PART II
HOMER AND THE ORAL TRADITION

Five
Sappho and Helen

Page duBois

Denys Page seems unimpressed with Sappho's fragment 16 Lobel-Page (L.-P). He complains of line 7: "The sequence of thought might have been clearer.... It seems inelegant then to begin this parable, the point of which is that Helen found in her lover, by stating that she herself surpassed all mortals in this very quality."^[1] Of the whole: "The poem opens with a common device^[2] ... In a phrase which rings dull in our doubtful ears, she proceeds to illustrate the truth of her preamble by calling Helen of Troy in evidence.... And the thought is simple as the style is artless. The transition back to the principal subject was perhaps not very adroitly managed...."^[3] Of the end, "The idea may seem a little fanciful: but this stanza was either a little fanciful or a little dull."^[4]

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

[1] Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 53.

[2] Ibid., 55.

[3] Ibid., 56.

[4] Ibid., 57.

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

Here is the full, reconstructed text:

	5
	10
	15
[5]	20

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

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

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

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

The poem beans with a brief cathlogue, a listing of horsemen, infantry, ships. The of line 2 is ambiguous in in position; it refers back to the cathode and forward to the infinitive construction in line 3. The dark earth is the basis for this host of warriors, and

[5] Ibid., 52.

warships, perhaps, and recalls the diction of the Homeric poems. Sappho sets against this background of choices, against the dark earth, and then she makes the declaration which is the logical heart of the poem, "I say it is what one loves."

The next stanza overpowers the doubter; she asserts the ease of proof of her statement and moves immediately into an example. The poet's strategy here is rhetorically subtle; at first the reader associates the abstract above with Helen herself. But the epic heroine has another function within the poem; she is not herself "the most beautiful thing." She moves toward it, drawn by desire.^[6] Helen stands at first, set up by the hyperbole of which is echoed by of line 8; her name is surrounded by superlatives, masculine and feminine. In line 7, which begins with the quality for which she is immortal in men's memory, she is surrounded by and She surpasses all mankind with respect to beauty. Sappho's proof is for a moment deferred, but the force of her example, the superiority of Helen to all, is stressed.

The third stanza begins with the line ends with The first letters of the first participle echo the of , and link the leaving behind, her act of desertion, with her beauty. The line expresses motion: we see Helen leaving, going, sailing; the the aorist, anchors her action in a single past moment. The participles catch her endlessly moving, taking steps, sailing away on a ship which recalls the third element of the catalogue at the poem's beginning. The following line sets her motion against the static force of that which she left behind, all those who should have been dear to her, who ought to have satisfied her. She forgets all; the perhaps plays on the root suggesting madness. (Alcaeus, in his poem about Helen, calls her )^[7] The stanza ends with a sentence that is lost; someone, something, leads the heroine astray.

There follows a fragmentary passage that is legible again at we have moved from the world of legend back to the of line 3, and to the present, the singer's time. The next word is If the logical center of the poem is the generalizing statement of lines 3 and 4, the moment of presence, the phenomenological center, arrives with the name of Anaktoria. We are made aware of her absence only with the participle allows us to imagine her presence as well. Sappho's memory creates her; the act of making poetry becomes the act of making here, now, the absent loved one.

The last stanza completes the process of memory and finally returns the listener to the wider world. The of line 17 echoes of line 4,

[6] F Will, "Sappho and Poetic Motion."

[7] Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 275.

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

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

Lattimore mistranslates this poem in a way which reveals the consequences of its compactness, its far-reaching compression. He translates lines 3 and 4 thus: "but I say she whom one loves best is the loveliest."^[8] In fact, the Greek does not mean that: is neuter; also does not show gender. Lattimore's translation, however, brings out an important aspect of the poem, a confusion between things and people which is essential to its logic. Lattimore makes the poem exclusively a love poem, a poem about Anaktoria. Sappho is writing something more, a sketch on the abstract notion of desire. At least as important as Anaktoria is the poet's attempt to universalize her insight, to move toward logical thought. She is defining desire with the vocabulary at hand.

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

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

[8] Lattimore, Greek Lyrics 40.

things with the old vocabulary as we see if we read the poem juxtaposed with this passage from the Nicomachean Ethics , where Aristotle is attempting to define , the end at which human actions aim:

.
(1.5, 1095b14-17)^[9]

Bruno Snell says of Sappho's fragment 16, "That one man should contrast his own ideas with those of others is the theme of [this] poem by Sappho."^[10] Yet elsewhere I think he comes closer to the real consequences of the type of thinking exemplified in this poem, which is not simply about personal taste. "But both of them [Archilochus and Sappho] are evidently concerned to grasp a piece of genuine reality; to find Being instead of Appearance."^[11] Although she might have done so, Sappho is not saying that Anaktoria = Much of the energy of the poem comes from the force of her personal preference, her ability to make Anaktoria walk before us, but Anaktoria's presence is straining to break out of a structure which gives her existence wider meaning.

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

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

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

[9] "To judge from men's r, ves, the more or less reasoned conceptions of the good or happiness that seem to prevail among them are the following. On the one hand the generality of men and the most vulgar identify the good with pleasure, and accordingly are content with a life of enjoyment" (Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics 13).

[10] Snell, The Discovery of the Mind 47.

[11] Ibid., 50. See also Wills, "The Sapphic 'Umwertung.' "

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

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

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

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

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

In the Odyssey , Helen greets Telemachos along with Menelaos; she is a contented queen, and Homer alludes to her stay in Egypt. According to an alternate version of the story, her (image) was at Troy; she gives her guest nepenthe, which she received in Egypt. We hear her story of

[12] "Hence all commodities exchanged must be able to be compared in some way. It is to meet this requirement that men have introduced money; money constitutes in a manner a middle term, for it is a measure of all things, and so of their superior or inferior value" (Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics 282). Cf. E. Will, "De l'aspect éhique."

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

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

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

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

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

[13] See Ellmann, Thiaking about Women .

[14] Dimock, "The Name of Odysseus" 111.

[15] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment 57-58.

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

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

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

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

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

[16] Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship 496.

[17] Propp, Morphology of the Folktale .

[18] Greimas, Sénantique structurale 177. Translated in Structural Semantics 203: "For instance, in a narrative that is only a common love story ending in marriage without the parents' intervention, the subject is also the receiver, while the object is at the same time the sender of love:

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

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

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

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

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

[19] Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 278-79.

[20] Mossé, Latyrannie dans la Grèce antique

[21] Gernet, Anthropologie de la Grèce antique 344-59.

[22] Vernant, "Le marlage" 62-63. Translated in his Myth and Society in Ancient Greece 60: "In this respect one can speak in terms of a break between archaic marriage and marriage as it became established within the framework of a democratic city, in Athens, at the end of the sixth century. In the Athens of the period after Cleisthenes, matrimonial unions no longer have as their object the establishment of relationships of power or of mutual service between great autonomous families; rather, their purpose is to perpetuate the household, that is to say the domestic households that constitute the city.... "

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

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

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

[23] Arthur, "Early Greece."

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

Jack Winkler

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

[1] English translation of Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes (1976). There are some uncritical myths in Wittig's own account of Sappho in her essay "Paradigm."

[2] Lefkowitz, "Critical Stereotypes," and Hallett, "Sappho and Her Social Context," analyze the bias and distortions found in critical comments, ancient and modern, on Sappho.

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

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

[4] There was also the category of heroic, exceptional woman, e.g., Herodotos's version of Artemisia, who is used to "prove the rule" every time he mentions her (7-99, 8.68, 8.87 f., 8. 101), and the stories collected by Plut. De mul. vir . The stated purpose of this collection is to show that aretee , "virtue" oi' "excellence," is the same in men and women, but the stories actually show only that some women in times of crisis have stepped out of their regular anonymity and performed male roles when men were not available (Schaps, "The Women of Greece in Wartime").

[5] "A feminist theory of poetry would begin to take into account the context in history of these poems and their political connections and implications. It would deal with the fact that women's poetry conveys... a special kind of consciousness .... Concentrating on consciousness and the politics of women's poetry, such a theory would evolve new ways of reading what is there" (Bernikow, The World Split Open 10-11).

[6] Consciousness of course is not a solid object which can be discovered intact like an Easter egg lying somewhere in the garden (as in the Sapphic fr. 166 Leda is said to have found an egg hidden under the hyacinths). Sappho's lyrics are many-layered constructions of melodic words, images, ideas, and arguments in a formulaic system of shared points of view (personas). I take it for granted that the usual distinctions between "the real Sappho" as author and speaker(s) of the poems will apply when I speak here of Sappho's consciousness.

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

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

Archaic lyric, such as that composed by Sappho, was also not composed for private reading but for performance to an audience.^[11] Sappho often seems to be searching her soul in a very intimate way, but this intimacy is in some measure formulaic^[12] and is certainly shared with some group of listeners. And yet, maintaining this thesis of the public character of lyric, we can still propose three senses in which such song may be "private": first, composed in the person of a woman (whose consciousness was socially defined as

[7] S. Butler, The Authoress .

[8] Foley, "'Reverse Similes'"; Domingo, "The Role of the Female" chap. 2.

[9] As Kalypso complains, Od . 5.118ff. Perhaps the poet means this to be a short-sighted criticism, illustrating Od . 1.32.

[10] In this territory and at these recitations women are present—Homer is not a forbidden text to women, not an arcane arrhelon of the male mysteries. In the Odyssey (1.325-29) Penelope hears and reacts to the epic poetry of a bard singing in her home, but her objections to his theme, the homecoming from Troy, are silenced by Telemakhos. Arete's decision to give more gifts to Odysseus (Od . 11.335-41) after he has sung of the women he saw in the Underworld may be an implicit sign of her approval of his poetry. Helen in Iliad 6 delights in the fact that she is a theme of epic poetry (357-58) and weaves the stories of the battles fought for her into her web (125-28).

[11] Merkelbach, "Sappho und ihr Kreis"; Russo, "Reading the Greek Lyric Poets."

[12] Lanata, "Sul lingnaggio amoroso."

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

Poem 1 is one of the passages in Sappho that has been best illuminated in recent criticism. Several analyses have developed the idea that Sappho is speaking in an imagined scene which represents that of Diomedes on the battlefield in Iliad 5.^[17] Sappho uses a traditional prayer formula, of which Diomedes' appeal to Athena at Iliad 5.115-17 is an example ("Hear me,

[13] The text used in this essay is that of Edgar Lobel and Denys Page, Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (abbreviated L.-P.).

[14] Homer seems to include this possibility in the range of performing klea andron (deeds of men) when he presents Achilles singing to his own thumos (spirit), while Patroklos sits in silence, not listening as an audience but waiting for Achilles to stop (Il . 9.186-91).

[15] Nagy, Comparative Studies .

[16] Sappho is only one individual, and may have been untypical in her power to achieve a literary life and renown. Claims that society in her time and place allowed greater scope for women in general to attain a measure of public esteem are based almost entirely on Sappho's poems (including probably Plut. Lyk . 18.4, Thes . 19.3; Philostr. VA 1.30). The invention of early women poets is taken to extremes by Tatian in his adversus Graecos and by Ptolemy Chennos (chap. 5, PP. 143-44).

[17] Cameron, "Sappho's Prayer"; Page, Sappho and Alcaeus ; Svenbro, "Sappho and Diomedes"; Stanley, "The Role of Aphrodite"; Rissman, Love as War .

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

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

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

[18] Translations of Sappho are my own; ellipses indicate that the Greek is incomplete.

[19] Bolling, "Restoration of Sappho"; Marry, "Sappho and the Heroic Ideal."

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

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

Poem 1 employs not only a metaphorical use of the Iliad (transferring the language for the experience of soldiers to the experience of women in love) and a familiarization of the alien poem (so that it now makes better sense to women readers), but a multiple identification with its characters. Sappho is acting out the parts both of Diomedes and of Aphrodite as they are characterized in Iliad 5. Aphrodite, like Sappho, suffers pain (; 354), and is consoled by a powerful goddess who asks "Who has done this to you?" (373). Aphrodite borrows Ares' chariot to escape from the battle and ride to heaven (358-67), the reverse of her action in Sappho's poem.^[20] Sappho therefore is in a sense presenting herself both as a desperate Diomedes needing the help of a goddess (Athena/Aphrodite) and as a wounded and expelled female (Aphrodite/Sappho) seeking a goddess's consolation (Dione/Aphrodite).

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

[20] Di Benedetto, "Il volo di Afrodite"; he refers to the poem as "Aphrodite's revenge" (122).

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

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

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

[21] E.g., J. B. Bury, "while Sappho confined her muse within a narrower circle of feminine interests" (Bury, Cook, and Adcock, Greek Literature 494-95), and similarly Jaeger, Paideia .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[22] Walls, "The Sapphic 'Umwertung' "; duBois, "Sappho and Helen."

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

So far I have been speaking Sappho's mind as I see it behind this poem. There is an interesting problem in lines 12 ff., where most modern editors of Sappho's text have filled the gaps with anti-Helen sentiments, on the order of "but (Aphrodite) beguiled her ..., for (women are easily manipulated,) light (-minded ... )." We do not know what is missing, but it is more consistent with Sappho's perspective, as I read it, to keep the subject of ', "beguiled," the same as in the preceding clause—Helen. "Helen beguiled—itself (or herself)," some feminine noun, such as "city," "blame" (nemesis), or the like. What is easily manipulated and light-minded (kouphos ) are the senior staff of Troy, who astonishingly dismiss years of suffering as they breathe a romantic sigh when Helen passes. Perhaps Sappho's most impressive fragment is poem 31:

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

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

[23] Snell, "Sapphos Gedicht"; Koniaris, "On Sappho Fr. 31"; Saake, Zur Kunst Sapphos 17-38.

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

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

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

[24] Del Grande, "Saffo."

My reading of poem 31 explains why "that man" has assumed a grotesque prominence in discussions of it. Androcentric habits of thought are part of the reason, but even more important is Sappho's intention to hint obliquely at the notion of a bridegroom just as Odysseus does to Nausikaa. Odysseus the stranger designs his speech to the princess around the roles which she and her family will find acceptable—helpless suppliant, valorous adventurer, and potential husband.^[25] The ordinary protocols of marital brokerage in ancient society are a system of discreet offers and counteroffers which must maintain at all times the possibility for saving face, for declining with honor and respect to all parties. Odysseus's speech to Nausikaa contains these delicate approaches to the offer of marriage which every reader would appreciate, just as Alkinoos understands Nausikaa's thoughts of marriage in her request to go wash her brothers' dancing clothes: "So she spoke, for she modestly avoided mentioning the word 'marriage' in the presence of her father; but he understood her perfectly" (Od . 6.66-67). Such skill at innuendo and respectful obliquity is one of the ordinary-language bases for the refined art of lyric speech. Sappho's hint that "someone" enjoys a certain happiness is, like Odysseus's identical statement, a polite self-reference and an invitation to take the next step. Sappho plays with the role of Odysseus as suitor extraordinary, an unheard-of stranger who might fulfill Nausikaa's dreams of marriage contrary to all the ordinary expectations of her society. She plays too with the humble formalities of self-denigration and obeisance, all an expansion of , "holy dread grips me as I gaze on you" (Od . 6.161).

"That man is equal to the gods": this phrase has another meaning too. Sappho as reader of the Odyssey participates by turn in all the characters; this alternation of attention is the ordinary experience of every reader of the epic and is the basis for Sappho's multiple identification with both Aphrodite and Diomedes in Iliad 5. In reading Odyssey 6 Sappho takes on the roles of both Odysseus and Nausikaa, as well as standing outside them both. I suggest that "that man is equal to the gods," among its many meanings, is a reformulation of Homer's description of the sea-beaten Odysseus whom Athena transforms into a godlike man: , "but now he is like the gods who control the expanse of heaven" (6.243). This is Nausikaa's comment to her maids as she watches Odysseus sit on the shore after emerging from his bath, and she goes on to wish that her husband might be such.^[26] The point of view from which Sappho speaks as one struck to the heart is that of a mortal visited by divine power and beauty, and this

[25] Austin, Archery 191-200.

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

In performing this experiment of reading Sappho's poems as expressing, in part, her thoughts while reading Homer, her consciousness of men's public world, I think of her being naturally drawn to the character of Nausikaa, whose romantic anticipation (6.27) and delicate sensitivity to the unattainability of the powerful stranger (244 f., 276-84) are among the most successful presentations of a woman's mind in male Greek literature.^[27] Sappho sees herself both as Odysseus admiring the nymphlike maiden and as Nausikaa cherishing her own complex emotions. The moment of their separation has what is in hindsight, by the normal process of rereading literature in the light of its own reformulations, a "Sapphic" touch: , "Farewell, guest, and when you are in your homeland remember me who saved you—you owe me this." These are at home as Sappho's words in poem 94.6-8: "And I made this reply to her, 'Farewell on your journey, and remember me, for you know how I stood by you."'^[28]

The idyllic beauty of Phaiakia is luxuriously expressed in the rich garden of Alkinoos, whose continuously fertile fruits and blossoms are like the gardens which Sappho describes (esp. frs. 2, 81b, 94, 96), and it reminds us of Demetrios's words, "Virtually the whole of Sappho's poetry deals with nymphs' gardens, wedding songs, eroticism." The other side of the public/private contrast in Sappho is a design hidden in the lush foliage and flower cups of these gardens. There are two sides to double consciousness: Sappho both reenacts scenes from public culture infused with her private perspective as the enclosed woman and she speaks publicly of the most private, woman-centered experiences from which men are strictly excluded. They are not equal projects; the latter is much more delicate and risky. The very formulation of women-only secrets, female arheta , runs the risk not only of impropriety (unveiling the bride) but of betrayal by misstatement. Hence the hesitation in Sappho's most explicit delineation of double consciousness: , "I am not sure what to set down, my thoughts are double," could mean "I am not sure which things to set down and which to keep among ourselves, my mind is divided" (51).

[27] Apollonios of Rhodes's Medea is conscious of love in terms drawn from Sappho: see Privitera, "Ambiguità antitesi," and note especially the characteristic presentation of Medea's mental afterimages and imaginings (3.453-58, 811-16, 948-55), which is the technique of Sappho 1, 16, and 96.

[28] Schadewalt, "Zu Sappho" 67.

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

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

[29] Bourdieu, Algeria 105; Abbott, Macedonian Folklore chap. 11.

[30] "One of the men in Chios, apparently a prominent figure of some sort, was taking a wife and, as the bride was being conducted to his home in a chariot, Hippoklos the king, a close friend of the bridegroom, mingling with the rest during the drinking and laughter, jumped up into the chariot, not intending any insult but merely being playful according to the common custom. The friends of the groom killed him" (Plut. De mul. virt . 244e).

[31] Soranos Gynaecology 1.18.

[32] Medical writers: Rufinus ap. Oribasios 3-391.1, Galen 2.37oe, Aetios 16.103-4 (clitoridectomy), Paulus Aigin. 6.70 (clitoridectomy for lesbians). Lexicographers: Phot. Lexikon , s.v.; Pollux 2.174, with the anagram skairon sarkion , "throbbing little piece of flesh."

analogous phenomena: the hollow between lip and chin,^[33] a depression on the shoulder of horses,^[34] a mollusk,^[35] a niche,^[36] an opening rosebud,^[37] the point of a plow^[38] —this last an interesting reversal based on the image of the plowshare penetrating the earth. The relation of numphe , clitoris, to pteruges , wings/labia, is shown by the name of a kind of bracken, the numphaia pteris , "nymph's wing," also known as thelupteris , "female wing"; by the name of the loose lapels on a seductively opening gown;^[39] and by the use of numphe as the name for bees in the larva stage just when they begin to open up and sprout wings.^[40]

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

[33] Rufus Onom . 42; Pollux 2.90; Hesychios.

[34] Hippiatr . 26

[35] Speusippos apud Ath. 3.105b.

[36] Kallixinos 2 (FHG III 55).

[37] Phot. Lexicon , s.v. numphai : "And they call the middle part of the female genitals the numphe ; also the barely opened buds of roses are numphai and newlywed maidens are numphai ." The equation of flowers and female genitals is ancient (Krinagoras AP 6.345; Achilles Tatius 2.1) and modern (art: Lippard, "Quite Contrary"; Dodson, "Liberating Masturbation"; Chicago, The Dinner Party and Through the Flower ; poetry: Lorde, "Love Poem"). Sappho appears to have made the equation of bride and roses explicit, according to Wirth.
I would not reject the suggestion that Sappho's feelings for Kleis, as imagined in fr. 132, were given a consciously lesbian coloring: "I have a beautiful child, her shape is like that of golden flowers , beloved Kleis; in her place I would not ... all Lydia nor lovely.... "Indeed, taking it a step further, this "child" (pais ) may be simply another metaphor for clitoris (Kleis/kleitoris ). The biographical tradition that regards Kleis as the name of Sappho's daughter and mother may be (as so often) based on nothing more than a fact-hungry reading of her poems. (The same name occurs at fr. 98b.1.) On flowers and fruit see Stehle, "Retreat from the Male."

[38] Pollux 1.25.2; Proklos ad Hes. Op . 425.

[39] Pollux 755, 62, 66 (= Ar. Thesm. Deut . fr. 325 OCT).

[40] Arist. HA 551b2-4; Pilot. Lexikon , s.v. numphai ; Pliny NH 11.48.

[41] For the connection of Nymphs to marriage and birth see Ballentine, "Some Phases of the Cult of the Nymphs."

[42] See Kirk, "A, Fragment of Sappho Reinterpreted"; Killeen, "Sappho Fr. 111"; and Lanata, "Sul linguaggio amoroso," who suggests that ft. 121 may be "una variazione scherzosa nel nota fr. 105" (66).

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

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

Fragment 105a, spoken of a bride in the course of a wedding song, is a sexual image. We can gather this sense not only from the general erotic meaning of "apples" but from the location of the solitary apple high up on the bare branches of a tree,^[48] and from its sweetness and color. The verb , "grow red," and its cognates are used of blood or other red liquid appearing on the surface of an object that is painted or stained or when the skin suffuses with blood.^[49] The vocabulary and phrasing of this fragment reveal much more than a sexual metaphor, however; they contain a delicate and reverential attitude to the exclusive presence-and-absence of women in the world of men. Demetrios elsewhere (148) speaks of the graceful naïveté of Sappho's self-correction, as if it were no more than a charming touch of folk speech when twice in these lines she changes her mind, varying

[43] Foster, "Notes on the Symbolism of the Apple"; McCartney, "How the Apple Became the Token of Love"; Trümpf, "Kydonische Äpfel"; Lugauer, "Untersuchungen zur Symbolik des Apfels"; Littlewood, "The Symbolism of the Apple"; Kakridis, "Une Pomme Mordue"; POxy . 2637 fr. 25.6; Abbott, Macedonian Folklore 147 f., 170, 177.

[44] Theophr. Hist. Pl . 6.6.6.

[45] Rufus Onom . 64; Galen de usu partium 15.3: "The part called numpha gives the same sort of protection to the uteri that the uvula gives to the pharynx, for it covers the orifice of their neck by coming down into the female pudendum and keeps it from being chilled." Sappho's fr. 4^[2] , on the warmth afforded by enfolding wings (ptera ), may be read of labia as well as of birds.

[48] "In other parts (of Macedonia) ..., especially among the Wallachs, a pole with an apple on top and a white kerchief streaming from it ... is carried by a kilted youth in front of the wedding procession" (Abbott, Macedonian Folklore 172).

[49] Hippocrates Epid . 2.3.1, Moth Sacr . 15, Morb . 4.38 (of a blush).

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

Revision of myth is combined with a sexual image in fragment 166: , "They do say that once upon a time Leda found an egg hidden in the hyacinth." As the traditional denigration of Helen was revised in poem 16, so the traditional story of Helen's mother is told anew. Leda was not the victim of Zeus's rape who afterward laid Helen in an egg; rather she discovered a mysterious egg hidden inside the frilly blossoms of a hyacinth stem, or (better) in a bed of hyacinths when she parted the petals and looked under the leaves. The egg discovered there is

(1) a clitoris hidden under labia

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

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

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

for," "I search out by feeling" It is used of Odysseus feeling the flesh of Polyphemos's stomach for a vital spot to thrust in his sword (Od . 9.302), of animals searching through dense thickets for warm hiding places (Hes. Op . 529-33), of enemy soldiers searching through the luxurious thicket for the hidden Odysseus (Od . 14.356), of Demeter searching high and low for her daughter (h. Hom. Cer . 2.44), of people searching for Poseidon's lover Pelops (Pind. Ol . 1.46). The contexts of this verb are not just similar by accident: maiomai means more than "search for," it means "ferret out," especially in dense thickets where an animal or person might be lurking. In view of the consistency of connotations for this verb there is no reason to posit a shifted usage in Sappho 36, as the lexicon of Liddell, Scott, and Jones does. As these lexicographers read it, Sappho's words are redundant— "I desire you and I desire you." Rather they mean "I desire and I search out." I would like to include the physical sense of feeling carefully for hidden things or hiding places.^[52] In the poetic verb maiomai there is a physical dimension to the expression of mutual passion and exploration. Desire and touching occur together as two aspects of the same experience: touching is touching-with-desire, desire is desire-with-touching.

The same dictionary that decrees a special meaning for maiomai when Sappho uses it invents an Aeolic word (B) , "I walk," to reduce the erotic meaning of a Lesbian fragment of uncertain authorship, Incert. 16: "The women of Krete once danced thus—rhythmically with soft feet around the desirable altar, exploring the tender, pliant flower of the lawn." is a recognized Aeolic equivalent of , akin to . The meanings "ferret out," "search through undergrowth," "beat the thickets looking for game," "feel carefully" seem to me quite in place. Appealing to a long tradition, Sappho (whom I take to be the author) remarks that the sexual dancing of women, the sensuous circling of moving hands and feet around the erotic altar and combing through the tender valleys, is not only current practice but was known long ago in Krete.

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

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

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

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

Poem 2 uses sacral language to describe a paradisal place^[55] which Aphrodite visits:

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

[53] West, "Burning Sappho" 322.

[54] Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 83.

[55] Turyn, "The Sapphic Ostracon."

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

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

[56] Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 36.

[57] Lasserre, "Ornements érotiques"; Hallett, "Sappho and Her Social Context." "Sarebbe augurabile che nelle allusioni all'amore saffico cadesse in disuso la sgradita defmizione di 'turpe amore' inventata da un moralismo se non altro anacronistico" (Gentili, "La veneranda Saffo" 48 n. 55). Stehle, "Romantic Sensuality, Poetic Sense," is excellent.

[58] Late Greek rhetoric maintains the tradition of praising a public official at a ceremonial event by a declaration of love. Himerios (48) and Thernistios (13) tell their audiences that the honored official is their boyfriend.

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

[59] "Women who love women, who choose women to nurture and support and create a living environment in which to work creatively and independently, are lesbians" (B. Cook, "'Women Alone Stir My Imagination'" 738).