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.