Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520918061

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CLASSICS AND C O N T E M P O R A R Y

THOUGHT

Thomas Habinek, editor I. II.

Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position:, by William Fitzgerald Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches, edited by Ellen Greene

III.

Re-reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission, edited by Ellen Greene

IV

Tragedy and Enlightenment: Athenian Political Thought and the Dilemmas of Modernity, by Christopher Rocco

V

Warriors into Traders: The Power of the Market in Early Greece, by David W. Tandy

Reading Sappho

Reading Sappho Contemporary Approaches

E D I T E D BY

Ellen Greene

U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A L I F O R N I A PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1996 by The Regents of the University of California

L i b r a r y of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reading Sappho : contemporary approaches / edited by Ellen Greene, p. cm. — (Classics and contemporary thought : 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-20195-7 (alk. paper) - ISBN 0-520-20601-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Sappho—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Love poetry, Greek—History and criticism. 3. Women and literature—Greece. I. Greene, Ellen, 1950II. Series. PA4409.R474 1996 884'. 01 dc20 96-13702 CIP Printed in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

To my father and to the memory of my mother

CONTENTS

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ix

SERIES E D I T O R ' S F O R E W O R D

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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xi

Thomas Habinek INTRODUCTION

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I

Ellen Greene

I • LANGUAGE AND LITERARY I. S a p p h o ' s A m a t o r y L a n g u a g e

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CONTEXT //

Giuliana Lanata, translated by William Robins 2. C r i t i c a l S t e r e o t y p e s a n d the Poetry o f S a p p h o

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26

Mary R. Lejkowitz 3. P h a e t h o n , S a p p h o ' s P h a o n , a n d the W h i t e R o c k o f L e u k a s : " R e a d i n g " the S y m b o l s o f G r e e k L y r i c

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35

Gregory Nagy 4. Eros a n d Incantation: S a p p h o a n d O r a l Poetry

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58

Charles Segal

II • HOMER A N D THE ORAL T R A D I T I O N 5. S a p p h o a n d H e l e n

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79

Page duBois 6. G a r d e n s o f N y m p h s : Public a n d Private in S a p p h o ' s L y r i c s

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Jack Winkler

III

• R I T U A L A N D SOCIAL C O N T E X T

7. S a p p h o ' s G r o u p : A n Initiation into W o m a n h o o d Claude Calame

vii

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113

8q

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CONTENTS

8. Sappho and Her Social Context: Sense and Sensuality Judith P. Hallett

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125

9. Romantic Sensuality, Poetic Sense: A Response to Hallett on Sappho Eva Stehle 10. Who Sang Sappho's Songs? André Lardinois

IV

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743

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• WOMEN'S EROTICS

11. Woman and Language in Archaic Greece, or, Why Is Sappho a Woman? Marilyn B. Skinner 12. Sappho's Gaze: Fantasies of a Goddess and Young Man Eva Stehle 13. The Justice of Aphrodite in Sappho 1 Anne Carson

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226

14. Apostrophe and Women's Erotics in the Poetry of Sappho Ellen Greene 15. Sappho and the Other Woman Margaret Williamson

CONTRIBUTORS

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INDEX

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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265 287

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248

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233

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175

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank Tom Habinek, the series editor, and Mary Lamprech, the Classics editor at the University of California Press, for their enthusiastic support of this project. I am grateful to the friends and colleagues who generously offered advice and support, especially Harriette Andreadis, André Lardinois, Yopie Prins, and my colleagues in the Classics Department at the University of Oklahoma, especially my ever supportive chair, Jack Catlin. I also want to thank Mary Lefkowitz for introducting me to the beauty of Sappho's fragments in a seminar at Berkeley. Finally, I thank J i m Hawthorne for his counsel, for computer expertise, and for his love and friendship.

IX

SERIES EDITOR'S FOREWORD Thomas Habinek

T h e series Classics and Contemporary Thought seeks to encourage dialogue between classical studies and other fields in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. It is based upon the recognition that each generation puts its own questions to the raw material of the past a n d is grounded in the conviction that the classical past still has much to say to the contemporary world. In contrast to much conventional classical scholarship which seeks ever more sophisticated or detailed answers to questions inherited from earlier scholarship, works selected for publication in this series use the skills of the classicist to address new issues or pose new questions. Because the literature and art of ancient Greece and Rome are distant f r o m our own experience, their interpretation requires the mediation of specialists. But the obligation of such specialists is to the present as much as to the past. It is, in essence, to make the past available to the present. T h e essays collected by Ellen Greene in two volumes entided Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches and Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission seek to make the poetry of Sappho m o r e readily available to contemporary readers in a variety of disciplines a n d from a variety of backgrounds. T h e y do not pretend to represent the totality of m o d e r n responses to Sappho. Rather, the essays in Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches focus on the leading interpretations of Sappho, her context, a n d her achievement advanced by scholars in the field of classical studies in recent years, while the essays in volume two, Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission, examine reactions to S a p p h o at different stages of history from antiquity to the twentieth century. T h e juxtaposition of the two volumes provides a useful contrast between contemporary and earlier approaches to the poetry of Sappho, while illustrating the more general claim that each generation makes of the past what it will. O u r encounter with the poetry of Sappho today XI

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SERIES EDITOR'S FOREWORD

is shaped both by our own experiences and concerns as inhabitants of a late twentieth century post-industrial society and the interests, attitudes, and preconceptions of previous generations o f readers, translators, and scholars. By exploring both we can arrive at a richer understanding of Sappho and perhaps even of ourselves. T h e essays in the first volume, Contemporary Approaches, reflect some of the broader social and intellectual developments that have characterized the last three decades and provide insight into the reconfiguration of classical studies that has accompanied those changes. T h e increasing empowerment o f women, with the resultant interest in women's history, women's writing, and women's "ways o f knowing," has accounted for the focus on Sappho as the first female writer in the Western tradition whose works have survived in any quantity. Sappho has become a test case for both the constructivist and the essentialist views of culture and gender, with scholars placing corresponding emphasis on discontinuities and continuities between her era and our own. As proto-queer, Sappho raises comparable issues with respect to sexual orientation: is she the recovered voice of a long-suppressed lesbian consciousness, or does she instead invite us to consider alternative ways of categorizing human sexual behaviors and emotions? Also running through the volume are conflicting views of the importance of institutions and their impact on the creativity o f the individual artist. T h e earlier o f the essays, in particular, advocate a direct experience of Sappho's poetry and emphasize the texture o f her language and the specificity of her imagery. While later essays never fully abandon such approaches, they pay more attention to Sappho's poetry as a cultural phenomenon, one shaped by and shaping in turn the myths and rituals of the ancient Greek peoples. In this respect, Sappho studies of the past thirty years have followed the trajectory of literary studies more generally, moving toward more deeply historicized and contexualized interpretations. Underlying the essays in the second volume, Reception and Transmission, is a different set of questions concerning the relationship between past and present. For some of the contributors, the vagaries in accounts of Sappho from antiquity through the twentieth century testify to the unrecoverability of past experience or past literature in any but the most attenuated form. In their versions of the reception of Sappho, each generation is seen to create its own Sappho on the basis of its own needs and interests. For other contributors, exploring past versions of Sappho becomes a way of moving closer to a true account o f the poet in her original context—like excavating layers o f earth at an archaeological site or unwrapping a mummy. For still others, earlier generations' encounters with Sappho become models for our own potentially fruitful relationship with the past. These conflicting views of the task o f the critic or historian are not easily reconciled. What unites

SERIES EDITOR'S F O R E W O R D

t h e m , h o w e v e r , is a sense o f S a p p h o as a figure o f p o t e n t i a l .

xiii

W h i l e the

i n d e t e r m i n a c y o f c e r t a i n aspects o f S a p p h o ' s p o e t r y may, as G l e n n M o s t argues, b e d u e to cultural constraints o n the expression o f f e m a l e desire in a r c h a i c G r e e c e , it is a n u i n d e n i a b l e s o u r c e o f the interest she c o n t i n u a l l y attracts f r o m disparate readers.

I n d e e d , the f r a g m e n t a r y n a t u r e o f the

s u r v i v i n g texts has o n l y i n c r e a s e d their v a l u e for s u c c e e d i n g g e n e r a t i o n s . For s o m e , it has m e a n t the o p p o r t u n i t y to c r e a t e w h a t e v e r S a p p h o t h e y n e e d . For others, the historical irony implicit in the f r a g m e n t a r y p r e s e r v a t i o n o f p o e m s o f y e a r n i n g a n d s e p a r a t i o n serves as a r e m i n d e r o f the i n e v i t a b l e incompleteness of h u m a n knowledge and affection. O n e y e a r b e f o r e the p u b l i c a t i o n o f the earliest o f the essays c o n t a i n e d in these v o l u m e s , S y l v i a Plath's p o e m " L e s b o s " a p p e a r e d in h e r p o s t h u m o u s c o l l e c t i o n Ariel. W h i l e Plath's p o e m m i m i c s the d i a l o g u e style, the t e m p o r a l c o m p r e s s i o n , a n d the n a t u r a l ' i m a g e r y that c h a r a c t e r i z e s S a p p h o ' s w r i t i n g , its s p e a k e r p l a c e s herself, r a t h e r t h a n the u n n a m e d addressee, in the p o s i t i o n o f d e p a r t i n g lover. Plath's suicide m a k e s it t e m p t i n g to associate h e r w i t h S a p p h o , w h o m l e g e n d describes as l e a p i n g to h e r d e a t h in d e s p a i r o v e r a failed love relationship, but the t e s t i m o n y o f Plath's p o e t r y suggests that she b e l o n g s instead to a l o n g line o f f e m a l e writers w h o h a v e f o u n d it n e c e s s a r y to r e j e c t the authoritative e x a m p l e o f S a p p h o in o r d e r to g e t o n w i t h their creative lives. In h e r case, the r e j e c t i o n o f S a p p h o m a r k s a m o r e w i d e s p r e a d g e n e r a t i o n a l resistance to the h e g e m o n y o f the elite classical t r a d i t i o n , a refusal, in M u r i e l R u k e y s e r ' s w o r d s , to e n t e r " t h e p o p u l a t e d c o l d o f d r a w i n g rooms."

In a sense, Plath (along w i t h R u k e y s e r a n d others), b y d e n y i n g

S a p p h o ' s authority, closed the d o o r o n o n e g e n e r a t i o n ' s r e a d i n g o f h e r p o e m s a n d their significance. W h a t w e h a v e b e f o r e us, in the t w o v o l u m e s c o m p i l e d b y Ellen G r e e n e , is a r e p o r t in p r o g r e s s o n the present g e n e r a t i o n ' s e n c o u n t e r w i t h S a p p h o — t h r o u g h direct e x p e r i e n c e o f h e r texts, t h r o u g h c o n t e x t u a l i z e d interpretations, a n d t h r o u g h r e f l e c t i o n o n h e r m e a n i n g for past r e a d e r s a n d re-readers.

INTRODUCTION Ellen Greene {¿vaoaoOcti

Tiva cpaL^i' etl xoixepov otjijietov

S o m e o n e , I say, will r e m e m b e r us in the future. SAPPHO (FR. 147 L.-P.)

As the earliest surviving w o m a n writer in the West, S a p p h o stands at the beginning of Western literary history. Despite a reputation that "has been battered more often than it has been burnished,'" S a p p h o has exerted an intense and lasting presence in the Western imagination. Aristotle's c o m m e n t , however, that S a p p h o was honored "although she was a w o m a n " speaks to the fact that Sappho's reputation owes at least as m u c h to her gender as to her talent as a love poet. 2 Interest in Sappho, particularly in the scholarly tradition, has often reflected a voyeuristic fascination with the "queerness" of a w o m a n writing poetry in which m e n are "relegated to a peripheral, of not an intrusive, role." 3 Curiosity about S a p p h o over the centuries has been fueled by the fragmentary condition of her poems, the lack of any concrete information about her life, and the implications of homoeroticism in her work. M u c h of the scholarship on Sappho, until relatively recently, has focused either on textual reconstruction and analysis or on Sappho's sensationalized "biography." In the past thirty years, however, with the feminist wave of the 1960s and 1970s, Sappho's poetry has begun to be reevaluated. Like so m a n y other w o m e n writers who have been gradually brought out of their literary closets, S a p p h o has r e s u r f a c e d — n o t as the hysteric or "schoolmistress" of previous generations, but as a powerful a n d influential voice in the Western cultural tradition. With Giuliana Lanata's article, " S a p p h o ' s A m a t o r y L a n g u a g e , " originally published in 1966 a n d appearing here in English for the first time, Sappho scholarship turns decidedly away

1. Catherine Stimpson, series editor's foreword to Fictions of Sappho, by Dejean. 2. Arist. Rh. 1389^2. 3. D e j e a n , "Fictions o f Sappho" 790.

1

2

INTRODUCTION

f r o m the obsession to r e c o n s t r u c t S a p p h o ' s b i o g r a p h y a n d to r a t i o n a l i z e a w a y the h o m o e r o t i c aspects o f h e r poetry. E d g a r L o b e l a n d D e n y s P a g e ' s 1955 c o m m e n t a r y o n S a p p h o a t u r n i n g p o i n t in S a p p h o scholarship.

marked

T h e i r b o o k , Poetarum Lesbiorum

Fragmenta, w i t h a c o m p l e t e text a n d c o m m e n t a r y o n S a p p h o ' s f r a g m e n t s , b e c a m e the definitive edition o f S a p p h o ' s p o e m s a n d , to a l a r g e e x t e n t , resolved the p h i l o l o g i c a l issues o f textual r e c o n s t r u c t i o n . W i t h i n a d e c a d e o r so o f their c o m m e n t a r y , in the late 1960s a n d early 1970s, a n e f f l o r e s c e n c e o f literary a n d c o n t e x t u a l criticism e m e r g e d in w h i c h scholars b e g a n to r e a d S a p p h o ' s p o e t r y for its literary c o n t e n t a n d its relation to literary a n d m y t h i c a l tradition. C h a n g e s in S a p p h o criticism, m o r e o v e r , c o i n c i d e d w i t h g e n e r a l c h a n g e s in classical scholarship; in the 1970s efforts to assimilate m e t h o d o l o g i e s f r o m o t h e r b r a n c h e s o f literary a n d cultural studies b e g a n to appear. In a d d i t i o n , feminist s c h o l a r s h i p a n d , m o r e recently, g e n d e r t h e o r y a n d criticism h a v e p r o v o k e d discussion a b o u t h o w S a p p h o ' s g e n d e r h a s b o t h s h a p e d h e r p o e t i c discourse a n d i n f l u e n c e d the social c o n t e x t o f h e r poetry. T h i s b o o k is the first a n t h o l o g y d e v o t e d to scholarly studies o f S a p p h o ' s work.

Significantly, it represents the fruit o f t w o a n d a h a l f d e c a d e s o f

a b u r g e o n i n g c o r p u s o f S a p p h o s c h o l a r s h i p — d u e largely to the serious study o f w o m e n in a n t i q u i t y a n d to inquiries into G r e e k a n d R o m a n s e x u a l attitudes a n d practices. 4 T h e a i m o f this c o l l e c t i o n is to d r a w w e l l - d e s e r v e d attention to S a p p h o ' s i m p o r t a n c e as a p o e t and to p r e s e n t the diverse a n d o f t e n c o n t r a d i c t o r y critical a p p r o a c h e s t o w a r d S a p p h o that h a v e b e c o m e the h a l l m a r k o f S a p p h o scholarship.

T h e b o o k divides into f o u r section:

"Language and Literary Context," " H o m e r and O r a l Tradition," "Ritual and Social C o n t e x t , " and "Women's Erotics." T h e s e categories represent a simplified o r g a n i z a t i o n o f a r a n g e o f positions that o f t e n o v e r l a p a n d a r e m o r e diverse t h a n s u c h c a t e g o r i z a t i o n m i g h t suggest. T h e y are m e a n t to g u i d e the r e a d e r t h r o u g h the m a j o r strands in S a p p h o s c h o l a r s h i p a n d to p r o v i d e a sense o f the lively d e b a t e a n d c o m p e t i n g critical positions w i t h i n S a p p h o studies that h a v e c o n t i n u e d to e n g a g e scholars o v e r the last several d e c a d e s .

T h e o p e n i n g section o f the c o l l e c t i o n , " L a n g u a g e a n d L i t e r a r y C o n t e x t , " illustrates the first w a v e o f essays (after P a g e a n d L o b e l ) that f o c u s o n literary c o n t e n t in S a p p h o ' s p o e t r y : that is, S a p p h o ' s use o f literary c o n v e n t i o n s

4 . S e e e s p e c i a l l y C a n t a r e l l a , Bisexuality in the Ancient World; Foley, e d . , Reflections of Women in Antiquity; F o u c a u l t , The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure; F o u c a u l t , The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, The Care of the Self; H a l p e r i n , W i n k l e r , a n d Z e i t l i n , eds., Before Sexuality; P e r a d o t t o a n d S u l l i v a n , e d s . , Women in the Ancient World; R i c h l i n , e d . , Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome; a n d S n y d e r , The Woman and the Lyre.

INTRODUCTION

3

(topoi) and poetic devices, including elements of ritual language, the assimilation of oral modes of discourse, and the relationship of Sappho's poetry to a literary and cultural tradition. T h e first essay by Lanata is one of the earliest articles to focus closely on Sappho's erotic language within the context of both the epic and lyric traditions. In a similar vein, M a r y Lefkowitz's 1973 article, "Critical Stereotypes and the Poetry of Sappho," shows how traditional biographical approaches to Sappho fail to do justice to her poetry. Lefkowitz objects to earlyparticularly Victorian—views of Sappho's work as the product of an "abnormal" female psychology. Lefkowitz's article takes issue with the tendency of male critics to assume that the art of women writers is merely an emotional outpouring indicative of psychological disturbance or "deviance." She argues that Sappho's poetry is not, as Denys Page avers, "without artifice," but rather that Sappho's poetry shows a sophisticated and ingenious use of traditional poetic figures and literary topoi. While Lanata and Lefkowitz locate Sappho within an archaic literary tradition, Gregory Nagy's essay focuses on the mythical tradition as a way of contextualizing her poetry Nagy's essay "Phaethon, Sappho's Phaon, and the White Rock of Leukas: 'Reading' the Symbols of Greek Lyric" examines the origins of the Greek myths of Phaethon and Phaon that led to the famous Sappho-Phaon story. Nagy looks for mythological parallels in the various accounts of the story primarily in archaic Greek lyric, Homer, and a fourth-century Greek play, The Leukadia, by Menander. Nagy analyzes the symbolism of the White Rock and its complex relationship to both the mythical figure of Phaon and to S a p p h o — a s both mythical figure and poet. Charles Segal explores yet another facet of Sappho's use of literary convention. His article, "Eros and Incantation: Sappho and Oral Poetry," investigates the ways Sappho's poetic language embodies modes of discourse used in oral poetry. Segal examines the "ritualizing, incantatory" qualities of Sappho's language and investigates the extent to which Sappho's poems reflect personal experience expressed within a social and ritual context. Segal articulates the problem that we, as modern readers, often encounter when we try to draw the line between the personal and the conventional in Sappho's poetry: 3 T h e total aesthetic experience produced by [Sappho's p o e m s ] results from a c o m i n g together of the two levels of communication, the ritual and the private. It is here, at these points of juncture between the social, outward-facing, public 5. See Page duBois's new book, Sappho Is Burning, which discusses how Sappho is an important figure in the development of the history of subjectivity in the West. DuBois sees Sappho's fragments as offering "aesthetic, philosophical, and ideological alternatives to the Eurocentric notions that Western humanism has so long revered" (26-27).

4

INTRODUCTION

dimension and techniques of her art and their private, more personal, less ritualistic aspect, that S a p p h o especially exemplifies her originality and artistry. It is also where she is most difficult for the m o d e r n sensibility to grasp.

Indeed, the relationship b e t w e e n a " p r i v a t e " voice a n d a " p u b l i c " discourse in Sappho's poetry is extremely vexed, since archaic G r e e k culture is t h o u g h t to be far m o r e c o m m u n a l a n d certainly m o r e reliant on oral f o r m s o f c o m m u n i c a t i o n than is our o w n culture. A n important dimension in investigating the oral qualities o f S a p p h o ' s verse is the interrogation o f S a p p h o ' s use o f Homer. T h e second section, " H o m e r and the O r a l T r a d i t i o n , " includes Page duBois's essay " S a p p h o a n d H e l e n " a n d J o h n Winkler's essay " G a r d e n s o f N y m p h s : Public a n d Private in Sappho's L y r i c s " — e s s a y s that focus specifically on S a p p h o ' s use o f H o m e r i c myths and formulas. D u B o i s argues that Sappho's reinterpretation o f the H o m e r i c H e l e n overturns m a n y o f the male assumptions e m b e d d e d in H o m e r i c narrative, a n d that S a p p h o ' s " r e a d i n g " of the H e l e n myth reflects afeminine consciousness that emphasizes H e l e n as a subject of her o w n desires, rather than as an object o f male desire. Winkler's essay also looks at S a p p h o ' s use o f H o m e r as a w a y of "allowing us, even e n c o u r a g i n g us, to a p p r o a c h her consciousness as a w o m a n and poet reading H o m e r . " W i n k l e r explores the tension b e t w e e n the " p u b lic" and "private" character of S a p p h o ' s p o e m s by investigating h o w Sappho's use o f H o m e r i c material reflects the encounter b e t w e e n her private, w o m a n - c e n t e r e d world and male public culture. T h r o u g h an e x a m i n a t i o n o f fragments i, 2, 16, and 31, W i n k l e r explores S a p p h o ' s revision o f H o m e ric myth and argues that in S a p p h o ' s appropriation o f the "alien" text o f H o m e r , she reveals the implicit i n a d e q u a c y o f the exclusion a n d denigration o f w o m e n in H o m e r a n d thus, in a sense, revises traditional " m a l e " readings o f Homer. A related area of inquiry in recent S a p p h o criticism focuses on the performative and cultural context o f S a p p h o ' s poetry. T h e section " R i t u a l a n d Social C o n t e x t " includes essays that investigate the ritual and social purposes Sappho's erotic p o e m s might have served in her c o m m u n i t y on Lesbos. T h i s area of scholarship invites the most speculation about S a p p h o since w e have little or no conclusive evidence for the social conditions on Lesbos at the time S a p p h o c o m p o s e d her poems. T h e scholarly debate a b o u t S a p p h o ' s audience and the performative context o f her p o e m s focuses on questions c o n c e r n i n g the relationship b e t w e e n S a p p h o ' s expression o f personal passions and the public, social function o f h e r art, a n d h o w participation in a c o m m u n a l cultural discourse m a y be reconciled with S a p p h o ' s distinct, highly individuated v o i c e — a voice that seems to articulate " p r i v a t e " feelings so compellingly.

INTRODUCTION

5

A n aspect of the debate about Sappho's audience centers on the traditional dichotomy between choral and monodic poetry. G o r d o n Kirkwood's 1974 study, Early Greek Monody, assumes that Sappho's voice is primarily monodic, that is, spoken as a solo voice expressing emotions of an exclusively personal and intimate nature. Similarly the eminent scholars Bruno Snell and C . M . B o w r a assume that "the distinction between choral lyric and m o n o d y is fundamental." T h u s , Bowra writes o f Sappho's "remarkable intimacy and candour," and Snell refers to Sappho's "deeply emotional confessions." 6 M a n y recent scholars have contested the strict division between choral lyric and monody, arguing that although S a p p h o speaks in the first person, the " I " cannot possibly denote merely private consciousness, but rather suggests an embodiment of the shared or communal. C l a u d e Calame's article, "Sappho's G r o u p : A n Initiation into W o m a n h o o d , " the first essay in the section, "Ritual and Social C o n t e x t , " addresses the debate in S a p p h o criticism about the modern construction of a thiasos, a group of w o m a n with ritual and cultic functions to which S a p p h o has often been linked as a sort of leader. C a l a m e looks at Sappho's own fragments as well as other archaic Greek fragments for evidence of the existence of a Lesbian "circle" or group whose female members m a y have been affiliated with one another through the bonds of friendship and erotic love. Further, C a l a m e examines the ways in which such a "circle" m a y have functioned. H e argues that there is evidence to suggest that S a p p h o gathered groups of y o u n g w o m a n around her as both students and companions. Musical and erotic instruction in the Lesbian "circle," C a l a m e maintains, were crucial elements in preparing young girls for their roles as adult, married women. However, C a l a m e argues against the view of S a p p h o as a "schoolmistress"; his article emphasizes that the education imparted to the y o u n g w o m e n o f Sappho's group, through the performance of song and cult acts, was entirely ritualized in both form and content. Judith Hallett's article, " S a p p h o and H e r Social Context: Sense and Sensuality," continues the debate raised by Segal about the relationship between Sappho's expression of personal passions and the public, social function of her art. Hallett's discussion of Sappho's social context, however, raises the question about what the social purpose and public function Sappho's poetry m a y have been in the context of a community of w o m e n operating in a socially segregated society. Hallett's essay is one o f the earliest to consider Sappho's gender as a crucial factor in the "public" dimension o f her poetry. Hallett argues that Sappho's erotic verses m a y be viewed as an institutional force, a social vehicle for women designed to impart sensual

6. B o w r a , Greek Melic Poetry 178; Snell, The Discovery of the Mind 52-59.

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INTRODUCTION

awareness a n d c o n f i d e n c e in y o u n g females " o n the threshold of m a r r i a g e and maturity." In responding to Hallett's article, E v a Stehle's essay, " R o m a n t i c Sensuality, Poetic Sense: A Response to Hallett on S a p p h o , " fuels the debate over the public a n d private in S a p p h o by taking issue with Hallett's (and other's) views about the d o m i n a n c e o f a social function for S a p p h o ' s p o e t r y Stehle argues that the private emotional reality in S a p p h o ' s p o e m s is p a r a m o u n t , superseding any function S a p p h o ' s poetry m i g h t have as an "institutional force." Moreover, she maintains that S a p p h o ' s "strong personal focus a n d introspective quality" w o u l d be subversive to a public celebratory setting. T a k i n g fragment 94 as her example, Stehle argues that S a p p h o ' s poetic expressions o f desire in an atmosphere " o f segregation in sensuous surroundings" suggest an alternate female world quite apart f r o m the assumptions o f male public c u l t u r e — a s s u m p t i o n s associated with competition and domination. In contrast to E v a Stehle's view, in a n e w essay entitled " W h o S a n g Sappho's Songs?"

A n d r é Lardinois suggests the possibility that all S a p p h o ' s

p o e m s were chorally p e r f o r m e d . Lardinois questions the traditional distinctions b e t w e e n choral and monodie poetry and argues that Sappho's p o e m s ought to be regarded chiefly as choral in nature rather than as personal or a u t o b i o g r a p h i c a l forms o f expression. Lardinois specifically addresses the question o f how S a p p h o ' s songs were sung. A l t h o u g h he acknowledges that we have very little information about the actual p e r f o r m a n c e of S a p p h o ' s poems, Lardinois e x a m i n e s a n u m b e r o f the m a j o r fragments a n d shows h o w they c a n be interpreted as b e i n g p e r f o r m e d "with the help of choruses." His analysis focuses primarily on the pluralistic voice in S a p p h o (the use o f "we"), references a n d allusions in the p o e m s that suggest a c o m m u n a l atmosphere, and the use o f poetic topoi c o m m o n in c h o r a l songs. A l t h o u g h Lardinois points out the m a n y ways in w h i c h S a p p h o ' s poetry is similar to that o f her male counterparts, at the end o f his essay he a c k n o w l e d g e s the possibility o f differences in tone and subject matter b e t w e e n S a p p h o a n d male poets. H e sees the difference, as he says, not "as a difference b e t w e e n a public (male) and a private (female) world (Stehle, Winkler, Snyder)," but as a "difference between two distinct public voices." T h e next section in the collection, " W o m e n ' s Erotics," explicitly takes up the issue o f g e n d e r difference. Feminist approaches in recent S a p p h o criticism question the extent to w h i c h S a p p h o ' s p o e m s present a w o m a n specific discourse that secures a female perspective within m a l e - d o m i n a t e d discursive systems.

A n u m b e r of essays in this v o l u m e argue that Sap-

p h o assimilates conventional social a n d literary formulas to a w o m a n ' s consciousness. Stehle, Williamson, Skinner, a n d I argue that although S a p p h o utilizes m a n y conventional formulas o f archaic G r e e k poetry, her poems, nonetheless, speak a different language than that o f her m a l e counterparts

INTRODUCTION

7

and produce a significandy different version of desire—one that is markedly nonhierarchical or, as Marilyn Skinner puts it, is "conspicuously nonphallic." Skinner's essay "Woman and Language in Archaic Greece, or, Why Is Sappho a Woman?" investigates the degree to which Sappho's poetry represents a distinct creative tradition that transcends the "androcentric cultural categories" that dominate the patriarchal discourses of ancient Greece. Sappho's poems, Skinner argues, offer a woman-centered perspective that not only perpetuates women's culture but also reflects a "nonnormative" subject position for women that "defiantly locates itself against patriarchy." Moreover, Skinner theorizes that the nonhierarchical, nonphallic model of desire represented in Sappho's fragments provided an alternative cultural norm to both men and women, an alternative that allowed women to claim an authentic subject position and men to "escape from the strict constraints of masculinity." Eva Stehle suggests, in "Sappho's Gaze: Fantasies of a Goddess and Young M a n , " that Sappho's poems can be read as implied criticism of a patriarchal value system. Stehle makes use of recent work in feminist theory on how the erotic gaze promotes gender hierarchies and preserves women's object status. She argues that in describing "the effect of the gaze on the gazer," Sappho departs from the erotic poetry of her male counterparts by breaking down "the opposition between viewer and viewed that is created by the gaze." In other words, Sappho uses the gaze not to objectify the one desired, but to "dissolve hierarchy." In my essay, "Apostrophe and Women's Erotics in the Poetry of Sappho," through readings of Fragments i and 94, I extend Stehle's argument in order to focus on how Sappho's use of apostrophe creates a model of eroticism that is both intersubjective and nonhierarchical. Anne Carson, in her essay " T h e Justice of Aphrodite in Sappho Fr. i," interprets fragment i (the "Hymn to Aphrodite") in a way that demonstrates how the poem reiterates the traditions of Greek erotic poetry. In particular, Carson argues that Sappho presents a version of desire in accord with the hierarchical mode of eroticism prevalent in male homoerotic relations. Further, Carson's effort to integrate Sappho's poem not only with the conventions of archaic lyric but also with "archaic currents of thought" militates against the view (taken by Stehle, Williamson, and myself) that Sappho's mode of discourse represents female homoerotic desire with its own symbolic systems and conventions. In her essay, "Sappho and the Other Woman," Margaret Williamson contends in contrast that Sappho's fragments produce a version of erotic experience that defies cultural norms. Through an examination of the subject positions mapped out in Sappho's poetry, she, like Stehle, argues that Sappho's erotic discourse differs considerably from that of male writers

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INTRODUCTION

for w h o m "the only form self-other relationships seem to take is that of struggle that will end in the mastery of one over the other." As these essays show, the last several decades of Sappho studies have been enormously productive. It is my hope that this volume will further stimulate the growing field of scholarship on Sappho, a n d help to situate S a p p h o as an important voice in the Western literary tradition. Moreover, this collection will, I hope, contribute to the ever-expanding project of recovering women writers and attending to their roles in literary and cultural history. It is my belief that as this project goes forward, Sappho will remain an authorizing a n d enduring presence. As the first female literary voice in the Western tradition, Sappho's poetry can lay claim to a special, originary status within that tradition. Despite the vastly diverse responses to and interpretations of Sappho's poems, readers of S a p p h o throughout the ages have, nonetheless, recognized in her eloquent expressions of desire the paradoxical conjuncture of pain a n d pleasure, bitterness a n d sweetness that lies at the heart of erotic experience. As Anne Carson puts it, "It was S a p p h o who first called eros 'bittersweet.' N o one who has been in love disputes her." 7 7. See Carson, Eros the Bittersweet 3.

ONE

Sappho's Amatory Language Giuliana Lanata Translated by William Robins

At times, Sapphic poetry—most particularly the amatory lyric of Sappho— has been injured by its own extensive success. It has come about, in other words, that, confronted by such an imposing phenomenon, ancient as well as modern criticism has abdicated its proper nature as an interpreter in order to surrender itself to the "ardent" and "ineffable" tones of dithyrambic exaltation, of mawkish sentimentality, of decadent sensiblerie. A patient (and petulant) excerptor of the vast specialist literature on the topic could compile without too much difficulty a small anthology of bad taste within the field of so-called imitative criticism. Even a critic as sober, moderate, and cautious as D. L. Page let himself take part at one point, introducing in two pages of his Sappho andAlcaeus a description of the "society" of Lesbos fit for the pen ofJ. A. Symonds, which seems directed less by any kind of critical necessity than by the "Mediterranean" myths of a nineteenth-century Englishman: "exquisite gardens, where the rose and hyacinth spread perfume; pine-treeshadowed coves, when they might bathe in the calm of a tideless sea.'" Welcome, then, are the calls for methodical sobriety put forward by Max Treu at the beginning of the brief interpretive essay included in his edition of Sappho, 2 and according to which Page's book is, in fact, to such a great degree informed. From another angle, due to an incomprehension already current in antiquity about the historicosocial context within which to place Sappho's poetry for a correct evaluation of its contents, criticism took the road of This essay was originally published as "Sul linguaggio amoroso di Saffo," Quaderni urbinati di cultura classica, no. 2 (1966) 63-79. 1. Page, Sappho andAlcaeus 140-41. 2. Treu, ed., Sappho 137-38.

¡1

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a more or less sensitive or fervent or scandalized denunciation, or more often a hazy a n d evasive psychologism of a kind that strove (and strives, for this is not a closed chapter) to illustrate "amorous fullness," to reconstruct the interior history of a "beautiful soul." In this choir there is n o lack of voices, animated by chivalric indignation, that in response to any "calumny" point to the "skilled housewife" 3 in Sappho, the " m a d a m e landlady" for some pensioned Edwardian, a second M a d a m e de M a i n t e n o n , the "lady professor" of literature and belles-artes. N o r does it seem that any better service has been rendered to the interpretation of Sappho's poetry by those m o d e r n critics who have made a great display of the latest Freudianisms. T h u s whoever today would reconsider in its complexity what is usually improperly called Sapphofrage is tempted to repeat, albeit with amused irony and with different motivation, some words that G u n t h e r Zuntz wrote in his tastefully disdainful Latin: "Philologorum in mores inquisituro luculentam sane hae interpretandi rationes praebent materiam: ad S a p p h o nihil pertinet." 4 If, a m o n g other things, it is true that "the eternal feminine" is exalted m o r e willingly in criticism written, for example, in Italian, in criticism written in G e r m a n hints of siidliche Glut (southern passion) frequently appear. Naturally, there have been many espousals of positions that were supposed to "de-dramatize" the question and bring it back to more appropriate terms. So, for example, Erich Bethe in an article that remains fundamental 5 (but also Beloch, DeSanctis, a n d Marrou, to mention some names) has clarified very lucidly the place that homosexual love occupied in archaic Greek society—in Sparta as well as in Chalcis, in Lesbos as well as in Crete, within both male a n d female communities or associations—where it constituted one of the bonds a n d at the same time established itself as an important pedagogic instrument. Typical of this historical m o m e n t in Greek civilization is the tendency to consider the learning process as the work of a careful a n d overshadowing vigilance exercised on the ¿pti>[j.svo d 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 - 59107. 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 Religion 177; Winkler, Constraints of Desire 188 f.), and that Telesilla (fr. 717), like Sappho (test. 21,41; fr. 44a), composed a hymn to Artemis, agoddess presiding over various facets of women's lives including the initiation of young girls (Burkert 151 and Calame, Les chceurs i:i74f.). 108. For example, on Crete women can compete with men in witty, poetic responses (imandinadh.es), mostly of a sexual nature (Herzfeld, The Poetics of Manhood 142-46), not unlike the exchange found in Sappho fr. 137. O n Madagascar, women are associated with direct, open expressions of anger (Keenan, "Norm-Makers, Norm-Breakers" 137-39); c f- Homer II. 20.252-54 and, perhaps, some of Sappho's satirical poetry. Nagy, Poetry as Performance chap. 4, compares Sappho fr. 1 to female initiation songs of the Navajo and Apache. 109. O n archaic Greece, see Alexiou, The Ritual Lament, esp. 4-14, and Martin, Language of Heroes 87; on rural Greece today, see Alexiou, esp. 36-51, andCaraveli, " T h e Bitter Wounding." 110. Frs. 94, 95, 96. Merkelbach, "Sappho und ihr Kreis" 12 f., refers to these poems as "Trostgedichte" (consolation poems) or "Trostlieder" (consolation songs)—"ähnlich wie wir auch heute noch Leidtragende nach einem Todesfall zu trösten . . . suchen" (similar to the way we try still today to console the afflicted after a death). Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World" 55-58, describes them as "mourn [ing]" the elusiveness of happiness and taking as their subject "the loss of the beloved by parting," comparing them to fr. 140a (the song for Adonis). Rauk, "Erinna's Distaff " n o , actually calls fr. 94 a "lament" and compares it to other laments in Greek literature. In fr. 96, Atthis, the addressee, may be dead, if x a p tCTOtiis the correct reading in 1. 17 (cf. IL 22.210-11; Od. 4.502; Ale. fr. 38A.7), as is Baucis in Erinna's Distaff (n. 107 above).

ELEVEN

Woman and Language in Archaic Greece, or, Why is Sappho a Woman? Marilyn B. Skinner

The challenge posed by French theory to received ideas of female consciousness and self-representation has emerged during the past decade as the most urgent intellectual problem confronting feminist literary critics on this side of the Atlantic. Historically, American feminist criticism has been based on an empirical notion of authorship and a concomitant view of literary texts as repositories of gender ideology. During its earliest phases, then, practitioners sought to expose the misogyny of male-authored literature and to posit an alternative female poetics, as contained in a new canon of recovered women writers. Emanating from the Continent, radical attacks on the liberal humanist creed now seem to call that "fundamental feminist gesture" into question.' T h e threat is all the more insidious for being incorporated

An oral version of this essay was delivered at the "Feminist Theory and the Classics" panel presented on 30 December 1990 at the 122nd annual meeting of the American Philological Association in San Francisco, California. I wish to thank the panel co-organizers Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin, my fellow presenters Marilyn A. Katz and Barbara K . Gold, and the two respondents Judith Hallett and Kristina Passman, as well as many members of the audience, for a wealth of stimulating suggestions. Subsequendy, in her role as editor, Nancy Rabinowitz carefully assisted me in blocking out a tighter, more linear argument. I also owe a great debt to Eva Stehle and Jane Snyder, who read draft versions of the paper and commented extensively on them. Lastly, my special thanks to David Halperin, whose painstaking efforts to help improve a paper disputing his position manifest an exceptional scholarly generosity, feminist in every sense.This essay was originally published in slightly different form as "Woman and Language in Archaic Greece, or, Why Is Sappho a Woman?" in Feminist Theory and the Classics, edited by N. S. Rabinowitz and A. Richlin, 125-44 (New York: Routledge, 1993). 1. Jardine, Gynesis 50-64. On the French challenge, see Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism"; Draine, "Refusing the Wisdom"; on traditional American feminist criticism, see Todd, Feminist Literary History. 175

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in critiques of patriarchal discourse undertaken by H é l è n e Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—thinkers who, insofar as they themselves are reckoned as "feminists," might be presumed sympathetic to an engaged feminist enterprise. 2 Although Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva differ considerably with respect to other issues, they jointly insist that w o m a n is excluded from d o m i n a n t structures of representation. 3 Taking Lacanian psychoanalysis as their methodological point of departure, all three contend that sexual difference is inscribed into Western symbolic systems at the most rudimentary level. Language in a patriarchal culture originates with man, who locates himself as discursive subject a n d positive reference point of thought; w o m a n is relegated simultaneously to the negative pole of any conceptual antithesis a n d to a subordinate object position. She can be defined only in terms of her alterity, n a m e d in a way that inevitably reduces itself to " n o t - m a n . " Linguistic transgression, then, must necessarily precede and facilitate her political resistance. W h a t shape female linguistic transgression might take is, however, a contested matter. Kristeva's formulation is the least oppositional. Rejecting the possibility of a biologically based female identity, she argues instead that subversion of the rational symbolic process occurs only through irruption of a repressed linguistic core, the "semiotic"—affiliated, though not explicitly identified, with the cultural category of the feminine. 4 Cixous, for her part, advocates the active production of écritureféminine, a m o d e of writing i n f o r m e d by sexual difference yet not absolutely restricted to w o m e n . Characterized by a lyric openness and a lack of conventional, logical organization—qualities also imputed to the tender utterances of the lost pre-Oedipal m o t h e r — the texts of écriture féminine are intended to challenge the "phallogocentric" symbolic order directly. 5 Lastly, Irigaray postulates an exclusively female 2. Key passages from the writings of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva were conveniently selected and translated by Marks and de Courtivron, New French Feminisms. The difficulties French feminist theory poses for an Anglo-American feminist criticism that regards the text as the representation of an author's personal subjectivity and experience are explored in the classic debate between Kamuf, "Replacing Feminist Criticism," and Miller, "The Text's Heroine." For subsequent elaborations, see, among others, Weedon, Feminist Practice 16566; J. Butler, Gender Trouble 1-34; Flax, Thinking Fragments 168-78; and Hekman, Gender and Knowledge 144-5 1 • Strategies for transcending the ensuing dilemma are put forward by Homans, "Feminist Criticism and Theory"; Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism"; and de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't, "The Essence of the Triangle," and "Eccentric Subjects." For further insight into the relevance of French feminist theory to feminist criticisiri of classical texts, the reader is directed to Gold, "'But Ariadne Was Never There.'" 3. Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics. 4. Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics 163-67; cf. Hekman, Gender and Knowledge 87-90. 5. A.Jones, "Writing the Body."

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discourse {parlerfemme) grounded in women's specific libidinal economy. O n l y by speaking (as) w o m a n , in a language that, like female sexual pleasure itself, is "plural, autoerotic, diffuse, undefinable within the familiar rules of (masculine) logic" 6 can w o m e n a f f i r m a bodily desire excluded f r o m standard patriarchal speech. O f the three positions s u m m a r i z e d above, Irigaray's is obviously the most immediately vulnerable to charges of "essentialism," that is, the questionable presupposition of an ontological essence or nature in which all w o m e n participate by virtue of their sex. 7 L e a d i n g exponents of feminist theory are consequently m o r e a n d more inclined to treat her assertions nonreferentially, not as factual pronouncements but as rhetorical ploys for displacement of fixed conceptual schemes. 8 D u e , however, to her polemic interrogation of Platonic epistemology, which we will e x a m i n e below, Irigaray has won an unexpected following a m o n g feminist students of G r e c o - R o m a n culture. With classicists her declarations tend to take on literal force. Adopted as investigative premises, they in turn give rise to tediously homogeneous readings of the G r e c o - R o m a n literary tradition, readings whose consequences for the study of w o m e n in antiquity are potentially disastrous. In this essay, I attempt both to alert m y colleagues to the d a n g e r of arriving, via Irigaray, at such a theoretical impasse and to outline a more positive w a y of conceptualizing the ancient literary record, using S a p p h o as my e x e m p l a r y text. A l o n e a m o n g Continental feminists, Irigaray glances back to the temporal origins of patriarchal discourse, seeking to expose its roots as well as its controlling principles. In Speculum of the Other Woman, she grapples with the foundation legend of male linguistic hegemony. 9 Western cultural erasure of w o m a n as speaking subject c o m m e n c e s , according to her, in fourthcentury B.C.E. G r e e c e , receiving p r i m a r y metaphysical expression in Plato's " M y t h of the C a v e " (Resp. 7 . 5 ^ - 5 ^ ) . In that authoritative text the cave is a " m e t a p h o r of the inner space, of the den, the w o m b or hystera, sometimes of the e a r t h " (243) a n d thus linked, by extension, to infancy and prelogical symbiosis with the mother. In Socrates' eyes, it is the prison f r o m which one escapes in order to ascend to the full light of masculine B e i n g and T r u t h , the a b o d e of the Father. T h a t initiatory pilgrimage once accomplished, return to the dark f e m a l e abyss is unthinkable: in future, the sole licit relationships will be those between father a n d son, or philosopher and pupil. " B u t w h a t b e c o m e s of the mother f r o m n o w o n ? " asks I r i g a r a y (315). S h e vanishes

6. Burke, "Irigaray" 289. 7. Fuss, Essentially Speaking 56-58; Butler, Gender Trouble 9 - 1 3 . 8. Gallop, Thinking through the Body 92-99; Fuss, Essentially Speaking 71-72; Schor, "This Essentialism." 9. Irigaray, Speculum 243-364. Further citations will be given in parentheses in the text.

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from sight, for "man has become blind by dint of projecting (himself) into the brilliance of that Good, into the purity of that Being, into that mirage of the Absolute" (362). Obsession with the abstract ideal banishes woman's specificity to the void of the unintelligible. What results from male abolition of female presence is an underlying "sexual indifference" in the putative representation of gender relations. 10 In a second treatise, This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray elucidates that notion. Statements purporting to describe an encounter between male and female subjects in fact record the mere interaction of a male subject with externalized and objectified aspects of himself projected onto "woman," a counterfeit token of dissimilarity. Woman's actual subjectivity is ineffable, since in the male "sexual imaginary" she can be no more than "a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man's fantasies." 11 Later it is stated categorically that "the feminine occurs only within models and laws devised by male subjects. Which implies that there are not really two sexes, but only one. A single practice and representation of the sexual" (86; Irigaray's italics). Irigaray's perception of an intrinsic uniformity underlying representations of pseudo-heterosexual congress between man and his manufactured "opposite" is encapsulated in her well-known pun hom(m)osexualite. As Gallop concludes: "Irigaray has discovered that phallic sexual theory, male sexual science, is homosexual, a sexuality of sames, of identities, excluding otherness.'" 2 Irigaray's portrayal of Platonic idealism, and post-Platonic Greek discourse in general, as a unitary thought system from which the female is summarily excluded resonates powerfully with the misgivings of feminist classical scholars, long accustomed to apologize for the "male-centeredness" of surviving primary sources. 13 It should come as no surprise, then, that recent important work on Greco-Roman gender ideology betrays a deep indebtedness to her ideas. Page duBois, although undertaking what she herself labels "a critique of psychoanalytic theory and its ahistorical, universal claims about gendering," finally revamps Irigaray's contentions into a quasihistorical scenario in which Plato's texts become the instrument whereby woman's distinct metaphorical role in pre-Socratic discourse is usurped by masculinity. 14 Similarly, Georgia Nugent discovers beneath Ovid's facile play with the titillating figure of the hermaphrodite a hom(m)o-sexual "reflection

10. Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction 58; de Lauretis, "Sexual Indifference." 11. Irigaray, This Sex 25. Further citations will be given in parentheses in the text. 12. Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction 84. 13. C u l h a m , " T e n Years after Pomeroy" 15-17; cf. C u l h a m , "Decentering the Text," a n d responses. 14. DuBois, Sowing the Body 3, 169-83.

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of the (masculine) S a m e . ' " 3 A s the most conspicuous application of Irigaray's ideas by a trained classicist, though, D a v i d Halperin's essay " W h y Is D i o t i m a a W o m a n ? " merits lengthier consideration. 1 6 T h e D i o t i m a of Plato's Symposium is, Halperin argues, a rhetorical trope. Plato puts the Socratic model of philosophical intercourse into the mouth of a prophetess in order to call attention to this model's novel qualities o f reciprocity and procreativity. Within the male-structured G r e e k gender system, those elements had formerly been excluded from masculine eroticism and subsumed wholly under female sexuality. In the Symposium, that culturally prescribed feminine "difference" is reappropriated, in an intellectualized and sanitized form, for males. W h a t is true for Diotima, Halperin concludes, also obtains for any other G r e e k inscription of " w o m a n " : in the ancient representational e c o n o m y the female serves as "an alternate male identity whose constant accessibility to men lends men a fullness and a totality that enables them to dispense (supposedly) with otherness altogether.'" 7 For Halperin, then, as for anyone else w h o takes Irigaray's account of Plato's myth literally, it is impossible to find any hint of authentic female reality in the G r e e k signifier " w o m a n . " W h e n an Athenian man speaks to his fellow symposiasts, Woman, the universal, does not exist—as Irigaray's mentor L a c a n disquietingly asserted. 1 " O n e dubious effect of this line of reasoning about language is that studies of female literary production are rendered otiose. Gynocritics, defined by Elaine Showalter as the investigation of the "history, themes, genres, and structures of literature by w o m e n , ' " 9 was, as I have previously stated, a driving preoccupation of A n g l o - A m e r i c a n feminist criticism in its earlier developmental stage, during the middle to late 1970s. W h a t energized and justified that sociohistorically based method of inquiry was the assumption that texts composed by w o m e n reflect the peculiar conditions o f women's lived experience within given cultures, ordinarily the shared experience of a "subculture" marginal to the male public world. 20 A c c o r d i n g to this hypothesis, female subcultures, especially in preindustrial societies, are wholly occupied with the vital activities customarily assigned to w o m e n by a cultural division of l a b o r — t h e tasks of domesticity, including sexuality, reproduction, and nurturing, and the ceremonies surrounding the h u m a n life cycle. O n an emotional level, the energies of participants are meanwhile channeled

15. Nugent, "This Sex" 176. 16. H a l p e r i n , One Hundred Years of Homosexuality 13-51.

17. Ibid., 151. 18. Lacan, " G o d a n d the Jouissance" 144.

19. Showalter, "Toward a Feminist Poetics" 128. 20. Ibid., 131-32

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into female bonding networks, primarily ties among blood and marriage kin, and into attachments, sometimes passionate, between friends.21 Discourses originating in the female subculture address such concerns, which are separate and distinct from those of males in the same society. Real-life female experience therefore engenders a "female perspective" encapsulated in women's texts. This entire set of commonsense propositions has now been called into question by aposdes of French theory.22 If the Western symbolic system is a male-ordered construct, as they believe, the feminine specificity putatively contained in women's writing must be an illusion. Let us consider a practical application of that skeptical postulate. Despite its patriarchal bent, Greek society nurtured a lively and continuous tradition of female authorship, extending from the archaic age well into the Hellenistic period.23 A canonical roster of major women poets, arguably compiled by the learned scholars of Alexandria, was in circulation by Augustan times.24 Sappho of Lesbos, who flourished approximately 600 b . c . e . , headed the list as Homer's counterpart, a complementary model of excellence for her sex (AP 7.15). Hellenistic women writers like Erinna and Nossis expressly looked back to Sappho as their exemplar.2' Applying gynocritic methods to these texts readily illustrates how books by women "continue each other."26 Feminist classical scholars have just begun to direct intense critical attention toward Sappho's neglected followers. Continuing that scholarly project would help to validate the creative ventures of contemporary women. It is no secret that texts signed by females are habitually targeted for ideologically motivated suppression. To contemplate the numbers of women thus far silenced is utterly disheartening.27 But if ancient female poets did sustain a distinct creative tradition, no matter how minor, within such a male-dominated society as that of ancient Greece, patriarchal discourses evidently do not always succeed in drowning women out. Conversely, if the Greek conceptual system is construed as inherently masculine, one must necessarily concede that no Greek woman, not even Sappho, was ever able to transcend androcentric cultural categories.28 The "female voice" in antiquity would turn out to be a male voice with a slight foreign inflection. Under such circumstances, work on the female literary tradition might well be abandoned as useless, insofar as women's texts could no longer claim 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World." Jardine, Gynesis 40-41; Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics 75-80. Snyder, The Woman and the Lyre. Antipater of Thessalonica AP 9.26; cf. Baale, Studia inAnytes 7-9. Rauk, "Erinna's Distaff"; Skinner, "Sapphic Nossis." Woolf, A Room of One's Own 84. See Russ, How to Suppress Women's Writing; Olsen, Silences. DuBois, Sowing the Body\ 29.

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to r e f l e c t a s e p a r a t e , gender-specific sensibility. T h i s w o u l d surely b e a disc o u r a g i n g o u t c o m e for a feminist scholar s e e k i n g to u n c o v e r scanty traces o f a n c i e n t w o m e n ' s subjectivity.

For the a s p i r i n g w o m a n writer, its c o r o l l a r y

i m p l i c a t i o n s a r e e v e n m o r e disturbing. B e f o r e a c q u i e s c i n g in s u c h m e t h o d o l o g i c a l i n j u n c t i o n s , h o w e v e r , w e o u g h t to s c r u t i n i z e F r e n c h feminist t h e o r y m o r e intently. First o f all, r e a d e r s otherwise f a v o r a b l y disposed to a p s y c h o a n a l y t i c a p p r o a c h a r e i n c r e a s i n g l y troub l e d b y its resolute ahistoricism. D e s p i t e h e r ostensible r e c o u r s e to origins in setting u p P l a t o as the ktistes o f W e s t e r n m e t a p h y s i c s , I r i g a r a y e l s e w h e r e r e p u d i a t e s history as j u s t a n o t h e r h o m ( m ) o - s e x u a l c o n s t r u c t (This Sex 126, 171-72), a m o v e h a r s h l y c r i t i c i z e d b y M o i . 2 9 In m o r e s w e e p i n g t e r m s , W e e d o n protests that a n investigation o f g e n d e r c o n f i n e d to the level o f t e x t u a l analysis, " i r r e s p e c t i v e o f the discursive c o n t e x t a n d the p o w e r / k n o w l e d g e relations o f the discursive field w i t h i n w h i c h textual relations are l o c a t e d , " is s i m p l y i n a d e q u a t e as feminist practice. Similarly, T o d d c h a r g e s that F r e n c h t h e o r y ' s a b s t r a c t i o n o f s e x u a l d i f f e r e n c e f r o m historical flux a n d c h a n g e e n tails a d e f a c t o " e r a s i n g o f the history o f w o m e n w h i c h w e h a v e o n l y j u s t b e g u n to g l i m p s e . " T h e a r g u m e n t is taken o n e step f u r t h e r b y J a n e F l a x , w h o c o n t e n d s that w o m e n ' s o b v i o u s exclusion f r o m p u b l i c discourse is a c t u a l l y the p r a g m a t i c result o f a political i n e q u a l i t y s h a p e d b y m a t e r i a l conditions: " c u l t u r e is m a s c u l i n e , not as the e f f e c t o f l a n g u a g e b u t as the c o n s e q u e n c e o f a c t u a l p o w e r relations to w h i c h m e n h a v e far m o r e a c c e s s than w o m e n . " 1 0 U n d e r pressure o f these critiques, the d e n i a l o f history implicit in F r e n c h feminist t h e o r y e m e r g e s as b o t h reductionist a n d p e r v e r s e .

W e classical

scholars o u g h t to ask ourselves, then, w h e t h e r a d o p t i o n o f s u c h a timeless m o d e l o f linguistic g e n d e r a s y m m e t r y is n o t so m u c h at o d d s w i t h o u r o w n d i s c i p l i n a r y mission as to involve us in e m b a r r a s s i n g s e l f - c o n t r a d i c t i o n . For w e are students o f G r e c o - R o m a n civilization, that is, o f a g i v e n s o c i o t e m p o r a l milieu; a n d w e are c o n s e q u e n t l y b o u n d to address the issue o f l a n g u a g e a n d g e n d e r (or a n y o t h e r issue, for that matter) w i t h p r o p e r attention to the c o n d i t i o n s o f life in p a r t i c u l a r a n c i e n t e n v i r o n m e n t s , as f a r as w e a r e able to a s c e r t a i n t h e m . H i s t o r y is, b y definition, w h a t w e are m a n d a t e d to d o . S e c o n d , e v e n w i t h i n that p s y c h o a n a l y t i c m o d e l , l a n g u a g e itself is n o t entirely m o n o l i t h i c .

T h o u g h they p l a c e c o n t r o l o f l o g i c a n d

normative

discourse o n the side o f the male, K r i s t e v a , C i x o u s , a n d I r i g a r a y all m a k e s o m e p r o v i s i o n for a disruptive impulse s t e m m i n g f r o m the f e m a l e — o r f r o m w h a t e v e r passes for " f e m a l e " within their r e s p e c t i v e systems. W e h a v e seen that f o r K r i s t e v a " w o m a n " c a n be r e i n t r o d u c e d into l a n g u a g e as that w h i c h

29. M o i , Sexual /Textual Politics 147-49. 30. Weedon, Feminist Practice 166; Todd, Feminist Literary History 84; Flax, Thinking Fragments 103.

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escapes signification, while for Cixous she resurfaces as the p r e - O e d i p a l mother making fond inarticulate noises. For Irigaray, at least in one chapter of This Sex Which Is Not One, she materializes in a surprisingly familiar form: as embodied w o m e n speaking a m o n g themselves. 31 Responding to an interviewer's question about the possibility o f evolution within the masculine cultural and political realm, Irigaray cites the new discourses—marginal, to be sure—created by women's liberation movements: " S o m e t h i n g is being elaborated there that has to do with the 'feminine,' with what w o m e n among-themselves might be, what a 'women's society' might m e a n " (This Sex 127). A t a slightly later point in the interview (135), she expands on that suggestion: There may be a speaking-among-women that is still a speaking (as) man but that may also be the place where a speaking (as) woman may dare to express itself. It is certain that with women-among-themselves . . . in these places of womenamong-themselves, something of a speaking (as) woman is heard. This accounts for the desire or the necessity of sexual nonintegration: the dominant language is so powerful that women do not dare to speak (as) woman outside the context of nonintegration. Tentative as this formulation may be, Irigaray in my opinion has cleared a space within her own Lacanian cosmos for real-life w o m e n interacting as speaking subjects. A n d though she has contemporary liberation movements in mind, her notion of "places of women-among-themselves" can surely be extended to other communities of w o m e n , especially those sheltered to some degree, as a result o f unusual cultural circumstances, from patriarchal modes of thought. I therefore propose to negotiate the restoration of " w o m a n " into the G r e e k literary tradition as the historical consequence o f " w o m e n - a m o n g themselves speaking (as) w o m a n , " that is, producing woman-specific discourses. In the poetry of Sappho, semiotic analysis has uncovered an elaborate complex of coding strategies differing perceptibly from those of the dominant symbolic order. 32 O p e n , fluid, and p o l y s e m o u s — a n d hence conspicuously nonphallic—those strategies are employed to convey the passionate sexual longing felt by a w o m a n — t h e first-person speaker designated as " S a p p h o " — f o r a female companion, w h o is often but not always physically absent. 33 T o m e they supply fragmentary but nevertheless arresting evidence

31. For an excellent analysis of the scheme of practical politics outlined in this passage, see Fuss, Essentially Speaking 66-70. 32. Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World"; Burnett, Three Archaic Poets', Rissman, Love as War; Stehle, "Sappho's Gaze"; Winkler, The Constraints ofDesire 162-87. 33. Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World" 47-48; Snyder, "Public Occasion and Private Passion."

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that on archaic Lesbos a socially segregated group of girls a n d w o m e n devised its own symbolic system a n d set of discursive conventions, formally adapted to the expression of female homoerotic desire and exercised in the composition and delivery of oral poetry. T h a t repertory of poetic discourses has been assumed throughout antiquity a n d down to the present day to be wholly Sappho's own invention, designed to articulate private feelings; for convenience's sake, it m a y even yet be t e r m e d a "Sapphic" voice. 34 O n e need not deny the poetic genius of the flesh-and-blood singer capable of handling her material with such artistic economy that it rapidly passed from m o u t h to m o u t h throughout the Greek world and survived intact for many centuries. Yet, given the normal function of the archaic Greek poet as appointed spokesperson for his or her community, it is far more likely that Sappho's self-stylization as desiring ego, along with her extensive stock of themes, verse forms a n d melodies, tropes a n d imagery, was largely traditional, a product of many generations of local creative endeavor. T h u s Sappho would have inherited both her social role a n d her craft from a long line of female predecessors. 3 ' By approaching these songs as social discourses, we avoid the sticky problems of representation involved in treating a text as the faithful mirror of an author's unique subjectivity. To redeploy Showalter's concept, then, Sappho's poetry will here be presumed to distill the shared impressions of a historically contextualized "subculture," refracting to some degree women's lived realities, their confrontations with experience, albeit only in synthetic a n d highly idealized form. Yet in affording us insights into patterns of social ideology promulgated a m o n g a group of elite Greek w o m e n on

34. For an important reading of Sappho as spokesperson for a group, rather than an individual, consciousness, see Hallett, "Sappho and Her Social Context." In a new study (Hallett, in progress), subsequent Roman appropriations of Sappho's mode of homoerotic discourse are surveyed and comprehensively identified as a "Sapphic tradition." While I am deeply indebted to Hallett for the concept of an ancient gender-specific style of literary expression capable of articulating female desire, my purpose here is not primarily to defend her revisionist approach to Sappho nor to trace out the poet's impact on later literature, but rather to urge my colleagues to forgo constructions of ancient literary history that eradicate Sappho's achievement and its continuing influence. 35. Plausible arguments for a continuous Greek lyric tradition extending as far back as the eighth century B.C.E. are supplied by R. L. Fowler, The Nature of Early Greek Lyric 9-13. It is worth recalling Virginia Woolf's observation that "if you consider any great figure of the past, like Sappho, like the Lady Murasaki, like Emily Bronte, you will find that she is an inheritor as well as an originator, and has come into existence because women have come to have the habit of writing naturally" (A Room of One's Own 113). Though I would question the use of the term "writing" in Sappho's case, I believe Woolf's intuitive perception of her as heir to a female poetic tradition is probably accurate.

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sixth-century B.C.E. Lesbos, this body of texts may still prove immeasurably valuable for feminist historical inquiry.36 Sappho's friends were able to "speak (as) woman among themselves" precisely because they were not readers. In contemporary postindustrial societies, where males are educationally advantaged, control of electronically based information systems is guarded, and writing is still the primary mode of communication, the ordination of "man" as unmarked subject of discourse is probably inevitable. In predominantly oral societies, on the other hand, women do have readier access to the cultural tradition insofar as it is conveyed by word of mouth. The nucleus of a cultural heritage is, according to Goody and Watt, "the particular range of meanings and attitudes which members of any society attach to their verbal symbols."37 But that collection of meanings is always open to modification. Within tightly integrated nonliterate societies, then, women can verbally intervene in dominant symbolic systems and append additional "feminine" values to signifiers, provided they have first had occasion to invent their own ways of encoding those values. Given a culture endowed with the custom of female musical performance before same-sex audiences, such occasions do arise: having positioned herself as speaking subject, the singer will tailor her presentation to her listeners' interests, imbuing it, as Showalter has argued, with "women's experience," as that is commonly understood by her society.™ Now if, within the oral tradition, a female perspective has thus secured a claim to validity, that perspective could well assume a legitimate, albeit subordinate, place in a subsequent written tradition, so as ultimately to provide readers with an alternative subject position available to either sex. By "subject position" I mean an organized way of seeing the world, constituted through language, that permits the individual to impose a coherent meaning on the circumstances and events of his or her life, simultaneously enjoining practices based on that meaning. 39 Once incorporated into a discursive system, a subject position may be adapted to various ends, long-term or immediate, serious or playful—utilized as a set of practical strategies for 36. Here I follow the lead of Homans, "Feminist Criticism and Theory" 173, who holds out to feminist critics a possible route of escape from the liberal humanist/poststructuralist quarrel over individual subjectivity: turning one's attention to collective female discourses. 37. Goody and Watt, "The Consequences of Literacy" 28. 38. In contemporary sex-segregated Middle Eastern cultures, women still create oral poetry and employ it for precisely this purpose: see Joseph, "Poetry as a Strategy of Power"; AbuLughod, Veiled Sentiments 171-271. The overall effectiveness offemale poetic discourse as a power tool depends on its acceptance by men: when memorized and quoted by males, women's songs indirectly provide their composers with a strong voice in the larger community (Joseph 427). As we will see, this modern parallel illuminates the reception of Sappho's songs in antiquity. 39. Weedon, Feminist Practice 2 1 - 2 7 .

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living in the world or, in contrast, appropriated as a vehicle for escapist fantasy. In the ancient literary tradition, the "Sapphic voice" seems to have become just such an alternative subject position. From the archaic period to the early Hellenistic era, the Greek world experienced a slow transition from orality to literacy. 40 Available evidence, chiefly from Athens, indicates that the capacity to write, with a corollary dependence on written records, spread through the population only gradually, coexisting for a long time with the time-honored m n e m o n i c skills of a nonliterate society. 4 ' T h o u g h women are decoratively shown as readers on fifth-century B.C.E. Athenian vases, in practice they remained disproportionately illiterate, not only in Greece but in all parts of the ancient world and at all historical periods. O n the other hand, women storytellers perhaps contributed a great deal to preserving and h a n d i n g on oral traditions, even after the dissemination of literacy. 42 T h o u g h this societal transformation was already well advanced in his lifetime, Plato in his last treatise still singles out song and dance, rather than books, as the basic medium for transmitting an awareness of cultural values to the young (Leg. 2.653C-656C). From time immemorial, oral instruction in the knowledge necessary to survive in Greek society—including an understanding of theology, history, politics, law, and even agriculture, as well as practical training in poetry, music, and rhythmic m o v e m e n t — h a d been made available to all upper-class youth, girls as well as boys, through their attendance at public festivals a n d their own parts in cult and ritual. For girls in particular, socialization was achieved by m e m b e r s h i p in a chorus composed of age-mates, beginning in childhood a n d continuing until marriage. T h e anomalous p h e n o m e n o n of women poets in a rigidly gender-stratified society is plausibly explained by their function as poet-educators for adolescent groups of female initiates. 43 Sappho, it is widely believed, was just such an educator, composing cult songs for the young w o m e n enrolled in her sodality or thiasos and training t h e m in oral performance. 4 4 Responsibility for instructing Greek girls in music a n d dance was not, however, confined to women. T h e genre ofpartheneia, or "maiden songs," was extremely popular, a n d a n u m b e r of famous male poets—Alcman, Pindar, Simonides, Bacchylides—are credited with producing such works ([Plut.]

40. Havelock, Preface to Plato, and "The Preliteracy of the Greeks"; Harris, Ancient Literacy. 41. Thomas, Oral Tradition. 42. O n women's illiteracy, see Cole, "Could Greek Women Read and Write?" and Harris, Ancient Literacy 106—8; on women storytellers, see Thomas, Oral Tradition 109. 43. Dowden, Death and the Maiden 103. O n the girls' chorus, see Calame, Les chœurs. 44. Merkelbach, "Sappho und ihr Kreis"; Calame, Les chœurs 1:385-420; Gentili, Poetry and Its Public 72-89.

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De tnus. 17.1136 f.). L e n g t h y f r a g m e n t s o f t w o p a r t h e n e i a b y A l c m a n , active in S p a r t a in the m i d - s e v e n t h c e n t u r y B.C.E., are f r e q u e n t l y c o m p a r e d to S a p p h o ' s verses b e c a u s e his speakers, like hers, express a s t r o n g h o m o e r o t i c attraction to the b e a u t y o f their c o m p a n i o n s . 4 5

T h i s generic resemblance

has p r o m p t e d the s u g g e s t i o n that S a p p h o w a s h e r s e l f a f o l l o w e r o f A l c m a n . 4 6 A t the v e r y least, it proves that h e r f u n c t i o n as socializer o f y o u n g f e m a l e initiates c o u l d e l s e w h e r e b e u n d e r t a k e n b y m e n , a n d thus leads us to w o n d e r a b o u t the a u t h e n t i c i t y o f h e r f e m a l e p e r s p e c t i v e . C o u l d S a p p h o b e i m p o s i n g u p o n h e r y o u n g c h a r g e s a c o g n i t i v e structure d e r i v e d f r o m , a n d i n t e n d e d to reinforce, p a t r i a r c h y ? I f so, this w o u l d b e b u t o n e m o r e i n s t a n c e o f w o m e n c h o o s i n g " t o i n h a b i t the s p a c e to w h i c h t h e y a r e a l r e a d y a s s i g n e d " b y a m a l e "logic of domination."4' I d o n o t believe, t h o u g h , that that is the case.

While Sappho's manip-

ulation o f v e r b a l d e v i c e s like d i c t i o n , figures o f s p e e c h , a n d i m a g e r y is c l e a r l y i n d e b t e d to the m a i n s t r e a m tradition, 4 8 h e r m o d e s o f subjectivity d i f f e r e n t i ate h e r to a n e x t r a o r d i n a r y d e g r e e f r o m h e r m a l e c o u n t e r p a r t s — p a r t i c u l a r l y those w o r k i n g w i t h i n the s a m e g e n r e , w h e t h e r p a r t h e n e i o n o r erotic m o n o d y . Specifically, h e r m o d e l o f h o m o e r o t i c relations is bilateral a n d e g a l i t a r i a n , in m a r k e d c o n t r a s t to the rigid p a t t e r n s o f pursuit a n d p h y s i c a l m a s t e r y i n s c r i b e d into the role o f the a d u l t m a l e erastes, w h a t e v e r the sex o f his love object. 4 9 T h e distinction b e t w e e n these t w o w a y s o f c o n s t i t u t i n g h o m o e r o t i c passion c a n b e illustrated by j u x t a p o s i n g A l c m a n ' s r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s o f girls in love w i t h the d e s i r i n g s p e a k e r s p o r t r a y e d in n u m e r o u s S a p p h i c texts, m o s t n o t a b l y h e r f r a g m e n t 31. 30 T h e c h o r u s ' s a d m i r a t i o n o f t h e i r l e a d e r s H a g e s i c h o r a a n d A g i d o in A l c m a n f r a g m e n t 1 is p e r m e a t e d w i t h a spirit o f e a g e r rivalry, since they are c o m p e t i n g w i t h a n o t h e r chorus. 3 ' nistic tensions e m u l a t e the m i n d s e t o f a m a l e w a r r i o r society.

S u c h agoMeanwhile,

the y e a r n i n g for A s t y m e l o i s a e x p r e s s e d in A l c m a n f r a g m e n t 3 b e t r a y s a n a b j e c t d e p e n d e n c y quite f o r e i g n to S a p p h o herself. 3 2 In contrast, S a p p h o ' s d e c l a r a t i o n s o f passions a r e a subtle m e a n s o f a w a k e n i n g the b e l o v e d to the

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

46. Hallett, "Sappho and Her Social Context" 139-42. 47. DuBois, Sowing the Body 29.

48. B. Fowler, "The Archaic Aesthetic." 49. See Foucault, The History of Sexuality 2:38-93. On Sappho's model, see Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World." 50. For the convenience of nonspecialists, the numeration of the fragments of both Sappho's and Alcman's poems is that found in the most recent Loeb editions (Campbell, Greek Lyric vols. 1 and 2, respectively). 51. Page, Alcman 52-57.

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

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m u t u a l p l e a s u r e s o f sexuality. T h u s f r a g m e n t 31 is n o a n g u i s h e d c o n f e s s i o n , b u t instead a v i r t u o s o display o f s e d u c t i v e p o e t i c control: b y m a k i n g h e r vividly c o n s c i o u s o f h e r o w n p o w e r to c a p t i v a t e others, the s p e a k e r d r a w s the addressee into a d e n s e w e b o f sensual self-awareness a n d so e n c o u r a g e s in h e r a r e c i p r o c a l erotic response. 3 3 T h e r e are c o r r e s p o n d i n g d i f f e r e n c e s , too, in e a c h poet's stance t o w a r d m e m b e r s o f the opposite sex a n d c o n c o m i t a n t p o r t r a y a l o f g e n d e r relations. T h o u g h A l c m a n ' s s i n g i n g girls a r e c e n t e r stage, the g a z e fixed u p o n t h e m is u n m i s t a k a b l y m a l e , for in their s w e e t n a ï v e t é a n d e m o t i o n a l v u l n e r a b i l i t y t h e y p r e s e n t t h e m s e l v e s as u n s u s p e c t i n g o b j e c t s o f h e t e r o s e x u a l desire.

In

S a p p h o ' s p o e t i c universe, h o w e v e r , m e n a r e h a r d l y a f o c u s o f f e m a l e interest; as J o a n D e j e a n d e f l a t i n g l y r e m a r k s , t h e y a r e " r e l e g a t e d to a p e r i p h e r a l , if n o t a n intrusive, role." 3 4 M a s c u l i n e ideology, o n the o t h e r h a n d , is p r e s e n t as i n e s c a p a b l e b a c k g r o u n d noise, r e p r e s e n t i n g b o t h the p o w e r o f the c u l t u r a l system to e n f o r c e its d e m a n d s o n w o m e n " a n d a p r i v i l e g e d

conceptual

f r a m e w o r k to w h i c h S a p p h o c o u n t e r p o s e s h e r o w n antithetical o u t l o o k . For e x a m p l e , in r e b u k i n g the transgressions o f h e r e r r a n t b r o t h e r C h a r a x u s a n d his mistress D o r i c h a (frs. 5, 7, 15), she s e e m s to be c e n s u r i n g a m a l e e c o n o m y o f desire: erotic obsession, the i m p u l s e to possess the o b j e c t undividedly, has b r o u g h t public d i s g r a c e u p o n C h a r a x u s h i m s e l f a n d p r o v o k e d u n s e e m l y a r r o g a n c e in his p a r a m o u r (fr. 15.9-12). A g a i n , the first s t a n z a o f f r a g m e n t 16 c o n f i r m s the speaker's s u p e r i o r insight i n t o w h a t is " t h e most b e a u t i f u l " (to kalliston) b y o p p o s i n g h e r c o m p r e h e n s i v e a n d relativistic definition o f b e a u t y to a series o f overtly m a l e , a n d p a t e n t l y l i m i t e d , foils. Lastly, the v i o l e n c e o f S a p p h o ' s r e a c t i o n to the sight o f h e r b e l o v e d in f r a g m e n t 31 is e n h a n c e d b y a n i n d i r e c t c o n t r a s t w i t h m a s c u l i n e impassivity. W h i l e the m a n sitting o p p o s i t e the girl must b e t a k e n as a h y p o t h e t i c a l r a t h e r t h a n a c o n c r e t e

figure,36

his

intrusion into this intimate c o n v e r s a t i o n w a r n s o f the crass i n d i f f e r e n c e o f the g r e a t w o r l d outside the thiasos, less i n c l i n e d to a p p r e c i a t e the addressee's singular loveliness. In n o n e o f these texts d o e s S a p p h o close h e r eyes to the o n t o l o g i c a l reality o f the m a s c u l i n e order. S h e r e c o g n i z e s it, instead, as a p r i o r a n d c o n t r o l l i n g p r e s e n c e , b u t still a v o w s the e t h i c a l s u p e r i o r i t y o f h e r n o n n o r m a t i v e s u b j e c t position, h e r r a d i c a l l y w o m a n - c e n t e r e d a p p r o a c h to existence.

Whenever

h e r texts t r o p e d i f f e r e n c e b y a n a p p e a l to gender, t h e n , the f e m a l e s t a n c e affords a posture o f resistance to p r e v a i l i n g m a l e attitudes a n d p r a c t i c e s . B u t the resulting p o l a r i t y is not inversely " h o m ( m ) o - s e x u a l , " in I r i g a r a y ' s

53. O'Higgins, "Sappho's Splintered Tongue." 54. Dejean, "Fictions of Sappho" 790. 55. Stehle, "Sappho's Gaze" 224-25. 56. Winkler, The Constraints ofDesire 179.

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sense: rather than conjuring u p male alterity as the mere negative projection of itself, the speaker's perspective defiantly locates itself against patriarchy, the pre-extant condition. O n e might state, paradoxically, that Sappho's poetry is literally "heterosexual," for it affirms the availability of distinct, gender-specific modes of subjectivity a n d directs its audience to choose what is identified as the better, though less advantaged, of two real alternatives. It appears, then, that the subject position extracted from Sappho's monodies a n d choral compositions does not replicate patriarchal modes of awareness but rather affords a substitute basis for organizing female experience. T h r o u g h imaginative identification with the first-person speaker, a girl would have absorbed survival tricks for living within a patriarchal culture: formulas for resisting misogynistic assumptions a n d so protecting self-esteem, for expressing active female erotic desire, for b o n d i n g deeply with other women, a n d for accepting the underlying ambiguities and absences of full closure inherent in both h u m a n discourse and h u m a n life. Consequently, she would be, in her adult years, an energetic a n d wholly socialized participant in female communities—those into which she was born and those she would join u p o n her marriage. T h e ultimate purpose of Sapphic song, we may conclude, was to encode strategies for perpetuating women's culture. But would it really have been possible for a girl who internalized a female subject position to preserve it after leaving the thiasos a n d reentering a patriarchal milieu? Again, let us observe the peculiar epistemic processes of oral cultures. In passing information from one generation to the next, nonliterate societies exhibit "structural amnesia": aspects of the past no longer relevant to present concerns are sloughed off from the record and forgotten. 07 Susan Schibanoff suggests that illiterate women respond to directives from the dominant culture in similar fashion. 08 With no concept of a fixed, unyielding written text to deter them, they can "mishear" utterances in conflict with their own values a n d thereby resist immasculation. If Schibanoff is right, it follows that adult w o m e n in archaic and early classical Greece, segregated from the larger public sphere except on ritual occasions a n d having little or no exposure to reading or writing, could easily have retained a woman-centered perspective—more easily, no doubt, than their literate great-granddaughters. 5 9 At separate cult gatherings such as the Adonia a n d the Thesmophoria, to say nothing of daily private interaction in their own homes, these women h a d a b u n d a n t opportunities to speak a n d joke 57. Ong, Orality and Literacy 46-49. 58. Schibanoff, "Taking the Gold" 87-91. 59. On the increased availability of formal education for women from the fourth century B.C.E. onward, see Pomeroy, "TECHNIKAI KAI MOUSIKAI."

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among themselves, to chant and dance, to adapt a flexible mythic heritage to their purposes—in short, to propagate their own discourses in relative isolation. 60 We know, for example, that women sang folk songs, because scraps of them have been preserved, including one (PMG 869) that may have originated on Lesbos in Sappho's own lifetime: its reference to Pittacus, a ruling tyrant, is suspiciously familiar and quite possibly obscene. 61 It is reasonable to surmise, then, that compositions of Sappho and other women poets also formed part of a widespread female oral tradition handed down from mother to daughter, and that those compositions served, in effect, as a mechanism for opposing patriarchy. Considered in such a way, Sappho's poetry offers an intriguing parallel to Luce Irigaray's own demonstration of parlerfemme, "speaking (as) woman," in "When O u r Lips Speak Together," the essay that concludes This Sex Which Is Not One (205-18). There, troping speech as lesbian erotic play, Irigaray gives substance to her conception of a polysemous feminine language enacted through the female body. Communication between her lovers takes place on a timeless, almost wordless plane beyond patriarchal "compartments" and "schémas" (212), where only the body's truths are valid. "You," the addressee, and "I," the speaker, meld into one composite being through simultaneous jouissance, and this interchange of inexhaustible orgasmic pleasure constitutes a sharing of consciousness. Because Irigaray's model of female language depends upon corporeal contact, however, the subject is forced to seek a way of embracing across distances and can only appeal, in the end, to a vague notion of mystical somatic fusion (215-16). Yet it seems obvious that a connection with the absent partner cannot be sustained, in practice, without recourse to writing—which poses the danger of reinscription as object within a prefabricated patriarchal account. Song, Sappho's medium of communication, avoids this pitfall because it is memory based. In oral societies, memory is the repository of all knowledge and the matrix of the collective as well as the individual consciousness. Thus an idealized experience captured in song and committed to memory can surmount the physical limitations of space and time. Meanwhile, song as performance art also provides scope for idiosyncratic self-expression by prescribing that every successive rendition will be unique, produced by one singer at a particular moment in time. T h e song text is both infinitely repeatable and infinitely varied. 62 Patterns of intimacy forged by erotic

60. Winkler, The Constraints ofDesire 188-209. 61. Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry 448-49. 62. For a theoretical analogy, compare de Lauretis's several arguments for redefining personal subjectivity as an ongoing "process of engagement" with externally formulated social discourses. According to de Lauretis, the agent exercises a considerable degree of

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encounters within the Sapphic thiasos would consequently have survived a patriarchally enforced separation by marriage, for the searing intensity of the love affair could be rekindled through verses associated with that affair a n d later p e r f o r m e d over and over again during the singer's lifetime. 63 By the same means, the moving lessons learned from her adolescent experience of desire might be imparted to outsiders—women of another community, or her own children a n d grandchildren. 6 4 Long after the composer's death a n d long after the death of her last companion, then, this poetry would have continued to offer generations of women an authentic female subject position. T h a t in turn explains the emergence, century after century, of yet other Greek women poets, for w h o m their archaic foremother served as enabling prototype a n d fount of inspiration. But we should not forget that Sappho's songs would not have gained fame in the wider world, or eventually circulated as written texts, had they not offered something to m e n as well as to women. Divorced from their p r i m a r y cultural context, artistic works produced by female communities are subject to marginalization or distortion precisely because they exhibit disturbing deviations from n o r m a l social ideology. Thus, to cite an already familiar example, Alcman in his maiden songs is most likely appropriating a Spartan female initiatory discourse akin to the one Sappho herself inherited a n d making it conform to a masculine symbolic order. Sappho's poetry is, as we have seen, undeniably deviant; yet it was still preserved, transcribed, a n d ultimately enshrined within the androcentric literary tradition as a special category of discourse. H a d m e n used it solely for voyeuristic gratification, converting its female subjects into erotic objects, they would have drastically modified its content, as we have observed Alcman doing, a n d excised in the process its woman-oriented elements. Clearly, then, Greek male listeners must have found another, peculiar application for it, one that required its survival intact a n d unchanged. Sappho's great poetic achievement, I believe, was to articulate a female desire so compellingly as to make it at once emotionally accessible to m e n as well as w o m e n — a l t h o u g h men's responses to it were shaped by far different relations of gender a n d power. T h e diffused eroticism that taught female auditors in the sheltered atmosphere of the thiasos how to transcend linear symbolic systems was perceived within the masculine sphere

self-determination in adapting those discourses to serve her private needs and even combining them into more complex vehicles of consciousness that escape conventional categories (de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't 182-86; cf. "Feminist Studies/Critical Studies" 8-10, and "Eccentric Subjects" 144-45). 63. Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 277 313. 64. Segal, "Eros and Incantation."

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as delightfully idyllic and romantic. Consequently, as we learn from ancient critical pronouncements, anecdotal evidence, and visual representations of the poet as cultural icon, male listeners and readers cherished Sappho's work as a socially permissible escape from the strict constraints of masculinity. 65 In the symposium, singing one of these compositions—songs charged with the comforting presence of benign divinity and flooded with aching but sweet reciprocal desire—would have allowed m e n momentarily to "play the other," in Zeitlin's phrase, and so to release themselves from the necessity of being at all times publicly competitive and self-controlled. 6 6 By logical extension, allusion to Sappho b e c a m e an obvious tactic for proj e c t i n g metaphoric "difference" upon one or two antithetical male-structured categories, particularly during the long process of conversion to a writingbased system of literary production. Yet the Sapphic texts still stayed in play as a locus of real differentiation, continually reinscribing into mainstream Greek discourse a set of gender assumptions radically free from male bias. Pace Irigaray, w o m a n accordingly maintained a toehold in the Western symbolic order for as long as those texts remained intact. Pace Halperin, there is a dash of actual female subjectivity even in Diotima: w h e n he argues persuasively that the Platonic image of reciprocal intellectual eroticism is derived from earlier ideas of female homoerotic relations, 6 ' Halperin overlooks the fact that Plato's audience would have obtained its artistic impressions of female homoeroticism chiefly from the poetry of Sappho. 65. T h e psychological spell Sappho exerted over a male listener's imagination is implied at [Longinus] Subl. 10.1-3, where the author marvels at her ability to select and c o m b i n e "the most extreme a n d intense" (ta akra ... kai hypertetamena) emotions in her descriptions of love. Praise of the c h a r m (kharis) and pleasure (hedone) of her subject matter points to a general perception of her poetry as emotionally enthralling; see Demetr. Eloc. 132 a n d H e r m o g . Id. 2.4 (p. 331 Rabe). Portrayals of S a p p h o on red-figure pottery (for example, the kalathos by Brygos on which she appears with Alcaeus [Munich 2416, ARV2 385/228] and the hydria [Athens 1260, ARV2 1060/145] showing her reading in the presence of three female companions, one of w h o m crowns her with a wreath) hint at widespread use of her songs as entertainment at symposia in fifth-century B.C.E. Athens; cf. the apocryphal tale of Solon's reaction to one such p e r f o r m a n c e (Ael. a p u d Stob. Flor. 3.29.58; Campbell, Greek Lyric 1:13, no. 10), which, though admittedly late, nevertheless provides insight into h o w male listeners responded to S a p p h o a n d how her songs were transmitted orally. T h a t cultural image of S a p p h o explains why the musical theorist Aristoxenus attributed to her the invention of the poignant a n d affecting mixolydian m o d e ([Plut.] Demus. 16.1136c!; for its character, see Plato Resp. 3.398c). 66. O n Greek mimesis of the female as a theatrical device for affirming elements excluded f r o m ordinary male experience, consult Zeitlin, "Playing the Other." For the p a t t e r n of "the G r e e k male's fascination with and gradual appropriation of the socially suppressed female other," see duBois, Sowing the Body 176-77; and, on the symposium as privileged space for the assumption of a " t e m p e r e d alterity," see Frontisi-Ducroux a n d Lissarrague, "From Ambiguity to Ambivalence." 67. Halperin, One Hundred Years 126-37.

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If metanarratives like Irigaray's are to serve as frameworks for profitable scholarly inquiry, they must be pliant enough to admit a blurring of polarities, to incorporate pronounced exceptions to their rules. Confronting a gargantuan heap of male-authored texts, feminist classical scholars have understandably perceived sexual/textual oppression everywhere and so have written off the Greco-Roman literary tradition as a blank page of canonical female silence. But, as Cicero informs us, silenced voices do cry out {Cat. 1.21) and, according to Susan Gubar, blank pages can tell tales.68 While we may accurately describe Western culture as masculine in orientation, we must refrain from subscribing to paradigms of cultural construction that obliterate women's historical contribution to art and learning, for to do so is to do patriarchy's work. In conclusion, then, I submit that the female-specific discourse known as Sappho's poetry is not so marginal to the Greek, or to the western European, literary tradition as to be readily excluded from consideration as an influential cultural factor, no matter how absolute and totalitarian the grip of the patriarchal symbolic system might appear. As many honorific allusions by later women writers suggest, this discourse did provide generations of ancient women with a (m)other tongue and a basis for constructing a positive account of their own experiences. More important for its perpetuation (and, one might add, for the overall mental health of the culture), GrecoRoman males benefited from the opportunity afforded by Sappho's texts to enact a woman's part, if only in play, and so to enter imaginatively into states of awareness foreign to them. In the innovative Hellenistic period, literary representation itself gained new vitality from incorporating additional elements of the female perspective preserved in Sapphic poetry. Finally, we should not forget that, exactly like their predecessors in antiquity, women taking up the pen at the beginning of the modern era invoked Sappho as a heroic authorizing presence. 69 Thus all contemporary women who write, within the Western tradition at least, may call themselves daughters of Sappho. As we reread her scanty fragments, we consequently do much more than rediscover the woman's voice in ancient literature. We are glimpsing the other shattered surface of what was once a two-sided glass. That no comparable glass has existed until recently for modern man has been his loss, no less than woman's. 68. Gubar, "The Blank Page." 69. Kolodny, "The Influence of Anxiety."

TWELVE

Sappho's Gaze: Fantasies of a Goddess and Young Man Eva Stehle

In the fragments of Sappho's poetry and notices about its contents, references to four myths which belong to a common pattern can be detected. These are the stories of Eos and Tithonos, Selene and Endymion, Aphrodite and Adonis, and Aphrodite and Phaon. T h e last is complicated by "biographical" descriptions of Sappho's own thwarted love for Phaon. Given that Sappho does not seem to have referred to mythological stories very often, these myths form a significant group. 1 Yet, frustratingly, none of the poems survives well enough to reveal what use Sappho made of any of the myths. It is the purpose of this essay to show why Sappho may have been interested in the pattern to which this set of stories belongs and to suggest the use she made of it. I will begin by describing the four stories as known from elsewhere and the evidence that Sappho used them. T h e story of Eos and Tithonos is known from the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (218-38): Eos (Dawn), enamored of the beautiful Tithonos, snatched him off to her home at the end of the earth. She asked Zeus for immortal life for him, but forgot to ask for immortal youth. Once he had grown old, Eos shut him up in her palace and left him to his fate. 2 In a papyrus fragment This essay was originally published in slightly different form as "Sappho's Gaze: Fantasies of a Goddess and a Young Man," differences 2 (1990) 88-125. 1. The exception is the Trojan War, to which Sappho does refer relatively often: 16, 17, 23, 44, and one could add 166 and 105b (Voigt [V.]). Apart from figures connected with the Trojan War, I count eleven references to mythical characters, excluding divinities, whose stories may have been told or at least alluded to. In addition to those discussed here, there are the Tyndaridai, Niobe and Leto, Medea, Theseus, Achelous, and Prometheus. 2. In Homer {II. 9.1, Od. 5.1), Eos is said to rise from her bed beside Tithonos to bring light to mortals. Homer may think of him as a god. See Escher in PW under Eos, col. 2658: for other versions of the myth of Tithonos, see P. Smith, Nursling of Morality 82-86. 193

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which preserves the right-hand half of a poem of Sappho's (58 V.) appears the two lines: " . . . rosy-armed Eos . . . carrying to the ends of the earth." T h e name of the person whom she is carrying is lost in the lacuna. But in the five lines directly preceding, the speaker complains about old age, grey hair, and weak limbs. Old age was Tithonos's trouble, and he is the only one of her lovers whom Eos is said to have carried off to her palace at the edge of the world. It seems very probable, then, that the allusion is to the known story. 3 T h a t S a p p h o told the second myth, that of Selene (Moon) and Endymion, we know only from a scholium, or marginal comment, on Apollonios's Argonautica: "It is said that Selene comes down to the [Latmian] cave to Endymion; Sappho and Nikandros . . . tell the story concerning Selene's love." 4 T h e story has not survived, so we cannot tell whether Selene abducted Endymion in Sappho's version. Sappho's is not the usual tale of Endymion: she may have used a local story of Asia M i n o r or created this version herself. 0 T h e story of Aphrodite and Adonis is known in several variants. 6 According to the best-known version, Adonis was the child of M y r r h a ' s incest with her father: Aphrodite loved the supremely beautiful youth, and they hunted together; Adonis fell, however, gored in the thigh by a wild boar, and died, leaving Aphrodite to mourn him.' T h e r e are other variants (one is given below). In some it is recorded that Aphrodite laid Adonis down in a lettuce bed as he was dying. What makes the detail interesting is that lettuce was said to cause impotence. 8 Attributed to S a p p h o is a two-line fragment 3. Eos is similar to Aphrodite in some ways: Boedeker, Aphrodite's Entry, has argued that Aphrodite is a hypostasis o f Eos (10-17). 4. Scholia to Ap. Rhod. 4.57 f. (264 Wendel), partly quoted in Voigt, Sappho etAlcaeus 199. 5. See n. 4 and cf. Page, Sappho and Akaeus 273-74, who analyzes the myths into two traditions. T h e "western" version is that Endymion was king o f Elis. Eternal sleep is usually part of his story (but Selene is not): Zeus gave him the right to choose his time o f death; or Zeus agreed to grant a wish, and Endymion chose eternal sleep without aging; or Endymion tried to rape Hera, and the sleep was a punishment. T h e "eastern" version is less well-known: a grave in the Latmian cave is reported by Strabo 14.1.8 and an inscription shows that Endymion was a local hero in that area: cf. Paus. 5.1.5. Cf. also Gebelmann Ackerman and Gisler, LIMC, under Endymion, cat. 726-28; Bethe in PW under Endymion, cols. 2557-60, for collected evidence. Sappho could have created her version out o f this material, adding the goddess to the story o f Endymion's sleep. 6. T h e best collection of sources for the myth and cult o f Adonis, together with extensive discussion, is Atallah, Adonis. 7. Ovid Met. 10.298-559, 708-59, gives the fullest treatment. Adonis becomes an anemone after death in this telling, on which metamorphosis (into a flower without scent) see Ribichini, Adonis 76-78. 8. See Euboulos fr. 13 (Kassel-Austin) and Callim. fr. 478 (Pfuhl) for the statement that Aphrodite laid Adonis in the lettuce: both authors connect the anaphrodisiac nature o f lettuce with Adonis's feebleness. Winkler, Constraints of Desire 20, attributes this statement to Sappho

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(140 V.): "Tender Adonis is dying. Aphrodite, what shall we do? / Beat your breasts, maidens, and tear your garments." Dioskourides calls Sappho a "fellow mourner" to Aphrodite grieving over Adonis, and Pausanias also says that Sappho sang of Adonis. 9 The fragment quoted may be from a cult song, for there was a festival for Adonis celebrated by women, the Adonia: the appearance of reposition in the fragment supports that view of it. But we cannot be sure. Sappho used the hymn form for personal poetry, so she may have used other ritual forms as well. If Aphrodite herself speaks the second line, we may see rather evocation of a mythic scene than a ritual form. T h e fourth myth, Aphrodite and Phaon, is much harder to reconstruct. Late sources have it that Phaon was a ferryman of Lesbos who one day ferried Aphrodite, disguised as an old woman, between islands. In gratitude she changed him from an old man into a young and beautiful one. He seduced the women of the island, and met his fate in various ways. 10 Sappho, the Byzantine commentator Palaiphatos tells us, often sang of her love for Phaon." But one of the earliest sources, the comic poet Kratinos, says that Aphrodite loved Phaon and hid him in the "lovely lettuce.'" 2 T h e best explanation of the evidence is that Sappho sang of Aphrodite's love. The reference to lettuce implies that Phaon was a figure who could be confused with Adonis. 13 T h e pattern which the stories have in common is that of a goddess desiring a young, beautiful, mortal man whom she hides away in an enclosed place far from civilization. T h e young man is or becomes incapacitated sexually by mistake. Cf. also Ath. 2.68f~7oa on lettuce. Détienne, Gardens of Adonis 67-71, calls attention to the significance of these references. 9. Dioskourides AP 7.407 (18.1585 Gow-Page); Paus. 9.29.8 (214 V). The phrase, "Oh, Adonis," is also quoted from Sappho (ii7Bb: 168 V.). A suggested restoration of 96.23 V includes a reference to Adonis: West, "Burning Sappho" 328. 10. Sappho is said to have leaped from the Leucadian rock (an act that cured passion, if one survived it) for love of Phaon. The story probably developed in fourth-century comedy, for it is attested from comic fragments. See Stoessl in PW under Phaon, cols. 1791-93, on its development. See Wilamowitz, Sappho und Simonides 25-40, and Nagy, "The Symbols of Greek Lyric," on the complicated question of the relationship between Phaon and the Leucadian rock. Wilamowitz thinks that Phaon was localized at Lesbos only after he became attached to Sappho, Stoessl that Phaon may have been a Lesbian mythic figure of whom Sappho's poetry spread knowledge. The "leap" may originally have been a metaphor for swooning in love. 11. See 211 V for collected references to the Phaon story, 211a for Palaiphatos. 12. Kratinos was an older contemporary of Aristophanes: Eq. 526-36. A scholiast to Lukianos (211c V ) remarks that Aphrodite changed Phaon from old to young because she was in love with him. 13. Cf. Burn, The Meidias Painter 40-44, and Beazley, "Some Inscriptions" 3 2 0 - 2 1 , for vase paintings that depict Adonis and Phaon as similar figures. For the two famous vases by the Meidias Painter, one depicting Adonis, one Phaon, see Burn pis. 22-25a, 27-29.

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and never leaves his condition of dependence and confinement to return to human society. T h e moment of impotence seems to be the one chosen by Sappho: the man is sleeping, aged, or breathing his last; the narrator joins Aphrodite in expressing love or grief. How was Sappho using this pattern, what connection did it have with her poetry for and about other women? It is a question that we cannot answer directly, both because Sappho's poetry is so largely missing and because such mythic patterns must be understood in context. I will therefore approach Sappho's myths through a study of the pattern elsewhere in early Greek literature. T h e liaison of a goddess with a mortal man (young or not) is a recurring theme in this period. There are numerous other examples besides the ones just given. Why were such stories popular and what possibilities did they offer to Sappho? These will be my preliminary questions, before returning to Sappho's use of them. My investigation has two stages, the first determining what structural and ideological characteristics all such myths have in common, the second how they open space for erotic fantasy. I

In order to study the pattern as a whole, I must describe some of the other realizations of it known from early Greek literature. To begin with, it lies behind Helen and Paris in the Iliad.H Aphrodite "snatched" (exherpax') Paris from the batdefield and took him to an enclosed place, his bedroom (3.380-82): the verb is the one used of goddesses carrying off beloved youths. 15 There he remains, beautiful, compliant, apparently immobile until she returns to him (with Helen). Aphrodite then goes to find Helen, who is so close to Aphrodite that, as Helen herself implies, she and Aphrodite can replace each other in love relationships. 16 Helen says to Aphrodite, when summoned to the side of Paris: "You go sit by [Paris], leave the way of the gods and no longer tread Olympus with your feet, but always worry over him and guard him until he makes you his wife—or his slave" (3.406-9). In the Odyssey, Kirke and Kalypso enact the pattern with Odysseus. 17 Kalypso holds Odysseus captive, desiring him for her 14. Helen was a heroine (i.e., a figure whose grave was worshiped) or a goddess at Sparta: Hdt. 6.61; cf. Od. 4.561-69; Theoc. Id. 18. Calame, Les chœurs 1:334-44; West, "Immortal Helen," and Clader, Helen, argue for her being a goddess, 15. The plates in Kahil, Les enlèvements, show the increasingly sexualized representation of both Paris and Helen in vase painting in the course of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. 16. Cf. Clader, Helen, esp. 58-62, 69-80. 17. Od. 10.203-574, 5-55-261. The Kirke and Kalypso episodes are generally thought of as duplicates: cf. Od. 9.29-32.

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husband, a n d has offered h i m immortality.

197

S h e also mentions two m o r e

examples in the course o f her protest to H e r m e s a b o u t b e i n g forced to let Odysseus go: You are harsh, you gods, supremely jealous, you who begrudge goddesses' sleeping openly with men, if one would make him her proper consort.

Thus when

rosy-fingered Eos chose Orion, the lightly living gods resented it, until chaste, golden-throned Artemis killed him, assailing him with her gentle arrows. Thus when Demeter, yielding to her desire, mingled in love with Iasion in a thriceplowed field, Zeus was not ignorant but killed him, striking him with a flashing thunderbolt.

T h e Theogony, or rather its pseudo-Hesiodic continuation, offers a list specifically o f goddesses w h o slept with mortal m e n and o f their offspring (965-1020).

I n c l u d e d are D e m e t e r and Iasion, H a r m o n i a a n d K a d m o s ,

K a l l i r h o e a n d C h r u s a o r , Eos a n d Tithonos, Eos a n d K e p h a l o s , A p h r o d i t e and P h a e t h o n , M e d e a a n d Jason, Psamathe and Aiakos, T h e t i s a n d Peleus, A p h r o d i t e a n d Anchises, K i r k e and Odysseus, a n d K a l y p s o and Odysseus. 1 8 P h a e t h o n , w h o m A p h r o d i t e carried off to be her immortal temple-keeper, is here the son o f Eos a n d Kephalos. 1 9 In the case o f A p h r o d i t e and P h a e t h o n , unlike the others, no issue is mentioned. Finally, the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite tells the story o f A p h r o d i t e ' s seduction of Anchises. A p h r o d i t e appears before Anchises' hut, c l a i m i n g to be a mortal virgin w h o was snatched by H e r m e s from the d a n c e and brought to M o u n t Ida to be A n c h i s e s ' wife. Persuaded, A n c h i s e s takes her to b e d on the spot. A f t e r w a r d , w h e n A n c h i s e s learns w h o it is that he has just slept with, he cowers and begs not to be m a d e impotent: " D o n ' t let m e live strengthless a m o n g m e n , but take pity. For not flourishing o f life is the m a n w h o sleeps with immortal goddesses" (188-90). 20 In the final conversation between them, A p h r o d i t e reassures h i m and promises h i m a son but w a r n s him not to speak o f the encounter.

To

explain w h y she c a n n o t m a k e h i m immortal she narrates the story o f Eos a n d T i t h o n o s and, a variation on the pattern, o f Z e u s a n d G a n y m e d e s (202-38). 21 If w e range d o w n t h r o u g h the fifth century w e find the first attested narration

18. It is striking that only one of the heroes born to a goddess in this list is central to Greek heroic legend. That is Achilleus, and it has long been noted that Achilleus is a misfit in the Greek genealogical system. Two of the heroes, Aineias and Memnon, are Eastern. Three— Latinos, Agrios, and Geryones—belong to the Far West, and Geryones is more monster than hero. The famous heroes do not come from such unions. 19. Cf. also Eur. Hipp. 454-56, who mentions Eos's snatching Kephalos. 20. Cf. Giacomelli [Carson], "Aphrodite and After," for a discussion of the meaning of

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

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of Adonis's life in Panyassis's poetry, as Apollodoros records. 22 T h e reference runs thus: Panyasis [sic] says that [Adonis] was a son of Theias, king of Assyria, who had a daughter Smyrna. . . . [She commits incest with her father, then flees and is changed by the gods into a myrrh tree.] In the tenth month thereafter, the tree having burst, the one called Adonis was born, whom Aphrodite, in secret from the gods, hid in a chest on account of his beauty while he was still an infant and entrusted to Persephone. But when [Persephone] saw him, she refused to give him back. Judgment being in the hands of Zeus, the year was divided into three parts, and [Zeus] ordained that Adonis should remain under his own cognizance for one part of the year, with Persephone for one part, and with Aphrodite for the third part. Adonis assigned to [Aphrodite] his own share also. Later, however, while hunting Adonis was gored by a boar and died. (3-H-4) While there is no way to know how far the summary draws on Panyassis, it can be argued, on the basis of the coherence of the plot, that the whole summary except the last clause should be attributed to him. 23 Apollodoros may have borrowed the detail of being gored from the better-known version given above. T h e Adonis story stands out among the others because it is associated with a festival, the Adonia. Sappho's lines of lament for the dying Adonis may have been meant as a song for the ritual mourning of Adonia. T h e festival was kept at Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries, and later at Alexandria, as well as elsewhere. T h e Athenian festival has been reconstructed largely from vase paintings, with help from remarks in Plato and comic writers. 24 It was celebrated by women, who planted seeds of lettuce, fennel, perhaps wheat and barley in pottery vessels or large shards.

O n c e the seeds had

sprouted, the pottery pieces were carried to the roofs of the houses, where the sprouts shriveled in the sun and the women lamented. T h e pots were thrown into the sea or into streams. A t some point in the festival incense was burned, fruit was heaped up in baskets, and women danced to flute and tambourine. 20

22. See, in addition to works cited above, the notes in Frazer's Loeb edition of Apollodorus ad 83-89. 23. This is the solution of Atallah, Adonis 53. Ribichini, Adonis 133 n. 82, on the other hand, thinks that Panyassis told of Adonis's death after a life of cycling between earth and Hades. 24. In addition to Atallah, Adonis chaps. 3-6, see Weill, "Adoniazousai," and Servais-Soyez in LIMC under Adonis, nos. 45-49 and cat. 227-28. Ar. Lys. 389-96 and Plato Phdr. 276b are the most informative contemporary literary sources. 25. At Alexandria, as we learn from Theoc. Id. 15, Queen Arsinoe set up a display of Aphrodite and Adonis stretched out together on a banquet couch surrounded by fruit. A singer told Adonis's story. Then with lamenting the image of Adonis was thrown into the sea.

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T h e s a m e mythic pattern of a goddess with a mortal m a n lies b e h i n d Pindar's narrative o f J a s o n a n d M e d e a in Pythian Hippolytus

a n d Phaethon

4 as well.

Euripides'

have links to it. O t h e r examples of the story pattern

e x i s t — K y b e l e a n d Attis, for instance, E o s a n d Kleitos, H y l a s a n d the n y m p h s , the story of H e r m a p h r o d i t u s f o u n d in O v i d . 2 6

T h e story o f A k t a i o n a n d

A r t e m i s is a negative inversion of the s a m e pattern: she destroys h i m after he has seen her in the nude. 2 ' Bacchylides 17 has a deflected example: the y o u n g T h e s e u s leaps into the sea a n d c o m e s to the h o m e of his father Poseidon, w h e r e he sees his stepmother A m p h i t r i t e : " S h e put a r o u n d him a s h i m m e r i n g purple robe a n d set on his curly hair a fauldess wreath that guileful A p h r o d i t e h a d given h e r once at her wedding, dark with roses" (112—16): then she sends him b a c k to his ship. 28 A c u p by O n e s i m o s shows a youthful T h e s e u s , dressed in a short filmy chiton, standing before Amphitrite. A t h e n a stands between them as if to c h a p e r o n T h e s e u s . 2 9 It is evident that the pattern w a s p o p u l a r a n d generative. N o recent interpretive a p p r o a c h has considered all these stories together, a p r o c e d u r e that m a y a p p e a r too reminiscent of Frazer's. 3 0

B u t various

strategies have been used on individual myths or subsets of this group. 3 1 Cf. Gow, ed., Theocritus, esp. 2:262-66. See Weill, "Adoniazousai" 674, for the possibility that it was celebrated at Argos in the mid-fifth century. 26. T h e narratives of Kybele and Attis are late and divergent, e.g., Ovid Fasti 4.223-44 and Paus. 7.17, although his story was known much earlier: it is indirectly attested by Hdt. 1.34-45. Cf. Vermaseren, The Legend of Atthis, esp. chaps. 3 - 4 . Eos and Kleitos: Od. 15.250—51. Hylas and the nymphs: Theoc. Id. 13: this story too was connected with a ritual, a search for the boy (Ap. Rhod. 1.1354). T h e figure of Hylas is attested by Hellanikos FGrH 4 F 131. Hermaphroditus: Ovid Met. 4.285-388. Similar is Stesich. I'MG 279 (placed among the spuria by Page), which sketches the story of the shepherd Daphnis, loved by a nymph, unfaithful to her, and blinded in consequence. O n young men as victims of rape and on the fear of sexuality as feminizing, see Zeitlin's excellent discussion, "Configurations of Rape." 27. In the earliest extant version, Eur. Bacch.. 339, Aktaion is punished because he boasted that he was a better hunter than Artemis. But cf. Stesich. PMG 256 (from Paus. 9.2.3), the well-known version, though conflated with one in which Aktaion is killed to prevent his marrying Semele. 28. See Segal, "Myth," for the scene as an erotic initiation of Theseus. 29. For the cup (Paris Louvre G104 and Florence Museo Archeologico PD321), see LIMC under Amphitrite no. 75: ARV 318.1. It is dated to ca. 300 B.C.E. Cf. also no. 76, where Athena is not present. 30. Frazer, Adonis, esp. chaps. 1-3, 9-10, of course, saw in Adonis a paradigmatic case of the vegetation god who yearly dies and is reborn. T h e pattern is universal, according to his rendition. 31. Boedeker, Aphrodite's Entry, argues for an Indo-European background for the myths involving Aphrodite, Eos, Kirke, on the grounds that these goddesses are descendants of Eos, who is cognate with the goddess Ushas of the Rig Veda: she distinguishes them from Near Eastern goddesses (chap. 3). Helen as a tree-goddess who withdraws periodically has been claimed for the Indo-Europeans by West, "Immortal Helen." Nagler, "Dread Goddess,"

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O f these, the structuralist approach of Marcel Détienne, with its emphasis on the logic of culturally specific symbolism, has been the most productive; consideration of its results will be my starting point. Détienne argues that Adonis represents the extremes of sensuality a n d sterility, as expressed by his connection with spices and lettuce. In the Adonia (which he claims was celebrated at Athens only by courtesans a n d their friends) erotic but unfruitful sexuality is negatively contrasted with marriage and reproduction as they were celebrated in the T h e s m o p h o r i a , a festival of Demeter. T h e courtesans, on this interpretation, would be enacting their own marginality. Détienne's work on the Adonis myth a n d ritual is stimulating because it has shown the way to ideological interpretation of apparently apolitical myth and ritual complexes. A particular myth or ritual can take on m e a n i n g from its contrast with other myths and rituals. Narrative details can be read as codes carrying oppositional meaning. 3 2 O t h e r s have combined structuralist techniques with a historical perspective. Ribichini, for one, undertaking an interpretation that takes the N e a r Eastern material into account, proposes that Adonis is the Greek conception of the effeminate, ineffectual N e a r Eastern m a n , marked by all that the Greek m a n considers to be antithetical to himself. " Adonis is a failed hero. T h e meaning of the Adonia festival for Athenian m e n is that by not celebrating it they mark their masculine effectiveness. 34 Ribichini assumes an implicit contrast with the normative Greek male self-image as recorded in the figures of the hero and the citizen. J o h n Winkler criticizes Détienne from a different perspective: in drawing one message from the myth-ritual complex, Détienne assumes a homogeneous social fabric with the citizen males' point of view as the only source

using Jungian categories, finds an old pattern of a goddess who lives near the still center of the world and who is maleficent until resisted or overcome, when she becomes a helper, providing information or sending the hero to one who can provide it. Sowa, Traditional Themes, treats the patterns in a Jungian framework (esp. chaps. 2-3.5). Segal, "Homeric Hymn," does a structuralist reading of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and finds that the child Aineias is a mediation of the contradictions between mortal and immortal, city and wild. P. Smith, Nursling of Mortality, follows his method but throws the emphasis on the justification for mortality. 32. Piccaluga, "Adonis e i profumi," criticizes Détienne for his handling of the evidence. Lévèque, "Un nouveau décryptage," wishes a more historical approach had been integrated into the analysis. 33. Ribichini, Adonis 1 3 - 2 0 , esp. 17 if. Adonis is consistently identified as an Easterner, from Assyria, Arabia, Syria, or Cyprus. Hesiodic fr. 139 (Merkelbach-West) says his father was Phoenix ("the Phoenician"). He is therefore a fantasy figure of the "effeminized" other in a geographical as well as bodily sense. Sex-role reversal is typical of figures from the Near East in Greek thought: see Ribichini's list, which includes Paris, 69-70. 34. Ribichini, Adonis 85-86.

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of meaning. 3 5 T h e inattention to the question of " m e a n i n g for whom?" is especially culpable because Détienne is not using a strict Lévi-Straussian model of contradictions a n d mediations but positing a contrast of values: one pole is affirmed, the other rejected. Winkler poses the question of the m e a n i n g of the Adonia for the participants, who, as he correctly points out, are not just courtesans. His reading of the juxtaposition of the Adonia with the T h e s m o p h o r i a is that the women are enacting the differential involvement in sexual union and reproduction between m e n and themselves: If any contrast is to be drawn between the respective roles of the sexes in cultivating these natural processes, m e n must be placed squarely o n the side of Adonis, Aphrodite's eager but not long enduring lover. What the gardens with their quickly rising and quickly wilting sprouts symbolize is the marginal or subordinate role that m e n play in both agriculture (vis-à-vis the earth) and h u m a n generation (vis-à-vis wives and mothers). 3 6

In other words, the gardens are a women's joke about male sexuality. W h a t Winkler has done is to shift the oppositional terms from legitimate and illegitimate sexual union (in Détienne's analysis) to male a n d female implication in sexual union, as described by the women. O u t of the complex of terms used by the ritual, different interpreters have singled out different terms as the significant oppositional ones. Ribichini, concentrating more on the mythic assemblage a n d less on the ritual, finds the controlling opposition to be the one between the Greek male a n d the N e a r Eastern m a n as constructed in Greek popular culture. Comparison of Détienne's a n d Ribichini's readings as if from the hegemonic position of a Greek (especially fifth-/fourth-century Athenian) m a n and Winkler's as if from that of a Greek (fifth-/fourth-century Athenian) woman exposes the dependence of the analysis on the position assumed by the interpreter, that is, on the social position in whose terms the myth is perceived. Détienne and Ribichini unproblematically adopt the position of the hegemonic male as the place from which to determine the m e a n i n g of 35. D e Lauretis, Alice Doesn't 103-6, likewise criticizes the early forms of narratology, which developed under the stimulus of structuralism: "More often than not, however, those efforts all but reaffirm an integrative and ultimately traditional view of narrativity. Paradoxically, in spite of the methodological shift away from the notion of structure and toward a notion of progress, they end up de-historicizing the subject and thus universalizing the narrative process as such" (105-6). 36. Winkler, Constraints of Desire 205. In his discussion, Winkler makes use of my interpretation of the myth pattern in Sappho's poetry, which I first put forward in a paper entitled "Sappho and the Enclosing Goddess" at the Berkshire Conference on Women's History in 1981. This paper is a reworked version of that one with different emphases, but its reading of Sappho supports Winkler's very suggestive connection between Sappho's use of the pattern and the women's joking at the Adonia.

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the myth and ritual. 37 Winkler constructs the possibility of a different set of shared views among women as the matrix for attributing meaning. The Adonia may indeed have had separate meanings for the female participants and the citizen male observers. T h e reading strategy of positionality— awareness that interpretation always comes from a specific social, sexual, and intellectual place—allows the modern interpreter to suggest the gist of other discourses besides the hegemonic one. 38 It allows the modern interpreter to escape from the view that myths as ideological formulations work their power to shape thought in undifferentiated fashion within a culture. I will follow Détienne's lead in seeking an ideological dimension to the set of myths I have singled out, while observing the interpretive position from which the ideology is discerned. However, as soon as one examines this set of myths, including the Adonis myth, for significant codes, it becomes clear that in their emphasis on the sexual code of male and female, Détienne and Ribichini have ignored another code, an equally potent (in symbolic terms) hierarchical opposition, that between divine and human. Adonis's lover is a goddess. Furthermore, in these myths as viewed from the position of a hegemonic male, the two codes produce a contradiction, a point at which cultural logic collapses. T h e pairing of a goddess and a human man poses, within Greek hegemonic discourse, an irreconcilable conflict between the two established hierarchies, the hierarchy of male and female and that of divine and human. In human relations the female is "tamed" by sexual intercourse, and the subordinate position is identified with the female one. But in divinehuman relations the human is subordinate to divine desire. Sexual intimacy between a human male and a goddess is therefore impossible to think in simple terms because the relative status of the two cannot be determined. T h e relationship must be adjusted somehow to make it conceivable. 39 37. I do not mean to imply that the modern interpreter can align her- or himself fully with an ancient figure or social position. Détienne analyzes the myth and ritual from the modern construction of the place of an adult citizen man. The idea of positionality is a useful reminder that one is working with a modern construction of a "Greek" social construction. 38. Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism" 428-36, argues the usefulness of an idea of positionality in feminist discussion. It is a valuable interpretive frame in any attempt to move between a work of literature and the society that produced it. 39. Cf. below, n. 65, on hierarchical sexual relations. The practical effect of the two hierarchies on daily life would seem to be quite different. However, the gods were a conceptual form used to think about power relations. Alkman warns the male members of the audience, "Do not attempt to wed Aphrodite" (1.17 PMG). The line probably encodes a warning not to seek above one's station, not to seek an enthralling woman as a bride: the thought is cast in terms of divinity and human. Cf. the separation of the two in Pind. Nem. 7.1-7. The problematic of the human place vis-à-vis the divine was real.

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In the public discourse of early Greece, where these myths are found, the adjustment is the work of narrative. In each telling of each myth the narrative must resolve the conundrum by adjusting the hierarchies and shaping the outcome of the encounter, or, in other words, by assigning a location to the phallus. Given this need for resolution, observation of static codes is not sufficient to discover the ideological working of these myths: we must follow the movement of the narrative. M y second source of inspiration, then, is a sentence of Teresa de Lauretis's. Speaking of film, de Lauretis says "the very work of narrativity is the engagement of the subject in certain positionalities of meaning and desire." 40 I must also observe the effect of narrative positioning in creating ideological harmony in these myths. 41 From the point of view of hegemonic culture, the most conservative move is to ensure that the male/female hierarchy ultimately predominates. There are other possible resolutions that also preserve the male/female hierarchy (without elevating it over the divine/human one), as I will point out below. Not all adjustments, however, would reinforce hegemonic values. If the divine/human hierarchy is emphasized at the expense of the male/female one, an autonomous, sexually active female figure, one who controls the phallus, is created. Thus, cultural logic, through this myth pattern, can potentially offer narratives that subvert male dominance. In fact, public narratives from early Greece avoid this outcome. Using the narratives described above I will show how male/female hierarchy is protected. T h e Kalypso episode in the Odyssey details the impossible situation that results when neither hierarchy gives way to the other. Odysseus is held captive by Kalypso, who would like to shut Odysseus up forever on her island in a state of emotional and physical dependency. In this condition Odysseus is forced to make love with her: "At night he would lie beside her under compulsion in the hollow cave, an undesiring man beside a desiring [woman]" (5.154-55). T h e act that defines him as a " m a n " also defines him as subordinate, for his sexual activity "under compulsion" is the clear sign of his submission to Kalypso. 42 Yet his refusing immortality is his refusal to accept definition as her paramour and the subordinate sexual status implied. Kalypso had no intention of accepting his refusal, as her speech to Hermes makes clear (5.118-36, quoted in part above), while Odysseus's "sweet life was flowing away as he mourned for his homecoming, for the nymph no

4 0 . D e L a u r e t i s , Alice Doesn't 106.

41. See Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions, on the use of closure in ideological fiction to emphasize the point being made. Closure functions in the myths I will discuss to establish the definite status of the paradigmatic figures. 42. The verb used, iauein, does not mean "to make love." It means "to spend the night," but it is used to refer to lovemaking elsewhere in the Odyssey, e.g., 11.261, 22.464.

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longer pleased him" (5.152-53). According to Athena, Odysseus wants to die (1.59). This impasse in their relationship and in the narrative is dissolved only by displacing the problem upward. 43 Zeus exercises his patriarchal dominion and commands Kalypso (via Hermes) to send Odysseus on his way. Structurally, then, both hierarchies remain in force. Odysseus's status is preserved, though only because Kalypso lets him go. However, the audience's desire for the narrative to continue means that the audience is positioned to identify Odysseus's autonomy, his sexuality, with narrative movement and to wish for it to prevail over hers. His escape can therefore be read as his triumph. Narrative in this case requires male predominance over the immobilizing goddess.44 In the case of Kalypso and Odysseus control of the phallus is contested. Most of the narratives I mentioned resolve the conflict by revising the status of one of the figures. Odysseus's encounter with Kirke points up the contrast. On this occasion Hermes intervenes beforehand to protect Odysseus from Kirke. Not only does Hermes give him the mold that inhibits Kirke's magic: he also instructs him to pull his sword on Kirke. When she asks him to her bed, he is not to refuse, "but ask her to swear a great oath of the gods that she will devise no other evil pain for yourself so that she not make you worthless and unmanned when you are disarmed/naked" (10.299-301; cf. 336-44). By neutralizing Kirke's power, the gods arrange it so that the male/female hierarchy will predominate from the start and Kirke accommodate herself to Odysseus.4" The Theogony continuation elevates the male/female hierarchy by other methods. It chooses, apart from the Aphrodite- and Eos-stories, those stories in which the female has been compelled by another god rather than desiring the young man (Thetis), has been at least partly humanized into a mortal woman (Medea, Harmonia), or is a minor nymph. T h e unions mentioned, except for Aphrodite and Phaethon, are all fertile. Eos and Tithonos have two sons in the Theogony (whereas none is mentioned in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite). Odysseus and Kirke have two children, Agrios and 43. Without the gods' intervention Odysseus's story can neither e n d nor move forward. T h e narrative signals the impasse by repeating the description of Odysseus's state: 1.11-15, 48-59; s - 1 1 - ' ? 44. See de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't 113-24, on the male as subject, the female as obstacle in myth as analyzed by L o t m a n . In the c o m p l e m e n t a r y fashion, Devereux, Femme et mythe 36, citing the myth of Pirithoos—who went to Hades to seduce Persephone, but sat d o w n a n d found himself immobilized, stuck to his seat—equates immobility with castration a n d impotence. 45. Kirke too threatened to interrupt Odysseus's journey, although the narrative moves past the threat so rapidly as to neutralize it: after a year Odysseus's m e n remind him that they should be on their way (10.469-74).

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Latinos: Odysseus and Kalypso's son is Nausithoos. T h e offspring may be metaphorical, for instance, Demeter giving birth to Ploutos (Wealth) and Eos giving birth to Phaethon (the Shining One). This representation minimizes the conflict of hierarchies without acknowledging its existence. From the perspective of the Theogony as a whole, these goddesses (except Aphrodite) are hardly powerful, and the production of sons is the only story they are given. For the audience this bareness is satisfying because the lines are attached to a narrative in which Zeus establishes patriarchy by asserting his control over reproduction. These lines link the cosmic order (expressed through the distribution of divinities) with human history and tie the audience, placed in history, into Zeus's plan. Because of their narrative position, the lines can assimilate the sexual power of the female to her reproductive activity and thereby stabilize the location of the phallus, the location of control over the erotic situation, with the man. T h e goddess is placed within patriarchy and subsumed in the category "mother." In the one instance of the union of Aphrodite and Phaethon, as told by the author of the Theogony continuation, a different resolution is found. The author says of Phaethon, "When he was young, in the tender bloom of glorious youth, a child with light thoughts, laughter-loving Aphrodite darting down snatched him up and made him an enclosed temple-keeper, a shining daimon, in her holy shrine" (988-91). 46 The abduction is not said to have been followed by sexual union. 4 ' Only in Aphrodite's epithet "laughterloving" is the phallus indirectly and unspecifically signaled via a pun. 48 This vignette settles the status conflict unequivocally in favor of the goddess but deprives Phaethon of all activity, including sexual activity: immortalized and enclosed, he has no further story. As in the case of the Odyssey, generation, history, and narrative require male dominance. Phaethon's fate indirectly 46. West, Hesiod: Theogony, points out ad loc. that daimon is a term used of men who have lived on earth and after death have a limited sort of divine power. The adjective dios (shining) is applied to goddesses but not to the higher male gods. (It is also applied to human men.) The text implicitly marks Phaethon's limited and subordinate divinization. 47. In Apollod. 3.14.3 Tithonos is the son of Eos and Kephalos, and his son is Phaethon (by what mother is not said); Adonis is Phaethon's great-great-grandson. The notice indicates both the fluidity of these stories and the fact that the young men were felt to be linked as well as interchangeable. It is remarkable that in Euripides' partly preserved play Phaethon the young man is about to marry a goddess on the day that he goes to find Helios, drives the chariot, and is struck down by Zeus's lightning. Diggle, Euripides: Phaethon 10-27, 155—60, thinks that the goddess is a nymph, one of Heliades. He denies any connection between the Phaethon of this myth and the one in Hesiod, but the pattern seems to exert its pull. 48. Hesiod puns on Aphrodite's epithet "laughter-loving," philomeides, and a term for genitals, media, saying that Aphrodite is laughter-loving because she was born from the severed genitals of Ouranos (Theog. 200).

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points to the significance of the other couples, whose offspring are part of the audience's "historical" past. By calling as much attention as it does to Phaethon's youth, the Theogony continuation also points to another way to escape from impasse in a reassertion of male dominance. A narrative may explicitly mark the man as subordinate within the human hierarchy: his status may be clarified by making him the object of homosexual love. 49 If a man who is subordinate to a goddess is also subordinate to another man, then his position with respect to the goddess does not establish a model of female control that would threaten the male/female hierarchy.30 Thus in various tellings Dionysos, Apollo, and even Heracles are said to have been Adonis's lovers.31 Adonis is thereby assimilated to the category of youths who fail to make the transition to adulthood. 52 The fourth-century comic poet Plato emphasizes the humorous results produced by this resolution of the conflict. In four lines quoted from a lost play, Adonis, Adonis's father receives a prophecy: O h , Kinyras, king of the Cyprians, hairy-assed men, Your child has become most beautiful and most marvelous O f all humans, but a pair of deities will destroy him, She being rowed with clandestine oars, he by rowing. (fr. 3 Kock)

The deities are Aphrodite and Dionysos. Adonis, caught between extremes as beloved of a male god and lover of a goddess, will perish of status ambiguity. We cannot tell about narrative positioning in the case of Adonis, but Plato Comicus seems to have presented Adonis as ambiguous and marked for 49. For analysis of the unequal status of the two partners in a male homosexual relationship, see Dover, Greek Homosexuality 100—109, and Foucault, The History of Sexuality 2: chap. 4, esp. §3. Public norms, not behavior, are in question. 50. One version of the tale of Eos and Kephalos makes explicit Kephalos's submissive character. In a story that may come from Pherekydes, Kephalos's wife Prokris, disguised as a man, came to hunt with him, bringing a javelin that never missed and a dog that always caught its prey. Kephalos wished for these: Prokris set the condition that Kephalos should submit to "him" in sexual intercourse. When they lay down Prokris revealed herself to him and either accused him or was reconciled with him: Ant. Lib. 41.6-7; Hyg. Fab. 189. See Fontenrose, Orion 91-94. Eos does not occur in this version as the rival of Prokris, but Fontenrose suggests that "Nephele" (Cloud) represents her. 51. In addition to Plato Comicus (below), see Ptolemy Hephaistion in Phot. Bibl. 190, I47b.g-i2 (Henry) for Herakles; i46b.4i-42, 1473.1-3, for Apollo. He calls Adonis "androgynous." Atallah, Adonis 50-51, calls this a late "deformation" of the myth, adding that the "slender, equivocal ephebe" is an Alexandrian preoccupation. It seems to me rather that the fantasy potential of the myth pattern is increasingly overtly expressed. 52. E.g., Hyakinthos and Narkissos: cf. Ribichini, Adonis 128-29. Ribichini stresses that Adonis does not seduce but is seduced, except in one late pastiche found in Servius ad Verg. Eel. 10.18, in which, pressured by Juno, he violates Erinome, beloved ofjupiter.

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failure from the beginning, in contrast to his father, king of hairy-assed m e n . Adonis is also a failed hunter, whose death f r o m the wound inflicted by the boar makes him a victim of male aggression. 33 From this perspective, it is clear that to m a r k Adonis as an "effete Easte r n e r " is one more m o d e of achieving a resolution that preserves (Greek) male sexual control; Ribichini's analysis of Adonis's m e a n i n g reveals a strategy for resolving the contradiction in status hierarchies created by the story. T h e possibility of yielding to a woman is acknowledged, but rejected as non-Greek. A n d the spices (Adonis's mother Myrrha) a n d lettuce, whose opposition in the myth Détienne studies, mark the two ends of the narrative (birth and death) and trace Adonis's demasculinization. Adonis is overloaded with markers of his subordinate status, for he is the most prominent mortal lover of Aphrodite. 3 4 Attis castrates himself, driven m a d by Kybele, when he undertakes to marry a n y m p h (and thus assume adult male status). His sexual subjection is clarified at the m o m e n t when he tries to escape from it. Hylas drowns, pulled down into a pool of water by the n y m p h s — a n image of surrender to sensuous passivity. Anchises' statement in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite that m e n who sleep with goddesses do not flourish and H e r m e s ' fear that Kirke might u n m a n Odysseus fit in here. In these cases the goddess's control of the phallus is taken literally; it is lost to the m a n . T h e m a n is marked as a n o n - m a n : thus there is no question of an otherwise dominant man's yielding sexually to a female. T h e Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite itself does not make use of the simple resolution suggested by Anchises. Instead it explores at great length the ironies created by the confusion of hierarchies. 1 5 Zeus shames Aphrodite a m o n g the gods by causing her to fall in love with the mortal Anchises. But Aphrodite's desire leads her to exercise her power over the h u m a n m a n , deceiving him while causing him to desire her. Yet her deception is to

53. The boar was sent by Apollo or Ares; in later tellings Apollo himself, Hephaistos, Heracles, Persephone, the Muses, or Artemis kills Adonis: Atallah, Adonis chap. 2, esp. 63-74; the earliest extant reference is fourth century B.C.E. (unless it was in Panyassis). Discussion in Ribichini, Adonis 108—44, w h o points out that Adonis is associated with other hunters who are overcome, e.g., Aktaion, Hippolytos, Perdikkas, Kephalos (108). Piccaluga, "Adonis, i cacciatori falliti," concentrates on this aspect of Adonis, believing him to represent a preagricultural life that had been left behind and was therefore coded in myth as inadequate. 54. I do not mean to suggest that my interpretation overrides Ribichini's and Détienne's, that the operation of status hierarchies is the only point of these stories. T h e need to adjust hierarchies is a constraint, one of various pressures that act on material of diverse origin to produce similar stories. 55. Bergren's excellent discussion of the Hymn, "The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite," takes a différent approach—rhetorical analysis—and pays special attention to the distribution of power among the gods. She too emphasizes the ambiguities in the narrative.

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cast herself as a mortal w o m a n , an innocent virgin submitting to others' directives. O n l y so can she be the recipient of Anchises' uninhibited desire. Anchises says to her, " I f you are a mortal w o m a n . . . as you say, and c o m e here through the agency of the immortal messenger H e r m e s and will be called my wife for all time, then no one of the gods or mortal m e n will restrain m e here from mingling in love with you right n o w " (145-51). 36 O n c e they have made love she pours sleep over Anchises. T h e n , dressed again, towering in height to the roof of the hut, and shining with her immortal beauty unveiled, she wakes him. Anchises cowers in the bedclothes, seeing in her swelling figure a portent of his impotence and cries, " D o not let m e live strengthless a m o n g men"; she now controls the phallus. Yet A p h r o d i t e assures Anchises that she will not only do him no h a r m but will give him a child, as though she were a mortal w o m a n . In her final statement, however, she explains that she cannot make him divine. Furthermore, he must not mention or boast of the encounter. If he uses it to enhance his male status a m o n g humans, Z e u s in anger will strike him with a thunderbolt (that is, reduce him to the "strengthlessness" that is his proper lot). M a l e / f e m a l e hierarchy has been restored a m o n g the gods: Aphrodite is subordinate to the will of Zeus. Between Aphrodite and the h u m a n the situation is more ambiguous. Aphrodite, in her desire, provoked Anchises' desire: both desires have been satisfied. Aphrodite's threatening stature at the end is counterbalanced by the fact that she is pregnant. T h e Hymn closes with Anchises unscathed and a father-to-be but w a r n e d of his merely h u m a n status: the hierarchies, no longer suspended, are delicately balanced. Yet the Hymn also points to a resolved closure, projected beyond its own text. Aphrodite's emphatic w a r n i n g to Anchises not to speak of the encounter activates the audience's knowledge that Z e u s did thereafter strike him with lightning. 07 Anchises must have been unable to keep silent about his encounter with Aphrodite, unable to renounce the glory or resist naming his son's mother. O n c e the tale exists in public discourse, Anchises must take on the status of a non-man. 5 8 Narrative positioning here is complex. T h e

56. Anchises' doubt over whether Aphrodite is mortal or goddess in itself sums up the conflict of hierarchies: if she is a goddess he will worship her, if a mortal woman he will take her to his bed. Cf. Bergren, "The Homeric Hymn" 16-17, 20—22, on Anchises' effort to test her with logical alternatives and his eras-induced blindness to flaws in his logic. 57. This statement assumes that the audience for the Hymn was already familiar with the tradition: the earliest extant reference is Soph. Laocoon fr. 373 (Pearson). P. Smith, Nursling of Mortality 142 n. 129, and Rossbach, in PW under Anchises, col. 2107, discuss the evidence; Anchises has an "eldest daughter" in II. 13.428-33, but she may be an invention out of Homer's need for names. 58. I assume that the lightning strike symbolizes unmanning and that the portrayal of Anchises as crippled is both a decorous and an overt representation of his condition. For the

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a u d i e n c e notes w h a t A p h r o d i t e w i s h e s to k e e p h i d d e n a n d also k n o w s (or guesses) A n c h i s e s ' fate. B u t the a u d i e n c e ' s desire is for A p h r o d i t e ' s desire to b e r e v e a l e d ; it is c o m p l i c i t w i t h A n c h i s e s ' failure to k e e p silent, a n d so r e p l a y s A p h r o d i t e ' s s h a m e , b u t also h e r desire. W e will r e t u r n to this situation. T h e s e narratives resolve the c o n t r a d i c t i o n in such a w a y as to p r e s e r v e the m a l e / f e m a l e hierarchy. T h e story p a t t e r n calls forth this closure so c o n sistently that the story's p o t e n t i a l for s u b v e r t i n g the m a l e / f e m a l e h i e r a r c h y m u s t h a v e b e e n felt. T h e t w o tales that refuse to r e d u c e the r e l a t i o n s h i p b e t w e e n g o d d e s s a n d m a n to a simple hierarchy.

Odyssey 5 a n d the

Ho-

meric Hymn to Aphrodite d o in f a c t m a k e use o f the c o n t r a d i c t i o n in interested f a s h i o n : the c o n t r a d i c t i o n supports a positive evaluation o f m o r t a l i t y f r o m the p o i n t o f v i e w o f a n adult m a n . T h e goddesses K a l y p s o a n d A p h r o d i t e c o n s i d e r i m m o r t a l i z i n g O d y s s e u s a n d A n c h i s e s , but in e a c h c a s e i m m o r t a l i t y w o u l d h a v e as its p r i c e s u b o r d i n a t i o n a n d / o r c o n f i n e m e n t . T h u s the tradeo f f for i m m o r t a l i t y is p r e s e n t e d as a loss o f sexual a u t o n o m y a n d e v a l u a t e d as n o t w o r t h it.

K a l y p s o offers to i m m o r t a l i z e O d y s s e u s if h e will stay w i t h

h e r e v e n t h o u g h he d o e s n o t desire h e r (5.206-10), so it is c o n d i t i o n a l o n c o n f i n e m e n t a n d r e l i n q u i s h i n g o f desire. A p h r o d i t e herself r e j e c t s the desirability o f i m m o r t a l i z i n g A n c h i s e s b e c a u s e there are o n l y t w o m o d e l s for d o i n g so: G a n y m e d e s ' , w i t h its e t e r n a l s u b o r d i n a t i o n a n d passivity (absence o f desire), a n d T i t h o n o s ' s , w h i c h includes (temporary) desire b u t also a g i n g a n d c o n f i n e m e n t as its n e c e s s a r y correlate. 1 9

S o in these t w o stories the

s e x u a l h i e r a r c h y o f m a l e / f e m a l e is called o n to r e c o n c i l e the m a n to his m o r t a l lot. In a series o f instances f r o m the G r e e k literary c a n o n , w e h a v e seen that the s e l f - c o n t r a d i c t o r y n o t i o n o f a g o d d e s s a n d a m a n in s e x u a l u n i o n is i m a g i n e d a n d n a r r a t i v i z e d in such a w a y as to p r o t e c t the adult m a n ' s c l a i m to s e x u a l dominance.

Narrativity, at w o r k e n g a g i n g the s u b j e c t in positionalities o f

m e a n i n g , r e p r o d u c e s the cultural n o r m for m a l e / f e m a l e relations. H o w e v e r , o t h e r narratives w i t h o t h e r resolutions are possible. T h e story o f D e m e t e r a n d Iasion, o f w h i c h n o early version has survived, m a y h a v e b e e n told b y w o m e n (who n e e d not h a v e a g r e e d w i t h K a l y p s o ' s i n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f it) in

phallic quality of lightning, cf. the story of Semele: e.g., Eur. Bacch. 6-9, and Dodds's notes on the subject in Euripides. 59. P. Smith, Nursling of Mortality 87-go, and Bergren, "The Homeric Hymn" 33-35, have posed the question why Aphrodite does not ask Zeus for immortality and eternal youth for Anchises, as the paradigm of Eos and Tithonos would suggest. Smith argues that Anchises' mortality is taken for granted, or rather, insisted on by the poem, so the thought that it might be otherwise is not entertained. Bergren points out that Zeus's will requires Aphrodite's grief, so the poem does not permit Aphrodite to seek satisfaction. In an article in process I am working out at greater length the argument that the Ganymedes and Tithonos models between them exhaust the possibilities.

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connection with the festival for Demeter, the Thesmophoria. Demeter's treatment of Demophon—the baby she started to immortalize, rejected when his mother caught her at it, but continued to favor as he grew up—has affinities with our pattern. 60 In this story and perhaps in the women's version of the Adonis story, whatever it was, divinity is the source of a female power that exposes the imitations of the male. Sappho's narratives may likewise have rewritten the males'—but if so, no hint of it survives in the fragments and notices. If women produced versions that subvert the male/female hierarchy, they have been lost. By attentiveness to the contradiction and to the requirement that the narrative resolve it somehow, we can see how these narratives are inflected so as to preserve the male/female hierarchy. We can imagine how women might have made a different use of them. Yet I have not answered either of the questions I posed, namely why the pattern is so popular and what its appeal to Sappho was. Male dominance could be asserted directly without the aid of these tales, and for Sappho they appear peripheral to her emotional attachment to other women. II

Perhaps we should look for the tales' popularity rather than to their (partial) ideological failure. T h e ideological meaning conferred on these myths by narrative closure cannot always completely contain them. Before closure, the myths may already have suggested images of eroticism whose hold on the imagination the resolution cannot necessarily cancel. As long as the narrative holds the contradiction in suspense, unresolved in favor of either hierarchy, it keeps a space open for fantasies of sexual encounter not controlled by the location of the phallus. So long as the contradiction is unresolved, the phallus is a symbol of domination; the Freudian/Lacanian phallus that imposes definition on the relationship is an indeterminate presence in the envisioned union. T h e goddess is both desiring and desirable, the man young, pliant, neither clearly possessor nor clearly object of the phallus. Desire and initiation of the affair may belong to the goddess, but the youth may be imagined as a responsive participant. T h e meeting of these two figures is not pre-scripted: it must be played out according to the dictates of individual fantasy. It can be staged in the imagination according to the script of male dominance, but also from the position of a woman's desire to 60. For Iasion cf. scholia to Od. 5.125: "he was a farmer, and the earth would give him exceptional harvest, always abounding, and he was rich: therefore they said that he slept with the earth and on this account she gave him good return." For Demophon, see h. Horn. Cer. 23191 and Richardson, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter 231-36.

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"possess" the m a n , f r o m a position of narcissism, voyeurism, or fetishism, of refusal of the O e d i p u s resolution, of a woman's refusal of compulsory heterosexuality. T h e collapse of cultural logic a n d the prohibition against condemnation of a divinity emerge as the enabling conditions for imagining women a n d m e n in other than their culturally prescribed sexual roles. 61 According to de Lauretis, the work of narrativity is to engage the subject in positionalities of m e a n i n g and desire. We have asked only about desire for narrative, not yet about how desire is figured into these narratives. Fantasy works in the visual imagination through the processes of gaze and identification. T h e idea of analyzing the operation of the gaze was proposed by Laura Mulvey as a way to understand the visual engagement of a viewer with a film narrative. It has been taken up by feminist film critics, including de Lauretis. Mulvey argues that classical Hollywood films reproduce the sexual construction of the m a n a n d the woman as described by Freud. 6 2 T h e hero is active: he is the one who gazes. T h e heroine is displayed a n d aestheticized, the object of the gaze. T h e m a n watching the film can identify with the hero as the "bearer of the look" and can gaze possessively at the heroine. T h e w o m a n as woman can only identify masochistically with the heroine's ability to attract the gaze. 6:i T h e possessive gaze, then, is aligned with the phallus: the act of gazing defines the desired sexual object. T h r o u g h gaze and identification the viewer takes up in fantasy a sexual position in relation to figures presented visually or to the imagination. T h o u g h Hollywood films may reinscribe the cultural norms, the processes of gaze a n d identification can support other positions and other fantasies. 64 This approach, treating

61. T h e goddess who desires cannot be censured as were, e.g., Phaidra and Stheneboia, mortal women who wished to initiate affairs with young men. 62. Here is a summary of the Freudian basis of Mulvey's analysis (Visual and Other Pleasures 1426): the processes of scopophilia and of identification with an ego-ideal structure initial pleasure in looking, according to Freud. Within the post-Oedipal order this pleasure is conditioned by differing relations to castration: the man's an active, possessive looking, the woman's a masochistic desire to be looked at. In film, therefore, male pleasure in looking is served by both ego identification and possessive gazing at the female star. T h e female, however, always threatens to signify castration, so provokes the further mechanisms of fetishism and voyeurism: she is either objectified or examined and exposed. See further Willemen, "Voyeurism," who adjusts some of Mulvey's terms. 63. Mary Ann Doane (personal communication) stresses that Mulvey's analysis applies to a specific historically located and material medium. I make use of the question Mulvey raises about the spectator's relationship to the gaze and the phallus but should emphasize that the differences in economic investment, cultural positioning, level of discourse between Mulvey's material and mine are great and the results of analysis different. 64. Consider this rumination by Barthes: "Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking

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the figures as visual images, will permit us to suggest some of the erotic configurations invited by narratives of goddess and mortal man. 60 I will begin with two representations of myths from Athenian vase paintings, since in these cases the visual appeal is explicit and the scene has been detached from the narrative whose closure determines it is ideological shape. In each case the painting is sexually suggestive and permits more than one response—that is, the process of gaze and identification may be variously deployed. The first is a scene of Eos carrying off a youth, perhaps Kephalos. 66 On a skyphos by the Lewis Painter dated to ca. 450-40, Eos, fully clothed, runs to the right and looks behind her. Her hair is covered by a sakkos except for a curl in front of her ear. She wears no jewelry. She carries the youth on her left arm, supporting his legs with her right hand. He has his arm around her neck and seems perfectly acquiescent. His left arm is flung out in a gesture which tilts his nude body slightly outward,

one's conflicts with the Law, e n t e r i n g into the dialectic of tenderness and h a t r e d ? " (The Pleasure of the Text 47). 65. Mulvey g r o u n d s her a p p r o a c h in Freudian analysis, which c a n n o t be applied u n p r o b lematically to G r e e k culture. However, t h e phallus was the central signifier of sexual relations as constructed in social n o r m s a n d in language in ancient Greece. O n e was positioned in relation to the phallus: one was p e n c t r a t o r , p e n e t r a t e d , neither, or b o t h . A w o m a n or a boy could only be p e n e t r a t e d or not: a y o u t h might occupy any of the four positions: a h e g e m o n i c adult m a n was (by definition) a p e n e t r a t o r but not p e n e t r a t e d . T h e difference was enshrined in vocabulary: o n e was a lover (erastes) o r a beloved (eromenos/-e). T h e phallus a n d the act of penetration defined p o w e r relations. Cf. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, esp. 49-54, 98-99, a n d Cantarella, Pandora's Daughters 24-37; also see Dean-Jones, " T h e Politics of Pleasure," o n the absence of a female erotic gaze in medical writing. Zeitlin, " C o n f i g u r a t i o n s " 124, points out that "there is an ideological value to r e p r e s e n t i n g the aggressive exercise of phallic p o w e r as the physical a n d concrete sign of m a l e s u p r e m a c y a n d potency," but she goes o n to discuss the conflicted c h a r a c t e r of sexuality: it is cultural a n d natural, t e n d e r a n d violent. 66. Florence, M u s e o Archeologico 4228: LIMC u n d e r Eos no. 272: ARV 975.35. T w o n u d e youths fleeing are o n the back. Kalos or kali (beautiful) is written beside each figure. T h e youth has b e e n variously identified as K e p h a l o s a n d Tithonos. Eos a n d a youth is a well-attested subject in a n c i e n t art: see LIMC catalogue a n d illustrations 46-288. In one scheme f o u n d o n A t h e n i a n vases, Eos p u r s u e s Kephalos, w h o is in flight. For a scheme similar to the one o n this vase, cf. nos. 267-82, esp. 268-70, 274. Cf. also K a e m p f - D i m i t r i a d o u , Die Liebe 16—24, e s P- ' 6 , o n the p o p u l a r i t y of the t h e m e f r o m ca. 490, 20-21 o n t h e s c h e m a of o u r vase. H e r no. 198 (pi. 11, 3) is o u r vase: contrast the youth's resistance in her nos. 193, 194. Eos with K e p h a l o s in h e r a r m s a p p e a r s in earlier art. Paus. 3.18.12 records that H e m e r a (Day) snatching K e p h a l o s was p i c t u r e d o n t h e t h r o n e of Amyklai, apparently a sixth-century work whose decoration included a great c o m p e n d i u m of the m a j o r myths. A sixth-century B.C.E. terra-cotta akroterion f r o m C a e r e in E t r u r i a shows Eos carrying a K e p h a l o s w h o looks like a child a n d has his a r m s a r o u n d h e r neck: A n d r e n , Architectural Terra-Cottas 36-37, pi. n , no. 40. In the late fifth c e n t u r y the pair f o r m e d a terra-cotta akroterion o n the Stoa Basileios at Athens: Pausanias 1.3.1; cf. K a e m p f - D i m i t r i a d o u 63 n. 130.

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exposing it to the viewer. In his left h a n d he holds a lyre. His hair is long and falls in stiff ringlets. Eos has obviously snatched the youth, yet he is complicit. H e is a youth, almost equal in size to her, yet the positions are those of mother a n d child. 67 T h e vase painting, in fact, seems to suggest simultaneously lovers a n d mother with child. Gaze a n d identification can play freely here. T h e gaze fastens on the youth: Eos is not sexually displayed. T h e one who gazes with desire sees a youth who is both yielding and "innocent." Omission from the picture of the phallus as the location of power permits the youth's submissiveness to be naturalized as childlike a n d renders the male status hierarchy irrelevant. At the same time, the parallel placement of the two heads with their similar profiles signals an equality between them. Submissiveness is equated with equality and allows the fantasy of a stabilized homosexual relationship. 68 O n the other hand, identification with the youth allows a narcissistic focus on one's own body as the object of the mother's desire. Identification with Eos elicits the fantasy of possessing the child as sexual fulfillment. T h e pair is eluding unseen pursuers. Escape from society and the son's return to the mother in erotic union are revealed visually as a possible inflection of the myth pattern. Phaidra would find it an engrossing image: so, perhaps, would Aktaion. A passage from Euripides suggests that the fantasy of return to the mother was recognized, so we can say that a viewer might have identified with Kephalos as a child in its mother's sexually possessive arms. In the Bacchae, Dionysos begins to work on Pentheus's suppressed sexual fantasy by offering to take him to the mountains to gaze on the women who are (Pentheus thinks) making love in the thickets. Dionysos's final enticement is that Pentheus will be carried h o m e in his mother's arms: D: Follow, I g o as a saving guide. Another will lead you back. D: Distinguished in all eyes. D: Carried you will c o m e . . . . D: In the arms of your mother.

P: P: P: P:

T h e one w h o bore me! It is for that I go. You speak my luxuriance. You will force m e to g o soft with delight. (965-69)

67. Devereux, Femme et mylhe, treats the myth pattern of a goddess and mortal man as a covert allusion to the son's incestuous desire for his mother (chap. 2, esp. 29). T h e very thought of such union is censured within the myth by representing symbolic castration as the result of even aborted encounters. 68. Plato later theorizes a stabilized and equalized male homosexual relationship based on the conversion of eras into philia and the eroticizing of philia. See Halperin, "Plato and Erotic Reciprocity."

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Pentheus's language in his last two half-lines has overtones both erotic and "effeminate." 69 Dionysos elicits Pentheus's desire to see the women, to be a woman, to be the object of his mother's love. His mother, although not divine, is possessed of more than human power by agency of Dionysos. T h e same image of luxuriant yielding to a sexual mother-figure is sketched by the vase painting. Then again, the vase might be viewed from the position of the mother as voyeur, as suggested by the strange version of the Aktaion myth found in Nonnos. 70 As the first stage of his revenge on the house of Kadmos, Dionysus maddens Antonoe, then tells her that her son Aktaion is married to Artemis: the story of his death was a fabrication. T h e two go out into the wild, where they see Artemis and Aktaion sitting together. T h e mother spies on her son as he escapes the city to consort with a forbidden woman. Euripides and Nonnos present these respective desires as ones that emerge under Dionysiac dissolving of conscious control: they show us instances of what Greek culture designed as hidden fantasies. Iconographically, this scene is distinguishable from one version of the scene in which Eos carries her dead son Memnon from the field at Troy only by virtue of the limpness of Memnon's body.' 1 In this version Memnon is, like Kephalos, very youthful. Eos was said to have carried off the youthful dead, an appeal to morbid eroticism that assimilates the young man to both Kephalos and Memnon, to child and beautiful hero, as Eos is ambiguously mother and desiring woman. 72 In sum, the vase painting seizes a moment in the narrative of Eos and the youth when the youth's fate is open and uses it to create an appeal to submerged fantasies. T h e youth here is both submissive to Eos and an object of the gaze, yet his position in the human hierarchy is not explicit, and the alignment of the heads hints that they are doubles of one another. Furthermore, if the youth is taken as Kephalos, then his depiction here exists in tension with stories of Kephalos as a hunter and husband of

69. O n the language cf. Dodds, Euripides. 70. N o n n o s Dion. 44.278-54.3; discussed by Fontenrose, Orion 34-40, w h o has o t h e r arguments for a close relationship between Artemis a n d Aktaion. N o n n o s is no evidence for early Greek views. But stories such as his illustrate the suggestiveness of the pattern of goddess with young m a n . 71. See Paris, Louvre 0232 ( L I M C u n d e r Eos no. 332: ARV 250.24) by the Syleus Painter, dated to ca. 480. In no. 324 M e m n o n has a beard. A n u n b e a r d e d M e m n o n is less c o m m o n than the b e a r d e d type but not rare. 72. Scholia to Od. 5.121 a n d Eust. ad loc. say that the youthful dead were buried before dawn and said to be stolen by Eos. Cf. Vermeule, Death in Early Greek Art chap. 5, esp. 162-65. K a e m p f - D i m i t r i a d o u , Die Liebe 62 n. 97, on depictions of a winged female daimon w h o chases a youth.

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Prokris.73 T h e resulting ambiguity about the youth's status leaves open the painting's "meaning" to the play of fantasy. T h e second vase painting is from the end of the fifth century. A fragment of hydria painted by the Meidias Painter shows Aphrodite and Adonis.74 Aphrodite is seated. Her clinging dress outlines her breasts and nipples. She wears a necklace, and her hair is done up in an elaborate headdress. Adonis, nude, leans back between Aphrodite's knees with his head thrown back in "une attitude d'extase amoureuse.'" 5 She has her hands on his shoulders. They are surrounded by Erotes and female figures: the woman sitting facing them plays with a bird that perches on her finger. Here the disappearance from history remarked in the case of Phaethon is seen from the inside as immersion in sensuality and ease. Neither figure monopolizes attention as the focus of the scene: the gaze rather takes in the scene as a whole. In this case a dominant figure is absent, excised as unnecessary to the erotic scene. T h e person positioned as hegemonic male can thus supply the phallus, can gaze on the couple as the embodiment of alternative desires, woman or youth, almost collapsed together in total erotic spectacle. But the scene also invites multiple identifications. T h e postures and the contact between the figures can suggest to the viewer tactile sensations to be imaginatively reproduced in the viewer's body: the "ecstatic" yet relaxed muscle positions, the implied warmth, the softness of hands and hair. T h e viewer is both figures, drawn into a fantasy in which desire and sensation are diffused over whole bodies.' 6 Both vase paintings depict the goddess with a young man in such a way as to suggest the attractions of "illegitimate" patterns of sexual intimacy. In the first case, the power granted the female figure led to overlay of the erotic relationships with a mother-child relationship, a doubling that invites fantasies of regression or of reclaiming the child, fantasies formed around Oedipal issues. T h e second vase painting makes both figures objects of the gaze a n d / o r identification and invites fantasies of loss of gender identity and immersion in sensuality.

73. For the confused set of stories about Kephalos, see Fontenrose, Orion 86-100. 74. Florence, Museo Archeologico 81948: LIMC under Adonis no. 10: ARV 1312.1. Aphrodite and Adonis appear on Athenian vases toward the end of the fifth century at the same time as other scenes showing an interest in romance and women's lives: cf. Brendel, "The Scope and Temperament" 37-42; Servais-Soyez in LIMC under Adonis, cat. 229. 75. Servais-Soyez in LIMC under Adonis, cat. 224. 76. Cf. Silverman's conclusion, '"Suture"' 235, in her analysis of the female role in Gilda: "Vidor's film thus poses a temptation . . . the temptation to refuse cultural reintegration, to skid off course, out of control, to prefer castration to false plenitude." In the myth of a goddess with a young man castration enables a different kind of plenitude.

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T h e open space of sexual relations thought "otherwise" can be found in narratives of the literary canon as well. T h e narratives shape configurations in passing that their endings will deny. They can momentarily position the audience so as to gaze in imagination and identify with characters in a noncanonical way. T h e most overt example is the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite in its complex play with the pattern. T h e audience hears Anchises' speech of determination to make love to her (quoted above) from Aphrodite's perspective, for this is the effect we have seen her create. Right after Anchises' speech the text continues. "So saying, he took her hand: laughter-loving Aphrodite came slowly, turning her face aside and casting down her lovely eyes...." T h e sentence anchors the audience's attention on her. "Laughter-loving" (whether or not the pun mentioned above is felt) expresses Aphrodite's subjectivity, her delight in erotic joy. But the delight in her eyes is hidden as she turns her head away. Positioned by knowing her desire and Anchises' ignorance, by sharing her deceit, the audience "sees" Anchises undressing Aphrodite from her perspective. As he proceeds through four lines the audience's anticipation is aroused by the imminence of Aphrodite's fulfillment of her desire. Nor does the text switch to make her the object of the gaze. Although her body is revealed, the text reveals nothing about it. Thus the audience is put in the position of imagining the scene of lovemaking as expression of the woman's subjectivity. When Aphrodite discloses her identity, she reestablishes distance between the scene and the audience. She speaks of her shame from this distance, so it is detached from the preceding scene. T h e effect of female subjectivity as the audience's position is canceled by the narrative, but remains as an imaginative possibility. Panyassis's account of the Adonis myth (of which we have only the synopsis) may have resisted its own closure: instead, Adonis cycles between the upper and lower worlds. His extreme, childish youthfulness and his beauty as an object of the gaze are overemphasized by the detail that Aphrodite and Persephone fall for him when he is still a baby. Adonis gives his allotted portion of the year to Aphrodite, a gesture signifying mutual desire, his yielding to her, or both. T h e final third of the year is allotted to Persephone, to be spent in the underworld. In this segment of the cycle Adonis's beauty condemns him to be in thrall to a female who extinguishes him. Adonis's passivity, the absence of the phallus, means that he cannot survive as a sexual being. Yet Adonis's return undoes the closure and reestablishes sexual intimacy. If the final line of the synopsis referring to Adonis's death from the boar's wound was not in Panyassis's text, then Panyassis left his narrative undecided between rendering Adonis "impotent" (so as to recuperate the male/female hierarchy) and joining him with Aphrodite (so as to imply the irrelevance of the phallus).

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T h e Adonia festival suggests that women m a y have used the opportunity created by a narrative like Panyassis's to shape their own eroticism in a ritual setting. Winkler's construction of the women's interpretation of the Adonia emphasizes their part in reproduction: they celebrate their female power over life a n d sexuality. In this way the women give a different emphasis to their established role. Behind that shared focus on nurturance may lie other imagined roles. T h e Adonia combined dancing a n d mourning, use of incense, display of fruit, as well as the "gardens" that withered. It was celebrated, at least in part, at night and on the roofs of the houses. Its iconography suggests plentitude as well as loss. T h e m o u r n i n g implies identification with Aphrodite. But the celebration was also for her. Was it open to women to imagine themselves as substitutes for Adonis? Did the w o m e n take both positions in fantasy, Aphrodite and her lover, a n d collapse the cycle found in Panyassis: Adonis is already gone, already replaced? And was Adonis the child w h o is lost as well as the lover? T h i s complex set of possibilities—desiring (goddess or youth), mourning, being desired—results in a diffused sexuality, not centered around the phallus, without overtly specified object. T h e sensuous surroundings (incense, fruit), company of other women, a n d physical expression in dancing provide multiple gratifications." Vase paintings of the festival show a seated woman lost in contemplation as others carry objects to or from the roof or play the flute a n d dance, while baskets of fruit and incense burners stand nearby. 78 This is the public face of the festival, the women's activities viewed as spectacle but closed off from the viewer. In this emotional complex, both normalization of the pattern (Adonis's death) and disguise of the eroticism by m o u r n i n g protect the festival from suppression: the festival does not confront the hegemonic male with the possibility that women might embrace an eroticism in which he was replaced. T h e use of fruit and incense and "gardens" further obscures a n d diffuses the eroticism behind a vegetable code. Detienne's analysis allows us to see how the cult was explained (away) by the dominant culture: by joking about courtesans a n d their lovers enjoying it, mainstream discourse at once acknowledged curiosity, claimed control (for courtesans live at the mercy of men), a n d dismissed the cult as marginal. 7 9

77. Farwell, "Toward a Definition" 212-13, quotes Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich on the erotic in women as "diffuse and omnipresent energy" created in women's "presence to one another." This description fits the Adonia. 78. LIMC under Adonis, nos. 45-49. Cf. also the plates in Atallah, Adonis. 79. For association of the Adonia with courtesans, see, e.g., Diphilos fr. 42.38-41.49 (KasselAustin); Pherekrates 170 (Kock); Men. Sam. 35-50. Later Alkiphron, probably inspired by New Comedy, composed letters purportedly by courtesans to their friends: in two of these, 4.10.1

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Diffused eroticism and perhaps the same story of a cycle between the upper and lower worlds are indicated by Praxilla's lines on Adonis (PMG 747). According to her Hymn to Adonis, Adonis, when asked by those below what the loveliest thing that he has left behind was, said, "Loveliest [of all the things] I leave are the light of the sun, next the shining stars and the face of the moon and also ripe cucumbers and apples and pears." This list, judged inane by the world at large, gave rise to the saying, "Sillier than Praxilla's Adonis." One might guess at a connection with the Adonia and perhaps Adonis's parting from the upper world during the festival. In that case the disguise mentioned in the previous paragraph is at work. Praxilla's lines have an interesting resonance with two lines of Sappho's: " I love luxuriance . . . this light of the sun and beauty eros assigned as share to me also." 80 These are the last two lines of the fragment in which she mentions Tithonos. As we have seen, the pattern produces images of the desiring woman, the sexual mother with her son, the submissive but responsive man—all figures censored by the dominant culture. These emerge as the phallus is displaced within the text from its centrality as the signifier of desire. How the gazer views these figures created within but against the narrative depends on how she or he positions her- or himself in relationship to the phallus. T h e viewer may supply the phallus. Or the one gazing from the position of hegemonic male may disavow the phallus in order to identify with both figures, or with one of the figures, with the woman as lover of the beautiful boy or the reverse, in fantasies of passivity, transvestism, youthfulness. 81 From the position of the female, gaze and identification with the goddess are not disjunctive: that is, from this position one can both look at and " b e " the goddess. Notice the difference from the woman's gaze in the description of film theory: this is not the woman's constituting herself as the object of mother's gaze, but identification with the one who controls the relationship.82 The masochistic and 4.14.8, the Adonia is mentioned: in the latter a woman is invited to bring her "Adonis" (her lover) and a garden for the celebration. Adonis is called Aphrodite's beloved (eromenos). 80. Voigt, Sappho et Alcaeus 58. 81. Willemen, "Voyeurism" 212-13, points out that male scopophilia should have the man as its object since its origin is in autoeroticism. But scopophilia would be directed at the mother as well, to determine her status. It is perhaps worth noting that the two most important objects of the boy's initial scopophiliac interest, the mother and the child himself, can be reproduced in the pair goddess and young man. 82. Modern film theorists have had trouble theorizing a woman's gaze. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn't, extends Mulvey's original notion, that the woman shifts between identification with the (male) gaze and with the screen image, to the idea of a double identification with both simultaneously, as well as with the mythic subject and the narrative image, with movement and closure (134-56, esp. 141-44). Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures 29-38, later suggests that the woman regresses to a never-fully-represented active phallic stage. Doane, The Desire to Desire 6-13, discusses the difficulty that various discourses have in providing an account of

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

Ill If one reason for the popularity of the mythic pattern of goddess with young man is that it opened space for fantasies of uncodified erotic relationships, then Sappho's interest in the pattern may begin to appear more intriguing. T h e discussion so far also suggests that the way to approach Sappho's use of the myths is by examining the processes of gaze and identification in her poetry. Sappho often describes a woman gazing. A notice tells us, "Sappho says she saw 'a child too tender picking flowers'" (122 V). A line reads, "[When] I look at you [it seems to me] that you [are not] Hermione, but to compare you to light-haired Helen [is not out of place]" (23 V). 83 In the scrappy end of 96 V. we can read, "It isn't easy to look like a goddess, [but] you . . . " Furthermore, Sappho describes the gaze as having a powerful, even physiological effect on the gazer. In 22 V the narrator observes that the dress of another woman caused the addressee to "quail" when she saw it.84 In 31 V the narrator describes the violent effects of the sight of another woman on her: " W h e n I look at you briefly, then I can no longer speak, but my tongue is broken, at once light fire has run under my skin . . . " (7-10). In describing the effect of the gaze on the gazer as overwhelming, Sappho does not differ from other Greek writers. 85 However, Sappho does part company from them in her articulation of the experience: she avoids or breaks down the opposition between viewer and viewed that is created by the gaze. A t the end of 31 V (partially quoted above), the narrator says: woman's subjectivity. She suggests that the projected female spectator is divided unbridgeably between "masculinity" a n d narcissism. 83. This translation is based o n the supplements printed by Campbell, Greek Lyric vol. 1: Voigt's text, Sappho et Alcaeus, is m o r e conservative, but the idea is clear enough. 84. T h e narrator of Sappho's f r a g m e n t a r y poems is often not demonstrably female. I assume, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that it is a female voice. 85. Examples are legion. See, e.g., II. 14.294; Plato Chrm. I55d-e, Phdr. 2 5 i a - e . O n seeing a n d being seen in the Hippolytus of Euripides, see Luschnig, Time Holds the Mirror 3-15; o n tragedy generally D u r u p , "L'espressione tragica" 144-50.

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" I am greener than grass and I seem to myself to be little short of death" (14-16). T h e narrator's gaze has shifted from the other woman to herself. With her new focus she observes herself both from within and from without. The audience too must shift from the simple position of "looking" at another to the ambiguous position of both sharing the narrator's experience and watching her. By contrast, the gaze that remains focused on the object is correlated with lack of erotic effect; the poem sharply distinguishes the narrator's unmoved gaze at the man in the opening two lines ("That man seems to me to be the equal of the gods") from the disruptive gaze at the woman. 86 Similarly, in 1 V. "Sappho" describes Aphrodite's smile and repeats Aphrodite's speech from "Sappho's" own point of view, then takes on Aphrodite's voice. The switch is sudden, and the audience must simply shift perspective to suit. The narrator of 96 V describes the beauty of the absent woman and the woman's desire for the addressee: the narrator's relationship to the absent woman is characterized by both gaze and identification. In 95 V. the narrator's desire to see the lotus-filled dewy banks of Acheron may be a displacement from her desire for a woman, but the poem is too fragmentary to tell for sure. Sappho has other techniques for blurring gaze and identification. Description in her poetry is often both very sensuous and very unspecific. 87 A woman's beauty is displaced onto the surroundings: song, scents, flowers, rich cloth, enclosed places all reflect the woman's erotic attractiveness. 94 V is full of flowers and scent, and in 96 V the woman's beauty is deflected onto the landscape.88 Dika is asked in 81 V to weave garlands so that the graces will look on them. T h e very fragmentary 92 V seems to be a list of different colored robes, plus garlands. Aphrodite is invited to come to a shrine in a seductive landscape in 2 V. Sappho often refers to singing and music. Replacing the "look" at a woman by atmosphere, hearing, smell means that the distinction of self and other inherent in gazing is dissolved. Sometimes Sappho offers the addressee/audience a mirror for self-reflection. In 94 V the narrator describes to the addressee, who is leaving, the addressee's own sensuous ways of adorning herself. In 22 V the narrator tells the addressee of her (the addressee's) own desire for 86. Likewise, the man's gaze at the woman is unmoved. Race argues that "godlike" must mean "strong" (rather than, e.g., "happy") and refer to his self-possession in looking on her: he compares Pind. fr. 123 (Snell-Mahler). Robbins, '"Every Time I Look at You,'" likewise contrasts the man's gaze with Sappho's. Hierarchy is operative between man and woman—his is a phallic gaze—and Sappho invokes the divine/human hierarchy to emphasize it. The two hierarchies are additive here. 87. Cf. Winkler, "Gardens of Nymphs," on Sappho's metaphoric language for the body. 88. Cf. McEvilley, "Sappho, Fragment 94," who calls the scene in 94 V. a dream landscape, an idealized past.

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another.89 T h e adjective "lovely," which opens the second stanza, could refer either to the addressee or to the woman she desires.90 In all of these instances the audience's gaze is given no object of desire to focus on except a self-reflective one, an image of the addressee's own desirability. Both within the poetry and for the audience the two processes of visual fantasy, gaze and identification, are blurred. This practice means that the gaze cannot be aligned with the phallus. Sappho would have reinstated the operation of the male/female hierarchy by analogy had she used the gaze to objectify the one desired.

Instead she constructs poetry in and

through which the gaze opens the self to disintegration, shifting position, identification with the other, or mirroring of the viewer's desiring self.91 Through her use of the gaze to dissolve hierarchy, Sappho creates the same kind of open space for imagining unscripted sexual relations that the mythic pattern of goddess with young man makes possible. By this means Sappho can represent an alternative for women to the cultural norms.92 T h e long fragment (or possibly a complete poem) 16 V is important because it shows clearly the connection between Sappho's treatment of the gaze and her depiction of women's erotic life as separate from the dominant culture. A translation follows: S o m e say a host o f horsemen, some o f men on foot.

I

S o m e say o f ships, a m o n g sights on the black earth Is the most beautiful. I say that it is that thing W h i c h one desires. 5

Very easy it is to make this understandable T o all, for she w h o surpassed by far A l l humans in beauty, H e l e n , that man W h o was the best

9

A b a n d o n e d and sailed o f f to T r o y ; N o r to her child or her o w n parents D i d she give any thought: rather there led her astray [ ]

89. See D i Benedetto, "II tema della vecchiaia" 146, for a suggested thematic contrast between this fragment and 21 V. 90. This statement is tentative since it is not clear where the poem began and the preserved part is too fragmentary to be sure that the reference of the adjective was not unambiguous. 91. Doane, The Desire to Desire, points out that she analyzes the merger of identification and desire in the "woman's film" of the 1940s as problematic for women (esp. 2 2 - 3 3 )

and

remarks

that what is missing in the Greek period is commodification of the woman. I would add that Sappho's poetry presumes the possibility of sexual desire between women, so that blurring (it is not merger in the case of Sappho) of gaze and identification does not replace but rather permits a relationship with another. 92. Cf. Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World," on Sappho's depiction o f mutual (rather than dominant and subordinate) love relations among women.

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[Aphrodite?], for easily turned ( ? ) . . . [

"ghtly [

13 ]

W h o (?) recalls to m e Anaktoria, W h o is not here. I w o u l d wish rather to see her lovely step

17

and the bright sparkle of her face T h a n the chariots of the Lydians and those in armor Fighting on foot. 9 3

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

93. There is a large bibliography on this poem. See the annotated bibliography through 1985 in Gerber, Studies in Greek Lyric Poetry. 94. Some have been disturbed that Helen, who is introduced as a judge of beauty, is herself described as exceeding all humans in beauty. O n Helen's significance for the logic of the primal, see esp. duBois, "Sappho and Helen"; Most, "Sappho Fr. 16"; Thorsen, "The Interpretation of Sappho's Fragment 16"; Wills, "The Sapphic 'Umwertung.'" Wills notes the opposition between conventional and personal evaluations in the poem (440-41). DuBois, unlike the others, considers that Sappho meant to oppose male and female stories. Thorsen has a good discussion of the logic of the poem as a whole. Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 277-go, takes a different approach and focuses on memory.

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lacuna of line 12 or 13: the most likely possibility is that it was an epithet of Aphrodite. 95 T h e object of the woman's gaze is invisible, unnamed, not objectified. T h e result of eliding mention of Paris is that the relationship between Helen and Paris remains unspecified, the phallus unlocated, hierarchy suspended. Helen's gaze does not create a distinct object for the audience, nor does Helen slip back into her old role by becoming the object of Paris's gaze or guidance. T h e concretized male figure is left behind in the world of armies and conventional assessments. If the subject of the verb "led astray" was Aphrodite, then she replaces Paris in desiring and conferring beauty on Helen. By virtue of naming Aphrodite, the poem transforms the relationship into one between women, one in which Helen is both the subject w h o desires and also responsive to Aphrodite. This complex paradigm (Helen/unnamed Paris, Helen/Aphrodite) allows the narrator to find loveliest—not H e l e n — b u t a woman unknown to epic, Anaktoria. Like Helen, who left her parents and daughter, the narrator rejects conventional expectations linked with epic on the one hand and marriage and family on the other for a love of her own choosing. T h e logic of the poem illustrates the relationship of female desire to the public world of prescribed social relations. Aphrodite both represents the woman who chooses her love and offers divine affirmation of love that contravenes the cultural norm. But because Anaktoria is absent, the narrator's gaze must reconstruct her in fantasy. T h e separation of the narrator from Anaktoria produces the straightforward gaze that is not attributed to Helen. Helen sailed off to Troy rather than suffer separation, but the narrator must construct an imaginative image through the gaze of fantasy. Yet even in imagination the narrator does not offer simply an objectified Anaktoria to the audience. By referring to Anaktoria's way of walking and the sparkle of her face, she creates rather an image of light and movement. 96 Helen and Paris in 16 V adumbrate the pattern of a goddess with a young man: the poem shows how Sappho could inflect the pattern to create open space for fantasy. Since Aphrodite doubles both Helen and Paris, the interplay of relations among them permits multiple configurations of gaze and desire. In a more complex way than on the Adonis vase discussed earlier,

95. Scansion is against the possibility that "Paris" stood in the lacuna of either line. A god or quality is more likely to be the subject of the verb "lead astray" than a human: "love" is a possibility. See Voigt's critical apparatus ad loc. 96. Both Rissman, Love as War chap. 2, and Wills, "The Sapphic 'Umwertung,'" think that Anaktoria's "light" and "movement" imply a comparison with the armies, that Sappho assimilates love and war rather than opposing them. Rissman argues that this poem is a recusatio of epic (48-54).

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eroticism blurs gender identity. Sappho could have used the four myths in question to the same effect, treating the young man's gender as irrelevant (since he is not a dominating figure). In fact, in two of the myths the narrator is (apparently) associated or identified with the goddess. T h e maidens in 140 V lament with or as Aphrodite for the loss of Adonis. The confusion over whether Sappho or Aphrodite loved Phaon implies that Sappho adopted Aphrodite's voice, singing of Aphrodite's love for Phaon, perhaps as an analogy to a love of her own. T h e story of Selene and Endymion may have been similarly used. The pattern also provided an image of a separate emotional space where female desire might express itself, for in the myths the young man is hidden in the wild or at the end of the earth. However, what most forcibly strikes one about the fragments and notices is that the young man is portrayed at the point of impotence. Endymion is sleeping, Adonis dying. 9 ' By portraying the man's "strengthlessness," Sappho reinstates hierarchy: the young man is demoted to passivity, and the goddess prevails. The goddess can gaze at the young man with a possessive look. Selene's gaze on Endymion must have been straightforward, the gaze that Sappho's poetry usually avoids constructing. T h e maidens perhaps watch Adonis as he fades. But the goddess and youth cannot be a couple because he is succumbing or has succumbed to the fate that destroys him in the canonical narrative. Sappho invokes narrative closure as it enervates the mortal, assimilates him to a non-man, in order to preserve the male/female hierarchy. These figures are parallel to Paris in 16 V Conversely, his absence from the text becomes even more significant when aligned with these stories. As argued above, not naming him means that the poem avoids reinstating hierarchy and conventional assessment, while indicating the invisibility of an object's loveliness to those who do not love it. But ultimately Paris becomes an absence for Helen herself. He was killed in battle toward the end of the Troj a n War, and she returned to live with Menelaos. T h e hierarchy-scrambling relationship based on desire is lost, and the relationships prescribed by the social structure triumph. 16 V. can be seen as both imitating Helen's choice and pointing to its evanescence. In that case, the military forces that some find loveliest become more significant: they are the means by which the dominant 97. In 58 V., the only case where the narrator seems to have compared herself to the human member of the mythic pair (Tithonos), she seems to be lamenting her age and feebleness. In this case the point may be rather the goddess's care for a human despite her mortality. It may also be the survival of song, for Tithonos's voice runs on unquenchably, and a reference to a lyre appears just above the lines on Tithonos in Sappho's text. Cf. Di Benedetto, "II tema della vecchiaia" 152-63, who conjectures, on the basis of the last two lines (quoted in connection with the Adonia), that Sappho is claiming love of life in spite of age, in contrast to Tithonos.

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culture is enforced against individual desire, so are righdy aligned with the conventional assessments. T h e narrator's desire for the absent Anaktoria is perhaps also longing for one who has been reclaimed by her family and her role in the social structure. Sappho seems to have used the mythic pattern of goddess and young man not to picture nonhierarchical sexual intimacy but rather to reflect the fragility of her ideal of mutual desire under the pressure of the dominant culture. We can guess that she chooses the moment of closure in order to represent the closure that social demands forced on women's love lives. Many of Sappho's poems are about departure and absence: the women she knew seem to have been obliged to marry and leave or follow families elsewhere. However, the resolution in these particular myths in favor of the divine/human hierarchy (over the male/female one), in favor of the goddess, means that Sappho could at least use them to support women's claim to subjectivity in the face of objectification by others. A woman's subjectivity, like the goddess's, is represented as surviving the destruction of her love life.98 The pattern of a goddess with a young man is thus a model for women's loves: it validates the location of love and desire apart from the established social structures, analogizes the woman to a goddess to support her claim to subjectivity and active desire, and acknowledges the impossibility of retaining the relationships formed there in the face of social demands on the woman. T h e young man of the myth, then, may have represented both the fantasy of escape from cultural definition and the power of cultural demands to reclaim the individual. In these myths, in sum, Sappho perhaps saw a reflection of the working of the dominant ideology: through its own internal contradictions it opened space briefly for mutual erotic relationships, which it then closed down in its insistence that a woman's life follow the canonical narrative. Yet in Sappho's subversive logic, the straightforward gaze, the narrator's gaze in imagination at Anaktoria in 16 V , Selene's gaze at Endymion, is what is left to the woman when the desired other is lost. T h e absence of the other that transforms the gaze into projection also transforms the woman into a subject and possessor of the gaze. 98. Compare 96 V., in which the woman who has departed now shines like the moon when it causes the stars to fade. Though separated from Lesbos and/or Atthis, the woman continues to stand out from her surroundings. Hague, "Sappho's Consolation for Atthis," thinks that the simile is left hanging because it is an art image of the woman's loneliness: this too is an aspect of it.

THIRTEEN

The Justice of Aphrodite in Sappho i Anne Carson

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the earliest recorded critic of Sappho's first p o e m , praised it for its cohesion and smoothness of construction. 1 Since that time the poetic quality of the p o e m has not, I think, been doubted but controversy has arisen about the meaning of the poem. M u c h of the controversy has focused upon the penultimate stanza, lines 21-24. Recent scholarship provides us with several decades of debate about this s t a n z a — particularly about its tone. 2 T h e r e has been no debate about the actual events to which the stanza alludes. It is assumed that the events are obvious. I think that this assumption is untrustworthy, and that debate about the tone of the stanza could be eliminated, or at least radically simplified, if w e were to clarify our notion of what is g o i n g on in these verses. Lines 21-24 present the words of Aphrodite to Sappho. S a p p h o has suffered an injustice at the hands of her beloved, and has called upon Aphrodite to alleviate the pain of this injustice. T h e girl with w h o m S a p p h o is in love has apparendy fled from Sappho's advances, rejected her gifts, and refused her love. Aphrodite therefore makes three promises or predictions to S a p p h o c o n c e r n i n g the fate which lies in store for the unresponsive girl. Aphrodite says: "For in fact if she is fleeing, soon she will pursue. A n d if she is rejecting gifts, instead she will give them. A n d if she does not love, soon she will love, even if she does not want to." This essay was originally published in slightly different form as "The Justice of Aphrodite in Sappho Fr. r," Transactions of the American Philological Association n o (1980) 135-42. 1. Dion. Hal. Comp. 173-79. 2. Bibliography can be found in Saake, Zur Kunst Sapphos and Sapphostudien; Stanley, "The Role of Aphrodite." To these may be added Gentili, "II 'letto insaziato' di Medea"; Bonnano, "Osservazioni"; Bonaria, "Note critiche al testo di Saffo"; Lasso de la Vega, "La oda primera de Safo"; Marry, "Sappho and the Heroic Ideal."

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Although interpreters have differed about the tone of these words of Aphrodite, they have universally agreed about the situation being described. Aphrodite is promising, it is generally held, an ideal erotic revenge in the form of a mutual reversal of the roles of lover and beloved. She is promising to reverse the situation that exists between Sappho and her beloved, to turn the tables, so that the girl who is now indifferent to Sappho will experience a change of heart and will pursue Sappho with gifts and love. This standard view is recently expressed, for example, by Sir Kenneth Dover in his book Greek Homosexuality. Dover says: " T h e other person, who now refuses gifts and flees, will not merely yield and 'grant favours' but will pursue Sappho and will herself offer gifts.'" This is a plausible interpretation, but it is not what the Greek words say. Aphrodite's statements contain no direct object. She does not say that the girl will pursue Sappho, she does not say that the girl will give gifts to Sappho, she does not say that the girl will love Sappho. She merely says that the girl will pursue, give gifts, and love.4 There is an interpretation of these words available to us which imposes no assumptions on the grammar and which, furthermore, is in better agreement with the traditions of Greek erotic poetry. For it is not the case generally in Greek poetry that scorned lovers pin their hopes on a mutual reversal of erotic roles. In general, forlorn lovers console themselves with a much less fantastic thought: namely, that the unresponsive beloved will one day grow up and become a lover himself, or herself, and in the role of lover will pursue an unresponsive beloved and will come to "know what it feels like" to be rejected. Within the strict conventions of Greek homosexual Eros such a revenge is fairly certain. There are clearly defined ages of life appropriate to the roles of lover and beloved. 0 In the course of time the beloved will naturally and inevitably become a lover, and will almost 3. Dover, Greek Homosexuality 177. LI. 18-19 in particular are generally understood to support such an interpretation since, despite the uncertainty of the text, it is clear that these verses contain a reference to someone coming into someone's philotata. The various readings which have been suggested are cited and discussed by Bonaria, "Osservazione." Most plausibly, these verses refer to Sappho's beloved and the fact that she is not reciprocating Sappho's love. Whether the girl once reciprocated and now refuses, or never reciprocated at all, depends on the reading of 18-19. But even if reconciliation of some kind is involved here, this need not affect the explanation of 11. 21-24, for Aphrodite appears to begin a new line of thought with her question "Who is wronging you?" With this question Aphrodite passes from the specific injustice at hand to the general principle of justice that governs such cases. 4. Schadewaldt, Sappho 89, and Privitera, "La rete di Afrodite" 47 n. 44, remark on the absence of a direct object. Both assume that, if it were expressed, the object would be "you." 5. Plato Symp. i83d-e, igod-e; Alexis fr. 70 Kock; Theoc. Id. 7.120 and Gow ad loc.; AP 12.22, 31, 32, 33,46, 176, 186,195, 224, 228, 229; Theopompus Comicus fr. 29 Kock and Dover's comments in Greek Homosexuality 87 n. 48; Plut. Mot. 77ob-c; Licht [Brandt], Sexual Life in Ancient Greece 416 f.; Flaceliere, L'amour en Grice 43-70; Devereux, "Greek Pseudo-Homosexuality" 82.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Claude Calame is professor of Greek at the University of Lausanne. His interest in modes of poetic enunciation and his curiosity about social and cultural anthropology led him to the study of ritual and symbolic aspects of ancient Greek literature. Among his publications are Les chœurs de jeunes filles en Grèce archaïque, 2 vols. (Rome, 1977), translated as Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece (Lanham, Md., 1995); Le récit en Grèce ancienne (Paris, 1986); Thésée et l'imaginaire athénien (Lausanne, 1990); I Greci e l'eros (Rome, 1992). He has also edited several collected volumes, including L'amore in Grecia (Rome/Bari, 1984); Métamorphoses du mythe en Grèce antique (Geneva, 1988; and Figures grecques de l'intermédiaire (Lausanne/Paris, 1992). Anne Carson is professor of classics at McGill University. She is the author of Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton, 1986), numerous articles on ancient Greek literature, and poetry of her own. Page duBois is professor of classics at the University of Southern California. Her many publications include Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being (Ann Arbor, 1982); Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representation of Women (Chicago, 1988); Torture and Truth (New York, 1990); and Sappho is Burning (Chicago, 1995). Ellen Greene, the editor of this volume, is assistant professor of classics at the University of Oklahoma. She has published articles on gender and sexuality in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, Propertius, and Ovid. Her book, Gender, Power, and the Poetics of Desire: Studies in Latin Love Poetry (forthcoming, Chapel Hill), examines representations of women and the construction of gender in Catullus, Propertius, and Ovid.

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288

CONTRIBUTORS

Judith P. Hallett, professor of classics at the University of Maryland, College Park, has published widely on Latin language and literature; women, sexuality and the family in classical antiquity; and the classical tradition. In the summer of 1994, she codirected a summer institute for college faculty on "Sappho and Lady Mary Wroth: Major Writers of Classical Antiquity and the English Renaissance," which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Giuliana Lanata is a professor at the University of Genoa. In addition to numerous articles, her books include Poetica preplatonica: testimonianze e frammenti (Florence, 1963); Medicina magica e religione popolare (Rome, 1967); Gli atti dei martiri come documenti processuali (Milan, 1973); Legislazione e natura nelle novelle giustinianee (Naples, 1984; Esercizi di memoria (Bari, 1989); Processi contro i cristiani negli atti dei martiri (Turin, 1989); and Società e diritto nel mondo tardo antico: sei saggi sulle novelle giustinianee (Turin, 1994). André Lardinois is assistant professor of classics at the University of Minnesota. His main area of study is early Greek poetry. He coauthored a book, with T. C.W. Oudemans, entitled 7ragie Ambiguity: Anthropology, Philosophy and Sophocles' Antigone (Leiden, 1987), and he has published several articles on Sappho and Greek tragedy. Mary R. Lefkowitz is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College. Her books include Heroines and Hysterics (London, 1981); Women's Life in Greece and Rome, with Maureen B. Fant (Baltimore, 1982); Women in Greek Myth (London, 1986); and most recently Not Out ofAfrica (New York, 1996), and Black Athena Revisited, with Guy MacLean Rogers (Chapel Hill, I996)Gregory Nagy is the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. He is the author of The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore, 1979), which won the Goodwin Award of Merit, American Philological Association, in 1982. His most recent book is Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond (Cambridge, 1996). Earlier publications include Comparative Studies in Greek and Indie Meter (Cambridge, Mass., 1974); Greek Mythology and Poetics (Ithaca, 1990); and Pindar's Homer: The Lyric Possession ofan Epic Past (Baltimore, 1990). In July 1994, he became chair of Harvard's classics department. William Robins is assistant professor of English at the University of Toronto. Charles Segal is professor of Greek and Latin at Harvard University. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and served as president of the American Philological Association for 1993—94. His most recent books are Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow (Durham, N.C., 1993); Oedipus Tyrannus:

CONTRIBUTORS

289

Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge (New York, 1993); Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey (Ithaca, 1994); and Sophocles' Tragic World: Divinity, Nature, Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1995). Marilyn B. Skinner is professor of classics at the University of Arizona. She has published numerous articles on the female poetic tradition in ancient Greece, focusing on Sappho and her successors Corinna, Erinna, and Nossis. She has also published widely on Roman constructions of gender and sexuality, especially in the poetry of Catullus, and is coeditor of the forthcoming essay collection Roman Sexualities. Eva Stehle is associate professor of classics at the University of Maryland. Her interests center on ancient religions, poetry and performance, and women's roles in these areas. Her book, Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece (Princeton, 1996), concludes with a chapter on Sappho. Margaret Williamson is senior lecturer in classical studies at St. Mary's University College, University of Surrey. She has written on various aspects of Greek literature and has assisted with translations of Greek tragedy for the stage. She is the author of Sappho's Immortal Daughters (Cambridge, Mass., 1995)Jack Winkler was professor of classics at Stanford University until his death in 1990. He is the author of Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading ofApuleius' Golden Ass (Berkeley, 1985) and Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (New York, 1989). He is coeditor, with David Halperin and Froma Zeitlin, of Before Sexuality (Princeton, 1990) and, with Froma Zeitlin, of Nothing to Do with Dionysos? (Princeton, 1990).

INDEX

absence, 144, 225

49; 159-60, 166, 186, (see also S a p p h o ,

abstraction, 82, 83, 84, 97

WORKS, frs. 1, 2 below)-, p e r f o r m a n c e ,

actantial model, G r e i m a s ' , 86

'53> '55"5 6 > ' 7 1 ; w e d d i n g songs, 1561131

A d o n i a (festival), 195, 198, 200-201, 217,

WORKS: fr. 1 P, (first partheneion) 140-

219

41, (agonistic ethos) 6 0 , 1 4 9 , 1 8 6 ,

Adonis, 53, 57, 193, 194-95,

2 °°> 2 0 2 ;

fan-

(chorus' relationship with leader)

tasies suggested by, 216-19; hymns to,

124,167, (comparison with gods)

70n20, (see also S a p p h o , WORKS, fr. 140a);

167, (hypopetridion) 3 5 - 3 6 , 3 8 , 4 4 -

in lettuce bed, 40, 52, 194, 200, 207;

45; (imagery)

Panyassis on, 198, 216; parallelism with

158, (playful self-denigration) 162,

Phaon and Phaethon, 40, 45, 46, 52,

(Sappho fr. 16 compared) 166;

195; sexual status, 40, 206-7, 216, 224

fr. 3 P, (second partheneion) 1 9 -

147-48,

(meter)

Aeschylus, 55, 231

20, 139-40, 148, 186; fr. 17, 153;

Agariste o f Sicyon, 1 3 3 ^ 2

fr -

age: o f h o m o s e x u a l lovers, 7, 135, 226-32;

156; fr. 95b, 153

at marriage, 13, 136

39. 153;

fr - 2 6 ;

fr-

59a,

A l e x a n d r i a n era, 18, 180; see also individual

agonistic ethos, see competitive ethos

authors

A k k a d i a n epic, Emma Elish, 61

algesidoros (paingiver), 21

akroterion from C a e r e , terracotta, 2i2n66

alliteration, 61, 6 5 - 6 6 , 6 7 - 6 8 , 6 8 - 6 9

Aktaion myth, 199, 214

amachania (helplessness), 19

Alcaeus: a m a t o r y language, 23, 62; on

amaruchma (dazzling), 23n53

female beauty and cult, 60; first-person

amor versus, 55

feminine speech, 13; on Helen, 81, 87,

Amphitrite and Theseus, 199

260, 261; hetaireia, Ii4n5, 156; political

A m y k l a i , throne of, 2i2n66

life, I4n5, 156

A n a c r e o n : amatory language, 16, 18, 19, 23;

Alcman:

first-person

singular/plural use,

bisexuality, 127; erotic discourse c o m p a r e d

161; gender relations in, 186, 187; love

with Sappho's, 249, 250, 251-53, 255-56,

and death topos, 19-20; mention o f o w n

257; o n homoeroticism, 13, 128; horse im-

n a m e , 153; partheneia, 138, 139-42,

agery, 16, 147, 251; subject-object polari-

169, 171, 185-86, 189-90, (Sappho's

ties, 251-53, 255-56, 257; on W h i t e R o c k ,

p o e m s c o m p a r e d ) 139-42, 144, 147-

39-40, 41, 44

291

292

INDEX

Anacreon (continued) WORKS: f r s . 4 a n d 5 K , 1 6 ; f r . 3 4 6 ,

16,

2 3; fr- 347. 24; fr 4 I l a p > 19 anago (bring back to light and life), 54-55 Anaktoria, 81-82, 83, 121 Anaximander, 231 Anchises, 49, 197, 207-9, 2 >6 androcentric criticism, 30, 99, 100 Andromache, 33, 119, 133 Andromeda, circle of, 115, 119 anointing oneself, 146 Anthologia Palatina: 9.189, (on Sappho and circle) 115, 153; 9.506, (on Sappho) 248112; 12.12, 12.16, 12.85, ( o n ' o v e ) 228-29 anthropological study, 172 anxiety, homoerotic, 31-32, 122, 123, 128 Apache Indians, i72nio8 Aphrodite: and Adonis, 40, 45, 53, 57, 193; and Anchises, 49, 197, 207-9, 216; doloplokos, 20; Aphrodite/Eos parallelism, 4 8 -

49. 49-5°. 52, 54. '94 n 3; i n I l i a d > 94. '96, 245-46; as Istar, 54; and Phaethon, 45, 205; and Phaon, 40, 45, 53-55, 193, 195; and regeneration, 47-52; Sappho's circle and cult of, 14-17, 60, 118-19, I 2 o; Sappho's connection with, 55, 57, 60, 24546; tempers aches of heart, 15: and White Rock, 53 -55, 57; see also Sappho, WORKS, fr. 1 Apollo Erithios, cult of, 52 Apollodorus (vase painter), 1 3 1 - 3 2 ^ 7 apostrophe, 7, 233-47; and erotic reciprocity, 236^43; i n fr- 234, 243-46; in fr. 94, 234, 237-43; immediacy, 240; and memory, 237, 246; move from narrative to discursive time, 237, 241; subjectification of addresses by, 236-37 apple high on tree, woman as, 104-5, '48 Archilochus, 18, 21, i66n83, 22g aristocratic period, 248 Aristophanes, 21-22, Ecclesiazusae, 21-22, 137; ksbiazein, 129; Lysislrata, I30n2i; parabaseis, 153; Thesmophoriazusae, 1331131, 137 Aristotle, 1, 83, 84 Aristoxenus, ig2n65 Arkheanassa, Ii6ni3 Arktos Bear, 51 Artemis, 137, 199; Ortheia, 140, 147 artlessness of Sappho's poetry, alleged, 3, 26,

30-31. 33. 79 arts, plastic, 138-39; see also vase paintings asa (agony), 24 assonance, 61, 65 -66, 67 Athenaeus, 40, 114 Athens: Adonia, 198; democracy, 248, 252; Stoa Basileios, 2i2n66 Atthis (member of Sappho's circle), Ii6ni3, 118, 121: see also Sappho, WORKS, fr. 47 Attis and Kybele, 199, 207 audience, poet's relationship with, 237, 2404'. 256-57, 263 autobiographical reading of poems see biographical approach Bacchylides: on male beauty, 136; partheneia, I7ini05, 185; on Theseus and Amphitrite, 199 Bardot, Brigitte, 230 beauty: and absence, 144; contests, 137-38, 149; displacement of personal onto surroundings, 144, 219; male, 135-36, 138; Sappho's emphasis on, 138-39; wedding songs describe sexual, 168 Bella Coola Indians, 46 Benjamin, Jessica, 234 35, 242 Berlin papyrus, 19 Bethe, Erich, 12 bewilderment of heart, 23-24, 30-31, 64 biographical approach, 1-2, 3; fallacy of reading poems as autobiographical, 13, 26-34, 128, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 159 biographies of Sappho: Hellenistic, P. Oxy. XV, 126, 127; see also Suda Bion the sophist, 232 bisexuality, 127 bitter-sweet (glukupibros), 20-21 boundaries: of consciousness, 45, 53; inter-personal, 242, 246, 252, 253-63 Bowra, C. M., 5 brightness of love, 23 Bronte, Emily, 3ing brother, Sappho's, 165 Brygos (vase painter), ig2n65 Caere, Etruria, akroterion, 2i2n66 Callimachus, 40, 228 Calypso, 47, 85, 196-97, 203-4, 205, 209 castration complex, 31-32, 34

INDEX

Catullus: p o e m 51, after S a p p h o , 66, 129-30; p o e m 62, hymenaeus, 54 Cercylas of A n d r o s , 1 2 2 - 2 3 , I 2 7 n 9 chaos, 72 C h a r a x u s (Sappho's brother), 165 C h a r i n o s ' leap f r o m W h i t e Rock, 40-41 Charités, 15, 16, 20, 57, 60, 120 C h a r o n of Lampsakos, 4 1 - 4 2 choral poetry, 118; features f o u n d in S a p p h o ' s work, 6, 1 5 1 - 5 6 ; c h o r a l / m o n o d i c distinction, 5, 1 4 1 - 4 2 , 150-72 chorus, lyric, 118, 153-54, 161, 185; S a p p h o ' s circle c o m p a r e d , 115, 117, 151 Chrysippus, 72 Circe, 62, 196-97, 204-5 circle, Sappho's, 1 2 - 1 8 , 113-24; a n d A p h rodite, 14-17, 60, 118 19, 120; as cultic association, 14-17, 60, 92, 235; h o m o e r o t i cism, 1 7 - 1 8 , 60, 120-24; initiatory function, 120-24; as institution, 1 2 1 7 , U 3 _ I 7 I lyric chorus c o m p a r e d , 115, 117, 151; p e d a gogic f u n c t i o n , 114, 117—20, 123, 134, 185; symbolic system, 182- 83; s e e a ' s o u n d e r hetairai, hetaireia Cixous, Hélène, 176, 182 clitoris, 1 0 2 - 3 , io 4> i o 5 Cody, Dr. J o h n , 2 6 - 2 8 coinage, 84 collective expression of the individual, 123, 144 c o m m u n a l context of p e r f o r m a n c e , 6, 240-41 competitive ethos, 7, 60, 125, 137-38, 141, 149, 186 consciousness: b o u n d a r i e s of, 45, 53; Sappho's double, (public/private, m a j o r i t y / minority culture) 94-95, 96, 1 0 1 - 8 , 2 3 3 34, 250 "consolation p o e m s " , 172m 10 control of uncontrollable, 70-71 c o n v e n t i o n a l / p e r s o n a l relationship in S a p p h o , 3 - 4 , 71 coolness, 25 C o r i n n a , 14, 125, 138 correction, self-, 105 Cratinus, 40 Crete, 122, i 7 2 n i o 8 criticism, earlier, n - 1 2 cult, religious: c h o r a l poetry a n d , 118; educative f u n c t i o n , 185; S a p p h o ' s circle a n d ,

293

1 4 - 1 7 , 60, 92, 235; women's, 137-38 "culture", 119 c u p p a i n t e d by Apollodorus, 131-321127 Cyzicus; cult of Artemis, I i 6 n i 5 danviami (to be overcome), 17, 20, 246 D a m o p h y l e of Pamphilia, 116 dance, 58, 106, 115, 153 D a n t e Alighieri, Vita Nova, 19 daughter, Sappho's(Kleis), I 0 3 n 3 7 , 1 2 2 , 1 2 3 1 1 3 5 , I2 7> ' 3 1 , >44> >4 8 Davison, J., 127

de Lauretis, Teresa, i 8 g - 9 o n 6 2 , 203, 2 1 1 , 2181183, 2 3 5 - 3 6 d e a t h : love a n d , 19-20, 72, 144, 147, 239-40; a n d rebirth, myths of, 47- 52; Sappho's, 3, 2 9> 35- 57. i2(5 > ' 9 5 n l ° D e m e t e r , 197, 205, 2 0 9 - 1 0 D e m e t r i o s , 8 9 ^ , 101, 103, 104-5 democracy, A t h e n i a n , 248, 252 D e m o p h o n , 210 desire: abstract notion of, 79, 82, 83, 84, 97; fr. 94 o n expelling, 17, 1311126, 1641170 Détienne, Marcel, 200-202, 217 deute (repetitive), 17, 44n36, 67, 164-651173, 231, 232 Devereux, George, 3 1 - 3 2 , 122, 128 deviance, women's art as, 3, 26, 29 Dicaearchus, 1571135 Dickinson, Emily, 26-28, 34, 145114 didactic poetry, oral, 74 diegertikon, 1 5 7 - 5 8 ^ 9 D i m o c k , George, 85 D i o m e d e i a (Iliad 5), S a p p h o ' s reinterpretation, 92-96 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 232 Dionysos, 206

Dios apate (Iliad 14), 16, 17, 22, 63 Dioskourides, 195 Dioskouroi, 54 discourse: women's, 176-77, 182, 189, 234, 2 6 3 ^ 7 ; see abo private a n d public discourse disintegration, subject positions a n d , 257-59 diving, myths about, 3 8 - 4 3 , 53 D o a n e , M . A., 2 i i n 6 3 , 2 i 8 - i g n 8 2 , 22ingi d o m i n a t i o n a n d submission, 234-35, 2 44> 2 4 6 47' 2 5 I "53> 257> 2 5 9 doñeó (stir, shake), 21

294

INDEX

Dover, K . J . , 13, 21, 126114, 1301121, 227

71, ngn24,

dreams: district o f (dëmos oneirôri), 36, 38, 45;

169; fr. 113, ngn24,134n37; fr. 114,

i34n37, 148, 159,

6 8 - 6 g , u g n 2 4 , i5in4,172; fr. 115,

poems as, 28

6g, n g n 2 4 , 1 3 4 , 1 4 8 , 1 5 i n 4 ; fr. 116,

drinking songs, 157, i 7 i m o 5

ngn24,134n37; fr. 117,69, n g n 2 4 , '34 n 37; fr " 7 a > '48

écriture féminine (Cixous), 176 education, see pedagogic function

Eridanos, river, 53, 57

effeminacy, Near Eastern, 200n33

Erinna, 1161115, 17211107, 172m 10, 180

egalitarianism in love, see mutuality

Eros, 20; as adversary (Anacreon), 251, 253; force of, 15, I2in2g, 142, 229-30, 237, {see

eikasia games at symposia, 151114

also Sappho, w o r k s , frs. 31, 47, 130)

enchantment of poetry, see thelxis Endymion, 224

Erotes, 120

enkomion: fr. 31 as, 169, Pindar's, for T h e o -

eroticism, 173-264; apostrophe and, 233-47: female non-hierarchical, 5, 7, 145, 149,

xenos, 22-23, '36, '69 n 9'> Emana Elish, 61

186-87, 233-47, 248-64; male hierarchi-

envy, 31-32

cal, 186 - 8 7 , 2 1 3 n 6 8 , 2 4 6 - 4 7 , 2 5 1 - 5 3 , 2 6 3 M 7 ;

Eos, 47, 48-49, 57, 205; Aphrodite as parallel,

see also homosexuality; mutuality

4 8 - 4 9 . 4 9 " 5 ° . 5 2 , 54; ' 9 4 n 3 ; mortal lovers,

Eubulus, 40

see Kephalos; Kleitos; M e m n o n ; Orion;

Euphronius, 25

Tithonos

Euripides: Andromache, 137; Bacchae, 213-14;

epaoidë (incantation), 61

Cvcfo/u, 39-40,41,45; Hippolytus, 199; Phae-

ephebic love, 2on38; poetry, 13, (see also wider

thon, 46, igg, 205n47

Pindar; Theognis); vase inscriptions, 25 epic poetry, 3; Akkadian, 61; amatory language, 25; enchantment o f hearers, 74;

exchange, women as objects of, 84, 85, 86, 261 exclusion of w o m e n , see segregation

lyric tradition as older, 92; roots in ritual and incantation, 61; Sappho's relation to,

fantasies, erotic, 210- ig, 221, 223

4, 18, 25, 32—33, 75; subgenres, 36; women

fear, green, 32, 33

in, 4, 85-86, 87, 91, 261; see also Hesiod;

feminist theory, 2; ahistoricity, 181,192; Anglo-

Homer

American tradition, 175, 176; discourses

epinikia, performance of, 157

of female subcultures, 176-77; feminine

epiphanies, divine, 59, 71, 245-46, 250

as male construct, 176, 178-79, 180-81;

epithalamia, Sappho's, (frs. 104-17) 119, 134;

French, 175-92; on language, 181-82

biographical fallacy, 144; first-person sin-

ferrymen, mythological, 53

gular/plural use, 161; fr. 31 as possible, 22,

festivals, see Adonia; Thesmophoria

6 g n i g , 167-68; imagery, 134, 148; incan-

fetishism, 211

tatory effect, 68-69, 7 1 ! metrics, 157-58;

film theory, 203, 211, 218, 250

performance, 151, 154, 159-60, 170

fire, 24, 30

f r a g m e n t s : fr. 104,54, n g n 2 4 ; fr. 104a,

first person, poems in: biographical fallacy,

68, I58n43; fr. 105, 13, 119M4,

13,

158; fr. 105a, 68, 104-5,

159; pluralistic voice, 6, 155, 160-64, 165—

'48,

I58n43; fr. 105b, 148, i68ng2,

26-34,

'28, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145,

66, 171

193m; fr. 105c, I58n43; fr. 106,

Florence, fragments from, 15, 22

" 9 n 2 4 . '58; fr. 107, 119M4,

flowers, spring, 15-17

'58n43;

fr - I o 8 > I I 4 n 3>

folksong, 143, 144, 189, see also song

i58n43;

fr

I0 9>

"9n24>

"91124, i58n43;

fr. n o , 103, 105, ngn24,

134^7;

forgetfulness (lethe), 45 formulaic language, 64, 91; generalization o f

fr m , 103,105, iign24, I34n37,

personal experience, 71-72,123; Homeric,

148, I5in4, i68ng2; fr. 112, 69,

4, 33, 61; makansmos, 98-99; prayer, 92-93

295

INDEX

Fragments, Sappho's, see S a p p h o , WORKS

62; as tree-goddess, 1 9 9 ^ 1

France: feminist theory, 175-92; salons, 17thr8th century, 154, 171

Helios, 46, 48, 52 Hellenistic era: attitudes to female homosex-

Frankel, H e r m a n n , 22, 150-51

uality, 126, 127; S a p p h o ' s importance to,

Freud, S i g m u n d , and Freudianism, 28, 211

192; topoi on homosexuality, 228-29;

see

also individual authors G a n y m e d e s , 197, 209

Heosphoros ( M o r n i n g Star), 54

gates of the Sun, 36, 37-38

H e r a , 60, 115, 137-38

gaze, erotic, 7, 193-225, 237, 258; and fantasies, 210—19, 221, 223; goddesses

and

Hermaphroditus, 199 H e r m e s , 38

mortal men, 196—219; Sappho's use to dis-

Herodotus, I33n32, 261

solve hierarchies, 7, 219-25, 250

Hesiod: amatory language, 18; personal ele-

gender: instability o f categories, fr. 16, 262

ment, 74; on right age for marriage, 13; on

63; and language, 249; loss o f identity, fan-

therapeutic effects o f poetry, 62, 71; time

tasies of, 215; and p o w e r relations, 2i2n65,

as enactor o f justice, 231; fr. 139, 2001133;

234- 35, 263; and Sappho's reputation, 1;

frs. 199-200, I33n32; Theogony, 16, 20, 47,

theory, 2

52, 55, 197, 204-7; Works and Days, 60

generalizing o f personal experience, 71-72,

Hesperos (Evening Star), 54 hetairai, hetaireia, 14; A l c a e u s ' political, Ii4n5,

>23, 143 genitalia, female, imagery of, 102-8

156; erotic associations,

G e r n e t , Louis, 87

Sappho's circle as, 14, 15, 17-18, 114, 115,

gesture: ceremonial, 75; sexual import, i3on2i

17-18,

i2in3o;

1 5 4 - 5 5 , 2 3 5 , 247

glukupikros (bitter-sweet), 20-21

hetairistriai (women homosexuals), 130

goddesses: epiphanies, 71, 245-46, 250: and

heterosexuality: lesbiazein used of, 129; Sap-

y o u n g men,

193-225;

see also individual

names and under H o m e r gods: comparison with, 31, 32-33, 100-101,

p h o and, see daughter, Sappho's;

mar-

riage, Sappho's apparent hierarchies: age, in h o m o s e x u a l relations, 7,

162, 167; encounters with, 59-60, 63, 71:

226-32; gaze and, 7, 219-25, 250; gender,

h u m a n / d i v i n e and m a l e / f e m a l e hierar-

and apostrophe, 7, 233-47; m a l e / f e m a l e

chies, 202-10

and d i v i n e / h u m a n in conflict, 202, 203-

G o n g y l a , n 6 n i 2 , 121, 122

10, 224, 225; see also under eroticism

Gorgias, Helen, 62

Himerius, io8n58, 119, 153-54016

G o r g o , circle of, 115—16, 122

historicity: feminist theory a n d , 181, 192; pa-

Graces, 15, 16, 20, 57, 60, 120

triarchal discourse, 177

graffito from Stabiae, 228

Homans, Margaret, 1 8 4 ^ 6

greenness, 31, 32, 33

H o m e r , 77-110; A p h r o d i t e in, 15, 49; D i o -

Greimas, A . J., actantial model, 86

m e d e i a , 9 2 - 9 6 ; divine epiphanies, 59, 71,

gynocritics, 176

245-46, 250; e n c h a n t m e n t o f hearers, 6 2 63, 74; Eos, 4 8 - 4 9 ; epaoide, incantation,

habroles (luxuriance), 56, 57

61; "equal to the g o d s " , 31, 32-33; farewell

Hades, gates of, 3 7 - 3 8

scenes, i66n8i; fear as green, 32, 33; for-

Halperin, D a v i d , 179

mulae, 4, 33, 61; H e l e n myth, see H e -

H a r m o n i a , 204

len; imagery, 147-48; impersonality, 74; on

Havelock, Eric, 70, 7 2 - 7 3

p e r f o r m a n c e , I5in4, 155M4; public cul-

healing p o w e r o f poetry, 62, 71

ture as male, 91; S a p p h o ' s use of, 4 , 1 8 , 3 2 -

H e c t o r and A n d r o m a c h e , 33, 119, 133

33, 79-88, 89-109; similes, 83-84; w o m e n

Helen: A l c a e u s on, 87, 260, 261; H o m e r i c , 4,

in, 4, 85-86, 91

84-85, 9 i n i o , 196, 261-62; S a p p h o and, 7 9 - 8 8 , 9 7 - 9 8 , 105, 221-23, 224, 260, 2 6 1 -

Iliad: D i o m e d e i a , 9 2 - 9 6 ; Dios apate, 16, 17, 22, 63; e p i p h a n y o f

296

INDEX

hymns, 6 7 - 6 8 , 74, 152

Homer, Iliad (continued) goddesses, 71, 245-46, 250; g o d -

H y p e r i o n , 46

desses' snatching o f men, 196; H e l e n in, 84, 9 i n i o , 196, 2 6 1 -

lasion, 197, 209-10

62; M e l e a g e r story, 83; T e i c h o -

Ibycus, 21, 54, 123, 147; on force o f Eros, 15,

skopia, 97- 98

229

Odyssey, enchantment o f hearers, 74; goddesses, 71, 85-86,

196-97,

illiteracy and resistance to patriarchal culture, 188

(see also K a l y p s o : Kirke); Helen

illusion, 32-33, 73

in, 84-85;

imagery, male and female, 147, 148, 186

98-101,

Nausicaa

i68ngi,

episode,

i6gng6;

pas-

immediacy, dramatic, 240

sage o f suitors to land o f dead,

impersonation o f character in p o e m , 159

35 S 6 . 36—38, 45, 53; as so-

impotence o f h u m a n consorts o f goddesses,

lar metaphor, 37; women's role,

i95~g6, 197, 204n44, 205, 208, 216, 224;

8 5 - 8 6 , 91

lettuce and, 194, 200, 207

Homeric H y m n s , see under individual hymns

incantatory language, 3 - 4 , 58-75; epic poetry and, 61; examples in S a p p h o , 64 -70,

by name hom(m)osexualité, 178, 2 6 3 ^ 7

244; juncture of ritual and private, 7 3 -

homosexuality

75; language, 58-63; oral p e r f o r m a n c e ,

FEMALE: A n a c r e o n on, 128; anxiety, 31-32, 122, 123, 128; attitudes to, 126-29,

70-73, 75; techniques, (alliteration),

65-

66, 67-68, 6 8 - 6 9 , (assonance), 6 5 - 6 6 , 67,

143, 146; hetairai associated with,

(polysyndeton) 66, 69, (repetition) 66, 6 7 -

I2in30;

68, 68 -69, 69-70, (rhythm) 6 4 , 6 6 , 67, 6 8 -

initiatory

function,

120-

24; mutuality and reciprocity, 149,

6g, 701120, 74, 75; see also thelxis (enchant-

186-87, 242, 244, 246-47, 252-53,

ment) and under S a p p h o , WORKS

263^7;

pedagogic

role, 12, 247;

Incert. 16 (Lesbian fragment), 106

practice, evidence in S a p p h o for,

incest, 48, 49, 88

13, 60,

Indo-European mythology, 4 8 , 4 9 , 5 3 , i g g n 3 i

107, 108-9,

'3'~3 2 >

'4 2 >

144-45, '46—47; in Sappho's circle,

initiatory function, 120-24, ' 7 2 n i o 8

17-18, 60, 120-24; Sappho's feel-

institutional force, Sappho's poetry as, 5, 1 3 4 -

ings of, 122, 123, 132, 142 MALE: age o f lovers, 7, 135, 226-32; agonistic m o d e l , 186-87, 2i3n68, 246-47, 251-53, 2 6 3 M 7 ; ephebic poetry on,

35, ' 3 6 - 3 9 . '44, '47 intersubjectivity, 234-35,

242_43

Iragaray, Luce, 176-78, 182, i8g, 237; see also hom(m)osexualite\ parlerfemme

13; initiatory function, 122, 123-24;

irony, 230-31, 232, 250

passive, i 2 7 n i o , 2o6n4g; pedagogic

isos theoisin (equal to the gods), 31, 32-33, 100-

function, 12; Pindar on, 123, 136; poets', 123, 127; treatment o f y o u n g

i o i , 167 Istar, 54

men, 123-24, 144, 145-46 H o r a c e , 153, 154; scholiast to, 126

Jason, 197, i g g

horses, 35, 43, 4 4 - 4 5 , 147-48, 251

jealousy, 30, 31, 33

h u m a n / d i v i n e hierarchy, 202-10

J e r o m e , St., 1 3 3 ^ 1

H y l a s and nymphs, 199, 207

Joyce, James, I30n20

hymenaioi, 119, 151, 157

justice, erotic, 7, 226-32, 243-44

Hymn to Aphrodite, 15, 47, 200n3i; Anchises and A p h r o d i t e , 197, 207-9, 2 ' 6 ; Eos and

K a i m i o , Maarit, 160, 161

T i t h o n o s , 193-94

kalos inscriptions, I36n46

Hymn to Apollo, 63, 155

K a l y p s o , 47, 85, 196-97, 203-4, 205, 209

Hymn to Pan, 24

K e p h a l o s and Eos, 49, 197, 206n50, 2 1 2 - 1 5

INDEX

297

Kephalos son of Deioneus, 41, 43, 53

Madagascar, i72nio8

kharis (grace), 118-19

Madchenbund, Sappho's circle as, 12-13

Kirke, 62, 196-97, 204-5

Madchenpensional theory, 113, 120

Kleis, see daughter, Sappho's

magic, poetry as, 58, 61

Kleitos and Eos, 49, 50 -51, 52, 199

Magnesia, 45

Kolonos, 43

maidenhood, loss of, 134

tóma (sleep, drowsiness), 17, I2in2g

maiomai (search out by feeling), 25, 105-6

korai (statues), 1391156

makansmoi (wedding songs), 98 -gg, 168

Kratinos, 195

male world: and beauty, 135-36, 138: com-

Kristeva, Julia, 176, 181-82

petitive nature, 7, 60, 125, 137, 141, 149,

Kwakiutl mythology, 46

186; escape from, i g i , ig2; poets, Sap-

Kybele and Attis, 199, 207

pho as different from, 171-72, 185-88; selfimage, 200, 201; social groups,

Ii4ni5,

Lacan, Jacques, 176, 179

156, (see also symposia); subject position

lament genre, 172

study o f S a p p h o in relationship to, 257-63:

landscape, displacement of personal beauty

symbolic order, 189-90; women's under-

onto, 144, 219 language: amatory, 11-25, 7 1 " 7 2 ! f ° r choral and monodie poetry, 157, 158; female, 6 - 7 ,

standing comprehends, 94-g5, 96; see also homoeroticism, male and under sensuality and sexuality

176-77, 181-82, 189, 2 6 3 ^ 7 ; and gender,

mandinadhes (verbal competitions), i72nio8

249; ritualizing quality, 3 4, 58 -63; Sap-

marriage:

age at, 13, 136; brokerage, 100;

pho's dependence on mainstream, 186; see

nature of archaic, 133-34; Sappho's ap-

also formulaic language; incantatory lan-

parent, 122- 23, 127; Sappho's circle as

guage

preparation for, 118-20, 123, 134-35, '44~

Lattimore, R., 82 Leda, 105 lepidus/lepos, 57 "Lesbian", history o f English word, 129-30 lesbiazein, 129 lethe (forgetfulness), 45 lettuce, 40, 194, 195, 200, 207 Leucadian rock, 35-45, 53, 1951110 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 47, 86, 261 Lewis Painter, skyphos by, 212-15 limb-loosening (lusimelés), 20, 33, 140 Linus lament, 70n20 literacy, transition to, 185, 192 Lobel, Edgar, 2

45; in Sparta, 1 3 4 ^ 6 , 1 3 6 ^ 4 8 , i3gn6o; tyrants', 87-88 Martial, 129-30 mathetriai (pupils), 114, 116, 117 Maximus of Tyre, 14, H5n8, 155 M e d e a , 197, 199, 204 . Meidias Painter, ig5ni3, 215 Melampous, 37n7, 50-51 Meleager (Homeric figure), 83 Meleager (poet), 24-25 melon (clitoris), 104 M e m n o n , 214 memory, 72, 117, 237, 246, 255; in oral culture, 188, 189-go

Longinus, On the Sublime, ig2n65, 2 5 8 - 5 9 ^ 1

Menander, 38-3g, 40, 41, 55

Lord, Albert, 61

Merkelbach, Reinhold, 12-13, 15, 18, 71, 113

Loiiys, Pierre, I2gni7

metrics, choral and monodic, 157-58

love, see Eros; eroticism, homosexuality

Middle Eastern women's oral poetry, 1 8 4 ^ 8

Lucian, I2gni8, 131

militarism, resistance to, 82, 92- 96, 245-46,

lusimeles (limb-loosening), 20, 33, 140

260, 262-63

luxuriance (habrotes), 56, 57

mimesis, 70, 75, 118, igi

Lydia, members o f circle from, 119, 120

minority groups' consciousness of o w n and

lyric poetry, archaic: epic/lyric distinction,

majority culture, g4-g5, 96

74, 92; performance, 91; see also chorus,

moisopolon oikia, 113, 155

lyric and individual poets

molpe (song dance), 153

298

INDEX

monodic poetry, 5, 141-42, 150-72; Suda on Sappho's, 152-53, 170, 171 moon, imagery of, 148 mosaic, Porta Maggiore basilica, Rome, I26n3 multiple points of view, Sappho's, 94, 100, 108 Mulvey, Laura, 211, 2i8n83 Muses, 15, 60; Sappho as tenth, 125-26, 248 music, 58, 67, 115, 117-18 mutuality, erotic, 5,186-87,225, 234. 235, 247> 250, 255ni5; fr. 1, 7, 55, 149, 243-46; fr. 94, '49. 237. 242 mythology: conflation with reality, 72; on death of Sappho, 3, 29, 35-57, 126; of goddesses and younger men, 193 -225; IndoEuropean, 48, 49, 53; 1991131; revision with sexual image, 105; see also individual myths narcissism, 135, 211 Nausicaa, 98-101, i68ngi, 1691196 Navajo Indians, i72nio8 Near Eastern effeminacy, 200, 201 neologisms, Sappho's, 20-21 neoteric poets, Roman, 57 Nestor, 37 Nonnos, 214 norms, alternative cultural, 6—7, 184—85, 187 88, 190-91, 192, 233-34 Nossis, Ii6ni5, 180 Nugent, Georgia, 178-79 numphë (bride/clitoris), 102-3 nymphs, Hylas and, 199, 207 Ocean, shores of, 35-36, 41, 45, 53 Odysseus, 85, 196—97, 204-5; s e e Homer, Odyssey Oedipus resolution, 211 olisbos (artificial phallus), 131 Onesimos (vase painter), 199 oral cultures: exchange and marriage patterns, 86; memory, 188, 189-90; transition to literacy, 185, 192; women in, 184, 188-89, '89~90 oral tradition, 3-4, 58-75, 77-110; didactic poetry, 74; formulaic language, 71-72; gods, encounters with, 59-60; incantatory language, 61, 74, 75; lyric poetry, 72-73, 74, 92; paideutic effect, 70, 72-73; performance, 70, 72-73, 74, 75, i5in4, i55n24;

women's, 183, 184-85, 189-90, 192; see also epic poetry Orion, 49, 50, 51-52, 197 Ortheia, cult of Artemis, 140, 147 other: "playing the other", 191; and self, see subject positions Ovid, Heroides, 126, 127 Oxyrhynchus Papyri, 56, 126, 127 Page, Denys, 2, 11, 13, 15, 152; on fr. 1, 230-31; on fr. 16, 79; on fr. 31, 30-31, 168; on fr. 94, 107 paideutic effect, see pedagogic function Palaiphatos, 195 Palatine Anthology, see Anthologia Palatina Pandareos, daughters of, 50 Panyassis, 198, 216 Paris, 196, 200n33, 222 -23, 224> 260, 261 Parker, Holt N., i70-7ini03 parler femme (speaking [as] woman), 176-77, 182, 189, 263^27 Parry, Milman, 61, 7 5 ^ 3 parlheneia, 17111105, 185-86; see also under Alcman parthenoi, Sappho's group as, 114 patriarchal culture, women's resistance to, 184, 188-89, 245-46 pedagogic function: homoeroticism, 12, 247; oral performance, 70,72-73; Sappho's circle, 114, 117-20, 123, 134-35, '44-45> i 8 5 ; Sappho as schoolmistress, 1, 13, 30, 113, 120 peitho (persuasion), 59 Penelope, 85, 86 penis envy, 31-32, 34 performance: Alcman's poems, 153, 155-56, 171; anthropological study, 172; choral/monodic, 5, 118, 141-42, 150-72; communal context, 6, 240—41; epithalamia, 151, 154, 159-60, 170; H o m e r on, I5in4, I55n24; hymns, 152; incantatory effect, 70-73, 75; lyric designed for, 91; mimesis, 75; oral poetry, 70, 72-73, 74, 75, I5in4, I55n24; performative nature of Sappho's poetry, 138-42; poet/audience relationship, 237, 240-41, 256-57, 263; uniqueness of each, 189; see also chorus, lyric; dance; incantatory language; music; and under Sappho, WORKS

INDEX

p e r s o n a / p e r s o n distinction, 13, 26-34,

I2®>

139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 159 Phaethon, 35, 45-53, 197, 205; P h a e t h o n /

299

p o w e r strategies, women's oral p o e t r y and, i84n38 • Praxilla, 105050, 170, I7ini05, i72nio7, 218

A d o n i s / P h a o n parallelisms, 4 0 , 4 5 , 4 6 , 5 2 ,

prayer formula, 92—93

'95

private and public discourse, 3 - 4 , 5; juncture,

phallus:

artificial, 131; control of, 202-10,

5. 63-64, 70-71, 73-75, 101-8, 123, 125-42, •43-49; private, 9 1 - 9 2 , 144; public, 6, 91,

2i2n65, 213 Phaon: P h a o n / A d o n i s / P h a e t h o n parallelisms,

128, 138-42, 171-72

40, 45, 46, 52, 195; A p h r o d i t e and, 40, 45,

propemptika, 1 6 5 ^ 9 , 166

53-55, 193, 195; old man in Lesbian myth,

Propp, Vladimir, 86

57; Sappho's alleged love for, 29, 35, 38,

Proust, Marcel, 1291117

40, 122-23,

psychoanalytic approach, 176

I26,

>27, 193; solar theme o f

ptera, pteruges (wings), 102, 103, 1041145

myth, 53

ptoami (of bewilderment), 23-24, 30-31, 64

philosophy, 79

Ptolemaios C h e n n o s , 40-41, 45, 53, 57, 92ni6

Philostratos, 115, 116, 153 Pindar:

amatory language,

18, 21, 22-23,

public and private discourse see under private

123, 136; e n c o m i o n for T h e o x e n u s , 22- 23,

pur (fire, fever), 24

136, i 6 g n g 6 ; ephebic poetry, 18, 22-23,

Pylos, 37

136, i69ng6;

first-person

singular/plural

use, 161; on incantatory magic o f poetry,

refrain, choral, 151114

61; on Jason and M e d e a , 199; metrics,

regeneration myths, 47—52

158041; partheneia, 17111105, 185; perfor-

repetition, 66, 6 7 - 6 8 , 6 8 - 6 9 , 6 9 - 7 0 ; see also

mance, 153, 157036; Sappho's fr. 16 sim-

deule

ilar in structure, 166; time as enactor o f

reported speech, 256

justice, 231

resistance to dominant culture, 184, 188-89,

Pirithoos, 204n44 Plath, Sylvia, xiii Plato: cave, 177-78; Charmides, 136; on h o m o -

245-46; see also militarism rhythm, 64, 66, 67, 6 8 - 6 9 , 70> 74> 75 Ribichini, S., 200, 201-2, 207

sexual relationships, 2i3n68; Leges, 156,

Rig-Veda, 48, 49, 53, 1 9 9 ^ 1

185; Pkaedrus, 198; Republic, 55, 177-78; on

ritual: competition, 60; context o f S a p p h o ,

Socrates, 136; Symposium 130, 179

3—4, 111-72; educative function, 185; ele-

Plato C o m i c u s , 206-7

m e n t in S a p p h o ' s language, 3 - 4 , 58-63;

"playing the other", 191

epic poetry based in, 61; in fr. 2, 15-17, 63,

Pleistodike, 1161113, 122

152, 165, 219; lyric chorus a n d , 118; pri-

pluralistic voice, first-person, 6, 155, 160-64,

vate and public functions, 6 3 - 6 4 , 73-75;

165-66, 171 Plutarch, 117, 130-31, 250 P M G 869 (folksong), 189 poets, w o m a n , 92ni6; see also individual names political associations, male, 11405, 156, 2 5 2 -

verse forms, 60, 67—68, 165; see also cult, religious rock: hard (skuros/skiros), 42, 43; see also Leucadian Rock; W h i t e R o c k R o m e : Porta M a g g i o r e basilica, I26n3

53 polysyndeton, 66, 69

sacred/secular relationship, 60

Poseidon, 43, 44

salons, French, 154, 171

positionality, 202, 203, 211

sapling, image of, 134, 148

pothos, 17, 20, 106, I3in26, 164070; see also

" S a p p h i c " : history o f English w o r d , 129

desire p o w e r relations: and gender, 2i2n65, 234-35,

S a p p h o , WORKS fr. 1: Aphrodite's role, 15, 55, 62, 63,

263; in h o m o s e x u a l relationships, 246-47,

71, 220, 226-32, 245-46, 250;

252-53, 263n27; Sappho's era and, 248

apostrophe, 234, 243-46; auditory

INDEX

300

fr. 22, n 6 n i 3 , 170, 219, 220-21, 253-54

S a p p h o , WORKS, fr. i (continued) emphasis, 1391156; conventional f o r m ,

fr- 23, 1 3 9 ^ 6 , 193m, 219

152; incantatory quality, 62, 6 3 -

fr. 24a, 161

64, 6 7 - 6 8 , 72, 244; irony, possible,

fr. 27, Ii4n3, ^ 3 7 ,

230 -31, 232, 250; on justice in love,

fr. 30, Ii4n3, 1 3 4 ^ 7 , 157, 158, 161, 1 6 5 ^ 9

7, 226-32, 243-44; and militarism,

fr. 31, 29-34; androcentric criticism, 30,

92-96,

245-46;

on mutuality

of

99, 100; biographical fallacy, 2 9 -

eroticism, 7, 55, 149, 243-46; per-

34; context o f Longinus'

f o r m a n c e , 152, 153, 157, 164, 170;

tion, 258~59n2i; as describing cri-

011 p o w e r o f Eros, I2in29; private

sis o f homosexual anxiety, 3 1 - 3 2 ,

quota-

and public aspects, 63-64; reinter-

122, 123, 128; as enkomion, 169; as

pretation o f Homer, 92-96; repeti-

epithalamium, 22, 691119, 167 68;

tive deute, 164-651173, 231, 232; re-

" e q u a l to the g o d s " , 31,32 -33,100

ported speech, 256; " S a p p h o " in,

101, 167; Florentine fragment, 22:

153, 220; on Sappho's circle, 114,

gaze, 219-20, 258; illusion, 33; in-

1211131; textual transmission, 249;

cantatory effect, 58, 62, 6 4 - 6 7 ; on

thelxis, 62, 244; w o m a n as subject,

jealousy?, 3 0 , 3 1 - 3 2 , 3 3 ; and O d y s s e u s

244

and Nausikaa, 98-101; p e r f o r m a n c e ,

fr. 2, 15; fr. 96 parallels, 165; language and imagery, 57, 101, 107-8,

fr -

157, 158, 161

I2in2g,

167-69, 170; on power o f Eros, 132, 229ni2; as private p o e m , 152; sub-

1391156,148; p e r f o r m a n c e , 164,170,

ject positions, 257-59; topoi,

I7ini03; ritual aspects, 15-17, 63,

22 - 24; visual emphasis, 1391156,219-

152, 165, 219; thelxis, 62

20, 258

5, 55-56- ' 6 i , 165-66, 170, 187

fr- 34. ' 4 «

fr. 6, 161

fr. 36, 25, 106

fr. 7, 187

fr. 38, 24, 161

fr. 15, i66n83, 187

fr. 42, I04n45

fr. 16, 79-88; abstraction, 79, 82, 83, 84, 97; biographical

fallacy, 141;

on

brightness, 23; epic influence, 75n33, 193m; gaze, 221-25; generalization

fr. 44,14,114113,134n37,139056; epic theme, 33. 75 n 33> " 9 .

'93nI;

language,

158; p e r f o r m a n c e , 151114 fr. 47, 62, 70n20, 121, i 6 g n g 6 ; o n p o w e r o f

o f personal experience, 72; on He-

Eros, 24, 59, I2in2g

len, 7 9 - 8 8 , 9 7 - 9 8 , 1 0 5 , 2 2 1 - 2 3 , 2 2 4 >

fr. 48, 17, 24, 25, I2in2g

260, 261-62; and male culture, 9 6 -

fr. 49, Ii4n3, I2in2g, I2in3i, 132

98, I4in6g, 147-48, 259-63; per-

fr. 51, 101

formance,

fr 55.

151, 152, 166-67,

on p o w e r o f Eros, 121M9;

19,

>7°; pub-

lic and private discourse, 64, 72; resistance to militarism, 82, 260,

n

9n24

fr. 57, 62, Ii5n8, n g n 2 3 , i66n83 fr- 58' 23, 5 6 - 5 7 , H4n3, 194, 224ng7; perf o r m a n c e , 169, 170

263-64; on S a p p h o ' s circle, I2in3i,

fr 65, 153

I23n36; structure, 79, 82, 80-82;

fr. 68a, i66n83

subject positions, 259, 261-63;

fr. 70, Ii5n8

v '~

sual emphasis, 1 3 9 ^ 6 , 2 2 1 - 2 5 ; w o m e n

fr. 71, i i 5 n 8 , i66n83

in active role, 79, 86-87, 88, 259,

fr. 81, n g n 2 3 , 2 i g

260, 2 6 1 - 6 3

fr. 81b, 101

fr. 17, Ii4n3, 1 3 9 ^ 6 , 165, 170, 193m

fr. 82, 141

fr. 19, 161

fr. 92, 219

fr. 20, i66n83

fr. 94: apostrophe, 234,237-43; d e a t h wish,

fr. 21, 161, i 6 g n i o o , 170

ig, 147, 239-40; on h o m o s e x u a l

INDEX

practice, 107, 1311126, 144, 146-47; imagery, 101, 219; incantatory effect, 7i;and lament genre, i72niio; mutuality of eroticism, 149, 237, 242; and Nausikaa story, 100101; pedepomen, 251167; performance, 161, 163-64, 170, 237; pothos enigma, 17, I3in26, 1641170; on power of Eros, I2in2g; private and public aspects, 71, 152, 237; on Sappho's circle, 17,1211131, 1231136; Sappho's name, 153; third-, second-, and first-person, 161, 163-64, 237, 240-41 fr. 94 D. (52 B.), possible ascription to Sappho, 21-22 fr. 95, 19, 1161113, 170, i72nno, 220 fr. 96: agonistic model of culture, 141, 162; Alcman compared, 140, 141, 162; amatory language, 24; displacement of beauty onto landscape, 219; gaze and identification, 219, 220; on gods, 56, 162, 165; imagery, 101, 148, 219; incantatory effect, 71; and lament genre, i72nno; mutuality of desire, 149; performance, 152, 161-63, 170; on Sappho's circle, 114113, ngn24, 1231136; subject positions, 167, 254-55: visual emphasis, 139^6, 219, 220 fr. 98b, 1231135 fr- 99; ' 3 ' fr. 102, 17, 70n20, 144, 159 fr. 103, Ii6ni3 frs. 104-17, see epithalamia, Sappho's fr. 121, 13, 161 fr. 122, 219 fr. 126, 14, 17, H4n5, I2in30 fr. 128, 57 fr. 130, i6gng6; power of Eros, 15, 19, 21, 59, I2in2g, 140 fr. 131, H5n8, ngn23, I2in3i, 123^6, i66n83 fr. 132, I23n25, 131, 148 fr-

'33. '53 fr. 133a, i66n83 fr- '37, '59 fr. 140a, 57, 161, 194-95, 224; as cult song, 165, 195, 198; and lament genre, 69-70, 172; performance, Ii4n3,

301

152, 154» l 6 l > i 6 5 . >70 fr. 140b, 70n20 fr. 141, i34n37, 155 fr. 141b, 134 fr. 142, 14, Ii4n5, I2in30, 158 fr- '43. ' 5 8 fr. 144, H5n8, i66n83 fr. 147, 161 fr. 150, 14, 113112, I38n54, 155, 161 fr. 153, 114113 fr- '54. 63 fr. 155, i66n83 fr. 160, I38n54, 154-55, '7°; o n Sappho's circle, 14, Ii4n5, I2in30, I2in3i, •54^55 fr. 166, 105, ig3ni fr. 168, 70n20 fr. 169, 14 fr. 178, 1661183 fr- ' 9 4 57 fr. 211, 40, 53 fr. 213, Ii5n8, I22n32, i66n8o, i66n83 scents, 1391156 schoolmistress, Sappho as, 1, 13, 30, 113, 120 sculpture, I39n56 Scylla and Charybdis, 85 86 seeming, 258 segregation of women, 5, 34, gi-g2, g6, 128, 133, 134, 139, 248; and cultural autonomy, 183, i84n38, 188, 236 Selene and Endymion, 193, 194, 224 self and other, see subject positions self-correction, 105 semiotics, 176, 182-83 Semonides, i33n33, 134^6, 137 sensuality and sexuality: affirmation of young women in Sappho's circle, 128, 134, 1363g, 144, 147; ancient attitudes to Sappho's, 126-27; appreciation/appetite distinction, 132-33, 136; diffused, 217, 218; gestures, I30n2i; imagery, 102-8; male attitudes to, 133, 135-36, 137, 138; male control of women's, 89-90, 225; White Rock and myths of, 43-46; see also eroticism; homosexuality; mutuality, erotic Shakespeare, William, "Th'Expense of Spirit", 34 signs, Lévi-Strauss on, 261 similes, 83-84, 148

302

INDEX

Simonides, 2 0 1 1 4 0 , 1 7 1 x 1 1 0 5 , 1 8 5 Sirens, 62, 85 Skiron, myth of, 42 Skironites, myth of, 43 skolia, 1 5 7 , 1 7 1 x 1 1 0 5 skuros/skiros (hard), 42, 43 Skyphios, myth of, 4 3 - 4 4 Snell, Bruno, 5 , 2 2 , 7 4 - 7 5 , 8 3 Snyder, J. M., 152, 168 social context, Sappho's, 3 - 4 , 8 7 - 8 8 , 1 2 5 - 4 2 , 1 4 3 - 4 9 , 2 6 3 ; see also segregation socialization, lyric chorus and, 185 Socrates, 136 Solon, 13, 231 song: folk-, 143, 144, 189; as performance art, 189; popular, 20, 21 Sophocles, Trachiniae, 62 space: distances in Sappho's poetry, 242, 255, 256; sexual politics of public and private, 90; women's desires as not located in, 242 Sparta, 1 1 8 , 1 3 0 - 3 1 , 1 3 4 1 1 3 6 , i36-37n48, i39n6o speaking [as] woman, see parlerfemme Stabiae, graffito from, 228 stars, 51, 148 slilnuovo lyric, 18 Stobaeus, 13 stock characters, i66n83 Strabo, 39, 41 Strato ofSardis, 1 4 2 ^ 2 structural amnesia of oral cultures, 188 structuralist analysis of myth, 2 0 0 - 2 0 2 subject positions, 2 4 8 — 6 4 ; alternative, in women's literature, 6 - 7 , 1 8 4 - 8 5 , 1 8 7 - 8 8 , 1 9 0 9 1 , 1 9 2 ; elision, 2 3 7 , 2 4 2 , 2 5 3 - 6 3 ; women as subject, 7 , 7 9 , 8 6 - 8 7 , 88, 2 2 5 , 2 4 4 , 2 6 0 ; see also domination subjectification of addressee by apostrophe, 236-37

Suda: on Anacreon, 127; on monodic poetry by Sappho, 152-53, 170, 171; on Sappho's circle, Ii4n4, 1 1 6 , 1 1 7 , I2in3i; on Sappho's sexuality, 1 2 3 ^ 5 , 126, 127 sun: imagery, 1 4 8 ; myths, 3 6 , 3 7 - 3 8 , 4 5 - 5 3 sunzux (partner), 115, 122 surroundings, displacement of personal beauty onto, 144, 219 Sarya (Vedic sun-god), 48 sweat, 2 3 - 2 4 , 3 0

symbolic system: feminine, Sappho's circle's, 182-83;

Sappho's place in masculine,

189-

9° symposia, I5in4,

170, 191,

252-53

Tatian, 92m 6 Telesilla, 1 1 6 , 1 3 8 ^ 4 , I 7 2 n i 0 7 telessai/telesthen (accomplish, be accomplished), 55-56 text of Sappho, state of, 249 Thebes: initiatory rites, 123 tlielxis (enchantment), 5 9 , 6 0 , 6 2 - 6 3 , 6 3 - 6 4 , 67, 72, 74, 2 4 4

Themistios, io8n58, I 2 6 n 8 Theocritus, Epilhalamium of Helen, 17, 162; Idylls II, 22, 23, 62, 71; Idylls VII, 228 Theognis, 20n40, 228; ephebic collection, 1 3 , 1 6 - 1 7 , 1 8 ; on force of love, 2 3 - 2 4 , 2 5 , 229

Thera, 123, 131 Theseus, 42, 43, 199 Thesmophoria (festival), 200, 201, 210 Thetis, 197, 204 thiasos, 14 Thorikos, 43, 53 time: distances in Sappho, 241, 254, 256, 259; justice of, 231 Tithonos, 20

47, 49, 5 0 n 6 i , 56, 1 9 3 - 9 4 ,

'97. 2°4>

n

5 47 topoi, 3, 13, 19 -20, 72, 228 29 transition, social, 8 7 - 8 8 Treu, Max, 11, 18 "Trostgedichte", i 7 2 n n o troubadour poetry, 18 Turyn, A., 18, 19 tyrants, social transition under, 8 7 - 8 8 underworld, passage to, 3 6 - 3 8 , 4 5 , 5 3 U§as (Vedic goddess of dawn), 48, 1 9 9 ^ 1 vase paintings and inscriptions: Adonis and Adonia, I95ni3, 198, 217; ephebic inscriptions, 25, 1 3 6 ^ 6 ; erotic gaze, 199, 21215; female homoeroticism, 131; Meidias Painter, I95ni3, 215; Sappho depicted, I 53 nl 5> '92165; women reading, 185 Venus, planet, 54 Vernant, J.-P., 8 7 - 8 8 voyeurism, 211

INDEX

war, world of, see militarism weakness, feminine, 33-34, 94, 95, 96 wedding songs, see epithalamia; hymenaioi; makarismoi White Rock, myth of, 35-57; Aphrodite and, 53-55, 57; boundary of consciousness, 45, 53; and death of Sappho, 29, 35-45, 126, i95nio; leaping from, 38-41, 53, 57: in Odyssey, 35-36, 36-38, 45, 53; and sexual relief, 40, 43-46 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von, 29 -30, 1291117

303

wings (pteruges), 102, 103 withdrawal of women, see segregation wolves, 42n29 women, see individual aspects throughout index Woolf, Virginia, i83n35 Xenophon, 229 Zeus: "daughter o f " , 48-49, 54; and White Rock, 40, 45; see also Dins apate Zuntz, Gunther, 12

Designer: Compositor: Text: Display: Greek: Printer: Binder:

Ina Clausen Humanities Typesetting & Graphics, Inc. 10.5/12.5 Monotype Baskerville Monotype Baskerville Ibycus, designed by Silvio Levy modified by Pierre A. MacKay Braun-Brumfield, Inc. Braun-Brumfield, Inc.