PART III
RITUAL AND SOCIAL CONTEXT
Seven
Sappho's Group: An Initiation into Womanhood
Claude Calame
1. The "Circle" of Sappho as an Institution
With the model of the Hellenistic cult groups in mind, many modern scholars have decided that Sappho possessed a thiasos on Lesbos in the traditional sense of the term. Indications of this are very tenuous and the word is never used in connection with Sappho, so it seems more prudent to speak with Merkelbach of the Kreis or Lesbian "circle" of Sappho or, in an even more neutral mode, of her group.[1] Nevertheless, it is possible to see through these indications together with some fragments of the poet herself what an association of women at the end of the seventh century could be; the evidence also points to other groups of the same type, of interest as points of comparison with the Spartan educational system for women. The most significant fragment speaks of a moisopolon oikia , a house of women dedicated to the Muses. The term mousopolos could have the institutional meaning here that it certainly has in a Boiotian inscription dating perhaps from the second century B.C.E ., in which the actors in a theatrical troupe are described.[2]
This essay was originally published in slightly different form in the English translation of Les chœurs, Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece: Their Morphology, Religious and Social Function , translated by Janice Orion and Derek Collins (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994).
[1] See Merkelbach, "Sappho und ihr Kreis" 4 with n. 1, who summarizes the theses of his predecessors, as also West, "Burning Sappho" 324 ff.; Lasserre, Sappho 114 ff.; and De Martino, "Appunti" 271. I would like to thank A. Lardinois and B. Zweig for their useful remarks.
[2] Sappho fr. 150 Voight (V.); IG 7.2484. See Poland, Geschichte des griechischen Vereinswesens 206 f., and Lanata, "Sul linguaggio amoroso" 67; in Sappho's fragment, oikiai , metrically awkward, is a gloss that has slipped into the line in the place of a probable domoi . For other indications that could refer to the existence of the thiasos of Sappho, see Treu, "Neues über Sappho" 10 ff., and "Sappho," PW, suppl. 11:1228, 1325 f.
Sappho's "house" or group, like most of the female choruses of the archaic period, was composed of young gifts and, beside the epithalamia themselves, were probably composed for wedding ceremonies; her poems mostly speak of parthenoi, korai , or paides .[3] Indirect testimony defines the bonds linking the girls with the poet with the terms hetairai (philai ) and mathetriai .[4] The first term contains the semantic feature "companionship" and is used not only by the indirect tradition but also by Sappho herself when she speaks of her own companions.[5] Athenaeus cites the fragment in which the term appears and explains that the meaning as used by Sappho is different from the more common one of "hetaira"; in Sappho's meaning, it is employed when women or girls talk of their most intimate friends (sunetheis kai philas ). Semantic ambiguities of this type have probably led to the tradition that makes of Sappho a porne gune , a woman of doubtful morals.[6] The second term and its implications will be examined further, emphasizing the pedagogical element in these bonds of friendship and companionship.
There is a probable hint of the institutional base of these relationships in a verse of the famous "Ode to Aphrodite." The use in the same context of the term adikein , "to commit an injustice," and philotes , "friendship based on mutual confidence," indicates that the rupture by one of the members of Sappho's circle of the bonds of loving friendship was felt as a juridical violation of the rules. The wrong committed on the person of Sappho at the emotional level was made worse by the injustice committed with regard to the institutional foundation of their relationship. To betray Sappho was not only to betray the intimate and reciprocal relationship of philia the poetess was setting up with the girls of her group, but it meant also to break the bonds sanctioned by a contract.[7]
[3] Parthenos: frs. 17.14, 27.10, 30.2, 153 V., etc.; kore : frs. 108, 140 V.; pais : frs. 49.2 (Atthis), 58.11 V., etc. See now the detailed study of Lardinois, "Subject and Circumstance" 65 ff. The term gune is used only in frs. 44, 15, 31 (description of the wedding of Hektor and Andromache), and 96.6 f. V. (poem addressed to a young Lydian girl who is no longer in Sappho's circle).
[4] Suda under Sappho (S 107 Adler) = test. 253 V. (see Ael. VH 12.19 = test. 256 V.).
[5] Sappho fr. 160.1 V. = Ath. 13.571c-d. See frs. 142, 126 V. with Lanata, "Sul linguaggio amoroso" 66 f. The use of the term hetaira has led some interpreters to compare Sappho's group with the political hetaireia Alcaeus was animating at the same time at Mytilene (Trümpf, "Über das Trinken" 141 ff.; Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 209), and this hypothesis has been now put forward by Parker, "Sappho Schoolmistress" 341 f.; but Sappho's dancing companions are not represented as revelers at the banquet!
[6] Sappho test. 261, 262 V.; on this tradition, see below, § 3.
[7] Sappho fr. 1.18 V. See Rivier, "Observations sur Sappho" 84 ff.; Carson [Giacomelli], "The Justice of Aphrodite" 226 ff.; and Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 254 ff. The bonds of friendship within the Sapphic circle were combined with homoerotic relationships: see below, § 3, and now Calame, I Greci 17 f., 72 f.
These indications, to which is added the choreographic and musical activity evidenced in most of Sappho's fragments, show structures in the Lesbos circle analogous to those characteristic of the female lyric chorus: young girls, bound to the one who leads them by ties expressed in the term hetaira , perform together dances and songs. This situation is described in the epigram of the Palatine Anthology in which young Lesbians, under the leadership of Sappho, form a chorus in honor of Hera.[8] Philostratos also sees a choral image of this type when a picture of young girls (korai ) singing round the statue of Aphrodite recalls for him the figure of Sappho.[9] These girls, Philostratos explains, are led (agei ) by a khoregos designated as didaskalos , still young, who beats the rhythm while the adolescents (paides ) sing the praises of the goddess; by marking the beat, the khoregos indicates to the young girls the right moment for beginning the song. It is unnecessary to point out the presence of the typically choral semantic features of "leading" and "beginning" in this scene described by Philostratos.
Sappho was not the only woman in Lesbos at the end of the seventh century to have a circle of young gifts about her. She had two rivals in the persons of Andromeda and Gorgo.[10] A fragment of commentary on papyrus tells us that the same relations existed between Gorgo and her companions as between Sappho and her pupils.[11] These relations are referred to by the term sunzux , which means, literally, the one who finds himself or herself under the same yoke. The use of this term by the tragedians to refer to the spouse in a matrimonial context has been cited as proof of marriagelike bonds between the members of the group and its leader.[12] The plurality of these bonds within a circle and the frequent use of the term suzugos as a synonym for hetairos , the companion, suggest that this denomination is the expression of the relationship of "companionship" that, independent of any matrimonial meaning, unites the members with the khoregos in Gorgo's circle as in the
[8] AP 9.189. The word choros appears only once, it is true, in the fragments we have of Sappho: fr. 70.10 V. It is clear that the classical distinction between monodic poetry and choral poetry, which places Sappho's compositions under the category of monodies, does not correspond to reality: on this subject see Calame, L es chœurs 1:126 f. with n. 171, and, for Sappho specifically, Lardinois, "Subject and Gircumstance" 73 ff., and "Who Sang"; see also Greene, "Apostrophe and Women's Erotics."
[9] Philostr. Imag . 2.1.1 ff. = Sappho test. 217 V.
[10] Max. Tyr. 18.9 = Sappho test. 219 V.; see frs. 57, 131, 144 V. Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 133 ff., recognizes the existence of rivals and friends of Sappho, but denies their relations were other than personal, thus denying any official or professional reasons for these bonds; on another rival circle, see perhaps fr. 71 V.
[11] Sappho fr. 213 V.
[12] Gentili, Poesia e pubblico 106 f.; to the parallels cited by Gentili can be added the existence of a Hera Syzygia: see Stob. 2.7.3 . On this subject see Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 144 n. 1, and West, "Burning Sappho" 320.
lyric chorus.[13] I shall address later the sexual form which these relationships could take.
A late testimonium by Philostratos, probably not very dependable, reports that a certain Damophyle of Pamphilia had composed for young girls (parthenous ) love poems (erotika ) and also hymns to Artemis Pergaia.[14] Even if Damophyle is difficult to situate historically, it is interesting to note that, again according to Philostratos, this unknown poet passed as a pupil of Sappho, on whose musical activity she modeled herself; consequently the mention is an indirect witness of Sappho's activity, and it is significant that the author used the word "disciple" (homiletria ) for the girls who sang the compositions of the supposed Damophyle. The term is similar to mathetria used in the Suda to denote the companions and pupils of Sappho.[15] My list would not be complete without Telesilla, the Argive poet of the beginning of the fifth century One of her poems is addressed to young girls (korai ) and tells the story of Artemis fleeing from Alpheios.[16] The adolescent connotations of this myth could point to the fragment as an extract from a partheneion, but no source explicitly says that Telesilla was the leader of a group of gifts.
[13] The commentary attributed to Gorgo two suzuges , namely Gongyla and Pleistodike (probably the girl called by Sappho Arkheanassa; see Treu, Sappho, griechisch und deutsch 165); Gongyla is herself named in the Suda under Sappho(S 107 Adler) = Sappho test. 253 V. as one of the pupils of Sappho; see Sappho fr. 95.4 and possibly fr. 22.10 V. As for Arkheanassa, she reappears in a fragment of Sappho unfortunately very mutilated: fr. 103 Ca, 4 V. It is thus possible that, like Atthis, Pleistodike and Gongyla had left Sappho's confraternity for the rival circle of Gorgo. On the use of suzugos , see Eur. IT 250 (Orestes suzugos of Pylades), Tro . 1001 (Pollux suzugos of Castor); see also HF 673 ff. (suzugia of the Muses and the Graces,) Ar. Plut . 945.
[14] Philostr. VA 1.30 = Sappho test. 223 V. See Treu, Sappho, griechisch und deutsch 237; see also, for Corinna, fr. 655. Page (P.) 10 ff. 8.
[15] It seems to have been a late tradition that made the poet Erinna a companion (hetaira ) of Sappho. See Suda under Erinna (E 521 Adler) = Sappho test. 257 V. (see also Eust. Il . 326.46 ff.); Donado, "Cronologia de Erinna" 349 ff., and Rauk, "Erinna's Distaff " 101 ff. See also AP 9.190 = Sappho test. 56 Gall., with AP 9.26 = Sappho test. 52 Gall., which names nine poetesses, the earthly incarnation of the Muses. Among them are also Telesilla and another supposed companion of Sappho, Nossis (AP 7.718) = Sappho test. 51 Gall.; she was actually an Alexandrian poet: see Skinner, "Sapphic Nossis" 5 ff. A women's thiasos serving Artemis at Gyzicus is mentioned in the Suda under Dolon (D 1345 Adler) = Ael. fr. 46 Hercher. On the mention of a relationship of "companionship" in an epigram about Erinna, see AP 7.710.7 f. = Erinna fr. 5.7 f. D. (sunetairis ). The companion of Erinna to whom this funeral epigram is dedicated was a newly married young woman; she had probably left Erinna's circle to be married before death struck: see again AP 7.712 = Erinna fr. 4 D. and fr. 1B.47 ff. D.; see Snyder, The Woman and the Lyre 86 ff.
[16] Telesilla fr. 717 Page (P.); see also fr. 720 E In "Auf den Spuren" 1 ff., Herzog thinks that the poet headed a thiasos dedicated to Apollo, but see Snyder, The Woman and the Lyre 59 ff., and Cavallini, "Erinna."
So several women poets, particularly in eastern Greece, gathered around them groups of girls who were both their pupils and their companions; under their direction these adolescents were musically active, often in a cult context, thus making their association into something very similar, if not identical, to the lyric chorus.
2. The Instruction Given in Sappho's Group
In Sappho's group, there is no doubt about the didactic relationship between the poet and her companions. For instance, speaking of the famous fragment in which Sappho tells the recipient of the poem that she will disappear and leave no trace in the memory of men if she has not taken part in the "roses of Pieria," in other words in the musical activity of Sappho's circle, Plutarch says that the woman addressed was among those who were amousai and amatheis , strangers to music and ignorant. It is not only significant that it is Plutarch, with his great interest in pedagogy, who quotes this fragment and who sees that Sappho's circle offered a form of instruction and education by frequenting the Muses. But it has to be pointed out that inside Sappho's group, the memorial function of poetry, current in archaic Greece, takes on a specific role: it is only through poetry itself that the beauty acquired through musical activity will gain a kind of afterlife and that the educated girl will keep it, despite the destructions of time, in the memory of the persons performing the poem that praises her.[17]
Other fragments by the Lesbian poet refer to this pedagogical aspect by characterizing young girls who were not in her circle but in a rival group or were about to join to her circle as ignorant and ungracious.[18] As I mentioned already, the biographical section of the Suda itself names three mathetriai , three pupils of Sappho, and the khoregos who conducts the young gifts as they sing for Aphrodite is called didaskalos , the mistress. This relationship between master and pupil is identical to that between the khoregos and the khoreutai , according to the lexicographers. Finally a new fragment of commentary on Sappho's poems clearly describes the poet in her role as educator (paideuousa ); the commentator adds that this education was not only for gifts of good family (tas aristas ) in Lesbos, but also those who came from Ionia.[19] But what was
[17] Sappho fr. 55 V.; see Plut. Mor . 646e-f and Stob. 3.4.12 (pros apaideuton gunaika ): on this subject see Snell, "Zur Soziologie des archaischen Griechentums" 54 ff. On the memorial function of Sappho's poems, see Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 277 ff., and Gentili, Poesia e pubblico 116 ff.
[18] Sappho frs. 49, 130.3 f., 57 V.
[19] Suda under Sappho (S 107 Adler) = Sappho test. 253 V.; see frs. 16, 15, 95.4 V.; Philostr. Imag . 2.11 = Sappho test. 217 V. See above, § 1; P. Colon. 5860 a, b = Sappho fr. S 261A P.; see Gronewald, "Fragmente" 114 ff.
the content of the education given by the poet as instructor to the young aristocratic gifts of her group?
If music seems to be the essence of the education Spartan gifts received in choruses led by poets such as Alcman, we must remember that neither music nor dance were ends in themselves in Greece; they are the means of communicating by performing and assimilating by mimesis a precise set of contents. By reciting the poems composed by their masters the poets , the khoreutai learn and internalize a series of myths and rules of behavior; moreover, archaic choral poetry has to be understood as a per-formative art, as a set of poems functioning as cult acts in precise ritual contexts. But examining the content of the musical instruction in a cultic context of performance leads to the question of its function, of its pragmatics: what was the aim of the instruction received in the chorus of young gifts? For what would this instruction prepare the chorus members?
As far as Sappho's group is concerned, we see with numerous interpreters of this poetry that most descriptions of the poet and her advice bear on the themes of feminine grace and beauty. The life of Sappho's companions unfolded almost completely under the sign of Aphrodite, in an atmosphere and in a setting represented on the mythical level by the famous gardens of the goddess.[20] From a pedagogical point of view, Sappho's circle looks like a sort of school for femininity destined to make the young pupils into accomplished women: through the performance of song, music, and cult act, they had lessons in comportment and elegance, reflected in the many descriptions of feminine adornment and attitudes in the fragments that we have by Sappho.[21]
So Atthis, according to the Suda one of Sappho's three dearest companions, was a very young and graceless child (smikra pals k'akharis ) before joining the group; two sources that cite the fragment specify that "graceless" in this context meant a girl not yet old enough to be married, not yet nubile.[22] Physical grace thus became the mark of nubility; by being in Sappho's chorus the young girl acquires the grace that will make her a beautiful woman, which in turn clears the way for marriage. Consequently, possessing kharis signifies gaining the status of adult and the possibility of being a wife, in the same way
[20] Sappho fr. 2 V. See Schadewaldt, Sappho 25 ff.; Merkelbach, "Sappho und ihr Kreis" 25 ff.; Lanata, "Sul linguaggio amoroso" 68 ff.; Barilier, "La figure d'Aphrodite" 27 ff.; Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 217 ff.; Gentili, Poesia e pubblico 115 ff.; and, specifically for the signification of the gardens, Calame, I Greci 132 ff.
[21] Sappho frs. 22.9 ff., 81.4 f., 94.12 ff. V., etc.
[22] Sappho fr. 49 V. See Plut. Mor . 751d (ten oupo gamon echousan horan ) and scholia Pind. Pyth . 2.42 (II, p. 44 Drachmann).
as "beauty" made the young followers of the cult of Helen at Therapne into women ready for marriage.
And when Andromeda, Sappho's rival, tries to take away young Atthis, the poet attacks her cruelly by describing her dressed as a peasant, a rustic (agroïotis ).[23] If "rustic" means simply an exterior lack of elegance, it nevertheless has an impact on the status of the woman described in this way. The status conferred on a girl by Sappho's education is therefore distinguished from the state of ignorance and uncouthness of the child without instruction or the protégée of one of Sappho's rivals, in the same way as "culture" differs from "nature." The education received in Sappho's circle moves the young gift from the uncouthness and lack of culture of early adolescence protected by Artemis to the condition of the educated woman capable of inspiring the love embodied by Aphrodite; it leads her from a state of savagery to civilization. If the companion of Atthis is described by Sappho when she returns to Lydia after her time in the group as shining among the women (gunaikessin : no longer among the gifts) of her region like the moon among the stars, it is because the education she has undergone on Lesbos has given her divine beauty, and that through the songs and dances (molpai ) performed by Atthis herself. The reference to Aphrodite, guessed at in the final mutilated verses of the poem, as well as the comparison with the moon with its connotations of bodily liquids and ripeness, suggests that the girl is now an accomplished woman, probably married.[24]
The education of Sappho in her group prepared young girls to be adult, married women by teaching feminine charm and beauty. The poet's connections with marriage are confirmed by the numerous fragments of epithalamia transmitted by quotations, or by a poem such as the one describing the wed-dang of Hektor and Andromache, which some interpreters would like to be itself an hymenaion.[25] This is apparent again in a passage by Himerius, who paraphrases a poem very certainly by Sappho and shows the poet herself preparing a nuptial chamber for the newly married couple;[26] young gifts are arranged there—probably gifts from Sappho's circle who form a chorus to celebrate the couple—and a statue of Aphrodite is brought along together
[23] Sappho fr. 57 V.; see fr. 131 as well as fr. 81 V.
[24] Sappho fr. 96 V., to be compared with fr. 55 V., where the girl who has not had her part of the roses of Pieria, in other words Sappho's education, will die unknown and undistinguished (aphanes ); on the connotations of the moon in this poem, see Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 304 ff.
[25] Sappho frs. 104-17 V.; on the epithalamia of Sappho see Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 72 ff., 112 ff.; Galame, Les chœurs 1:161 n. 230; and Lasserre, Sappho 17 ff. See fr. 44 V., with the interpretations given a. o. by Rösler, "Ein Gedicht" 275 ff., and summarized by Lasserre, Sappho 83 ff.
[26] Himer. Or . 9.4 = Sappho test. 194 V. On this subject see Meerwaldt, "Epithalamia" 19 ff.
with figures representing the Graces and a chorus of Erotes . The preparation of the nuptial chamber was preceded in Himerius's description by a celebration of rites in honor of Aphrodite (Aphrodites orgia, agonas ) during which Sappho herself sang to the sound of the lyre. Even if we cannot know exactly what these rites were, constant reference to the goddess of love shows that the ritual was under the same sign as the values taught by the poet. Thus the acquisition of these same abilities by Sappho's pupils was vindicated in the context of marriage. The education they received aimed at developing in adolescents all the qualities required in women—specifically, young wives. It concerned those aspects of marriage under Aphrodite's protection, namely sensuality and sexuality rather than conjugal fidelity and wife's tasks, which were under the domain of Hera and Demeter. However, this education was not addressed to the same public as the Spartan system of education. Sappho's circle welcomed young adolescents from different parts of Ionia, particularly Lydia, so its character was not strictly Lesbian. The education the girls received, in competition with rival groups such as that of Andromeda, was probably not obligatory. Sappho and her khoreutai may have taken part in the official religious life of the island, but the instructional activity of the poet seems not to have been included in the educational system legally subject to the political community of Lesbos. It would be misleading to compare Sappho's group to a real school, not to speak of a "Mädchenpensionat" or a "finishing school." Sappho herself is certainly not to be considered as a "schoolmistress."[27] If she gave through the performance of song and cult acts an education to the girls of her group, this education had an initiatic form and content: it was entirely ritualized. Moreover, Sappho made accomplished women out of her "pupils," but she did not have to make them perfect citizens. She had to initiate them, with the help of Aphrodite, to their gender role as wives of aristocratic families.
3. Sappho's Homoeroticism: the Initiatory Function
The homoerotic feelings expressed in Sappho's poems have been the object of much debate, which I shall not repeat here. From antiquity on they have been falsified by moralizing resulting from different social attitudes that were
[27] Through the notions of Kreis or thiasos , the qualification of Sappho's group as a "Mädchenpensionat" by U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf (in Die Griechische 41) had the long fortune that is outlined by Lasserre, Sappho 112 ff., and by Parker, "Sappho Schoolmistress" 313 ff. (with the justified criticisms by Lardinois, "Subject and Circumstance" 57 ff.); see also Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 211 ff., and Cantarella, Secondo natura 107 ff. See P. Colon. 5860 a, b = Sappho fr. S 261A P., and above.
more or less critical toward male and female "homosexuality" and imposed various aesthetic visions on Sappho's poetry.[28] It is difficult to deny, however, that the fragments evoking the power of Eros, to mention only those, refer to a real love that was physically consummated.[29]
It should be noted that the semantic features "companionship," "education," and homophilia are all found among the basic elements that make up Sappho's group.[30] The instruction leading to marriage given by Sappho has as its corollary the homoerotic relations between mistress and pupils. In comparison with the male educational system, Sappho's circle, however, offers a new problem in that these homoerotic bonds are not between an older individual and a younger one, but specifically between a woman and her group of young girls. And yet, if Sappho sometimes addresses all her companions (hetairais tais emais ), the relationships, as expressed in her poems, are nevertheless all individual. Sappho's love pains expressed in several of her poems are provoked by the absence of a single companion, whether Atthis, Anaktoria, or Gongyla; and Sappho asks Aphrodite for a single young girl to entrust her philotes to.[31] There seems to be a contradiction between these singular love protestations and the collective character of the education given to the girls in Sappho's circle. We must presume that only some of the gifts had a homoerotic relationship with the poet, while the other adolescents only participated by reciting the passionate poems addressed to the young lover.
[28] If Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 143 ff., expresses a certain skepticism toward the lacunae in our documentation concerning the reality of "sapphic love," for Marrou, Histoire de l'éducation 72; Schadewaldt, Sappho 98 ff.; Merkelbach, "Sappho und ihr Kreis" 7 (in spite of 3 n. 2), Lanata, "Sul linguaggio amoroso" 64; West, "Burning Sappho" 320 ff.; Dover, Greek Homosexuality 173 ff.; and Gentili, Poesia e pubblico 117 ff., the reality of Sapphic eros leaves no doubt. For a history of the image of Sappho's sexuality, see Lardinois, "Lesbian Sappho" 21 ff., and Paradiso, "Saffo" 41 ff.
[29] Sappho frs. 47, 130, 48, 49 V.; see also 1.19, 16.4, 94.21 ff. V. For the erotic meaning of the expression exies pothon in this last poem, see particularly Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 298, who points out as well the sexual meaning of the "sleep" in fr. 2.8 V. (pp. 270 ff.).
[30] The bonds between hetairai were placed under the sign of Aphrodite: Sappho frs. 142, 160, and 126 V., with Ath. 13.571c-d. The connection among education, homosexuality, and an association of companions is found in a gloss of Pollux (4.43 ff.) that makes the terms agelaioi, mathetai, hetairoi, choreutai , and sunerastai synonymous. See Lardinois, "Subject and Circumstance" 58 ff., against the arguments of Parker, "Sappho Schoolmistress" 341 ff., who makes the hetairai of Sappho the participants in a sympotic hetairia .
[31] Sappho frs. 160, 49, 131, 16.15, 94.4, 1.18 ff. V.; see Max. Tyr. 18.9 = test. 219 V. It is significant that in Sappho's life in the Suda under Sappho (S 107 Adler) = test. 253 V., Atthis is described as one of the hetairai philai , "the dear companions," while Anaktoria and Gongyla are called mathetriai , "pupils." Sappho's poems themselves show that the pupils are also her loved ones: see Marrou, Histoire de l'éducation 70 ff. Danielewicz, "Experience" 163, also sees a "didactic purpose" in Sappho's love for the girls in her circle; see as well Cantarella, Secondo natura 108 ff.
It was probably the same in Gorgo's circle, in which the homoerotic bond defined by the term sunzux existed, possibly successively, between Gorgo and two girls, Gongyla and Pleistodike.[32]
The Cretan customs for the boys offer a striking parallel, since the eromenos is not alone when he goes away from the city with his erastes but is generally accompanied by his friends who take part in the rite of abducting the adolescent, go hunting, then celebrate the final banquet at the confusion of their expedition into the wilderness with the lover and his beloved; these same friends share the expenses of the gifts given to the eromenos at the end of the initiation and join with him in the sacrifice of the ox to Zeus.[33] These friends of the eromenos have no sexual contact with an erastes but have followed the same itinerary of initiation as their companion. Their participation in the sacrifice to Zeus certainly shows that they too have taken the step that leads to adulthood.
The reality of Sappho's homoerotic feelings and their expression in her love for a young gift explain how a scholar like Devereux can see in the famous fragment 31 V. the symptoms of an authentic crisis of "homosexual" anxiety.[34] He recognizes that the clinical expression of homosexuality is not exclusive of its sociological aspect. With Sappho, it is true that we seem to have a case in which homoerotic love has been so internalized that it "short-circuits" any heterosexual feeling. Hence, maybe, our own awareness when reading the poems of an internal vibration that goes beyond the expression in traditional forms of a homoeroticism entirely conforming to its educational function. This supposed extra dimension does not, however, contradict in any way the institutional reality of the circle and the pedagogical role of the relations within it: for Sappho, the ritual and initiatory "pseudo-homosexuality" could simply become an example of what we call homosexuality. Its educational and social function stays the same; its expression in poetry is inspired by a sensibility that finds no balance in a heterosexual life. And even this conclusion could be modified since Sappho, as she herself says, had a daughter and, unless her marriage with Cercylas and her love for Phaon
[32] Sappho fr. 213 V.; see above n. 13.
[33] Strabo 10.4.21 = Ephor. FGrH 70 F 149.21. See Calame, Les chœurs 1:421 ff.
[34] Devereux, "The Nature of Sappho's Seizure" 17 ff. Sappho's anxiety attack is not due to a sudden awaxeness of a socially sanctioned homosexuality, as Manieri, "Saffo" 44 ff., supposes, who in any case is wrong to attribute to Devereux such an interpretation of fr. 31 V. and who gives no solution to the problem posed by the particular content of this fragment; Sappho's crisis was probably provoked by seeing her masculine rival for whom she cannot be a substitute for the girl (cf. Devereux 22). Privitera, "Ambiguità antitesi" 37 ff., is right in saying that Sappho's symptoms are the sign of her fear when she realizes her love is hopeless and will never be returned; see also Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 229 ff., and Di Benedetto, "Intorno al linguaggio" 145 ff.
were merely the fantasies of the ancient biographers, she must have crossed the threshold of adult life marked in all Greece by marriage.[35]
I would like to take as proof of the educational and social role of Sappho's homophilia the fact that an adolescent's time in the poet's circle was a transitory step in a process. Most of the fragments of any length that have come down to us contain the memories of girls who returned to their native lands, most often Asia Minor, or left Sappho for a rival school.[36] As I have said, the education in Sappho's circle consisted of preparation for marriage through a series of rites, dances, and songs, mainly dedicated to Aphrodite. We have no definite indication about it. But, independently of any gender distinction, it is probable that some of these rites, as for the boys at Thebes and perhaps at Thera too, consecrated the homoerotic bonds between lover and beloved by means of a sexual initiation appropriate for adolescents with the objective of teaching the girl the values of adult "heterosexuality." The temporary and unreliable character of these bonds may provoke in a homosexually oriented person states of anxiety and depression like those that can probably be traced in almost all Sappho's poems of remembering. This would explain the peculiar and personal feminine tone often felt in the modern reading of Sappho's poetry.
Thus the ability of archaic lyric poetry to express the individual collectively explains how a poem by Sappho can express a personal experience true only for herself and one of her companions but can be accepted, recited, and even reperformed by all the gifts in her circle as both a lived and paradigmatic experience. Moreover the language used by Sappho can communicate collectively and can evoke a common system of representations so that all the pupils of the group can have the impression of being participants in the propaedeutic and initiative homoerotic bonds actually experienced by only one of them.
The conventional, formulaic character of the language infuses with life the poem performed by the group, rather than emptying it of meaning. If it seems to readers of Pindar or Ibycus that the homoerotic feelings expressed are a convention for praising the merits of a young man, they may nevertheless have originated in real feelings or in a real experience, feelings and experience that can be repeated through the reperformance of the poem. Moreover it
[35] Sappho frs. 98b, 132 V. See POxy . 1800, fr. 1.14 = test. 252 V., Suda under Sappho (S 107 Adler) = test. 253 V.; see also test. 219 V. On the legend of the loves of Sappho and Phaon, see test. 211 V. and Nagy, Greek Mythology 223 ff. For the controversy on the nature of Sappho's homoerotic feelings, see Hallett, "Sappho and Her Social Context" ("public, rather personal, statements"), and Stigers, "Romantic Sensuality, Poetic Sense" (a specific feminine form of sensibility); see also Winkler, "Gardens of Nymphs" 89ff.
[36] Sappho frs. 16.15, 94.2 ff., 96, 131 V.; see West, "Burning Sappho" 318 ff.
is surprising to notice that, although the education received by the boys and the girls through the choral performances is differentiated and prepares them for different gender roles, nevertheless the language used to express the homoerotic relationships underlying this ritual formation is basically the same. This kind of reciprocity between the linguistic practice of boys and girls as well as between what an adult can express to an adolescent (Sappho) or a group of girls to an older one (Alcman) is probably typical of a ritual and collective poetry with an educational purpose.
Eight
Sappho and Her Social Context: Sense and Sensuality
Judith P. Hallett
The poetic personality of Sappho and the poetic phenomenon of Sappho have proven difficult for both ancients and moderns to understand. Later generations of ancients—Greeks of the fourth century B.C.E . and thereafter, Romans, and Byzantines—were unaccustomed to supreme lyric talent in a woman who wrote about seemingly private passions. Several ancient sources thus class the late seventh-/early-sixth-century B.C.E . Sappho not among the leading male poets of her time, as the ninth great Greek lyric genius, but as tenth of the female Muses.[1] In so doing, they may have suggested that she had not earned literary stature through toil and competition, as did the men of her field (and, according to some, as had the female poet Corinna). But by calling her a Muse they ranked her an inspired and immortal figure to whom poetic self-expression and success came
An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages meeting, Boston, 24 November 1973. The translations that I wrote for that occasion and several of the major points I emphasized in the talk have since been incorporated into Pomeroy, Goddesses 53-55. Other earlier versions were delivered at Haverford College, Tufts University, and Boston University. I should also like to thank Dorothea Wender and Sheila Dickison for encouraging this project from the very start; Sir Kenneth Dover for sharing his ideas and providing me with advance access to his book on Greek homosexuality; Norman Austin and Ernst Badian for their invaluable comments and suggestions; and Catherine R. Stimpson, Froma Zeitlin, and Lydia Kirsopp Lake for their helpful criticism. This essay was originally published in slightly different form as "Sappho and Her Social Context: Sense and Sensuality," Signs 4 (1979) 447-64.
[1] See AP 7.14, 9.66, and 9.571: "Sappho is not the ninth of men, but is inscribed as the tenth Muse among the lovely Muses" (by the second-century B.C.E . poet Antipater of Sidon), as well as AP 9.506 (by Plato): see also Plut. Amat . 18 for the view of Sappho as the tenth Muse. Various, and later, ancient sources do, however, list Sappho among the nine great Greek lyric poets—for example Gell. NA 19.3 and Ath. 14.639e.
naturally.[2] Various works from the fourth century onward also represent Sappho as a mythic heroine, driven by her love for a younger man, Phaon, to a dramatic suicide.[3]
The ancients' belief in Sappho's superiority was so strong that it prevented them from ascribing to her conduct which, by the third century B.C.E ., was viewed as disgraceful for a female.[4] Although a number acknowledge the existence of rumors that she participated, physically, in homosexual activity, none lends credence to the charge. Our earliest such source, a biography from the Hellenistic period (third/second centuries B.C.E .), remarks that "she has been accused by a few of being undisciplined and sexually involved with women."[5] In the fifteenth of Ovid's Heroides , a fictive epistle from Sappho to Phaon, she is portrayed as discomfited by allegations that she enjoyed erotic attachments with other women; at line 201 she complains that her love for the women of her native Lesbos has made her infamous.[6] A scholiast to Horace (Ep . 1.19.28) accounts for the application of the epithet mascula to Sappho by asserting that she "is maligned as having been a tribade."[7] And the first biographical entry on Sappho in the tenth-century C.E . lexicon known as the Suda simply states that "she was slanderously accused of shameful intimacy with certain of her female pupils."[8]
[2] For the Muses' supposed ease at poetic creation, see Hes. Theog . 75-103. On the poetic competitions between male artists, see, for example, Hes. Op . 654 ff.; on the tradition of Corinna's competition with Pindar, see, e.g., Plut. De glor. Ath . 4.347 ff. and Paus. 9.22.3.
[3] See, e.g., Men. fr. 258; Ovid Her . 15; Ath. 13.596b; the Suda , S.V . "Sappho" (b ) and "Phaon." Sappho's suicidal leap is also depicted on the apse of the first-century C.E . underground basilica found in 1917 at Rome's Porta Maggiore. On Sappho's image in Greek literature of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E . see also Dover, Greek Homosexuality 174.
[4] See Dover, Greek Homosexuality 182. Dover suggests that Hellenistic attitudes toward female sexuality were influenced by those of classical Athens, which regarded the practice as a taboo subject.
[5] POxy XV 1800, fr. 1 col. 1.16 ff.; for its date, see Dover, Greek Homosexuality 174.
[6] Ovid Tr . 2.365, "Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas?" though often cited as evidence for Sappho's homosexuality, probably means that Sappho taught girls to love and belongs to a tradition, discussed by Dover, Greek Homosexuality 174-75, of Sappho as an instructor of girls.
[7] Hor. Carm . 2.13.24-25 "querentem/Sappho puellis de popularibus," cited by Dover, Greek Homosexuality 174, as a source for Sappho's homosexuality, merely refers to Sappho's plaintive verses about the girls of her native Lesbos and does not mention her sexual conduct as such.
[8] A remark by the fourth-century C.E . Greek rhetorician Themistius (p. xiii; p. 170 D.), to the effect that Sappho lavished praise on her paidika , may also deserve mention (this word is a standard Greek term for the youthful beloved in a male homosexual union). Yet as Themistius is only talking about verbal expressions of passion, his statement cannot truly be regarded as testimony to Sappho's sexual habits.
The shamefulness which these writers impute to women's participation in homosexual acts apparently explains their unanimous suspension of belief where Sappho's alleged practices are concerned. Three of these sources— the Hellenistic biography, the first-century B.C.E . Ovidian epistle, and the entry in the Suda —oncomitantly insist that Sappho's primary erotic allegiances were heterosexual, citing as evidence that she was infatuated with Phaon, was married, and had a daughter.[9] By comparison, the homosexual liaisons attributed to the male poets of Sappho's time do not meet with similar disbelief or disapproval. A number of these same authorities refer to the homosexual involvements of Greek male lyric poets as established facts; like virtually all ancient testimony on the lives of Greek poets, they do not give the impression that male pederasty, at least for the "active" partner, was thought cause for shame.[10] The Suda 's comment on Anacreon—"his life was spent on sexual relationships with boys and women, and on poems"—stands in sharp contrast to its words on Sappho. These ancient sources do not even entertain the notion that Sappho was, as they suggest Anacreon may have been, a well-adjusted bisexual. Rather than sanction female homosexual activity they retreat to incredulity.
Modern critics share the ancients' view of Sappho as an extraordinary individual. Yet they do not idealize her as a mythic figure but reckon her a flesh-and-blood human being. Recent scholars even assume that Sappho's homosexuality is an ascertained, or at least ascertainable, fact and try to come to terms with her homoeroticism instead of analyzing and appreciating her poetry. A 1966 essay typifies the customary approach. It claims to focus on the two special difficulties confronting students of Sappho's fragmentary remains: "the moral question" (i.e., involving "the view of Sappho as a homosexual") and the "aesthetic question" ("is Sappho worth reading?").[11] In a 1974 book on Greek lyric poetry, the chapter on Sappho begins by labeling as "crucial" her "relationship to her friends," examines whether the tradition of her homosexuality is a "correct inference," devotes its discussion of her most famous verses, fragment 31 Lobel-Page (L.-P.), to the obvious fact that Sappho is apparently describing her physical response to the attractions of another woman, and finally calls attention to Sappho's "disappointing aspects" while ostensibly summarizing the distinctive features of her poetry.[12]
[9] POxy . XV, 1800 fr. 1 col. 1.14-16 alleges that she had a daughter; Her . 15 depicts Sappho as enraptured with Phaon and hence a converted, if not a diehard, lover of men; the Suda speaks of her husband, Cercylus of Andros, as well as her daughter.
[10] Passive homosexual behavior by a man no longer a youth was, of course, another matter. See Henderson, The Maculate Muse 209 ff., on the abuse of pathics—"evidently the most risible type of homosexual"—in Greek comedy.
[11] Davison, "Sappho," in From Archilochus to Pindar 287.
[12] Kirkwood, Early Greek Monody 101 ff.
Fragment 31 L.-P. has, of late, even undergone dissection as a clinical record of acute symptoms suffered by a "masculine lesbian" during an anxiety attack.[13]
Modern criticism of supposedly homosexual, or at least bisexual, Greek male lyric poets, however, does not reflect the same obsession with their sexual preferences to the neglect of their poetry. The same critical study of Greek lyric poetry which accords key importance to the nature of Sappho's relationship with her friends relegates the topic on Anacreon's sexual tastes to a few brief comments, and carefully scrutinizes several of his erotic fragments without agonizing over the gender of their dramatis personae .[14] (Interestingly, the one possible reference to homosexuality in the poems of Anacreon which seems to trouble commentators most [fr. 358.5-8 Page (P.)] involves female homosexual behavior: his portrayal of a girl from Lesbos who ignores him to gape pros allen tina , "after another person [or thing] of feminine gender." Several scholars have taken elaborate pains to prove that Anacreon is not characterizing the gift as homosexual in her preferences.)[15] As disturbing as many moderns, nurtured on Judaeo-Christian values, find the idea of male homosexuality, they still seem less disturbed by unmistakable references to male homoeroticism than by possible allusions to its female equivalent. They are also far better able to appreciate works containing male homoeroticism as literary art.
The negative reaction which female homosexuality has aroused from the Hellenistic period onward has, it would seem, caused Sappho to receive different (and increasingly inequitable) treatment from that given Greek male lyric poets. It is my view, however, that the sensual conduct in which the first-person speaker of Sappho's verses often engages With other women may not truly merit the label of "female homosexuality" at all. It is also my thesis that Sappho should not be read merely as a confessional poet who voices private feelings to the female objects of her desire. Rather, I believe that she should be regarded primarily as a poet With an important social purpose and public function: that of instilling sensual awareness and sexual self-esteem and of facilitating role adjustment in young females coming of age in a sexually segregated society. Furthermore, I believe that she should be regarded as an artist voicing sentiments which need not be her own. I should like to establish the validity of this thesis through an examination of Sappho in her social context. For such an examination demonstrates that her concerns were shared by other individuals, and entire institutions, in
[13] Devereux, "The Nature of Sappho's Seizure."
[14] Kirkwood, Early Greek Monody 150 ff.
[15] See, for example, in English-language publications alone, Wigodsky, "Anacreon and the Girl from Lesbos" 109; Davison, "Sappho" 247-55; West, "Melica" 205-15. See also Dover, Greek Homosexuality 180.
the archaic and classical Greek world, and that these concerns adhere to previously established literary tradition.
Revulsion at female homosexuality has, as I have noted, largely inspired past efforts to discredit belief in Sappho's physical homoeroticism.[16] Yet the view that Sappho not merely indulged in, but exhibited an exclusive preference for, homosexual acts has only gained widespread currency in the past few years. Indeed, the modern sense of the words "Sapphic" and "Lesbian" is largely responsible for popularizing the view of Sappho as an exclusive, and physically practicing, homosexual. The terms "Sapphism," "sapphist," and "sapphic" were formally introduced into English only in the last decade of the nineteenth century, when British medical authorities eagerly labeled what they judged to be psychopathological behavior exhibited by the licentious French and accepted the tradition about Sappho's sexual preferences which was accredited in fin de siècle France.[17] The more colloquial word "Lesbian" has a more interesting history. In fifth-century B.C.E . Greek comedy the verb lesbi[a]zein , "to act like one from Lesbos," serves to denote fellatio performed by females, probably because of the renown of Sappho's island women for sensual, although apparently heterosexual, expertise.[18] Both the first-century B.C.E . Roman poet Catullus and his first-century C.E . imitator Martial attribute to women whom they call "Lesbia" varied exploits of a sexual, but
[16] See, for example, Robinson, Sappho and Her Influence 43-44, who denies with fervency that "Sappho is a woman who has given herself up to unnatural and inordinate practices which defy the moral instinct and ... harden and petrify the soul."
[17] "Sapphism," according to the Oxford English Dictionary , first appears in Billings National Medical Dictionary of 1890; a June 1901 issue of the British medical journal Lancet noted that "Sapphism" and other vices have been treated in French but not yet in English novels. The French view of Sappho as a homosexual owes much of its popularity to the 1895 publication of Pierre Loüys's Songs of Bilitis . These—closely following upon Loüys's translation of Lucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans —purported to be translations of an ancient Greek manuscript, the autobiography of a peasant gift who had belonged to Sappho's homosexual circle and later became a temple prostitute. They were immediately denounced as a forgery by the great scholar U. yon Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who vehemently denied the possibility of Sappho's homosexuality on the grounds that she was "an honorable lady, wife, and mother" (Wilamowitz's 1896 review was also reprinted in his Sappho und Simonides ). Yet Wilamowitz's crusade does not seem to have convinced Marcel Proust. In A la recherche du temps perdu , the narrator's discovery that Albertine and her girl friends are practicing homosexuals coincides with his remark that she would be "like Sappho" if she were to drown by leaping into the sea (see Kostis, "Albertine" 125-35).
[18] For lesbiazein , see Ar. Vesp . 1346, Ran . 1308, Eccl 920; cf. also Lucian Pseudologista 128. For the sexual image of Lesbian women, see Lucian Dial. Meret . 5 and Dover, Greek Homosexuality 182-84.
never a homosexual, nature; the former in poem 51, a translation of Sappho fragment 31 L.-P., and the latter at 2.50, a pasquinade on female fellatio. According to standard reference works, the English adjective "Lesbian" denoted intensely erotic, hetero- more than homoerotic, individuals and feelings until only a few decades ago.[19] But its medical and "underground" meaning, first attested in 1890, has gradually taken over as the existence of female homosexual liaisons has become more widely acknowledged among the educated, Anglo-American public.[20]
Whatever the history of the terms may be, the prevalent modern impression that Sappho was a Lesbian, that she herself took part in homosexual practices, is not based on ancient testimony. As we have seen, the ancient sources who as much as mention Sappho's reputation for physical homoerotic involvement (the earliest of which postdates her lifetime by at least 300 years) describe this reputation as nothing more than a wholly disgraceful accusation. This denial is all the more noteworthy when compared with other comments about female homosexual relations in classical antiquity. At 1916 of the Symposium —a work which precedes Sappho's Hellenistic biography by over a century—Plato's Aristophanes speaks matter-of-factly of women who are attracted to other women, the hetairistriai : these, he claims, are halves of an originally all-female whore, and analogous to men who love other males.[21] A poem written over 400 years later by the Roman epigrammatist Martial graphically lampoons a masculine female homosexual. In his Lift of Lycurgus , the second-century C.E . Greek writer Plutarch ascribed homoerotic liaisons to the women of archaic Sparta, Sappho's
[19] Webster's New International Dictionary , 3rd ed., still gives "erotic" as the chief nongeographic meaning of "Lesbian," citing "Lesbianism" in the sense of "female homosexuality" as "medical term." The Oxford English Dictionary does not even give a sexual meaning for the word "Lesbian." And both Klein, Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary 418, and the Random House Dictionary of the English Language , S.V . "Lesbian," still list the meaning "erotic" ahead of "Pertaining to female homosexuality."
[20] See the 1976 supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary , S.V . "Lesbian": it also notes that an 1892 Dictionary of Psychological Medicine and James Joyce's 1922 Ulysses use the adjective "lesbic" for "female homosexual," no doubt because "Lesbian" carried quite different connotations at that time.
[21] As Dover, Greek Homosexuality 172, remarks, however, this is the only extant reference to female homosexuality in classic Attic literature; it is also unclear to him whether or not the word hetairistria "acquires a derogatory nuance from laikastria , 'whore.'" Although Aristophanes' Lysistrata (411 B.C.E .) depicts the female title character as complimenting a Spartan woman on her physical charms, and going so far as to touch her breasts (ll. 80 ff.), he does not suggest that these or other sexually deprived women turn to one another for sexual satisfaction (rather, he has them masturbating with phallus substitutes). This would imply—as I argue below—that gestures which moderns would regard as inviting and initiating physical homosexual activity were not so viewed by the Greeks of classical times.
veritable contemporaries.[22] And Lucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans , composed in the late second century C.E ., portrays women of Corinth and Lesbos who shun intercourse with men in favor of relations with other females.[23]
In addition, the surviving fragments of Sappho's poetry do not provide any decisive evidence that she participated in homosexual acts. Many of Sappho's lyrics written in the first person imply an involvement in acts of heterosexual love. It must not be forgotten, after all, that some of her poems make reference to a beloved daughter. In fragment 132 L.-P., its first-person speaker even applies to her daughter, her only child, the adjective agapetos , a word used in the Homeric epics exclusively for a family's male hope and heir: "I have a lovely child, whose form is like / gold flowers. My heart's one pleasure, Cleis, for whom I'd not give all Lydia..."[24] Yet her first-person lyrics never depict the speaker as engaging in acts of homosexual love. To be sure, a fragmentary lyric ascribed by some to Sappho (fr. 99 L.-P.) has been interpreted as containing part of a word—olisbos —meaning an artificial phallus. Still, even if one accepts Sappho as the author, and olisbos as the reading, here the poetic context fails to clarify Sappho's relationship to it, and its to Sappho.[25]
More significantly, there are no references in Sappho's lyrics to any physiological details of female homoerotic involvement—neither when she is writing in the first person nor when she is describing the actions of other women.[26] To be sure, this may be nothing more than tasteful reticence, the literary counterpart of a scene on an archaic vase from Thera dated to Sappho's time (ca. 620 B.C.E ): the vase depicts two females affectionately performing the chin-chucking gesture which served as a prelude to heterosexual and homosexual lovemaking among the Greeks, and leaves the rest to the imagination.[27] It may well be that Sappho wrote more explicitly about
[22] Mart. 7.67; Plut. Lyc . 18.9, which claims that "highly reputable" Spartan women engaged in love affairs with maidens in order to illustrate the omnipresence and high valuation of eros in early Spartan society.
[23] Luc. Dial. Meret . 5.
[24] For agapetos in Homer, see Il . 6.401 and Od . 2.365; 4.727, 817; 5.18. See in this connection also frs. 121 (to a male lover, and in the first person), 112, 115 L.-P.
[25] On this fragment, POxy . 2291, see Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 144-45, and Kirkwood, Early Greek Monody 269-70. For the use of an olisbos in other sexual acts, see Pomeroy, Goddesses pl. 12; Hipponax fr. 92 and Petron. Sat . 132; Boardman, Athenian Red-Figure Vases pl. 99, view 1.
[26] Dover, Greek Homosexuality 175-76, would maintain that fr. 94.21-23 L.-P.—"And on soft beds tender you expelled desire"—refers to the female addressee's satisfying either Sappho's or her own desire through bodily contact; the expression "to expel desire" is, however, too vague to permit a definitive interpretation and, in any event, not physiologically explicit.
[27] See Dover, Greek Homosexuality 173. The vase is also discussed by Pomeroy, Goddesses 243, and depicted in Richter, Kourai pl. VIIIc. Its scene stands in contrast to that of an Attic red-figure cup by Apollodorus, dated ca. 500 B.C.E . and pictured in Boardman and La Rocca, Eros in Greece 110. This portrays two naked women, one of whom, on her knees, fingers the genital area of her standing companion. These women are, however, thought to be hetairai (courtesans) preparing for a celebration with men by anointing one another with perfume; La Rocca finds it unlikely that the scene depicts an erotic relationship between the women (since there are no other examples of this in Attic vase painting) but likely that such relationships existed in a society with such rigid sexual segregation.
her own, and others', participation in homosexual acts in verses which have been accidentally, or even deliberately, lost. So, too, the surviving lyrics may contain implicit, or euphemistic, allusions to specific homosexual practices which readers today, ignorant of what sexual connotations certain words carried to an ancient Greek audience, have been unable, or unwilling, to perceive.[28] But from the evidence we do have we can only conclude that she did not represent herself in her verses as having expressed homosexual feelings physically.
Nevertheless, when writing in the first person, Sappho does evince a "lover's passion" toward other women and give utterance to strong homosexual feelings. In fragment 31 L.-P., for example, Sappho depicts herself as responding to a female friend's charms with violent physical reactions—"My tongue freezes silent and stiff, light flame trickles under my skin, I no longer see with my eyes, my ears whirring." Later classical authors, moreover, drew on these verses when delineating the symptoms not only of overpowering (heterosexual) passion, but of fear, drunkenness, and epilepsy as well.[29] In other lyrics, too, the speaker, presumably Sappho herself, is portrayed as sensually attracted and aroused by other women. Most notable of these is fragment 49 L.-P., addressing a women named Atthis. Its speaker states: "I adored you, once in the past, when you seemed to me to be a small, graceless child." Fragment 96 L.-P., which avows desire for Atthis, and fragment 1 L.-P., the hymn to Aphrodite, merit note in this context as well.[30]
It is poems of this sort which lead her modern readers to surmise that Sappho must have actually engaged in physical relationships with the women she found sensually appealing, or might as well have done so if she in actuality did not. The psychoanalytical and biographical orientation of recent literary criticism encourages such a conclusion by its tendency to regard the impulses that artists reveal in their work as essentially identical
[28] See Russo's review of Kirkwood, "Reading the Greek Lyric Poets," and Lanata, "Sul linguaggio amoroso" 65-66.
[29] For the adaptation of these symptoms to other contexts, by later authors, see Catull. 51 and Lucr. 3.154-56, 476-79, 487-91.
[30] Dover, Greek Homosexuality 176 n. 10, however, points out that the one phrase in ft. 1 L.-P. indicating the beloved's sex as female is at variance with the usages of Sappho's dialect. Several textual emendations designed to restore linguistic normality would in fact remove the feminine ending.
with their realization in behavior, be they acknowledged by or unknown to the individual.[31] This supposition is also fostered by contemporary notions about male and female sexual behavior. For in our society, we assume that men who express sensual appreciation for women desire (or at least would not object to) physical involvement with them. Furthermore, we are conditioned to view as unfeminine any woman who openly expresses sensual attraction for another human being; she is taking the "sexual initiative" and behaving as only men are supposed to. Indeed, when that object of allure is a woman, as in Sappho's poems, the aggressive female is considered doubly masculine.
Our modern Western social and sexual categories and expectations, however, differ considerably from those of Sappho's milieu. Archaic Greek society was for the most part sexually segregated. A well-born young gift, so far as we can tell, had little contact with males before and after marriage. A bride simply accepted the spouse, often a stranger, her father selected for her.[32] After marriage, a woman in this (as in later periods of Greek) society was excluded from the worldly pursuits which occupied most of her husband's time and life; her sexual charms and needs were, it would seem, neglected and often feared by him.[33] Thus she could hardly have expected her husband's esteem and devotion to sustain her emotionally. Even the union of Hector and Andromache, who were celebrated in early and later Greek literature as the model married couple, is depicted as a highly asymmetrical and rather unaffectionate relationship, in which she is bound to him by dependency more than anything else and chastised for the merest show of independence.[34] The archaic and classical Greeks, however, do not appear to have accorded the state of matrimony or the sexual role of wife much social prestige or respect. Marriage itself was viewed simply
[31] Many ancient Greeks and Romans seem to have adopted this approach as well. Although Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae employs in it jest when characterizing the playwrights Euripides and Agathon as misogynist and transvestite, respectively, others—such as St. Jerome (on Lucretius's poisoning by a love philter)—do so seriously. For ancient biography in general, see Fairweather, "Fiction in the Biographies."
[32] Consider, for example, Hesiod's account of Helen's wooing (frs. 199 and 200 Merkelbach-West) and the absence of Agariste, daughter of Cleisthenes of Sicyon, from Herodotus's account of her betrothal at 6.126-30.
[33] The exclusion of archaic Greek women from men's activities is emphasized by Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry 178; Arthur, "Early Greece" 43; and Lefkowitz, "Critical Stereotypes" 33-34. For the attitudes voiced by men in archaic Greece toward wives' sexuality, see, for example, Semonides' "Essay on Women," esp. ll. 48-49, 53-54, and 90-91, and Hes. Op . 373-75, 695-705; see also the discussion in Pomeroy Goddesses 49.
[34] Homer Il . 6.369-493 is the locus classicus on Hector and Andromache. For Sappho's poetic glorification of Hector's and Andromache's nuptials, see fr. 44 L.-P.; for Stesichorus's, see Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry 257; for Euripides' less idealized portrayal of their marriage, see his Andr . 222-27.
as a socioeconomic (and sometimes political) institution,[35] necessary for the orderly transfer of property and for the perpetuation and strengthening of family and state; it was not deemed necessary for either partner's emotional well-being. Archaic Greek social institutions attempted to undermine, and archaic Greek poets to disparage, the bonds of marriage.[36] Significantly, the only writer of the archaic and classical periods who delights in the details of marriage rites for their own sake, and who in fact regards the marital union as an important and equal source of pleasure to bridegroom as well as bride, is Sappho. Fragment 115 L.-P., for example, celebrates a bridegroom's sensual beauty: "To what, O beloved bridegroom, should I properly liken you? I should liken you most closely to a slender sapling." Fragment 141b L.-P. describes prayers for "nothing but blessings" to the bridegroom.[37]
Sappho's wedding poems, moreover, indicate that the female members of her milieu were profoundly concerned with their physical desirability as brides and the prospect of losing their maidenhood.[38] The nuptial ceremonies she represents in her lyrics focus on the bride's sexual initiation and its attendant joys. Yet these young women could not have received sexual attentions from their suitors or hoped to find emotional gratification within marriage itself. They could only have turned to other women to become sensually aware, in order to perform adequately in the role to which their society assigned them and to find the sexual validation that could satisfy their needs. Women were the sole individuals with whom they socialized and by whom they were socialized. Other women would also have experienced feelings identical with those of a young woman and been more sensitized to her concerns. In this perspective Sappho's sensually expressive verses may be viewed as an institutional force in and a reflection of her social setting—a social vehicle for imparting sensual awareness, and sexual self-esteem, to
[35] On the function of marriage in archaic Greek society, see Lacey The Family in Classical Greece 67-68, 71-72, 197-200, 212-13; and Pomeroy, Goddesses 33-42.
[36] See Pomeroy's discussion of the epiclerate in Athens, a product of Solon's sixth-century B.C.E . legislation (Goddesses 60-62). The Spartans' practice of wife sharing, allowing a wife who has borne children for her husband to produce offspring for another, childless, man as well—described by Plut. Lyc . 15 and Xen. Lac . 1.4—deserves mention in this context too. For the disparagement of marriage by poets of this period, see, e.g., Archil. fir. 80, Semon. "Essay on Women" 96-114, and Hes. Theog . 602-12; for an opposing view, see Hippon. fir. 81.
[37] See also frs. 27, 30, 44, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 117, 141 L.-P., all formally identified as wedding poems.
[38] On maidenhood, see the fragments cited in n. 37 above and frs. 104a, 104c, 197, 114 L.-P.; also Catull. 62.38-44 (another Sapphic echo). Fr. 114 is, in fact, an address to maidenhood: "Maidenhood, maidenhood, where do you go when you leave me? I will never come back to you, no longer come back."
women on the threshold of marriage and maturity.[39] For in the male sector of archaic and classical Greek society, as well as among females in various · Greek locales, an array of sociocultural institutions, including the production and performance of highly personalized poetry, appears to have served this precise function.
Admittedly; the behavior and culture of males and females in the sexual apartheid of archaic and classical Greece were very different. The cultural pursuits esteemed by the upper-class Greeks of preclassical and classical times were exclusively male ones: warfare, politics, athletics, worship of the great male deities, art, even the quest for wisdom.[40] These activities, which were formally organized and conducted in accordance with well-defined rules, operated as elaborate and prestigious social institutions. They provided competitive situations for a man to surpass others and achieve the recognition by which he would be known as agathos , superior. Along with shrewdness, skill at speaking, strength, and stamina, these institutions put to the test sensual attractiveness, being kalos .[41] As virtually all of Greek art from the archaic and classical periods attests, a young man's appearance often determined how other men judged him, whether as an athlete, citizen of his polis , artistic inspiration, or intellectual protégé.[42] To be sure, observers or judges may have often complimented a young male on his physical beauty in order to advertise their desire for a physical relationship. Short-lived physical liaisons between older men and youths were a socially sanctioned and much-documented phenomenon in the upper classes, one which thrived to some extent because of women's lowly social state and exclusion from men's affairs. For a young male such a relationship gave emotional satisfaction and the narcissistic gratification of being appreciated as an equal sexual partner.[43] But publicly voiced sensual appreciation of a handsome youth might mean no more than would approbation of his calisthenic or cognitive talents.
[39] The argument to follow agrees—in many of its points—with the views of Merkelbach, "Sappho und ihr Kreis." However, I also attempt to consider the psychological purposes served by Sappho's poetry (as well as its "institutional" nature), to delineate the role of physical beauty in her milieu, and to confront the problems of poetic personality and personalism as they relate to her work.
[40] For "male institutions" in Greek society, and an analysis of how the Greek "zero-sum game" contest system—in which the rewards had to come from one's competitors—worked in determining athletic, religious, military political, and artistic success, see Gouldner, Enter Plato 12-13, 40-64. See also the discussion of Pomeroy, Goddesses 71-74.
[41] See the discussion of Licht [Brandt], Sexual Lift in Ancient Greece 428-30.
[42] See, for example, Theog. 933-38; Pind. Ol . 8.19, 9.94, 10.99-105; Ar. Nub . 972-78; Plato Chrm . 157a4 ff. For Greek male physical narcissism, see Gouldner, Enter Plato 41-42, and Slater, The Glory of Hera 33-35.
[43] See Dover, "Eros and Nomos" 31-42, and "Classical Greek Attitudes" 59-73.
Throughout ancient Greece festivals glorified the beauty of boys simply as a religious and aesthetic ideal;[44] the period in which Sappho lived also began to pay artistic homage to the youthful male nude figure.[45] In their victory odes, poets such as Pindar and Bacchylides extol the comeliness of a victorious competitor at the great games as matter-of-factly as they do his lineage or agility; in fragment 108, an encomium to the youth Theoxenus, Pindar claims to react strongly—"melting like bee-stung wax"—to the physical presence of young males.[46] Yet these religious, aesthetic, and poetic tributes cannot be interpreted as "sexual overtures"; rather, they seem to be conventional public gestures intended to enhance the aesthetic appeal of their objects in a culture which placed a high premium on male physical beauty. Greek men of the archaic and classical periods seem to have observed a distinction between sensual appreciation and sexual appetite, as is perhaps best illustrated by Plato's portrayal of Socrates. At 155d3-4 of the Charmides , Socrates makes no bones about his immediate response to the physical attractions of this young disciple—"I caught a glimpse of what was inside his clothes, and caught on fire." But, notwithstanding this and other Platonic dialogues in which Socrates enthusiastically remarks upon the beauty of other young men, Plato characterizes Socrates as refusing to succumb to (homo)sexual temptation and as actively dissuading other males from engaging in physical relations with desirable young men.[47]
It only stands to reason, therefore, that Greek society would have similarly institutionalized the sensual education and affirmation of upper-class young women. Since women's social value and contribution were defined mainly in physical, sexual terms, and since daughters were as a rule less educated than sons (their acculturation period terminated upon their marriage and hence considerably earlier than that of men),[48] it also stands to reason that
[44] Cf. Ath. 13.565f-556a, 609f; Arist. Eth. Nic . 1099a; Theophr. fr. 111.
[45] For the development of Greek sculpture, see the article by Richter, S.V . "Sculpture, Greek," in the Oxford Classical Dictionary .
[46] Cf. Bacchyl. 9 Snell 27 ff. and the passages of Pindar cited in n. 42 above. The Athenian vases with kalos inscriptions, dating from the mid-sixth century B.C.E . and praising the beauty of a particular boy, also deserve consideration in this context: only rarely is the youth praised known to be a favorite of the vase painter himself. See Robinson and Fluck, Greek Love-Names 3, who remark, "that the admiration for a beautiful youth must often have been city-wide and not merely the personal feeling of a single individual is also attested by the multitude of his admirers in many cases, to which the kalos inscriptions bear witness."
[47] See Alcibiades' testimony to Socrates' self-restraint at Sym . 216d-219d and Socrates' own speeches at Phdr . 238d-241d, 244a-257b; see also the discussions of Grube, Plato's Thought 90-119, and Wender, "Plato, Misogynist" 75-90.
[48] That ancient Greek women generally were wed soon after puberty to men of about thirty and that Spartan women's marriage (to men of their own age) when they were in their late teens is anomalous find support in Hes. Op . 665 ff.; Xen. Oec . 7.5, Ath . 56.7; Arist. Pol . 1335a28. See also Plutarch's insistence, at Lyc . 15.4, that Spartan brides were "never small and of tender years, but in their full bloom and ripeness," as if to underline their uniqueness among Greek women. On the nature and limitations of women's formal education throughout Greece, see Plato Leg . 805d6-806c7.
Greek female institutions would have focused far more intensively than their male counterparts on fostering sensual consciousness and confidence. The better known and more accessible ancient Greek sources seem more interested in criticizing the "gossiping" networks and domestic associations of married women and express apprehension about women's socializing and sharing sexual knowledge with one another. The seventh-century B.C.E . poet Semonides' "Essay on Women" praises the type of wife who "takes no pleasure in sitting among women when they talk about sexual matters"; a speech delivered by the self-reproachful Hermione in Euripides' Andromache castigates other women whose gatherings corrupted her personally, and endanger the domestic tranquility of all husbands, with their "Siren talk"; Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae and Ecclesiazusae caricature women's groups as composed of wives excessively interested in sex and drink, and consequently as threatening to marriage.[49] Yet positive portrayals of other ancient Greek female institutions survive as well—portrayals which provide evidence that these institutions supplied well-born women with the same sort of sensual enlightenment and self-validation which Greek men of their class derived from their associations, and did so without either undermining Greek male society or challenging its view of women's place.
Most prominent among these institutions are, of course, female religious cults. Those which featured the worship of a female divinity often concerned themselves with different aspects of women's experience and its correspondences in nature. Hera, for example, was associated with matrimony, maternity, and the fertility of domestic flora and fauna; Artemis with human childbirth and the fecundity of wild creatures.[50] One of Hera's holy festivals, held on Sappho's native Lesbos, was devoted to a female beauty contest and, like similar celebrations elsewhere, was comparable to the festivals which glorified male beauty.[51] By emphasizing and placing a competitive value on young women's physical appearance, these contests served the
[49] Semon. "Essay on Women" 90-91; Eur. Andr . 930 ff. For Aristophanes' portrayal of women's groups, see Pomeroy, Goddesses 103-5 (my translation of Thesm . 383-413, 497-519), 112-14. On women's groups in archaic Greek society, and their parallelism with men's groups, see also Merkelbach, "Sappho und ihr Kreis" 2-3.
[50] On the various cults of Hera and Artemis in archaic and classical Greece, see Roscher, Ausführliches Lexicon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie 1:2075-87, 2098-104 (on the hieros gamos ); 1:559-94.
[51] See Alc. fr. 130.32-35 L.-P., as well as a scholiast to Il . 9.129; Hesychius, S.V . "pylaiides "; Ath. 13.609 ff.; AP 9.189; and Theophr. fr. 111 for these contests.
specific purpose of bolstering women's pride in their looks. Furthermore, marriage preparations and ceremonies, which seemed to have prefigured, or reenacted, the nuptials of each female participant, were organized into an institution of their own, one that allowed all to share, vicariously, the attention bestowed upon the bride.[52]
In addition, Greek lyric poetry for and by women also appears to have functioned as a type of institution. Like all ancient Greek lyric verse, monodic (i.e., lyric ostensibly for solo performance) and choral, it directs itself at a public; a recent critic has sensibly questioned the applicability to early Greek monody of "the modern sensibility that understands the 'lyric' poem as the essence of personal expression, the private voice that is meant not so much to be heard as overheard."[53] From what one may determine, archaic Greek "women's poetry" spoke to females committed to the same goals, and conditioned by the same experiences,[54] glorifying both the sensual charms of women and those aspects of their lifestyle which they found sensually gratifying and charming. What remains of Greek "women's" poetry—poems by females such as Sappho and Corinna, poems for females such as Alcman's maiden songs—celebrates, in strikingly affirmative fashion, not only female beauty but also the loveliness of nature and all things divine, the pleasures residing in day-to-day living, the emotional rewards deriving from close companionship.
In this context, the role of Sappho herself as a "sensual consciousness-raiser" falls within a common and culturally important tradition in archaic and classical Greece.[55] Like Sappho, male lyric poets and plastic artists routinely exalt the beauty of the human form, sharing her conception of physical and sensual graces as a reflection of divine favor which contribute to earthly fulfillment. Furthermore, Sappho's subject matter and manner of self-expression in one major respect more closely resemble those of sculptors and vase painters than those of other male poets. Her female subjects are mostly defined by, and limited to, their physical being and states of emotion;
[52] See Sappho frs. 29, 44.31, 51 L.-P.; Pind. Pyth . 3.17 ff.
[53] Russo, "Reading the Greek Lyric Poets" 709.
[54] See ibid., 720-23. Evidence indicating that Greek female lyric poets directed their work at, and chiefly gained recognition from, female audiences includes Sappho frs. 150 and 160 L.-P., Corinna fr. 655, Pausanias's allegation at 2.20.8 that the female poet Telesilla was "of high repute among women," and the fact that Sappho's poems generally feature women as their addressees.
[55] To be sure, "consciousness-raising" is a new concept and coinage, associated primarily with the heightening of political awareness; I would, however, argue that receptiveness to and cultivation of physical beauty were no less valued in and by the males and females of various archaic and classical Greek milieux than is political awareness among educated members of Western society today.
they are not immortalized, as are the subjects of male poetry, for glory achieved by doing. The nature of Sappho's material in fact helps explain her frequent emphasis on visual appearance and human feelings.[56] Nevertheless, to communicate the beauty of what she portrays, especially when writing in the first person, she must verbalize what may be construed as her personal judgment, feelings, and passions, and thereby render herself vulnerable to misconstruction. For such statements may be determined merely, and primarily, by the exigencies of her material. One should not, therefore, assume that Sappho's poems in the first person arc autobiographical, even if our ancient authorities on Sappho's life often do just that.[57] A distinction between Sappho and her poetic persona may well often exist, as it so often exists in the verses of her male poetic colleagues.[58]
That Sappho's verses were basically intended as public, rather than personal, statements, that they aimed at instilling sensual awareness and sexual self-esteem in young women, and that even those written in the first person may not express her own feelings seem more obvious if we consider other examples of poetry from a similar social and cultural milieu written in the generation prior to hers. The maiden songs of Alcman, a Spartan male poet of the mid-seventh century B.C.E .,[59] were composed for delivery by a chorus of young unmarried women in a sexually segregated society which, like Sappho's Lesbos, apparently encouraged greater sensual expressiveness for females than did other societies in ancient Greece.[60] One of these maiden songs, fragment 3 P., written in the feminine first-person singular, though
[56] Sappho's concern with the visual—expressed through the reiteration of verbs of seeing and an emphasis on the visual aspects of entities—is best illustrated by such fragments as 16 (contrasting what some think to be most beautiful with what she would most want to see ), 17, 23, 31, and 96 L.-P.; concern with other senses is, however, no less prominent (cf. the auditory emphasis of frs. 1.7-12, 44.20 ff.; the emphasis on scent in fr. 2). One might also regard Greek statues of lovely maidens, korai , as in certain respects analogous to Sappho's poetic portrayals of comely young women. The first such statue, predating Sappho's poems by half a century, was dedicated to the goddess Artemis by a woman, Nikandre (most later ones seem to have male dedicators). Unlike similar statues of young men, korai are always draped; their charms, moreover, are delineated decorously and subtly (see the discussions of Pomeroy, Goddesses 47, and Richter, Kourai ).
[57] See Dover, Greek Homosexuality 173, 179; cf. also Lefkowitz, "Critical Stereotypes" 29.
[58] On the distinction between poet and persona in archaic Greek lyric, see Dover, "The Poetry of Archilochus" 206, and Lanata, "Sul linguaggio amoroso" 65-66.
[59] For Alcman's dates, see Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry 192-93. Dover, Greek Homosexuality 181, would follow West's dating of Alcman to Sappho's own time (late seventh and early sixth centuries B.C.E ).
[60] Spartan men (according to Plut. Lyc . 14 ff.) resided with one another in military barracks until the age of thirty, with the result that not only maidens but women in their first decade of marriage lived apart from their male contemporaries. For Spartan women's (physical) education and sexual image, see Redfield, "The Women of Sparta" 148-49.
clearly recited by a group of young females, appears to have been performed in honor of the goddess Hera; it pays homage to the physical allure, and the responses it evokes, of a woman, Astymeloisa. The speakers compare her to a shooting star, golden sprig, and tender down; they refer to her as "causing longing which loosens the limbs" and casting "glances more melting than sleep and death."[61] A distinguished commentator on these lyrics, which were discovered only in the 1950s, has the distinct impression "that the whole company is in love" with Astymeloisa.[62] Yet critics for two decades have veered away from facing the poem's female "homosexual" sentiments, obviously because the author was a man,[63] and have either dissociated him personally from these lyric statements or maintained that he was voicing his own passion for Astymeloisa. Resemblances between this and Sappho's verses largely pass unnoticed, resemblances which include actual, uncommon words. These lyrics call to mind Sappho's "limb-loosening love makes me tremble—bittersweet, irresistible, surreptitious" (fr. 130 L.-P.) and "now she stands out among the Lydian women like the rosy-fingered moon, after the sun has set, surpassing all the stars" (fr. 96.6-9 L.-P.).[64] They suggest that Alcman's maiden songs may have influenced Sappho's "personal" poems and at least belong to the same literary tradition.
Alcman's other, longer and better known, maiden song (fr. 1 P.) is presumably connected with a festival of (Artemis) Orthria, Spartan goddess of fertility and vegetation[65] who, like Hera, was thought to preside over a girl's transition to married life. Here several female chorus members acclaim, in both first-person singular and first-person plural verb forms, one another's outstanding physical qualities graphically and lavishly; here, too, they avow, in sexually charged language, an emotional investment in each other.[66] A recent article has used parallels from Sappho's wedding songs to argue, persuasively, that this poem was also meant as an epithalamium, a marriage
[61] Ll. 61-81 of this fragment are translated, and the problems they pose discussed, by Dover, Greek Homosexuality 179-80.
[62] Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry 32.
[63] Lanata, "Sul linguaggio amoroso" 73-74, is a notable exception; she has recently been joined by Griffiths, "Alcman's Partheniaion" 59 ff., which does not deal with fr. 3 P. but with its longer sister, discussed below.
[64] Lusimeles , "limb-loosening," found in both Alcman ft. 3 P. and Sappho fr. 130 L.-P., appears but twice in the Homeric epics (Od . 20.57, 23.343).
[65] Although Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry 51 ff., and Griffiths, "Alcman's Partheniaion" 24 ff., maintain that the song concerns (the Spartan) Helen in her role as goddess of unmarried maidens, and Gentili, "Il partenio" 65-66, argues that Orthria is Aphrodite.
[66] On the sexual connotations of the language in this fragment, see, among others, Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry 272; Gentili, "Il partenio" 60 ff.; Dover, Greek Homosexuality 180 (on the disputed teirein in 1.77); Nagy, "The Symbols of Greek Lyric" 000-00.
hymn, delivered by girls whose own nuptials are imminent to honor the wedding of another "fellow debutante."[67] Should this be the case, these verses may have even influenced Sappho's renowned choral wedding poems. Its tone and content at least allow us to infer that many of Sappho's fragments thought to be personal, autobiographical statements might in fact be part of public, if not marriage, hymns sung by other females. Fragment 82 L.-P., "Mnasidika, of fairer form than soft Gyrinno," and fr. 16 L.-P., which praises Anactoria's step and face as more desirable than the armaments of Lydia, are but two examples of such fragments.[68] They recall passages from Alcman's poem in which the girls receive individual compliments on their attractive features: "The streaming hair of my kinswoman Hagesichora blooms like pure gold; her face, like silver—but what can I say openly?" (ll. 51-56), or "Abundance of purple dye does not suffice as aid, nor the all-golden, many-hued snake bracelet, nor the Lydian headpiece, glorious divine offering of softly glancing young girls, nor the hair of Nanno, nor Areta with godlike beauty, nor Sylakis nor Gleesisera" (ll. 64-72). Furthermore, Sappho's comparisons between beautiful young women in such fragments as 82 and 96 L.-P.—which suggest that the "agonistic" nature of male Greek culture to some extent permeated women's institutions as well—also have parallels in this poem by Alcman.[69]
Scholars in the past, both Greek literary critics and ancient social historians, have ignored the similarities between Alcman's maiden songs and Sappho's lyrics, largely because they regard the former as choral, public works by a serious male artist, the latter as personal, privately voiced statements by an eccentric female. Even Sappho's verses known to be choral epithalamia are frequently dismissed as overrepresented among her fragments, as exaggerated in importance for such undistinguished poetry.[70] Yet recent literary scholarship arguing that even Sappho's apparently monodic
[67] Griffiths, "Alcman's Partheniaion" 11 ff., notes, for example, that in lines 64 ff. the maidens are said to wear purple and gold, which traditionally belonged to a young woman's dowry. That fr. 3 P. concludes with Astymeloisa's appearance in "male society" ("receiving honor among the army ... cherished by the populace"; 13-15) suggests that it may have marked a début, if not a wedding, too. And Plutarch's statement that young men attended the performance of maiden songs (Lyc . 14.4) may imply that they served to introduce marriageable young women to men.
[68] See the discussion of this latter poem, which employs as its paradigm Helen (leaving her husband and kin at Sparta, and sailing to Troy), by duBois, "Sappho and Helen" 79-82.
[69] In fr. 16 L.-P., however, Sappho transcends the question of encouraging competition among people in order to define "the most beautiful thing on earth."
[70] So Kirkwood, Early Greek Monody 102, 104-23, 138; his attitude is criticized by Russo, "Reading the Greek Lyric Poets" 718-23. Kirkwood, moreover, does not deal with Alcman in his volume on Greek lyric, judging him a "choral" poet and of no major relevance to "monodists" such as Sappho.
lyrics were designed to be presented—perhaps by more than one person—at some sort of cultic ceremony, and recent studies in women's social history, which have likened the role of women in archaic Lesbos to that of women in archaic Sparta, provide further reasons for considering the work of Alcman and Sappho together.[71] And the knowledge that Alcman's maiden songs were written by a man who played no part in the actual performance of his lyrics has crucial implications for an understanding of Sappho, a member, and perhaps a follower, of Alcman's literary tradition. For the fact that Alcman's maiden songs, although written in the first person, probably do not express his personal feelings for the girls they portray but merely purport to represent those of their speakers argues for a similar distinction between Sappho and the emotions expressed in her poems. After all, the fact that Alcman's Sparta promoted the display of intimate appreciation for female beauty in public, to the extent that it was "scripted" by artists who did not personally engage in the display, and assigned high value to these testimonials (doubtless because they made women better able to accept their socially and sexually defined role) suggests that Sappho's Lesbos did the same. No evidence indicates that Sappho was any more involved with the women whose charms she praises in her lyrics than was Alcman with Astymeloisa or Hagesichora. No evidence, that is, despite later attempts to make sense of her sensually expressive verses, out of their social and literary context.[72]
Sappho's homosexual image may, of course be an accurate one. The emotional intensity of Sappho's poems, the eros , passionate love, which figures prominently in her verses but barely in Alcman's maiden songs,[73] certainly allows the possibility that Sappho did engage in homosexual acts as a private person. So, too, the women portrayed in Sappho's verses, and in Alcman's maiden songs, may well have expressed their homosexual sentiments physically. But whether or not she or they did so may not be germane to a basic understanding of Sappho as a creative individual, of the literary tradition in which she worked, or of her role in her society.
[71] For example, Russo, "Reading the Greek Lyric Poets"; Merkelbach, "Sappho und ihr Kreis"; Segal, "Eros and Incantation" 70-73; Pomeroy Goddesses 55-56.
[72] In order to discourage such attempts, in fact, the early-second-century C.E . poet Strato of Sardis concluded his poems, all of which praise the physical allure of young boys, and man), of which are written in the first person, with the following disclaimer (AP 12.258): "Perhaps in the future, someone, hearing these frivolous verses of mine, will imagine these pains of passion to have been all my own. But I'm forever writing compositions for others who love boys, since some god gave me this gift."
[73] For example, at Sappho frs 15.12, 16.4, 17.47, 49 L.-P.; Alcman fr. 1 P. merely speaks of erata Ianthemis at line 76 and uses the verb erao "to desire passionately" in the context of aiming to please a goddess.
Nine
Romantic Sensuality, Poetic Sense: A Response to Hallett on Sappho
Eva Stehle
Sappho is, as Judith Hallett observes, a difficult poet to write about. Sappho seems straightforward, personal, honest—"confessional," in Hallett's term. But any lyric poet writing in the first person requires a special critical attitude. One must keep in mind that the "I" of a poem is not necessary the "I" of the poet at all. The poet may put into another's mouth words he or she would not speak in propria persona . The "I" may be generalized, as in folksong,[1] or a poet may be writing with a specifically personal voice, as Sappho does when she uses her own name in a poem, but describing events that did not necessarily ever take place. The description of events is the poet's setting (like a stage set) for the play of emotions which he or she wishes to expose. The original emotions themselves must have their stimulus in the poet's experience, but the process of clarifying them requires the poet to refine, transform, extrapolate experience imaginatively, perhaps beyond recognition.
This tantalizing paradox—what looks most like a window into the life of the poet may be least true to the events of that life—is enormously complicated in Sappho's case by the fact that she seems to espouse lesbianism. Many react first to this, which they feel compelled to deny, denounce, celebrate, or somehow judge. They then read the poetry accordingly: On the other hand, those who do try first to distinguish poet from persona seem faced with a confused choice of explaining away the eroticism or discussing Sappho's putative "psychopathology." Hallett is absolutely right that the issue of homosexuality intrudes on, if it does not dominate, almost every discussion of Sappho in a way that does not happen with male poets. Hallett's
This essay was originally published in slightly different form as "Romantic Sensuality, Poetic Sense: A Response to Hallett on Sappho," Signs 4 (1979) 464-71.
[1] See Tsagarakis, Self-Expression in Early Greek Lyric , for discussion of the problem.
article suggests an approach that, trying to avoid all of these traps, has some good claims to consideration. Her idea of using Greek male treatment of young men and Alcman's two maiden songs as converging context for Sappho is very suggestive. I do have disagreements with her over both her method of argument and her conclusions.
First, I think Hallett underestimates the real complexity of the question of Sappho's poetic persona. If Sappho's purpose was sexual affirmation of young women preparatory to marriage, questions of the interaction of the persona with the public arise. Was Sappho's stance of lover designed to fit with a ritual role played by the actual woman? Or could erotic admiration via poetry be effective if the author dissociated herself from it? If the poetry was treated as coming not from Sappho but from the community, would the strong personal focus and introspective quality not be subversive to the communal solidarity of praise? Would Sappho's reiterated wish to die not appear ill-omened in a public celebratory setting, a rite of passage? In short, Hallett's discussion of the Greek social structure makes the possibility of institutionalized affirmation of girls appear most plausible, but she still must show that Sappho's poetry fits the bill, appearances to the contrary: Detaching the persona from the poet does not make it automatically an impersonal or communal voice, as Hallett seems to assume. Nor does this view of Sappho illuminate the artistry of the poems at all, throw light on, for example, the interconnected themes of beauty and absence, or the tendency to displace the sensuality of the desired woman onto the surroundings.
With respect to evidence for lesbian practice in Sappho's poetry, Hallett argues that Sappho never pictures the speaker as engaging in acts of homosexual love or mentions physiological details, and that "many of Sappho's lyrics written in the first person imply an involvement in acts of heterosexual love" (131). The last line of 94 Lobel-Page (L.-P.) she dismisses as "too vague" to be definite evidence. The point Hallett is making is that the text of Sappho's poems will not support any great insistence that Sappho was a practicing homosexual lover, which is true. Yet Hallett falls into the biographical trap herself with the remark that many lyrics imply heterosexual love. She seems to assume that indications of sexual activity (or lack of them) will be biographical, even if nothing else is, an assumption which leads Hallett to write as though all the fragments were equally good indicators of Sappho's personal sexuality. In fact, the "many" fragments must be mainly the scraps of wedding hymns and bits of "folksong" (e.g,, 102 L.-P.), in which the persona, the "I" of the poem, is communal or generalized, as well as the references to Cleis, Sappho's daughter. None of the major fragments, in which the persona is some manifestation of the poet, breathes a hint of sexual interest in a man. The points to be made, it seems to me, are two. First, Sappho's
sexual activity, whatever it was, was integrated with the institution of marriage (which may not have been sexually very demanding).[2] Second, we must pay attention to the direction of erotic intensity of Sappho's persona, that is, consider the emotional reality of the poems, without trying to deduce anything about the restriction or range of her enjoyment of sexual activity—and without attributing psychological abnormality or social maladjustment to her.
I think one implicit purpose of Hallett's whole paper is to combat the general supposition that Sappho was emotionally abnormal. Certainly the standard picture of Sappho is of a woman falling unreservedly in love with a girl, being crushed at the girl's departure, falling unreservedly for the next girl, who will also depart, becoming ever more exhausted but never more intelligent in her loving.[3] Hallett's answer is to say that Sappho's poetry has an institutional erotic function but not private emotional reality. The idea should, rather, be met head on. Sappho was "abnormal," perhaps, in being unusually open to romantic impulse, unusually aware of the human urge for union and the inevitable separateness. When she wished to explore and clarify these impulses through poetry she chose female homosexual love as the vehicle because lesbian love offered the most receptive setting for romantic eros. Escape to a realm of beauty, illusion of perfect union, inevitability of parting: these could be expressed through union with another woman because such love was separate from daily domestic life with a husband; because the other woman could seem to match, reflect, make the emotional connection far more easily than a man; and because separation, if only by virtue of the inevitability of marriage, was inevitable. The poems of absence and longing need not record—each and every one—a parting or failure in love.[4] By placing her persona in such settings Sappho could explore the interacting realities of psychological openness to and distance from a lover. Sappho must have known enough of both the romantic yearning for transcendent union and the different quality of lesbian intimacy from heterosexual intimacy to create a romantic, alternate female world.
Before looking at 94 L.-P. in this light, let me say that I disagree with Hallett over the way in which the Greek disposition to praise young men should be taken. I think she is right in seeing that the admiration is an
[2] Plutarch (Sol . 20.3) over 700 years later suggests that a man should make love to his wife three times a month because it eases marital tensions. The passage is cited and discussed by Pomeroy, Goddesses 87.
[3] Detailed exposition of this view is given in Schadewaldt, Sappho . See also Bagg, "Love, Ceremony, and Daydream," who suggests that Sappho suffered from guilt.
[4] The same reasoning as is typically applied to Sappho would, if applied to Family Dickinson, conclude that she had died frequently.
important validation of a youth at puberty and is directed at the whole personality, not just the young man's looks. It makes a good analogy with what Sappho's effect on young women around her may have been. But the praise of young men was undeniably based on sexual attraction.[5] That does not mean that everyone who admired a youth felt the immediate urge to possess him sexually. But it is misleading in emphasis to say; as Hallett does (135), that "sensual appreciation of handsome youth might mean no more than approbation of his calisthenic or cognitive talents" (italics mine). For the reason why other qualities could be expressed through language of sexual appreciation is that sexual attractiveness in a young man was highly valued. Desire to possess a young man was socially acceptable. Therefore even those who had no designs on a young man could praise, for example, intellectual capacities via the powerful medium of sexual evaluation.
Likewise, validation of one woman by another in sexual terms must have relied on the social acceptability of one woman as object of sexual interest on the part of another. People in general are, if anything, too little inclined to distinguish between a person's statement of sexual attraction to a forbidden group and that person's likelihood of acting on it. So Sappho's poetic expressions of desire and love would have aroused hostiliy, not affirmation, if they were directed at a group with whom physical expression of desire was ruled out by the society.
Let us now look at 94 L.-P., the poem which may refer to actual homosexual activity.[6] The poem opens (after a missing line), "Really, I wish to die; weeping she left me." The next three stanzas record a conversation in which Sappho comforts the distraught girl. The comfort turns into a reminiscence of the good things they shared, of which four stanzas are occupied by one occasion: "you adorned yourself with flowers at my side, you put round yourself garlands of flowers, you anointed yourself with oil, on a soft bed you expelled desire" (to paraphrase). The atmosphere is one of segregation in sensuous surroundings. With each stanza the focus is more directly on the body of the other woman. The first contains no mention of it (unless in a lacuna in the text). In the second stanza Sappho refers to her "tender neck." In the third the woman anoints herself (typically done while nude after a bath).[7] And in the fourth she expels longing (someone else's longing,
[5] Dover, Greek Homosexuality , makes this clear, though, as he also points out (53-54), strict decorum seems to have inhibited public discussion of actual lovemaking: The same would likely be true for Sappho.
[6] See Hallett 131 n. 26. For an excellent discussion of the poem see McEvilley, "Sappho, Fragment 94."
[7] See Il . 14.170-72; Od . 6.224-28; h. Hom. Ven . 61-63. In the first and third passages lovemaking follows. In the second Nausicaa becomes interested in Odysseus as a potential husband.
according to the verb form). The whole movement of the recollection is toward erotic culmination.
In these four stanzas Sappho's only reference to herself is the "at my side" of line 14, though the detail implies that Sappho pictures herself as present throughout. The concentration is entirely on the sensuousness of the other woman. Its effect could be sexual affirmation of the addressee, and Sappho may have intended, among other things, to create that effect. But there is an artistic reason for focus on the other woman through the four stanzas. Sappho is dramatizing her (or rather her persona's) complete openness to the other woman, her loss of self-consciousness in absorption with the other. Yet this is now memory, and the other woman does not share it. The unity previously so complete is now suddenly, irretrievably dissolved. The persona's (not the poet's) wish to die is a wish to halt the flux, preserve the perfect moment of emotional fusing with another.
Keeping the romantic quality of 94 L.-P. in mind, we can consider Sappho in comparison with Alcman's two maiden songs (1 and 3 Page [P.]). Alcman's tone is similar to Sappho's in some ways, but Hallett's discussion skirted the essential difference that Alcman's poems refer to their own context, a celebration and an appeal to the gods. And the method of praise is different. Alcman draws on the standard imagery of praise found in Homer and applied to both men and women. His picture of human, including erotic, interactions is male. Sappho avoids both. Her imagery and description of personal dynamics differentiate the female from the male.
The most prevalent image in Alcman's first maiden song is of the horse. Four times a girl is compared with a horse, a particular breed of horses, or a trace-horse (Il. 47, 50, 59, 92). In one instance our lack of information about breeds means that we do not catch the point of a comparison: a girl compared in beauty with Agido is a Colaxaean horse running against an Ibenian. There may be a ritual reason for the emphasis on horses; they seem to have figured in the worship of Ortheia.[8] But the references to breeds dearly come from the area of male interest in breeding and racing horses. The image has a tradition in literature also. Paris is compared with a horse in Iliad 6.506-11. Ibycus compares himself with a prizewinning racehorse in a love poem (287 P.). Anacreon uses the image for a girl whom he threatens to ride (417 P.). Sappho, in the extant fragments, never uses any such comparison for a woman. When horses do appear in her poetry they are associated with men, implicitly dissociated from women. In the priamel 16 L.-P., for instance, Sappho chooses "what one loves" as most beautiful rather
[8] See Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry 203, ad 1. 48.
than an army of horsemen. In 2 L.-P. a "horse-pasturing meadow" is located within the bounds of a shrine where it will not be open to pasturing animals.[9] A late reference to Sappho's wedding hymns says she compared the grooms to prizewinning horses, the brides to the delicacy of roses (117a L.-P.).
In Alcman's second maiden song Astymeloisa is compared with a "golden shoot" (1. 68). The image of a shoot or sapling is found in the Iliad (18.56) of Achilles and in the Odyssey (6.163) of Nausicaa. The term is similar to one Sappho herself uses in a wedding hymn to describe the groom (115 L.-P.). But Sappho does not use it of a woman. Instead we find comparisons of women to fruit or flowers. In a wedding hymn a woman is an apple high on a tree (105a L.-P.). Sappho's daughter has an appearance like golden flowers (132 L.-P.).[10]
Again, Alcman compares Agido to the light of the sun in the first maiden song (l. 41). Connection with the ceremony is possible; it took place before sunrise. But there are Homeric parallels: Hera's seductive veil is white like the sun (Il . 14-185); Achilles in armor is like the shining sun (Il . 19.398). And in both Alcman's songs girls are compared with stars. The image in 3 P. is the more elaborate: Astymeloisa is "like some shining star in flight through the heavens" (ll.66-67). The star image is used in the Iliad of men; Athena is compared with a shooting star (Il . 4.75-77).[11] Both sun and star have the masculine gender in Greek. Sappho uses neither image, but twice compares a woman with the moon eclipsing the surrounding stars (34, 96 L.-P.). The moon is female in gender and a goddess in mythology. Sappho, I think, consciously wished to connect women with the mysterious rhythms of the moon as separate from the sharp, bright male world of sun and stars. We owe the preservation of one of these fragments to the commentator who noted the contrast with a passage of the Iliad .[12]
But Sappho's images for women's appearance are few, despite her emphasis on vision. Similes are noticeably more frequent in the wedding-hymn fragments, particularly for men. A groom is like Ares or Achilles (105b, 111 L.-P.), or has a honeyed face (112 L.-P.). The disproportion may be accidental, but perhaps Sappho is less concerned to provide praise of the woman
[9] See my article, "Retreat from the Male" 92.
[10] The comparison of men with flowers was traditional but often as an indication of youth or pathos: see Il . 8.306-8; Theog. 1348 West (W.).
[11] Il . 22.26-31, Achilles; Il . 11.62-64, Hector. The point of the comparison is usually visual. But Astyanax is said to be "like a lovely star" (Il . 6.40) in a simile called unique. See Scott, The Oral Nature of the Homeric Simile 68.
[12] Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry 273, ad 34 L-P. The image of moon eclipsing stars is thought to be traditional but does not show up earlier than Sappho. The moon is never used in a comparison with a person in the Iliad or Odyssey . In h. Hom. Ven . 88-90 the effect of a necklace on Aphrodite's breasts is compared with the moon.
on whom she turns her attention than to explore the effect of that woman's presence or absence. Description implies separation between observer and observed. For Sappho another woman's presence rather generates a sensuous environment, figured as flowers, fabric, perfume, sacred precinct, which encloses them both, erasing the separation.
Alcman has the chorus in 1 P. talk of fighting, probably because they are competing with another chorus. Alcman's chorus thinks of it as a battle, one in which they denigrate their own ability to prevail without the aid of the leader, who commands their obedience (ll. 92-95). In 3 P. the chorus describes Astymeloisa, perhaps the leader, in passionate terms but describes her as not answering. Later, as the fragment tails off, the chorus says, "I would become a suppliant of hers" (1. 81). Male assumptions about competition and about dominance and submission have determined the form of erotic expression: love and beauty are contests. Sappho does not picture love relations as domination by one partner over the other. In 94 and 96 L.-P. desire is mutual. In 1 L.-P., the only combative love poem, either Sappho or the other woman is free to initiate the relationship. Dover notices the difference from the style of male homosexual relations but does not pursue the subject.[13]
Finally, Astymeloisa in Alcman 3 P. is known to the army and is a darling of the people (ll. 73-74), while Sappho's encounter with or fantasy of a desired woman is always in an environment isolated from men (except in 31 L.-P.).
Detailed comparison of Alcman with Sappho illuminates Sappho's special romantic quality. Alcman's girls are imagistically and ceremonially integrated with the whole Spartan culture, participating in its values. Sappho used the special conditions of lesbian love to create an alternative world in which male values, those same values which denied Greek women an outlet for erotic fantasy, are not dominant, and within which mutual desire, rapture, and separateness can be explored as female experience.
[13] Dover, Greek Homosexuality 177. On male competitiveness, see the works cited in Hallett 135 nn. 40, 42.
Ten
Who Sang Sappho's Songs?
André Lardinois
In recent years the traditional division of Greek lyric into exclusively choral or monodic poets has been called into question. The main subject of inquiry has been the choral poets, like Pindar, Stesichorus, and Alcman. It has been argued that some or even most of their poetry was not performed by choruses, but by the poets themselves or other soloists.[1] In this article I want to focus attention on one of the allegedly monodic poets: Sappho. I will argue that there are among her fragments more chorally performed songs than so far has been acknowledged.
Other scholars already have voiced some uneasiness with the traditional picture of Sappho as a monodist. Hermann Fränkel believed that "among the Lesbians too, then, there were songs fairly close to choral lyric," like
I would like to thank Andrew Ford, Richard Martin, Jan Bremmer, Claude Calame, and Dirk Obbink for their valuable suggestions at different stages of this article, which began as a term paper I wrote for Andrew Ford's 1989 Graduate Seminar on Sappho and Alcaeus at Princeton University. A shorter, oral version was delivered at the 1992 APA conference in New Orleans. Some of the arguments are repeated from my article on Sappho, "Subject and Circumstance," which in many ways complements this article by arguing that Sappho was involved in the setting up of young women's choruses.
Fragments and testimonia of all lyric poets, including Sappho, are cited from Campbell's edition in the Loeb Classical Library, Greek Lyric , unless noted otherwise. Elegists and iambic poets are cited according to West, Iambi et Elegi Graeci .
Sappho fragment 16, "which meditates and argues like choral poetry." More recently, Claude Calame has suggested that Sappho's circle was organized as a young girls' choir which sang or danced to songs composed by Sappho, and Judith Hallett has declared that "many of Sappho's fragments thought to be personal, autobiographical statements might in fact be part of public, if not marriage, hymns sung by other females."[2] Yet, overall the traditional picture has prevailed that Sappho composed songs, essentially about herself (her own emotions), to be performed by herself.
I will first take a look at some of the evidence about Sappho's work. Next I will discuss the applicability to her work of the traditional distinctions between choral and monodic poetry. Special attention will be given to the use of the first-person singular and plural in early Greek poetry, which will also allow us to take a closer look at some of Sappho's fragments (frs. 94 and 96). In a final section I will review the other major fragments and show that they can be interpreted as being performed with the help of choruses.
1. The Ancient Evidence About Sappho's Work
It is commonly acknowledged that at least some of Sappho's poetry was choral. One of Sappho's books, probably the ninth, in the Alexandrian edition of her poems consisted wholly of epithalamia or wedding songs,[3] at least some of which were meant to be performed by age-mates of the bride.[4]
[2] Frankel, Early Greek Poetry 186 nn. 45, 172; Calame, Les chœurs 1:127, 368-69; Hallett, "Sappho and Her Social Context," 141.
[3] A better term is hymenaioi. Epithalamia is the name Hellenistic scholars gave to these poems and is not attested before that period. Originally it referred to songs sung in the evening outside the marriage chamber, but Sappho's songs cover a number of occasions on the wedding day, including the wedding procession and the banquet: see Schadewaldt, Sappho 32-58; Muth, "Hymenaios" 38-40; Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 119-23; Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry 214-23; and Contiades-Tsitsoni, Hymenaios 68-109. Hymenaios , on the other hand, is an archaic Greek term that was used for all types of song: as Aeschylus suggests, from bridal bath to bridal bed (PV 555-56). See Muth on this passage and the two terms in general, and more recently Contiades-Tsitsoni, esp. 30-32.
[4] Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 112 ff.; Campbell "Sappho" 162. Hymenaioi appear to have been primarily choral songs, performed by a chorus of young men and/or young women (Muth, "Hymenaios" 36) and there are clear indications of choral performance in Sappho's wedding songs, for example the dialogue-form of fr. 114 (Page 119 n. 1, 122,) and the refrain in fr. 111. Still, Homer (Od . 4.17-19) pictures a song performed at a wedding feast that is sung by a soloist and danced to by two tumblers, and Hague has compared Sappho fr. 115 to the eikasia games played at symposia, "in which one person ridiculed another by making a ludicrous comparison" ("Ancient Greek Wedding Songs" 134; my italics). It is possible that particularly during the banquet there were solo performances of songs related to the bride and groom, with or without the accompaniment of a dancing chorus. Fr. 44, if indeed a wedding song, is a possible candidate for such a performance (Contiades-Tsitsoni, Hymenaios 107).
Another type of song that is ascribed to her is religous hymns (test. 21, 47). These need not all have been choral, but some of them appear to have been genuine choral songs, such as fragment 140a, which is composed as a dialogue between a person (or group) impersonating the goddess Aphrodite and a group of young girls.[5]
Page maintained that, apart from these poems, "[t]here is no evidence or indication that any of Sappho's poetry ... was designed for presentation by herself or others (whether individuals or choirs) on a formal or ceremonial occasion, public or private," and that "[t]here is nothing to contradict the natural supposition that, with this one small exception, all or almost all of her poems were recited by herself informally to her companions."[6] One must be wary of relying on "natural suppositions," especially in the case of Sappho, and Page's supposition is actually far from "natural," since generally when scholars find that one or more poems of an archaic Greek poet are choral, they assume that the same holds true for the other poems.[7] Snyder, more carefully, distinguishes between three types of songs: those that are purely public (the wedding songs); those with the conventional form of public poetry (e.g., frs. 1, 2, 16); and those that are purely private (e.g., frs. 31, 94, 96).[8] It is not clear, however, whether she believes that the second group was actually performed in public and/or by others than Sappho herself: "Even though we may not want to go so far as to say that these songs were meant to be performed at some specific occasion, they nevertheless seem in some way connected with familiar rituals of a public character." The question is why we should not go so far as to say that these songs were performed at public occasions, if they indeed follow "the conventional forms of public poetry."[9]
According to the Suds (test. 2), Sappho wrote nine books of "lyric songs" (
) and also "epigrams, elegiacs, iambics, and solo songs (
)." We know that the epigrams were late Hellenistic forgeries,[10] and of her iambics and elegiacs nothing has survived, but the separate mention of solo songs has caused some surprise: "how did these last differ from
[6] Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 119. He has been followed by most interpreters, most recently Parker, "Sappho Schoolmistress" 331.
[7] See Davies, "Monody." Like Davies, I do not favor this approach and therefore will refrain from making such an argument.
[8] Snyder, "Public Occasion and Private Passion."
[9] Ibid., 3, 10.
[10] Campbell, Greek Lyric 1:xiii; for their text, 205.
her lyric poetry?" asks Campbell in a footnote to his edition of Sappho's fragments and testimonia.[11] I hope to show that this is more than just a rhetorical question.
As regards the actual performance of Sappho's songs, we have very little information. In later antiquity we hear of performances of her songs both by individuals (a boy; test. 10) and by groups of girls and boys (test. 53), but we do not know how this relates to the original performance context.[12] Some of Sappho's poems seem to have been intended to be recited by herself, like fragment 1, in which she mentions her own name, but such clarity is exceptional: the only other fragments in which Sappho mentions her name are 65, 94, and 133. We cannot be absolutely certain that she sang even these songs herself. Alcman composed several songs (frs. 17, 39, 95b) in which he mentions his own name but which nevertheless may have been performed by a chorus,[13] and both in Pindar's epinikia and later in the parabaseis of Aristophanes (e.g., Nub . 518-62) the chorus or chorus leader can speak in the name of the poet/composer. Sappho further mentions in her poetry that other women sang songs about each other or Aphrodite, and in one case she alludes to a song dance (
) of Atthis.[14] Were these their own compositions or did Sappho compose these songs for them, the same way she composed the wedding songs or the hymns?
The testimonial tradition about Sappho is not uniform either. Horace pictures her as plucking the lyre while singing to herself about her girls (Carm . 2.13.24-25 = test. 18), whereas an anonymous poet in the Anthologia Palatina describes her as leading a dancing chorus of Lesbian women, "her golden lyre in hand" (AP 9.189 = test. 59).[15] Philostratus (Imag . 2.1.1-3), finally, is reminded of Sappho when he sees a picture of a female director (
) leading a band of singing girls (
).[16] We thus have witnesses
[11] Ibid., 7.
[12] Other references to the performance of Sappho's songs in later times are Plut. Quaest. cony . 622c, 711d, but the number of singers is unclear here.
[13] Calame, Alcman 362 f.
[14] Frs. 21, 22, 96.5. In fr. 96.4 the Lydian woman is further said to have compared Atthis to a goddess and it is not unlikely that she did so in a song.
and/or fragments for at least three different types of performances: Sappho sings, with or without her chorus dancing; full choral performances; performances by one of her companions.
Sappho composed songs about young women,[17] and she probably composed her wedding songs for performances by them. The Adonis hymn (fr. 140a), with its reference to 
, may represent another type of song Sappho composed for these girls. Both types of song would have been performed in public.[18] It is generally assumed that Sappho sang the other songs herself in the small circle of her companions,[19] but there is really no evidence for this. No one in antiquity says so, not even Horace, who makes Sappho sing to her own lyre in the underworld.[20] This idea seems to have originated in the French salons of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, whose members believed to have found in Sappho a kindred spirit.[21] In the nineteenth century Sappho's "salon" was interpreted as a school for young girls and, more recently, as a female thiasos , but, as far as we know, there existed no literary "salons," schools for girls, or private thiasoi in archaic Greece.[22]
Modern scholars sometimes make reference to fragment 160 in which the speaker says something like: "I shall now sing these songs beautifully to the delight of my companions" (
).[23] We cannot be sure that this is what Sappho actually said
[18] Page, Sappho and, Alcaeus 119; Campbell, "Sappho" 162.
[19] E.g., Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 119; van Erp Taalman Kip, "Einige interpretatieproblemen" 340; Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World" 45; Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 209 n. 2.
[20] Horace's picture is reminiscent of Achilles playing all by himself on his lyre in Iliad 9 (on which, see 170 n. 102) rather than of a performance before a group.
[21] Compare Saake, Sapphostudien 15-16; DeJean, Fictions of Sappho 43f., 135-36.
[22] See Lardinois, "Subject and Circumstance" 63-64, 75-79. See Parker, "Sappho Schoolmistress" 339, for some examples of scholars who interpreted Sappho's "circle" as a thiasos . Nineteenth-century scholars: Welcker, Sappho 97; Wilamowitz, "Die griechische Literatur" 26.
[23] E.g., Lanata, "Sul linguaggio amoroso" 66; Winkler, "Double Consciousness" 165; Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 216; Campbell, "Sappho" 162.
(
does not fit the meter) or that Sappho herself is the speaker, but even if this were the case, to whom would she address these words? She does not use a second-person plural (as the speaker does in fr. 141) and therefore may be speaking about her companions in the presence of a larger audience. In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo the speaker similarly asks his dancing chorus, which consists of young girls (
), to remind others how much his singing delighted them (
; 170). If the Anthologia Palatina (test. 59) reflects an authentic tradition and Sappho sometimes performed her songs in public while her chorus danced, fragment 160 may have been part of such a song.[24]
Other possible evidence is fragment 150, in which Sappho calls a house (if 
is the correct supplement for the unmetrical 
) that of "the servants of the Muses" (
).[25] According to Maximus of Tyre, who has preserved the fragment for us, Sappho spoke these words to her daughter, which is probably why most scholars assume that she is speaking here about her own house.[26] Yet, even if this were the case, the fragment does not say that it was in her house, and only in her house, that Sappho and her companions performed their songs. We do not know what she means by the word 
, but we encounter the same term again in a Boeotian inscription where it refers to a theater group.[27] I do not want to deny that Sappho and her companions may have recited songs to each other at her house, but this is by no means evident and, instead, there are good reasons to believe that Sappho composed her songs for public performances.
The closest parallel to Sappho's circle is the groups of Spartan women for whom Alcman composed his songs.[28] These are young girls, at the brink of marriage, who come together to sing in choruses and perform certain rituals. The Spartan evidence strongly suggests that these groups were trained for
[24] For this type of performance in which a soloist sings while the chorus dances, one may compare Demodocus's song about Ares and Aphrodite, which is sung by Demodocus and danced to by a group of young Phaeacians (Od . 8.262-64), the wedding song in Od . 4.17-19, or the execution of the Linos song in Il . 18.569f. For some applications of this type of performances to other archaic Greek poets, see Davies, "Monody" 62-63.
[26] E.g., Welcker, Sappho 97; Wilamowitz, Sappho und Simonides 73; Kranz, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur 88; Burnett, Three Arctic Poets 211.
[27] IG VII. 2484. See Lanata, "Sul linguaggio amoroso" 67; Galame. Les chaurs 1:367.
[28] Merkelbach, "Sappho und ihr Kreis" 3; Calame, Les chaurs 1:27, 367f.; Lardinois, "Lesbian Sappho" 26-29.
public performances, not for the privacy of the poet's house. This does not necessarily mean that the gifts always had to do both the singing and the dancing. A fresh look at Alcman's poetry might reveal that not all of his "maiden songs" were like fragments 1 and 3, that is, sung by the whole chorus. There is the suggestion of exchanges between the choir and the poet, and of prooemia sung by Alcman himself.[29] It is also possible that such a "monodic"-looking fragment as fragment 59a was actually sung by the poet while his maiden chorus danced.[30] I want to argue for such a variety of performances in the case of Sappho's poetry as well.[31]
Finally, we may question whether any archaic Greek poet, male or female, would have composed poetry for something as intimate as a private group of young, adolescent women. Parallels have been drawn between Sappho's circle and the hetaireia of the Lesbian poet Alcaeus,[32] but there is quite a difference between a gathering of politically active, adult men and a group of young girls. If Sappho's circle had a counterpart in any male organizations, it was in juvenile bands of boy initiates, not in adult clubs of aristocratic warriors. Such groups were, like Alcman's choruses, trained for performances in public.[33]
2. Sappho and the Distrinctions between Choral and Monodic Poetry
Critics of the traditional division between choral poetry and monody have pointed out that it is not very old. Plato (Leg . 764d-e) is the first to mention it, and he speaks about the performances of songs, not about their monodic or choral character.[34] The archaic Greeks themselves do not seem to have been particularly interested in the distinction, for a number of archaic Greek genre names could refer to a poem sung by a soloist or a choral song, such
[29] On exchanges, see Rosenmeyer, "Alcman's Partheneion I" 338, who points to frs. 26, 38, 39, and 40; on prooemia , see Segal, "Alcman" 128.
[30] On the monodic character of Alcman fr. 59a, see Davies, "Alcman fr. 59a P.," review of Calame 387-88, and "Monody" 54-55.
[31] Besides these different kinds of "maiden songs," Alcman, just as Sappho, also composed marriage songs: for the evidence see Contiades-Tsitsoni, Hymenaios 46-67, with Muth's prudent remarks (review of E. Contiades-Tsitsoni 587).
[32] Most, "Greek Lyric Poets" 95-96; Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 209; Gentili, Poetry and Its Public 81.
[33] Bremmer, "Adolescents" 138; Buxton, Imaginary Greece 23-24. It is is worth noting that other female poets in the classical period were credited with having composed songs for young women's choruses as well: Calame, Les chœurs 2:174; Snyder, The Woman and the Lyre 40, 50 (Corinna), 54-55 (Praxilla), 60 (Telesilla).
[34] Davies, "Monody" 57, Lefkowitz, "Who Sang Pindar's Victory Odes?" 191. Cf. Fäber, Die Lyrik 1.16, and Harvey, "Classification" 159 n. 3.
as the skolion ,[35] the epinikion ,[36] and the hymenaios .[37] The differences between choral and monodic poetry that one finds most often cited concern
1. their metrics: the meters of choral songs are said to be more elaborate, the strophic structures longer.
2. their language: monodic poets stay closer to their local dialects, while choral poets make use of a more artificial language, based on Doric and the epic.
3. their contents: choral poets are less intimate and personal than monodic poets.[38]
Note that these differences are all relative: they may be less the result of the number of performers of the song than of the individual poet, the subject of the song, the audience, and so on.
I will now examine how these distinctions relate to Sappho's poetry:
1. There can be no question of any clear, metrical division between Sappho's choral and monodic poetry since we possess wedding songs (frs. 27, 30), as well as supposedly monodic songs (fr. 1), in the same Sapphic stanza.[39]
[35] Harvey, "Classification" 162. Dicaearchus (fr. 88 Wehrli) distinguished three different types of drinking songs: first a song sung by all the guests together, then stanzas sung by each of the guests in turn, and finally songs sung by the experts.
[37] See n. 4 above, p. 151. In general, archaic Greek terms for poetry mark the occasions of the song rather than any formal features: see Calame, "Réflexions" 118; West, Studies 7, 23; Fowler, The Nature of Greek Lyric 90; Gentili, Poetry and Its Public 36.
[38] E.g., Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry 6; Kirkwood, Early Greek Monody 10-11 (who makes an exception for Sappho: 10); Most, "Greek Lyric Poets" 89; Campbell, "Monody" 161. Segal, "The Nature of Early Choral Poetry" 125, is already more cautious. See for the history of the distinction Davies, "Monody" 58-61.
Sappho also used the dactylic hexameter for wedding songs (frs. 105, 106, 143) and for such a song as fragment 142, believed to be the opening line of one of her "amorous" songs.[40] The idea that choral meters are always complex is based in large part on Alcman's first partheneion, which has a fourteen-line stanza. Yet not all dance songs need have been so intricate as this one, which was clearly composed for a solemn occasion.[41] One should note that Alcman composed three-line stanzas as well.[42]
2. Page in his commentary on Sappho and Alcaeus followed Lobel in his assessment that Sappho wrote in her Lesbian vernacular, "uncontaminated by alien or artificial forms and features," with the exception of some "abnormal" poems.[43] However, this distinction, which has recently been disputed,[44] does not correspond to a division between her choral and supposedly monodic songs. Some of the "abnormal" poems appear to be monodic (notably fr. 44), while some wedding songs are as "uncontaminated" as her supposedly monodic songs (frs. 27, 30). Again, we should be aware of other circumstances that can determine the use of, for example, epic diction. Thus it is to be expected that Sappho is able to use more diction familiar to us from epic in poems composed in the hexameter or in a meter close to it (all "abnormal" poems). They are also more appropriate for a song in which she recounts an epic story, like fragment 44, yet no one would argue on this basis that fragment 44 is a choral song.[45]
[40] Campbell, Greek Lyric 1:157. We, of course, associate the dactylic hexameter mainly with the solo performances of Homer and Hesiod.
[41] I would argue the same for Pindar's epinikia and the tragic choruses. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Comp . 19 = Stesich. test. 28 Campbell) maintained that "the ancient poets, I mean Sappho and Alcaeus, made their stanzas short, so they did not introduce many variations in their few colons, and they used the epode or shorter line sparingly, but Stesichorus, Pindar, and the like made their periods longer and divided them into many meters and colons for the sheer love of variety " (my italics): no mention of monodic versus choral structures.
[42] Fr. 3.3 col. iii Page/Davies and, possibly, ft. 14a: see West, "Greek Poetry" 181. This, incidentally, spoils Davies' neat division between "eastern" and "western" poets ("Monody" 63-64).
[43] Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 327. The so-called abnormal poems are frs. 44, 104a, 105a, 105c, 1066-9, 142, and 143.
[44] Hooker, Language and Text ; Bowie, The Poetic Dialect ; and Nagy, Pindar's Homer 94 n. 60. It appears that Sappho's poetry, just like that of Alcaeus, is a complicated mix of old Aeolic, epic, and her local dialect. The same is essentially true for Alcman's (choral) poetry: Calame, Alcman xxiv-xxxiv.
[45] Rösler, "Ein Gedicht," following Merkelbach ("Sappho und ihr Kreis" 17) and Frankel (Early Greek Poetry 174), has actually argued that fr. 44 was a choral (wedding) song, but on different grounds. For the latest twist in the interpretation of this poem, see Lasserre, Sappho 81-106, and Contiades-Tsitsoni, Hymenaios 102-8, who both argue that it represents a monodic wedding song (cf. n. 4 above, p. 151).
3. This brings us to the contents of Sappho's songs. Many pages have been written about the profoundly personal feelings that Sappho expresses in her lyrics. But can we be sure that these are really her own feelings? Can we be sure that any of the early Greek poems is "personal," for that matter?[46] What is "personality" in such a group-oriented society as archaic Greece? Central to the debate have been poems in which the poet clearly impersonates a character.[47] Some of these we find, interestingly enough, among Sappho's fragments as well.[48] I will not pursue this matter further here. Instead, I will focus on some of the similarities between Alcman's partheneia, Sappho's choral wedding songs, and her so-called love poems.
The discovery of Alcman's partheneia has greatly changed the perception of early Greek choral poetry. Fränkel commented on the first fragment: "the style in the second half of Alcman's maiden song is as simple as that of the monodies of Sappho; in content choral lyric is frequently as personal as monody."[49] Of course, he meant to say that the chorus , not Alcman himself, was as "personal" in this song as Sappho in her poems.[50] But if this is true and the same degree of intimacy can be found in Alcman's choral songs as in Sappho's fragments, we must allow at least for the possibility that Sappho's songs were performed by a chorus of young women, just like Alcman's partheneia and her own wedding songs.
Indeed, the same degree of "intimacy" can not only be detected in Alcman's partheneia but in Sappho's wedding songs as well. In fragment 112 Sappho has a choir of girls sing to the bride: "your form is gracious and your eyes / ... / honey-sweet; love streams over your desire-arousing face."[51] One is hard pressed to find another fragment of Sappho that is so "intimate" as this one. The similarity between Alcman's partheneia, Sappho's own
[46] On this vexed question, see most recently Slings, "The 'I' in Personal Archaic Lyric," and Jarcho, "Das poetische 'Ich.'" For some of the consequences this has for the distinction between choral and monodic poetry, see Russo, "Reading the Greek Lyric Poets" 709-10.
[47] Dover, "The Poetry of Archilochus"; West, Studies 22 f.; Rösler, review of Tsagarakis, and "Personale reale o persona poetica?"; Slings, "The 'I' in Personal Archaic Lyric" 4 f.
[48] Fr. 102 (impersonating a girl speaking to her mother), fr. 137 (dialogue between a man and a woman). For more examples, see Tsagarakis, Self-Expression 77-81.
[49] Fränkel, Early Greek Poetry 170 n. 3.
[50] Compare Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry 32, on Alcman fr. 3: "We are left with the impression that the whole company is in love with her [Astymeloisa]."
wedding songs, and her fragments about the erotic appeal of young women strongly suggests that the latter could have been performed in public and possibly by others than herself.
If we cannot rely on any formal distinction, how then do we judge which fragments qualify for a choral performance, which for a solo one, and which possibly for a mixed mode? I suggest that we study carefully the situation described in the poems, together with any traces of the addressee and possible identification marks of the speaker. In most cases, however, too little of the poems survives to make even an educated guess as to how they were performed, and we had better accept this conundrum instead of touting these fragments as prime examples of personal lyric.
3. "I" and "We" in Sappho and Other Early Greek Poetry
There is one formal feature that can throw some more light on the possible speaker of Sappho's fragments: the use of the first-person singular or plural. It is often assumed that "I" and "we" are interchangeable in archaic Greek poetry, but the situation is in fact not as simple as that. The latest studies of the Homeric language suggest that single characters normally use a first-person singular in referring to themselves, and that instances in which they use a first-person plural are to be explained as indications that they somehow want to include one or more other persons.[52] This is the case both with the individual heroes and with the poet himself.[53]
The same holds true for the archaic Greek poets. Maarit Kaimio, who examined the use of the first person in tragic choruses, mentions three different ways in which a single poet or performer can revert to a first-person plural: to include the person addressed, to include a third person, or to include a larger group (for example the state or the whole of humanity).[54]
[52] Chantraine, Grammaire homérique 2:33-34; Schwyzer and Debrunner, Griechische Grammatik 243-44, contra Wackernagel, Vorlesungen 1:98 f. Notable exceptions are the possessive pronouns, which I will therefore leave out of consideration. See also Benveniste, "Relationships of Persons in the Verb" 201 f., on the use of the first-person plural in general.
[53] E.g., Il . 2.486 (all mortals), Od . 1.10 (poet and his public); cf. Chantraine, Grammaire homérique 2:34.
[54] Kaimio, The Chorus 30, lists five exceptions, all of which in my opinion can be explained: Solon 7.6 Diehl (= 19.6 West) and Xenophanes 2.12 Diehl (= 2.12 West) are instances of possessive pronouns (see n. 52 above); Anacreon frs. 357 and 395 are indeed troublesome cases, but "us" in fr. 357.6 can be explained as encompassing the poet and Kleoboulos (or even the whole of humanity), while in fr. 395-1 Anacreon may be suggesting that not only his own hair is turning gray but that of his audience as well. The final exception Kaimio mentions is Sappho fr. 121, but this may actually be a choral song. Stobaeus, who cites the fragment, says that it refers to the relative ages of marriage partners and it is possible that the fragment is derived from a wedding song. In any case, it is highly unlikely that Sappho spoke this fragment "in her own voice."
Choral poets, on the other hand, use the first-person plural as well as the first-person singular to refer to the group as a whole. A quick glance at the evidence shows that they actually use the first-person singular more often than the first-person plural: Alcman's partheneion fragment 3 has only first-person singulars (nine in total), in fragment 1 in the majority of cases. This is also true for the remains of Pindar's partheneia, paeans, and dithyrambs (Paean 6.128 is an exception). In tragedy, according to Kaimio, there is also a preponderance of the use of the first-person singular in self-references of the chorus. This use of the first-person singular by a chorus can be explained in several ways: the chorus is perceived as one body, or each of its members is believed to be speaking for him- or herself, or the first-person singular represents the experiences of another person (e.g., Sappho) with whom the chorus identifies itself.[55]
In other words, where the number of speakers is concerned, the first-person plural is marked and the first-person singular unmarked in archaic Greek poetry.[56] A first-person singular can refer to a soloist or a chorus in virtually all circumstances, but a first-person plural only to a chorus or a soloist who wants to include others. It is therefore possibly revealing to study the use of the first-person plural in Sappho's poems. In fragments 27 and 30 (two wedding songs) and fragment 140a.1 (the hymn for Adonis) the speaker refers to itself with a first-person plural and is therefore, most likely, a chorus. By analogy, fragments 6, 19, and 121 are probably spoken by a chorus as well. Fragments 5, 21, 24a, 38, 147, and 150 are either spoken by a chorus or by a soloist (not necessarily Sappho) who wants to include one or more other persons.
Among the major fragments in Sappho's corpus there are two that make extensive use of first-person plurals: 94 and 96. In fragment 96 (a song for Atthis about a woman in Lydia), the study of the first-person speaker can be combined with an examination of the situation described in the poem. Before taking a closer look at this poem we must determine, however, where exactly it ends. Some scholars have suggested that the poem ends at line 20,[57] but the echo of lines 4-5 in line 21 makes it quite clear that the poem continues.[58] Besides, the strophes 24-26 and 27-29 (and perhaps 21-23, if
[55] Kaimio, The Chorus 251; cf. Calame, Les chœurs 1:436-39.
[56] For the terms "marked" and "unmarked," see Crystal, Dictionary of Linguistics 211-12; cf. Nagy, Pindar's Homer 5-8, and Martin, Language of Heroes 29-30.
[57] Theander, "Studia Sapphica II" 67, followed by Schadewaldt, Sappho 120, and Kirk-wood, Early Greek Monody 118. Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 95 n. 2, is skeptical of any break.
[58] Saake, Zur Kunst Sapphos 174; Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 311; and Gentili, Poetry and Its Public 83.
The first thing to be noticed is the persistent use of the first-person plural by the speaker:. . 
(3), 
. [. .] (18), 
(21), and presumably 
in line 27. Of the verb ending in line 3 we cannot say very much, except that the "we" contained in it contrasts itself with the "you" in line 4, who is probably Atthis.[60]
in line 18, probably the subject of the infinitive 
, could be an inclusive "we" (speaker or speakers + Atthis), as 
in line 27 seems to be ("and for us ... she [Aphrodite] poured nectar"). But this can hardly be the case with 
in line 21. Again there is a contrast between the speaker ("we") on the one hand and Atthis on the other: "it is not easy for us to rival goddesses in loveliness of figure, but you have...."[61] Burnett comments about these lines that "the singer praises Atthis with the voice of a group" and "[t]he plurality is undoubted, and more important, the playful self-denigration—so like that of the girls of Alcman's Partheneion (or Theocritus's Helen )—is a sign that the group here hails Atthis as its leader,"[62] but she does not draw the obvious conclusion that the speaker is therefore most likely a group.
These words are in many ways reminiscent of Alcman's first partheneion, in which the chorus compares its leader, Hagesichora, to goddesses (though falling short of an equation; 96 f.) and her companion, Agido, to the Sun (41), while at the same time playing down their own beauty (64 ff.) and singing talents (85-87; cf. 100-101). To Hailer goes the credit of first having noticed the agonistic quality of Sappho fragment 96 and its resemblance to Alcman's partheneia.[63] Not only is the plural speaker of the poem and the way it contrasts itself to Atthis and the Lydian woman suggestive of a choral performance, but also the actions described in the poem. The woman overseas is thought of as dancing in Lydia right
[60] Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 92; Campbell, Greek Lyric 1:123 n. 1; Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 302-3; Hague, "Sappho's Consolation for Atthis" 29.
[62] Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 312.
[63] Hallett, "Sappho and Her Social Context" 140.
now,[64] while in the past she enjoyed the singing and dancing (
; 1.5) of Atthis. It would be very effective to think of the speakers of this poem as performing a song dance at the same time as the woman in Lydia and like Atthis in the past.[65]
In fragment 94 the use of "we" is more complex. Sappho is probably singing the song herself since her name is mentioned in line 5, although we cannot exclude the possibility of another soloist or a chorus impersonating her (see above). In the first line, Sappho or the girl who left her speaks in the first-person singular (
, 1; 
, 2).[66] In lines 4-5 the girl speaks (again) and uses a first-person plural (
; 1. 4). At first it might seem that this first person refers just to herself ("o, how we suffer"), but the echo of these words in line 11 (
) makes it clear that she is probably speaking both for Sappho and for herself.[67] The first-person plural in line 8 (
) is exclusive and probably refers to Sappho and her companions;[68] "we" in line 26 (
) refers again to Sappho and the girl, or to Sappho, the girl, and her companions. These companions, together with the girl and Sappho, may have formed the chorus that is mentioned at the end of line 27.[69] Their inclusion in line 8 strongly suggests that they were present at the performance of this song too, either in the audience (as commonly envisioned) or as a chorus supporting Sappho while she was singing.
The whole poem, or at least the preserved part (Sappho's speech to the woman who leaves her), is, I would suggest, concerned with choral performances. Most of the "pleasant things" of which Sappho reminds her, the stringing of flower wreaths (12 f.), putting on garlands (15 f.), wearing
[66] Gomme ("Interpretations" 255-56), Burnett ("Desire and Memory" and Three Archaic Poets 292), Snyder (The Woman and the Lyre 26), and Greene ("Apostrophe and Women's Erotics" 239-40) assume that the girl speaks the first line, contra Wilamowitz (Sappho und Simonides 50), Page (Sappho and Alcaeus 82), Saake (Zur Kunst Sapphos 189), and Robbins ("Every Time I Look at You"), who opt for Sappho.
[68] Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 78.
perfumes (18 f.), and going to holy places (25, 27), where there is a "chorus" (? 
; 27) and "sound" (
; 28), agree with the activities of a chorus; and one can even read a linear progression into them, starting with the preparations and leading up to musical performances at temples and other places.[70] In that case Sappho would be reminding a girl of previous performances perhaps at the very moment that she and her choir, of which the girl no longer was part, were performing again a song dance, just as in fragment 96.[71]
4. Some Major Fragments: Fragments 1, 2, 5, 16, 17, 31, 58, and 95
So far I have provided positive arguments why certain fragments of Sappho probably were composed for choral presentations. In the following paragraphs, dealing with some of the other major fragments, I will allow myself more latitude. I will reverse Page's "natural supposition" and consider if there is any evidence or indication that these songs may have been performed with the help of choruses.
Fragment 1 was most probably sung by Sappho herself or by someone impersonating her: her name is mentioned in line 20. It is possible, however, that she was accompanied by a group of dancers, just as in fragment 94. West has argued that Sappho deliberately left the name of her beloved unmentioned so the song could be performed on different occasions.[72] This certainly would depersonalize the song. It would also lend special significance to the idea of the repetition of her love feelings in the poem (with every new performance there is the pretense of a new love).[73]
[71] Fr. 94 has been identified as a "farewell song," which involves memories of previously shared experiences: see most recently Rauk, "Erinna's Distaff ."
[72] West, "Burning Sappho" 310.
Fragment 2 is an obvious candidate for a choral performance either by the chorus itself or by Sappho and her chorus. If 
(hither ... to this temple) is the correct reading in line 1, and there seems to be no better alternative,[74] we are probably present at a real shrine, however dreamlike this shrine is subsequently represented.[75] Athenaeus quotes the final lines of our fragment: "Come, Cypris, pouring gracefully into golden cups nectar that is mingled with our festivities,"[76] and adds what appears to be an adaptation of Sappho's subsequent line: "for these my companions and yours" (
). If this was still part of Sappho's poem, the hetairai associated with the speaker were probably present at the scene as well.[77] We might add that lines 13f., about Aphrodite pouring nectar for the participants in the festivities, is reminiscent of fragment 96.26f., where the speaker, whom I identified as a chorus, remembers how Aphrodite poured nectar for them and for Atthis.[78] On the basis of some broad similarities I would argue for a similar interpretation of fragment 17 (the so-called "Hymn to Hera"). Here the singers may be mentioned in line 14 (
).[79] These two fragments together with fragment 140a (the Adonis hymn) suggest that at least some of Sappho's (choral) poetry was composed for ritual occasions, not unlike Alcman's partheneia.
In fragment 5, a poem about her brother Charaxus, Sappho uses, after an initial 
(? l. 1), the first-person plural (
; 7), probably to include
[74] See Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 36; see ad loc. Voigt, Sappho et Alcaeus , and Campbell, Creek Lyric vol. 1.
[75] Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 42, and Merkelbach, "Sappho und ihr Kreis" 28: contra West, "Burning Sappho" 317; McEvilley, "Sappho Fragment Two"; and Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 261 f.
the other members of her family and/or her friends.[80] If the poem is a propemptikon or "send-off" poem, as several scholars have suggested,[81] it is almost certainly performed in public.[82] I believe that this song was sung by Sappho (or someone impersonating her) in public, while her chorus danced. The philoi included in 
in line 7 may refer to these dancers or to members of Sappho's family in the audience.[83]
Fränkel already identified fragment 16 as possibly a choral song.[84] Its opening priamel, followed by a mythical example and praise of the "laudanda," resembles the structure of Pindar's epinikia .[85] Hallett added that the isolation of a few distinctive features (Anactoria's step and face in ll. 17, 18) resembles the individual compliments paid to the chorus members in Alcman's first partheneion.[86] Segal, finally, observed that the desire of the
[81] Merkelbach, "Sappho und ihr Kreis" 24 n. 1; Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry 210; and Snyder, The Woman and the Lyre 17-18. Governi, "Su alcuni elementi propemptici," has adduced parallels from greetings and farewell scenes both in Homer (Od . 6.180, 184-85; 8.461; 15-111-12, 128) and in other Greek poetry (Theog. 691-92) for several lines in the poem (3-4, 6-7).
[83] Ft. 2o appears to derive from a similar song. In fr. 15, Sappho strikes a more critical note about her brother. If this is meant as a satirical poem, as I assume, its delivery is again best pictured in public where it would have effect. The same holds true for those poems in which she vilifies her rivals or girls who went to them: frs. 57, 68a, 71, 131, 133a, 144, 155, 178 (?), 213. I do not exclude the possibility that some of the figures mentioned in this poetry are poetic personae, similar to the stock characters presented in Archilochus's iambics (on which see West, Studies 25-28, and Nagy, Pindar's Homer 430-31.
[84] Fränkel, Early Greek Poetry 172.
[85] For a detailed comparison, see Howie, "Sappho Fr. 16," esp. 209-14. The sirnilarity was already noted by Fränkel, "Eine Stileigenheit" 90 f., and Early Greek Poetry 186; and Bundy, Studia Pindarica 5-6. Stern's objection ("Sappho Fr. 16" 349), that the priamel is voiced too personally for choral poetry, is answered by Bundy (6 n. 19), if Pindars epinikia are choral (see n. 1 above).
speaker in this fragment to make her observations "known to every one" (
Fragment 31 can go either way. The poem certainly contains a great number of first-person singular statements, but these could refer to a chorus as well as a soloist. The emotions described can be summarized by what Alcman's chorus says about its chorus leader: 
(she wears me out; fr. 1.77).[88]
Just as in this partheneion or in Sappho fragment 96, a triangle is set up between the speaker, the girl she is in love with, and a third person with whom the girl is involved (in this case a man). Note, for example, the structural opposition between that man, who "appears to be the equal of the gods" (
1-2a), and the speaker, who in lines 15-16 "appears to be little short of dying" (
). This echo, already noted by Wilamowitz, contradicts Winkler's assertion that the man is "not an actor in the imagined scene."[89] Better Snyder: "[the man is] a foil for the exposition of the speaker's feelings; he is calmly 'godlike' in response to the woman's sweet talk and charming laugh, whereas the speaker, in the same situation, is instantly struck dumb."[90] Both in Alcman fragment 1 and in Sappho fragment 31 the rivals for the affection of the beloved are compared to gods (Alcman fr. 1.41, Sappho fr. 31.1) and they are together with the beloved (Alcman fr. 1.78-79, Sappho fr. 31.3-4), while the speakers are unable to be in her presence. In both poems the speakers are also resigned to this fact. (Sappho fr. 31 continues in l. 17 with the words "but all can be endured," 
.)
As for the occasion on which this song was performed, I would not want to exclude the possibility that it was sung at a wedding, as Wilamowitz
[87] Segal, "Eros and Incantation" 64. Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 285 n. 19, adduces two parallels for the expression, one from a Pindaric hyporchema (fr. 105a.1 Maehler) and one from an epinikion of Bacchylides (ft. 3.85).
[89] Winkler, "Double Consciousness" 179. See Wilamowitz, Sappho grid Simonides 57 (cf. Robbins, "Every Time I Look At You" 259).
declared.[91] The opening line is certainly reminiscent of the traditional makarismos of the groom.[92] Most modern interpreters, starting with Page, have discredited this view. Page's main objection is that it would be inappropriate for Sappho (or, presumably, any other speaker) to speak about the intensity of her passions for a bride on her wedding day, but this could be our modern sensitivity.[93] In fragment 112 of Sappho a chorus describes a bride in very glowing terms, and when it says that "eros streams over her desirable face" (
) it is by no means clear that this is supposed to have an effect on her husband only.[94] Snyder objects that "a wedding song must have chiefly to do with the bride and the groom, not with the speaker's passion for one of them," but as Most remarks: "It is in fact the beauty of the unnamed girl that is the burden of the poem and the justification for its composition and performance: every detail Sappho provides is designed to testify, not to the poet's susceptibility, but to the girl's seductiveness."[95] In
[91] Wilamowitz, Sappho und Simonides 58. He was followed by Snell, "Sapphos Gedicht" 82; Schadewaldt, Sappho 98; Merkelbach, "Sappho und ihr Kreis" 6; Fränkel Early Greek Poetry 176; and Lasserre, "Ornements érotiques" 22. Welcker, "Oden" 89-90, already suggested that this poem "veranlasst ist durch die Heirath einer geliebten Schülerin," and "es mag auch eine Huldigung, Preis der Schönheit in dem hohen Ausdruck dieses Entzückens versteckt sehn" ("[this poem] is occasioned by the marriage of a favorite pupil," and "there may also be a celebration, praise of beauty hidden behind the intense expression of her enchantment"). Winkler, "Double Consciousness" 178-80, compares Sappho fr. 31 to Od . 6.158-61 (Odysseus's praise of Nausicaa), which in turn has been compared to a wedding song (Hague, "Ancient Greek Wedding Songs" 136-38).
[93] Page, Sappho and Alcatus 30ff. This was also noted by Merkelbach, "Sappho und ihr Kreis" 9, and Segal "Eros and Incantation" 69 n. 19: "we know too little of what conventions on archaic Lesbos would or would not have permitted." There is some evidence to suggest that a bride might be expected to be the object of widespread erotic admiration at ancient Greek weddings: see Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual 36 n. 25.
[94] Segal, "Eros and Incantation" 69, already drew the parallel between fr. 112 and fr. 31.
Alcman's partheneia and in Sappho fragment 112 the women are similarly praised through a declaration of the effect their beauty has on the speaker. Fragment 31, whether performed at a wedding or not, is really an enkomion .[96]
Fragment 58 is generally not considered one of the major fragments, but it is significant because, like fragments 21 and 22, it is suggestive of exchanges between Sappho (or another soloist) and the chorus. Line 11 mentions paides with beautiful gifts, either of the deep- or violet-bosomed Muses.[97] The speaker (a woman) says that she is overcome by old age and no longer able to do like the young fawns (probably to dance).[98] A similar-looking poem is preserved among Alcman's fragments. Here the speaker (Alcman himself, according to Antigonus, who preserved the fragment) addresses a group of "honey-tongued, holy-voiced girls," telling them that "his limbs no longer can carry" him.[99] I believe that Sappho in this fragment conjures up the same image and that the paides of line 11 make up the chorus that is dancing while she (or another performer) is singing.[100]
[96] Lasserre, "Ornements érotiques" 23, who argues that frs. 47 and 130 were part of similar enkomia , and further notes that the "I" person in these poems has more in common with the speaker in choral than in monodic poetry (7 n. 6, 21; cf. Nagy, Pindar's Homer 371). Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 235, and Race, " 'That Man' in Sappho fr. 31" 98-101, compare fr. 31 to Pindar's encomium for Theoxenus (fr. 123 Maehler), where there is also a third person who "meets the liquid glance that gleams from Theoxenus's eye and fails to swell with passion," whereas the speaker, I, "like wax in sun's high heat melt" (Burnett's translation). Compare also Odysseus's words to Nausicaa in Od . 6.160-61, which, just as Pindar's, are not intended as a declaration of love but as praise.
[97] See Di Benedetto, "Il tema della vecchiaia" 147-48, and Voigt, Sappho et Alcaeus ad loc. It is not unlikely that this line constitutes the actual beginning of the poem: Di Benedetto 147; Gallavotti, Saffo e Alceo 1:113. Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 129, also starts the poem on this line.
Fragment 95 portrays a conversation Sappho (or another woman) had with a woman in the past (probably Gongyla, whose name is mentioned in l. 4). This situation is reminiscent of fragment 94 and it may have been performed under similar circumstances.[101]
Most of these reconstructions are only suggestions. Ultimately it is impossible to prove that a particular song was sung by a chorus or by Sappho herself, with or without the help of choral dancers, but I hope to have shown that a choral performance of these songs is at least a serious possibility.
5. Sappho's Public Poetry
I have argued that three modes of performances can be detected in Sappho's poems, all public:
She sang while a chorus of young women danced (e.g., frs. 1, 5, 94, 95, 160?). The young women did both the singing and the dancing (most epithalamia, frs. 2, 16, 17, 31?, 96).
Exchanges between Sappho or another soloist and the group (frs. 21, 22, 58, 140a).
It is possible that, besides these more or less choral songs, there were genuine monodic songs, performed only by Sappho herself: after all, the Suda speaks of Sappho's monodies as well as lyric songs (above). If so, we must ask ourselves where these monodic songs were performed. We really know of only one occasion where more or less monodic poetry was performed in the archaic period: symposia.[102] It could be that Sappho composed some songs for symposia, as did Praxilla (see below), but I can find no trace of them in the remaining fragments, with the exception perhaps of some poems that were composed for the wedding banquet.[103]
[101] Cf. Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 85.
We may conclude that a monodic performance, by which I mean a single performer accompanying herself on the lyre and singing to a group, is not a likely option for Sappho's poetry. I have argued that Sappho's poems about young women do not fit the monodic mold any more than her wedding songs do or Alcman's partheneia. I have further argued that there are traces of a plural voice in these poems and many parallels with choral poetry (in particular Alcman). The testimonia and Sappho's own poems speak about a variety of performances but not about monodic performances (with the exception of the Suda , which mentions monodic songs in addition to nine books of other lyric songs). Finally, I disputed the idea that any archaic Greek poet, male or female, would have composed poetry for delivery to a group of young girls in the privacy of her own home, and I suggested that this view of Sappho, which is commonly accepted, first originated in the French salons of the seventeenth and eighteenth century.
By arguing for a more public delivery of Sappho's poems, I do not want to deny the important differences in tone and subject matter between Sappho and most male poets,[104] but instead of seeing this as a difference between a public (male) and a private (female) world (as do Stigers [Stehle], Winkler, and Snyder), I would like to suggest that this reflects a difference between two distinct public voices.[105] Only in this way can we make sense of the many similarities between Alcman's partheneia and Sappho's poetry. I believe that
[104] Here recent scholarship that has adopted a feminist perspective has done much to further our understanding of Sappho's poetry: duBois, "Sappho and Helen," and Sowing the Body 26-27 (with an important caveat on p. 29); Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World"; Stehle, "Sappho's Gaze"; Winkler, "Double Consciousness"; Snyder, "Public Occasion and Private Passion"; and Greene, "Apostrophe and Women's Eratics." See also Lasserre, "Ornements érotiques" 30; Hallett, "Sappho and Her Social Context" 138; Burnett, Three Archaic Poets , esp. 225-26, 288; Svenbro, "La stratégie de l'amour"; and Race, "Sappho, Fr . 16." Skinner, "Woman and Language," in my opinion, goes too far in insisting on the independence of Sappho's poetry.
[105] These public voices appear to be gender-specific as far as contents and performance are concerned, but they are not necessarily composed by only men or only women. Alcman composed "maiden songs," as did Pindar (frs. 94a-104d Maehler), Simonides, and Bacchylides (Calame, Les chœurs 2:167-74), while Praxilla was credited with writing skolia (Snyder, The Woman and the Lyre 55-56), a genre that was closely associated with the male domain of the symposium.
in the future it will be fruitful to compare Sappho's poetry more closely with Alcman's partheneia,[106] the poetry of other female poets,[107] and the public voices of Greek women in general. Anthropological studies of women's public or poetic voices in other cultures may be illuminating as well.[108] One of the public speech genres associated with women both in archaic and in rural Greece today was the lament.[109] There are echoes of this speech genre in Sappho's hymns (fr. 140a), in her wedding songs (fr. 114), and in a series of songs that are preserved among her "other" poetry.[110] No matter how one reads Sappho's songs, it is important to realize that most of them probably were intended to be performed in public with the help of choruses.
[106] For a beginning, see Calame, Les chœurs 1:361 ff., 2:94-97; Hallett, "Sappho and Her Social Context" 139-42; and Cavallini, Presenza di Saffo 17-20. The differences between Alcman's partheneia and Sappho's poetry to which Stehle ("Romantic Sensuality Poetic Sense" 147-49) and Skinner ("Woman and Language" 186-87) have pointed are noteworthy but do not measure up against the many similarities. See Lardinois, "Subject and Circumstance" 73 n. 59.
[107] Here Rauk's article, "Erinna's Distaff , "deserves special mention. He sees in Sappho fr. 94 and Erinna's Distaff a generic type of farewell addresses of women. We may also point out that Praxilla (fr. 747), like Sappho (fr. 140a), composed a hymn for Adonis, a typical women's cult (Burkert, Greek Relyion 177; Winkler, Constraints of Desire 188 f.), and that Telesilla (fr. 717), like Sappho (test. 21, 41; ft. 44a), composed a hymn to Artemis, a goddess presiding over various facets of women's lives including the initiation of young girls (Burkerr 151 and Calame, Les chœurs 1:174f.)
[108] For example, on Crete women can compete with men in witty, poetic responses (mandinadhes ), mostly of a sexual nature (Herzfeld, The Poetics of Manhood 142-46), not unlike the exchange found in Sappho fr. 137. On Madagascar, women are associated with direct, open expressions of anger (Keenan, "Norm-Makers, Norm-Breakers" 137-39); cf. Homer Il . 20.252-54 and, perhaps, some of Sappho's satirical poetry. Nagy, Poetry as Performance chap. 4, compares Sappho ft. 1 to female initiation songs of the Navajo and Apache.
[109] On archaic Greece, see Alexiou, The Ritual Lament , esp. 4-14, and Martin, Language of Heroes 87; on rural Greece today, see Alexiou, esp. 36-5[1] , and Caraveli, "The Bitter Wounding:"