Sardis ... often turning her thoughts in this direction ... (she honoured) you as being like a goddess for all to see and took most delight in your song. Now she stands out among the Lydian women like the rosy-fingered moon after sunset, surpassing all the stars, and its light spreads alike over the salt sea and the flowery fields; the dew is shed in beauty, and roses bloom and tender chervil and flowery melilot. Often as she goes to and fro she remembers gentle Atthis and doubtless her tender heart is consumed because of your fate ...

Once again the singer, the "I" of the poem, speaks to "you" and "she," both female, of their desire. A distant "she," a woman now (probably) in Sardis, the capital of Lydia, is described as turning her thoughts in this direction. Then the poem modulates into the past in order to describe her desire for the speaker's interlocutor, the "you" of the second strophe. The focus now shifts back through both tune and space to the woman in Lydia, who in her present surroundings is likened, in an extended simile, to the rosy-fingered

moon; and finally her desire for Atthis (who I am assuming to be the "you" of strophe 2) is recapitulated through her memory.

Here we can see an even more subtle and elusive play of desire at work, which once again works partly through an elision of the speaking positions. The singer is again associated through her song with the "you" of the second strophe: the woman now in Lydia, she says (or rather sings), "took most delight in your song." This time, though, the effect of the speaker's implication in the other woman's desire is even more complex than in fragment 22. The singer sings of a song that aroused desire, thereby performing through her poem an act designated within it as erotic, and thus constructing herself as a potential object of desire. She also, though, enacts desire from the subject, speaking point of view when she turns to the lengthy simile that names in song the woman's beauty. As in fragment 22, this effect simultaneously represents the gaps between subjects and bridges, without erasing, them. It is this effect that I am trying to capture by the term "elision," with the distances between the three speaking positions of the poem figured through, on this occasion, space as well as time. When finally she returns to the Lydian woman's desire for Atthis, in the sixth strophe, it is in a way marked by distances of both space and time: her longing for Atthis is possible only through the memory that bridges those distances.

It is evident from these two poems, and others besides, that there is a constant process of subtle and multifarious shifts going on between the speaking voices, and the subject positions, in Sappho's poetry. "I," "you," and "she" (and in fr. 9⁶ we should also add "we") are never clearly differentiated, securely demarcated positions, but are constantly linked in a polyphonic, shifting erotic discourse, a kind of circulation of desire in which the gaps between subjects, figured through time and space, are at the same time constantly bridged by the operations of love and memory.^[15] How different from the monologic erotic discourse of Anacreon, in which the only form self-other relationships seem to take is that of struggle that will end in the mastery of one over the other.

There are several major points of contrast here with Anacreon. The fact that this is a female voice speaking, astonishing though that is when one thinks of the silences that surround it, is only the beginning. Much more important is the way in which this female voice has been able to avoid

[15] I prefer to speak of the elision of subject positions, and of a circulation of desire, rather than, with Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World" (followed now by Skinner, "Woman and Language"), of reciprocity and mutuality: the latter description seems to me to take insufficient account of the transaction's embeddedness in social and linguistic practice. Another way of putting this, on a linguistic level, would be to say that it overlooks the effects of différance (Derrida, Speech and Phenomena ).

speaking from the feminine position occupied by the addressees of Anacreon and of other male love poets. Instead we have a polyphony of voices whose neither-one-nor-two,^[16] neither-subject-nor-object, relationship successfully both evades and contests the polarities found in Anacreon, and inscribed in the tradition in which he writes.

It is important to note, though, that although the boundaries between subjects are elided, they are not dissolved: there is a constant spacing effect between speaking positions. The most obvious way of achieving this is through the gaps of space and time found throughout Sappho's poetry. A second way, which we may note in passing, in which this spacing effect is achieved in Sappho is through the use of reported speech. This too is highly characteristic of her, and the ode to Aphrodite (fr. 1), combining reported speech with a set of complex temporal shifts, is an obvious example. Both resources are lacking in Anacreon, whose much sharper subject-object division does not require them: his poetry takes place for the most part in an undifferentiated present and makes little use of reported speech.

One of the most important contrasts with Anacreon, however, takes us back to the relationship between singer and audience. I suggested for Anacreon an isomorphism between the self-other relationship within the poetry and that of its sympotic audience with the world outside the symposium. For Sappho we are, of course, lacking historical information about who listened to her songs. But the analysis offered so far of her poetry offers a way of reading relationships with and between the members of her audiences within the poems themselves.

In the two fragments of Sappho considered so far, 22 and 9⁶ , the singing voice itself is an important way of achieving the effect of elision between speaking positions. In this circulation of desire, the singing voice plays a crucial role in that it both arouses and expresses desire, linking all the female figures who speak and are spoken of in the poem and making them both subjects and objects of desire. Not only this: the self-referential allusions to song also, I have suggested, return upon the subject of enunciation, the poet, and draw her in too. There is thus a second kind of elision: between the enunciating and enunciated subjects.^[17] Conversely, the addressee, the desired and desiring other, is not limited to the ostensible addressee of each poem, but ultimately includes the entire circle of women. If song itself both arouses and expresses desire, then to sing at all is to enter into an

[16] As the terminology shows, this analysis is influenced by the work of Luce Irigaray: see particularly This Sex . On the use of Irigaray by classicists, see now Skinner, "Woman and Language," and below, n. 27.

[17] Calame, Le récit , applies this distinction to the analysis of Greek poetry, though he has very little to say about Sappho.

open-ended, unbounded erotic dialogue with the entire group: the erotics of Sappho's poetry implies, therefore, a community of singing, desiring women. The contrast with poems of Anacreon in which a beloved other is addressed lies in the fact that in them the speaking positions within and outside the poem are often insulated from each other by the gap between ostensible and actual addressee.

My analysis has so far depended, however, on poems that evoke an all-female world. But there are others. If, in the poems so far considered, Sappho successfully evades the gendered polarities found in Anacreon and other male love poets, what of those poems in which the masculine intrudes upon this secluded world? Can her implication with a community of singing, desiring female subjects always provide a position from which to contest the position of feminine, object, other?

I shall address this question by looking at two more poems, each of which involves explicit opposition to the masculine. Perhaps Sappho's best-known poem is fragment 31, which famously charts the speaker's distress as she looks at a beloved woman in the company of a man:

He seems as fortunate as the gods to me, the man who sits opposite you and listens nearby to your sweet voice and lovely laughter. Truly that sets my heart trembling in my breast. For when I look at you for a moment, then it is no longer possible for me to speak; my tongue has snapped, at once a subtle fire has stolen beneath my flesh, I see nothing with my eyes, my ears hum, sweat pours from me, a trembling seizes me all over, I am greener than grass, and it seems to me that I am little short of dying. But all can be endured, since ... even a poor man ...

What the poem says on a surface level is obvious enough, even if it has given rise to a good deal of discussion as to the man's identity: what is important for present purposes is only that he is male.^[18] As the speaker looks at him, he in turn, like the female lovers in the poems discussed before, is listening to a beloved woman's desire-arousing voice. The spectacle of her rival's relation to this woman then, on the level of surface meaning, causes the speaker such pain that she has the sensation of bodily disintegration. The final, damaged fragments suggest some kind of recovery, but cannot be interpreted with confidence.

What is of interest here is the way in which the poet's disintegration is represented in terms of speaking positions. As in previous poems, the addressee of this poem is herself speaking: but to her male companion, not to the singer of the poem. One of the consequences is, within the poem, the

[18] Many scenarios have been proposed: see Page, Sappho and Alcaeus . The tendency in more recent criticism is to read the opening as a rhetorical trope ("whoever sits opposite you ...") rather than a real figure: see Winkler, "Double Consciousness" 74.

cessation of the singer's own voice. But the breaking of the erotic dialogue between female speakers is not the only cause of the disintegration. The other, I suggest, within the rhetoric of the poem, is the introduction of an objectifying gaze, whose direction is represented grammatically The quoted section of the poem is framed by a very significant verb: "to seem." At the opening, the single (in Greek) word translated as "he seems" constructs the male lover as the object of the speaker's gaze. But the direction of that gaze is reversed within the poem, when the speaker herself becomes the object of a gaze: the last phrase reads literally "I seem to myself."

There are two ways of interpreting this reversal, both of which can be taken to be in play simultaneously. The repetition of the verb has, to begin with, the effect of suggesting a simple reversal of the gaze with which the poem opened: as she looked then at her male rival, he now looks at her. The physical disintegration of the speaker can be understood therefore as the consequence of her becoming the object of male gaze. But more important than the gender of the gazer is the way in which the gaze itself reintroduces what was absent from the previous two poems, namely a polarized division between subject and object positions.^[19]

Linked with the introduction of this division is the fact that the fragmenting of the female speaker's self, and body, occurs not only on the literal level of description but also linguistically, as can be seen first from the description of herself as "greener than grass," and then from her use of the word "I seem." With this verb the subject's position itself becomes a divided one, since it involves the speaker in representing herself to herself from another's perspective, and therefore in splitting.^[20] One can, then, read this disintegration of the female subject as the consequence of her move from being the subject of the gaze to being its object: a move that itself depends on the fact that the gaze demarcates these positions far more sharply than Sappho's more customary mode of engagement with others, the voice. Subject and object positions, in the phrase "I seem to myself," then collide or conflict rather than, as in the previous poems, being elided.^[21] It is worth

[19] For a fuller treatment of the gaze in Sappho, see Stehle, "Sappho's Gaze," whose subtle and powerful analysis attributes to it some of the blurring and de-hierarchizing effects linked in this essay with the voice.

[20] It is significant that the use of the verb "appeared" is identified by Barthes as a sure indication of the move from personal to impersonal narration: a move that also, according to his categories, occurs in this poem. See Barthes, "Structural Analysis of Narratives" 112; see also, on nondialectical self-other relations, Jefferson, "Bodymatters."

[21] The context of this poem in Longinus's account provides a fascinating sideline on this discussion. Longinus, to whom we owe the survival of most of this poem, famously celebrates it as an example of poetic unity: he marvels at Sappho's "selection of the most important details and her combination of them into a single poem" (Subl . 10.3). This in itself seems surprising, given the poem's stress on dis -unity. And yet one detail of the text he quotes raises at least the possibility that he was more alive to the text's disintegration than his argument allows. The phrase "to myself," occurring immediately after "I seem," can be construed as an attempt to heal the division between subject and object, even though in so doing it also serves to highlight it. Longinus, however, in the text transmitted to us, omits it altogether, though he continues his quotation with a few words that apparently come after it. The missing words have been restored only through the insertion of a further papyrus scrap (fr. 213): Longinus's version of the line reads simply "I seem," omitting the telltale recuperative phrase. On the context of this omission in Longinus, see Hertz, "A Reading of Longinus."

noting too that the spacing effects which made that elision possible in the earlier poems are missing here: the tense of this poem, unlike many others of Sappho's, is a continuous present. It seems, therefore, that engagement with a masculine world is reflected in the range of techniques used as well as in terms of content.

It is of course possible to align the movement of this poem with the scenario of domination envisaged in Anacreon and to see this as, so to speak, the beloved's-eye view of things: a brief attempt by the object to speak. No doubt there is no accident in the fact that we have a female speaker describing the disintegration brought about by a male gaze. But it is important to separate the idea of gendered subject positions from that of gender in a simple sense, even if, as here, they happen to coincide. What has changed between this and the earlier poems is not just the introduction of a male figure: it is, more importantly, the introduction of a gendered subject-object polarity, in which the speaker appears momentarily to be in the subject position (subject of the gaze) but is then forced also into that of its object. It is the resulting contradiction that causes her disintegration into a mute, fragmented body. The example of this poem suggests, then, that it is not the mere assumption of a speaking position by a woman that counts, but the negotiation of the subject-object polarity: in other words the successful negotiation of the feminine, rather than the female, position.

In my final example, the speaker once again engages with the masculine. Fragment 16, the Anactoria poem, with its apparently self-conscious allusion to both dominant cultural values and poetic tradition, presents us quite explicitly with a woman challenging her marginal position in the culture. This time the speaker emerges from her encounter on a very different note; and once again the key to understanding why is the way in which the speaker is positioned within the poem:

Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth, but I say it is whatsoever a person loves. It is perfectly easy to make this understood by everyone: for she who far surpassed mankind in beauty, Helen, left her most noble husband and went sailing off to Troy with no thought at all for her child or dear parents, but (love) led her astray ...

lightly ... (and she?) has reminded me now of Anactoria who is not here; I would rather see her lovely walk and the bright sparkle of her face than the Lydians' chariots and armed infantry.

The categories with which the poem plays arc easily identified. The culturally prestigious, and masculine, values of militarism and heroism arc evident at the beginning and (what I take to be)^[22] the end of the poem, as well as in the allusion to Troy and the account of Helen's abandoned husband as "her most noble husband"—a description with strong connotations of military prowess. However, there are also reminders of the ways in which women are valued within the culture—in terms of their beauty, and of their role within marriage and the family It is not difficult to see how, even on first reading, the poem challenges these values. In the first strophe the emphatic "but I say" announces a strong and explicit challenge to a society that, collectively, values militarism above anything else, and claims the right to substitute an individual's desire—"whatsoever a person loves"—for that collectively sanctioned one. The markedly general phrasing of the opening then gives way to an example that defines the substituted desire as sexual, and a woman's: that of Helen, who left "her most noble husband" and went to Troy. A comparison with the treatment of Helen by Alcaeus, a male contemporary of Sappho's, also from Lesbos, exposes the rehabilitation that is going on here: far from suppressing the consequences of her action, one of Alcaeus's two treatments of Helen (42) singles her out as the cause of Troy's destruction and contrasts her with the virtuous and fertile Thetis; the other (283) stresses her limited responsibility for her actions. She was, according to Alcaeus, "crazed" by Paris when she followed him over the sea, and it is his transgression, not hers, against the laws of hospitality and exchange that is stressed. In Sappho's version, as Page duBois has pointed out, Helen is not the object of exchange (or theft) between men, but celebrated as "an 'actant' in her own life, the subject of a choice, exemplary in her desiring."^[23] The poem suggests, therefore, a double reversal of established values: love is to be valued above war, and women arc to take on an active, desiring subjectivity.

But this concentration on the strategy of substitution expressed in the opening strophe is vulnerable. Deconstructive criticism has taught us to read utterances as threatened by the repression on which they are founded, and the poem's attempt at mastering the values and paradigms of Greek culture seems to lay itself open to being read in this way. From such a

[22] The papyrus on which this poem was found continues with damaged sections of three more lines. Most editors think they are the beginning of another poem: some think they continue this one. I should make clear my assumption that the speaker is, as in almost all Sappho's poems, female.

[23] DuBois, "Sappho and Helen" 86-87.

perspective, the insistent repetitions ("perfectly;" "everyone," expressed in Greek by variants of the same word: panchu, panti ), like the emphatic "but I say;" suggest the fragility of the opening proposition rather than its strength. The claim to revalue militarism by means of language, to set in motion and then to control a process of linguistic substitution, sets up a structure that is open to reversal—and that is, within the poem, reversed. The presentation of Helen's desire makes the substitution she performs an ambiguous and unstable one: its object, Paris, is indicated only metonymically by a phrase—"to Troy"—which also connotes war and the destruction catalogued by Alcaeus. The values repressed by the speaker in the first strophe seem to return here, then, as well as in the final strophe, where the Lydian army is the measure of Anactoria's value to the speaker. According to this account, Sappho's revaluation is only the obverse of Alcaeus's in his poem 42, which was also announced as structured within language by the opening phrase "as the story goes"; and the movement of the poem as a whole is that of a desire for linguistic mastery that is threatened and dispersed by the otherness it seeks to control.

I began my argument with an attempt to examine Plutarch's assertion that the art of poetry was undifferentiated by gender. If my earlier analyses of Sappho have tended to prove him wrong, fragment 16 seems thus far to bring us up against an uncomfortable relativism vis-à-vis Sappho and Alcaeus. Once again, however, it is the relationship between the subject positions in fragment 16 that is the key to Sappho's distinctiveness. In this poem they are linked with another crucial element: the quintessentially female figure of Helen.

The dualities that Helen embodies have been persuasively outlined by Ann Bergren.^[24] In Herodotuss account of the origins of the long-standing hostility between Greeks and Persians—which includes the Trojan War—the women who move from one side to another, as marriage or love partners, have an ambiguous status: they are both subjects and objects of the exchange (or theft). Helen, who is also part of this self-renewing sequence of exchange, theft, and reparation, partakes of this ambiguity in a way we can glean from the poems of Sappho and Alcaeus just considered. That is, she both chooses Paris and is chosen by him, both abandons and is stolen from her husband, exchanges and is exchanged. This pattern conforms, of course, to Lévi-Strauss's analysis of the position of women in both kinship and linguistic structures as that of both signs and generators of signs.^[25] The duality can be found on a linguistic level too in the Iliad , where Helen is first encountered weaving in a tapestry the narrative of the war (3.125-28). She is, thus, both

[24] Bergten, "Language and the Female."

[25] Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology 60-62.

subject and author of the narrative, its weaver and herself woven into it by the rhapsode, the "song stitcher." Like the Sapphic singing voice, therefore, she elides the positions of enunciating and enunciated subject.

This duality is, no doubt, part of what motivates Sappho's interception of Helen in her long wandering through Greek literature. But the way in which she is drawn into the chain connecting the three female figures of the poem—the speaker, Helen, and Anactoria—is also important, and it draws on the fluidity of subject positions that we have traced elsewhere. The link between the three female figures of this poem, once again formed partly by verbal repetition, is one that has eluded some of the poem's critics. The author of a standard commentary on Sappho, for example, says apropos of Helen's first appearance: "It seems inelegant ... to begin this parable, the point of which is that Helen found [the most beautiful thing] in her lover, by stating that she herself surpassed all mortals in this quality."^[26] But what he is objecting to is the poem's most crucial move, and it is signaled precisely by the way in which the description of Helen, "who far surpassed mankind in beauty" echoes the opening reference to "the most beautiful thing," once again using variants of the same Greek word (kalliston, kallos ). The effect of this repetition is to hint that Helen is the object of the speaker's desire, announced in the first strophe. Helen then, in the next strophe, becomes herself a desiring subject, who goes away to Troy. But her oscillation does not end there. Another verbal echo links her with the absent Anactoria: the word translated as "walk," bama , is formed from the same verb as that for "went" in the account of Helen's journey to Troy, eba . The speaker, thus, is a desiring subject; Anactoria, at the end, is a desired object: but Helen, in between, by means of the now familiar elision, is both.

It is this elision that slides out from under the tyranny of the opening propositions, implicating both the speaker and Helen in an endless chain of substitution in which each is both subject and object, speaker and spoken. This, more than the opening challenge, is the move by which the poem really subverts the discourse in which it is framed, and we can see this in the resulting disruption and instability of gender categories. In sailing to Troy, leaving behind her family, for example, she imitates the action of the Homeric heroes; but this assumption of a male role at the same time enacts the female speaker's erotic impulse. In leaving "her most noble husband," to go to Troy; she rejects but also embraces each of the competing values in the first strophe—the object of individual desire and the values of heroism and militarism. We could multiply these antitheses indefinitely; and yet they could hardly mimic the text's resistance to them. The elision of subject and

[26] Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 53.

object results, then, in the confounding of mythical categories of gender: and it is here that the elision in Sappho of what is elsewhere a gendered polarity has its most radical effect.

Conclusions

The rejoinder to Plutarch that emerges from this reading of Sappho is, therefore, a fundamentally and fruitfully ambiguous one. Sappho writes, we can say, as a woman precisely to the extent that she writes as not-a-woman: from a position, that is to say, that undercuts and contests the "hommosexual" structures defining femininity. We may wish to ask further what defines this position: is it to be located in linguistic or psychic structures or, indeed, the female body?

This study hints at a further possibility. For Sappho's time and place we can hardly talk of her social situation as the background to her poetry: the sparsity of our information renders the distinction between fore- and background untenable. What I have done is, faute de mieux , to read a social context within, rather than behind, the poetry. The exercise suggests that the gendering of Sappho's poetic discourse takes place through that of her audience; and, furthermore, that gender is a matter of relations of power at least as much as of biological sex. It is the fact that she addresses an audience of equals, of singing, desiring women whose song and desire endlessly refract her own, that makes possible her characteristic mode of address: to the other woman of my title.^[27]

Since this is explicitly a motivated reading, I may perhaps be allowed to end by introducing another woman into my account of the Anactoria poem. You may think she is already there: the reader. The disruption of gendered positions that I have traced in relation to the figures of the poem has as its correlate that of the reader's position. The opening "some say" of the poem bears ambivalently on the gender of the reader. Gendered in Greek to the extent that, say, the word "mankind" is in English, it apparently contains

[27] As implied in Irigaray's pun parler-femme/par lea femmes . This is an important qualifier of her other famous punning term, hommosexualité : taken together, they suggest that women can escape the constraints of patriarchal discourse, but that this is possible only on the basis of social practice. Analyses of ancient culture in terms only of hommosexualité lead to the distortions that are contested, rightly, by Skinner, "Woman and Language." On the complexities of parler-femme , see especially Whifford, Lute Irigaray chap. 2. Irigaray's later work, such as her essay "Divine Women" (in Sexes and Genealogies 57-72), suggests that divine paradigms may also be a basis for it: the importance in Sappho of Aphrodite offers some confirmation of this. See also Cantarella, Bisexuality , on the different relationship to power structures for women, which (she argues) meant that homosexual love did not symbolize the transmission of power as it did for men.

the male reader only to assimilate his desire to that of the female speaker and of Helen: but a female reader is from the beginning both uneasily contained and excluded by it. It is from this fragmented position that reader and poem conduct their negotiation with gender, a negotiation that when it pauses in the last strophe has at least won a place for Anactoria alongside those massed and glorious armies. The place and the moment that Anactoria inhabits may be distant, conditional, and fleeting: but I think we can claim this as a kind of victory.