Sappho has been constructed as many things: proto-feminist, lesbian icon and even – by the Victorians – chaste headmistress of a girls’ finishing school. Yet ironically, as Page duBois shows, the historical poet herself remains elusive. We know that Sappho’s contemporary Alkaios described her as ‘violet, pure, honey-smiling Sappho’; and that the rhetorician and philosopher Maximus of Tyre saw her, perhaps less enthusiastically, as ‘small and dark’. We also know that her seventh-/sixth-century BCE island of Lesbos was riven by tyrannical and aristocratic factionalism and that she was probably exiled to Sicily. Much of the rest is speculative. DuBois suggests that the value of Sappho lies elsewhere: in her remarkable verse, and in the poet’s reception – one of the richest of any figure from antiquity. Offering nuanced readings of the poems, written in an archaic Aiolic dialect, duBois skilfully draws out their sharp images and rhythmic melody. She further discusses the exciting discovery of a new verse fragment in 2004, and the ways in which Sappho influenced Catullus, Horace and Ovid, as well as later writers and painters.
PAGE DUBOIS is Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Her previous books include Centaurs and Amazons; Sappho Is Burning; Slaves and Other Objects; A Million and One Gods; and Slavery: Antiquity and its Legacy (I.B.Tauris, 2010).
Sappho is addressed to students encountering the archaic Greek poet in literature and gender studies courses and to general readers aware of recent papyrus discoveries that have unexpectedly enlarged her canon. Original translations and discussions of those new poems, which have cast crucial light on Sappho’s concerns with ageing and family relations, make Page duBois’ study timely and distinctive. Reading her major fragments closely, while bringing evidence from social history to bear on their content, the author locates Sappho within the political, religious, and artistic milieu of seventh-century BCE Lesbos. She traces Sappho’s decisive influence upon later Greek and Roman literary and cultural traditions and then applies current interpretive models from reception studies and queer theory to establish her ongoing significance for contemporary audiences. This volume is an essential resource for everyone captivated by Greco-Roman antiquity.
– Marilyn B. Skinner, Professor of Classics Emerita, University of Arizona
Page duBois’ pioneering and original approach to Sappho has had a profound impact not only on Sappho studies but on the way we interpret ancient authors and attempt to understand ancient culture in general. While stressing the complicated nature of Sappho’s work, especially in its fragmentary form, and her elusiveness as a literary figure, duBois’ Sappho explores with wonderful clarity how the intense fascination with Sappho over millennia has given rise to an abundant array of literary adaptations, translations, and myth-making. Dubois’ book makes Sappho’s rich literary history both accessible and utterly enjoyable, bringing to life ancient Lesbos, the reception and transmission of Sappho in ancient Greece and Rome, and the metamorphosis of Sappho through centuries of translation. In her last chapter, duBois considers how recent developments in queer theory may affect our readings of Sappho’s work. Finally, duBois’ nuanced, brilliant reading of Sappho’s most famous poem, the Hymn to Aphrodite, illuminates the rich imagery and passion of Sappho, who remains an intense and lasting presence in the Western imagination.
– Ellen Greene, Joseph Paxton Presidential Professor of Classics and Letters, University of Oklahoma
Understanding Classics
Editor: RICHARD STONEMAN (UNIVERSITY OF EXETER)
When the great Roman poets of the Augustan Age – Ovid, Virgil and Horace – composed their odes, love poetry and lyrical verse, could they have imagined that their works would one day form a cornerstone of Western civilization, or serve as the basis of study for generations of schoolchildren learning Latin? Could Aeschylus or Euripides have envisaged the remarkable popularity of contemporary stagings of their tragedies? The legacy and continuing resonance of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – Greek poetical epics written many millennia ago – again testify to the capacity of the classics to cross the divide of thousands of years and speak powerfully and relevantly to audiences quite different from those to which they were originally addressed.
Understanding Classics is a specially commissioned series which aims to introduce the outstanding authors and thinkers of antiquity to a wide audience of appreciative modern readers, whether undergraduate students of classics, literature, philosophy and ancient history or generalists interested in the classical world. Each volume – written by leading figures internationally – will examine the historical significance of the writer or writers in question; their social, political and cultural contexts; their use of language, literature and mythology; extracts from their major works; and their reception in later European literature, art, music and culture. Understanding Classics will build a library of readable, authoritative introductions offering fresh and elegant surveys of the greatest literatures, philosophies and poetries of the ancient world.
Understanding Classics
Aristophanes and Greek Comedy
JEFFREY S. RUSTEN ∙ Cornell University
Augustine
DENNIS E. TROUT ∙ Tufts University
Cicero
GESINE MANUWALD ∙ University College London
Euripides
ISABELLE TORRANCE ∙ University of Notre Dame
Eusebius
AARON P. JOHNSON ∙ Lee University, Tennessee
Homer
JONATHAN S. BURGESS ∙ University of Toronto
Latin Love Poetry
DENISE MCCOSKEY & ZARA TORLONE ∙ Miami University, Ohio
Martial
LINDSAY WATSON & PATRICIA WATSON ∙ University of Sydney
Ovid
CAROLE E. NEWLANDS ∙ University of Wisconsin, Madison
Pindar
RICHARD STONEMAN ∙ University of Exeter
Plutarch
MARK BECK ∙ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
The Poets of Alexandria
SUSAN A. STEPHENS ∙ Stanford University
Roman Comedy
DAVID CHRISTENSON ∙ University of Arizona
Sappho
PAGE DUBOIS ∙ University of California, Berkeley
Seneca
CHRISTOPHER STAR ∙ Middlebury College
Sophocles
STEPHEN ESPOSITO ∙ Boston University
Tacitus
VICTORIA EMMA PAGÁN ∙ University of Florida
Virgil
ALISON KEITH ∙ University of Toronto
Published in 2015 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
London • New York
www.ibtauris.com
Copyright © 2015 Page duBois
The right of Page duBois to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
References to websites were correct at the time of writing.
ISBN: 978 1 78453 360 1 (HB)
978 1 78453 361 8 (PB)
eISBN: 978 0 85773 985 8
ePDF: 978 0 85772 661 2
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Text design, typesetting and eBook versions by Tetragon, London
Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- I · Understanding Is a Process, and One Poem
- II · Sappho of Lesbos
- III · Sappho in Ancient Greece and Rome
- IV · Trying to Translate Sappho
- V · Queer Sappho
- Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading
Acknowledgements
All translations of Sappho are by John Daley. The author gratefully acknowledges permission from John Daley and Arion Press to use translations of Sappho’s poems originally published in Poetry of Sappho, introduction by Page duBois, with wood engravings by Anita Cowles Rearden, in Greek with English translation by John Daley with Page duBois; prints by Julie Mehretu (San Francisco, CA: Arion Press, 2011).
My two lips, eyes, thighs, differ from thy two,
But so, as thine from one another doe;
And, oh, no more; the likeness being such,
Why should they not alike in all parts touch?
Hand to strange hand, lippe to lippe none denies;
Why should they brest to brest, or thighs to thighs?
(John Donne, ‘Sapho to Philaenis’)
Introduction
THIS BOOK IS PART OF the series Understanding Classics, each volume focused on a particular figure from the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome. Figure is a good word for describing ‘Sappho’. She is no longer a person, not yet an author, a somewhat enigmatic name we use to account not just for a small body of astonishingly beautiful poems, written in the Lesbian dialect of ancient Greek, but also for all the other phenomena that surround that name – the legends, the myths, the stories that follow her, the ways in which she was remembered by both ancient and modern people, and by us, the rich complicated process of remembering and alluding to and citing her and her world, for more than 2,000 years, the thrilling accounts of the discovery of her lost work, buried in the sands of Egypt and in European libraries.
The book begins with the assumption that ‘understanding’ is a process; it is not aimed at some final mastery of the author Sappho, but rather reflects a moment in a long process of engagement with this poet and her poetry. ‘Sappho’ is less a person, an author in a modern sense, than a nexus of knowledge, connections, attachments and projections. We cannot retrieve a ‘real Sappho’, and ‘understanding’ her, or these phenomena, entails taking account of many investments in the poetry and the stories, over millennia. That is, neither the figure Sappho nor her reader is a stable entity; both alter over time and the project of understanding changes through the process of engagement.
Chapter 1, ‘Understanding Is a Process, and One Poem’, tries to begin answering the question: Who is Sappho? Why should we care? I address the question of ‘understanding’, trying to make the issues accessible and pleasurable to readers not necessarily familiar with ancient Greek, or literary and cultural theory. And I aim to illustrate the beauties and wonders of Sappho’s poems, reading in detail one of the fragments, the first, a poem summoning Aphrodite, goddess of eros, of sexual desire.
Chapter 2, ‘Sappho of Lesbos’, presents the canonical Sappho, the poet as understood in antiquity. I here discuss the historical context of the figure Sappho, as far as we can know it. I consider the legacy of Homeric verse, Sappho’s position as an aristocrat in the tumultuous world of archaic politics on Lesbos and beyond, the conflicts among populist, tyrannical and aristocratic factions in the seventh and sixth centuries before the ‘common era’, BCE. I also discuss her place alongside her contemporary Lesbian, Alkaios, a...
