SOURCE: Walker, Jeffrey. “Argumentation Indoors: Alcaeus and Sappho.” In Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, pp. 208-49. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Walker considers the performance contexts of Alcaeus and Sappho's poetry, particularly the question of whether or not their audiences consisted chiefly of like-minded friends.]

Observe Alcaeus's nobility, brevity, and sweetness combined with forcefulness, and also his use of figures and his clarity, as far as that has not been ruined by his dialect; and above all the êthos of his political poems. Quite often if you were to strip away the meter, you would find political rhêtoreia.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Imitation 421s

And the [love] of the Lesbian [Sappho] … what else could it be but this, the technê erôtikê of Socrates? … For what Alcibiades and Charmides and Phaedrus were to him, this to the Lesbian were Gyrinna and Atthis and Anactoria; and whatever to Socrates were his rival-artists [antitechnoi] Prodicus and Gorgias and Thrasymachus and Protagoras, this to Sappho were Gorgo and Andromeda; sometimes she censures them, and sometimes she cross-examines and uses ironies just like those of Socrates.

Maximus of Tyre, Orations 18.9

The first thing to say is that these statements cannot necessarily be taken as reliable, and indeed should be taken with many grains of salt. Alcaeus and Sappho were active in the early sixth century b.c., about five and a half centuries before Dionysius, and about seven centuries before Maximus.¹ Dionysius's reference to the difficulty of reading Alcaeus's archaic dialect (Aeolic) is an index of that distance. Both Dionysius and Maximus are, moreover, the inheritors of literary-biographical traditions that all too often seem to have evolved as fanciful mixtures of fact and fabulation, or as simple confusion, especially in the case of archaic poets about whom there was little documented testimony—and this is perhaps most true for Sappho.² Further, it might be argued that Dionysius and Maximus have projected onto the poets a sophistic, rhetorical-critical interpretive frame that is anachronistic or that is, in Donald Russell's words, “fundamentally not equal to the task of appraising” poetry.³

My argument in this chapter is, however, that Dionysius and Maximus probably have gotten it about right, even if there is a measure of the fanciful in what they say. Without a doubt their statements are fallible interpretive constructs rather than reports of documented fact or testimony; but we might also temper our skepticism by remembering that both of these writers certainly had access to more documents than we do now, including complete collections of the poets' poetry. The question, however, is to what degree their statements can be understood as reasonably persuasive metaphors, and that is the possibility I will pursue.

Both Alcaeus and Sappho can be thought to offer us a contrast to the more public kind of lyric represented by Pindar's epinikia, or by other kinds of choral and monodic song performed at city festivals, communal celebrations, or Panhellenic gatherings. Alcaeus very probably composed such poetry: Himerius mentions and paraphrases a paian to Apollo (Orations 48.10-11), “Menander Rhetor” mentions hymns to Hermes and Hephaestus (On Epideictic 149; see also Pausanias 7.20.4, 10.8.10), and there are extant fragments of hymns to Artemis, the Dioscuri, Athena, and Eros, as well as fragments of heroic narrative derived mainly from the Troy legend.⁴ We know too that Sappho's repertoire included epithalamia performed at wedding celebrations—which could be regarded as a sort of female counterpart to epinikia—as well as songs to be performed at religious festivals by choruses of girls whom she had trained, or possibly by herself in solo performance. Fragments of some of these survive. But both Alcaeus and Sappho were and are most famed for what looks like “private” poetry, that is, poems that seem to have been meant for performance in symposiastic settings or small gatherings: Alcaeus's “stasiotic” (civil war) and other poems addressed to the hetairoi, “companions” that belonged to his faction in a losing struggle with Pittacus the tyrant-sage, and Sappho's erotic poems addressed to the women of her circle, whom she addressed likewise as hetairai in the sense of intimate “friends.”⁵

However, the “private” or symposiastic lyrics of Alcaeus and Sappho also are embedded in the factionalized, turbulent society and politics of sixth-century Lesbos—Alcaeus's poetry quite obviously so, but Sappho's no less so. And when the poetry is viewed from this perspective, the rhetorical interpretive frames applied by Dionysius and Maximus acquire heuristic value and become much more intelligible and persuasive. For as Dionysius recognizes, Alcaeus's lyric poetry is indeed a form of rhêtoreia, “oratory,” offering argument and exhortation on ethico-political themes for his hetairoi. As for Maximus, we should probably discount his portrayal of Sappho's “art of love” as “Socratic,” if that suggests a strictly intellectual relationship and thereby masks the probable realities of her (and her companions') sexual practices. My focal interest here, however, is the other aspect of Maximus's portrait: Sappho as a sort of protosophistic figure. Maximus himself is probably best described as one of the “philosophical” sophists of the second century a.d. an itinerant performer who specializes in popular “talks” or “lectures” (laliai; dialexeis) on moral-philosophical themes and who (like Apuleius) likes to style himself a Platonist, though clearly his commitments are eclectic and nondoctrinaire.⁶ In setting up an equivalence between the Sapphic and Socratic circles, Maximus portrays Socrates as a sophist who belongs to the same professional category as his “rival-artists” Protagoras and Gorgias and who practices an art of discursive sophia with a circle of companions and intimates; and so Sappho too. This discursive sophia is the medium and instrument of a technê erôtikê, revolving around questions of who to love, and what, and why, and how. It is, of course, a stretch to think of Sappho as a “sophist” simply; there were, after all, no such things as “sophists” in her time. Maximus's image of her can be taken only metaphorically. But it is also true, as Plato's portrait of Protagoras suggests, that the sophists were the successors of the poets, and that the circles that formed around archaic poets were the precursors of the circles that formed around the sophists.⁷ In sum, the underlying model that Alcaeus and Sappho share, and that connects them (especially perhaps Sappho) to the sophists of the fifth and fourth centuries, is the deeply traditional cultural practice of symposiastic filiation and factional rivalry, such as we have seen already in the Theognidea.

To view Sappho through the metaphor of “sophist,” and Alcaeus through the metaphor of “orator” on political themes, is to view both as performers of argumentation and exhortation—but also as performers who, in their more or less symposiastic settings, address themselves not to the more heterogeneous civic audience of Pindaric epinikia but chiefly to circles of insiders. This implies, at least in theory, an argumentation that can presuppose a greater degree of homogeneity, and thus a greater range of tacit assumables that can simply be invoked and need not be defended or negotiated. The performer, the poet, is under less pressure to construct the enthymematic grounds of judgment through the development and amplification of argumentative topoi. The performer/poet is in principle given greater license simply to “express” and artistically enhance particular modalities of judgment, particular attitudes, particular ethical positions, particular “feelings,” with which the audience can be expected to identify already. The closed circle of the symposium, in sum, implies or can be taken to imply a setting for a version of lyric that more nearly corresponds to twentieth-century notions of “lyricality” as the dramatized expression of personal emotion, the rhetorical function of which is to reinforce or intensify the insider group's solidarity and adherence to their shared ethico-political and ideological commitments. As such, it would seem most suitable to a factionalized identity politics. But to say this is to speak in abstract principle only. Much depends, in the concrete instance of any particular act of poetic argumentation, on how much the circle is really “closed,” on how permeable its boundaries really are, on the degree to which the topics of discourse are open to contestation, and on how much homogeneity can really be presupposed.

Let us take up Alcaeus first.

ALCAEUS

As Anne Burnett has said, “Alcaeus sang for men whom he believed to be like himself, and his music was meant to ready them for action by reaffirming the unity and permanence of their common convictions.”⁸ In his performance of that role he has impressed most modern commentators as a political reactionary whose ideas and whose êthos cannot possibly be admired, though one can still appreciate the technical elegance and eloquence of his poetry. Denys Page's judgment of 1955 still seems definitive: “[w]e shall not judge that Mytilene lost a statesman of any good promise in one who struggled so long and so vainly against the stream of history. … All through his stormy life he had neither might nor right on his side. There is little to admire in the man except his poetry.”⁹

There is no need to be greatly concerned here with the details of Alcaeus's life, sparse and fragmentary as they are, but a very brief outline will be useful.¹⁰ Alcaeus, like Sappho, was a citizen of Mytilene, the chief city of Lesbos, a large island situated near what is now the western Turkish coast, adjacent to the Troad and the rich kingdom of Lydia. Mytilene was an important trading center through which the luxuries of Asia passed to the Greek West and especially to a Greek nobility increasingly concerned with refined consumption and sumptuous display. Alcaeus was a member of one of Mytilene's four aristocratic clans, one of which, the Penthilidai, had been the traditional rulers of the island up to the beginning of his adult life. The Penthilid rulers held the title of basileus, “king,” but seem to have had more the function of a supreme magistrate who governed in conjunction with an oligarchic council of the noble families. The Lesbian nobles apparently were intensely proud, competitive, and given to factional tensions and feuds. The Penthilidai, in turn, appear to have been fairly brutal: Aristotle says “they went about striking people with clubs” (Politics 1311b).¹¹ By 620 b.c, the tensions between the Penthilidai and the other nobles had produced an uprising of at least one of the clans, and finally the killing of the last Penthilid king, possibly in revenge for raping the wife of a certain Smerdis.¹²

What followed was a period of violent stasis in which the noble houses struggled with one another for control, a period that more or less coincides with Alcaeus's (and Sappho's) adult life and poetic career. Perhaps a few years after the Penthilid collapse, the fighting was suspended temporarily through an alliance of some sort and the setting up of one Melanchros as tyrant. Around 612, however, Alcaeus and his brothers conspired with Pittacus—then a newly emergent but marginal figure among the Mytilenean nobility, and apparently of non-Lesbian descent—to assassinate Melanchros and restore the old political order, intending most probably to seize the former Penthilid position for themselves. Pittacus accomplished the assassination, but another tyrant, Myrsilos, emerged in the ensuing instability. Alcaeus's faction appears at this point to have sworn oaths with Pittacus to eliminate Myrsilos and restore the rights of “the people” (damos), which for Alcaeus most probably meant the landholding citizens under noble “leadership.”¹³ Pittacus, however, broke his oath and went over to Myrsilos, with whom he seems to have shared power while driving Alcaeus and his fellow-plotters into exile. After Myrsilos's death (c. 590) Pittacus became sole ruler of Mytilene and subsequently married a Penthilid, possibly to form an alliance to bolster his position against the revenge-minded families of Alcaeus and Melanchros. Aristotle says (Politics 1285a) that Pittacus was appointed aisymnêtês, “mediator” (or elected dictator) by the Mytilenean assembly to put an end to the depredations of the exiled factions “led by Antimenidas and Alcaeus the poet”; tradition says that he ruled as tyrant or aisymnêtês for ten years and voluntarily relinquished power. Alcaeus spent most of his adult life reviling Pittacus in poetry, calling him among other things an oath-breaker, a “gobbler” of the city, “Paunch,” and the “base-born … tyrant of the gutless, ill-fated city” (fr. 70, 129, 348) and struggling fruitlessly to depose him and restore the old political order. Alcaeus seems to have suffered exile as many as three times, and may have spent time in Egypt, Thebes, and Sicily. In the end he may have been pardoned and permitted to return; he may have died fighting as a mercenary in a Lydian campaign.

Despite Alcaeus's hatred of him, Pittacus was in fact an astute, effective, and popular ruler, and was to acquire a quasi-Solonic reputation for being just—despite the fact that he had committed at least one murder on his way to power. Later tradition named him one of the “Seven Sages” of the Hellenic world. Once in power, he seems to have struck a protodemocratic accommodation between the dêmos and the traditional nobility, though (unlike Solon) he undertook no constitutional innovations.¹⁴ As Page has said, Alcaeus was on the wrong side of history. As a politician, he generally seems to stand for nothing but factional self-interest and vendetta, and nothing but the resistance of archaic aristocracy to the political and social changes that were underway between the seventh and fifth centuries b.c.

Alcaeus's stasiotic poetry is chiefly committed to reinforcing the solidarity of his faction and exhorting his hetairoi toward some course of action. This is perhaps most apparent in his so-called “ship of state” poems.¹⁵ Two fragments will illustrate the type:¹⁶

[FR. 208]

I do not understand the stasis of the winds:
for one wave rolls in from this side,
and another from that, and we in the middle
together with our black ship are carried
much distressed by the great winter storm;
for the bilge-water's about the mast-hold,
and all the sail is a tattered rag already,
with great gaping rents running down it,
and the anchors are slackening, and the [rudders]
..........with both feet holding fast …
in the coils; and this alone [saves]
me; the cargo [has fallen overboard]
… above …
.....[unreadable fragments of one more strophe]

[FR. 6]

This next wave comes on [like?] the preceding
[wind?], and it brings us much trouble
to bail the water, when it enters the ship's
...............Let us shore up [the ship's sides] with all speed,
and into safe harbor we shall run;
and let not fainthearted fear take hold
[of any of us]; a great [ordeal] stands clearly forth.
Remember the previous [distress];
now let every man be proven steadfast.
And let us not disgrace [with unmanliness]
our noble fathers [lying] beneath the earth
..........[fragmentary phrases from four more strophes]:
from fathers … our thymos … is like … quick … let us not … monarchia
… let us not accept …

As D. A. Campbell notes, fragment 6 contains the first known occurrence of the word monarchia, and the now illegible marginal comment on the papyrus shred from which it comes contains the word “Myrsilos.” Further, Heraclitus's comment on fragment 208 (Homeric Allegories 5), which says that 208 is about “Myrsilos's tyrannical conspiracy against the Mytileneans,” is immediately followed by the first words of fragment 6.¹⁷ So these fragments appear to belong together—perhaps in this order, though we cannot know—and both appear to belong to the period of Myrsilos's tyranny. A papyrus fragment of a first-century a.d. commentary to a passage that is now completely illegible says, “in the first exile when Alcaeus's party, having prepared a plot against Myrsilos … fled into Pyrrha to escape being subjected to justice.”¹⁸ This would seem to be the general context for 208 and 6.

While it is impossible to know exactly what was argued by the ruined poems these battered remnants have been salvaged from, it is clear enough that 208 and 6 are allegorical (as Heraclitus says) and that the allegory serves a hortatory function.¹⁹ Singing to his comrades in symposium, Alcaeus represents the political turbulence of the Mytilenean stasis as a dangerous winter storm at sea. The storm may also represent, more specifically, the latest reversal of fortune suffered by the failed conspirators, who have been outmaneuvered, confused, and overwhelmed by forces they cannot control. The ship in which Alcaeus and his faction ride—not really a “ship of state” but just “our boat”—is beset by waves and wind that threaten to destory it. The poet's exhortation to his hetairoi to shore up the ship and run for safe haven would seem to indicate a flight into exile. The “next wave” that is coming on in fragment 6 may be the tyranny of Myrsilos after that of Melanchros, or simply the latest round of trouble that besets the defeated faction. The invocation of “our fathers … beneath the earth” seems linked to notions of protecting one's patrimony, including the political privilege of a nobility that rules in council with a basileus, and to notions of resisting the erosion or cancellation of those privileges under what Alcaeus styles as monarchia, “one-man rule.” Every man must do his duty, hold his position, rouse his thymos, and meet the onslaught bravely.

The rhetorical function of this poetry clearly is to maintain the cohesion of the faction as a political and fighting force, at a moment when it is threatened with defeat and disintegration—a crisis that apparently was chronic for Alcaeus and his co-conspirators.²⁰ Pittacus's departure and switching of allegiance to Myrsilos, whether it occurred before or after fragments 208 and 6, was a major instance of the kind of rupture that had to be prevented if the group was to pursue its goals effectively. At issue, then, is an ever-present question of solidarity: Alcaeus must exhort his comrades to stick together and to persist, even in exile, precisely because their ability to continue doing that is in doubt.

The allegory functions as an enthymematic pistis by giving enhanced and memorable presence to a paradigmatic narrative that defines and evokes the proper “in-thymatic” response to the question at issue in the crisis situation that the poem is about. The allegory does this, in essence, by calling on the audience's tacit understanding of the emotive significance of the narrative and the proper or necessary ways of behaving in the scene that is described. Alcaeus's hetairoi, as the warrior-aristocrats of a maritime island-state, would be familiar with seafaring and with the meaning of a winter storm at sea; likewise, they would be familiar with the martial ethic of being “steadfast” in the face of danger. The ship-in-storm allegory thus fuses the audience's seafaring knowledge with its code of manly, soldierly behavior. The persuasive force of this allegorical fusion derives, in part, from the sheer evocativeness of amplified description, the accumulation of vivid details not all of which are strictly necessary to the argumentative import of the comparison. As in Pindar's mythical “digressions,” Alcaeus's detailed rendering effects a psychagogic transport of the listener into the scene and lends it an enhanced emotive resonance. Insofar as Alcaeus's listener has experienced such storms, and insofar as the poem's descriptive psychagogy—enhanced by rhythmic prosody and musical performance—brings him to a well-realized visualization, it is likely to bring him also to rehearsal of a visceral, habitual response: he knows where to put his hands and feet, and what to do. Further, the language of the description has (or would have had, for Alcaeus's companions) clear resonances with Homer, Archilochus, and other poets who likewise had invoked “sea-storm” imagery as figures for war and political strife.²¹ These resonances give authority to the poet's voice by way of a citational effect, and at the same time (and for the same reason) warrant his invocation of the sea-storm narrative as appropriate and reasonable in the present circumstance: this is how poetic sophia speaks and has spoken of such things.

That observation raises an important point. On one hand, the allegory may create a “surplus” of evocative effect through the accumulation of descriptive details that exceed the strictly comparative-analogical function that they may have as metaphor: to what, for example, does one refer the “gaping rents” in the tattered sail? Or the “coils,” bimblessi? This odd word may mean “ropes,” but also is etymologically related to bimblinon or biblinon, “made of biblos,” meaning strips of papyrus fiber (from which ropes or twine might have been made). But biblos also can mean a roll of papyrus paper, a “book”: in the midst of the storm, with waves washing over the deck, the speaker's feet (or the feet of the sail?) are somehow caught in bookish things, papyrus rolls, “and this alone saves me.” On the other hand, however, even while it opens up such wayward and sometimes charming channels of suggestion, the allegory and the psychagogic force of its descriptive rendering also closes off major lines of thought that might otherwise be possible. Insofar as Alcaeus's listener is fully beguiled by the description, is fully caught up in imagining the scene and projecting himself into it, or plays out possibilities of meaning within its terms, it becomes difficult for him to conceive in any other terms the circumstances that the poem in actuality refers to. The listener's mind is filled with this particular scenario; all others are excluded. Suppose that Alcaeus had not chosen the ship-in-storm paradigm as the basis of his allegory—but instead, perhaps, the paradigm of army in distress, such as one sees often in the Iliad, or possibly an Odyssean tale of extricating oneself from a catastrophe by means of unheroic but clever stratagems (e.g., Odyssey 14's account of being defeated in battle by the Egyptians, begging for mercy from the Pharaoh, and afterward living a prosperous life in Egypt). What exhortations, and what judgments, are potentially warranted in such a scenario but excluded from the one that Alcaeus has employed?

Page, in his account of fragment 6, observes that there are obvious inconsistencies (from a realist point of view) between the ship-in-storm scenario and Alcaeus's exhortations to manly valor. Those exhortations, as Page argues, are more appropriate to “the soldier on the eve of battle, or the morrow of defeat, not the storm-tossed mariner,” because the mariner has no choice. Unlike the soldier, he cannot retreat or surrender, cannot beg for mercy, cannot leave the boat, and can only weather the storm or drown. Page makes this argument to support the political-allegorical reading of this and other “ship of state” poems against a line of literalist interpretation that treats them simply as seafaring songs (so that one must imagine Alcaeus absurdly banging on his lyre and singing to his shipmates in the middle of a storm, while they contend with waves and wind and cargo washing overboard).²² But Page's argument can be turned another way. The fusion of the storm scene with the battlefield-style exhortation is not only an index of the poem's allegorical intent but also a means of filtering and limiting the choices available to the listener's reasoning. By leading his audience to perceive the battlefield-style exhortation through the filter of the storm scene, Alcaeus removes all options but one. Like storm-beset sailors, Alcaeus argues, “we” have no possible option but to stick together and keep fighting. Surrender is not a possibility, nor suing for peace, nor “leaving the ship,” since within the logic of the allegory all three are equivalent to certain death; tactical retreat to a “safe harbor” is permitted as a means of continuing the struggle and at the moment is the thing to do. Further, this option-reducing argument is reinforced by being fused with exhortations not to “disgrace with unmanliness our noble fathers lying beneath the earth.” To give up the struggle or “leave the ship” is to lose one's manhood and one's claim to noble status also, as one sinks beneath the waves of political change brought on by Myrsilos. Within the terms of Alcaeus's aristocratic ideology, this is a fate worse than death. As long as Alcaeus's companions remain persuaded that the seafaring allegory is the appropriate means of representing and interpreting their circumstances and is the appropriate filter for the battlefield-style exhortation to continued struggle—as long as this scenario fills their minds and they cannot imagine other possibilities—their enthymematic reasoning will keep coming back to the same conclusions and the stasis will go on.

Alcaeus's hetaireia, his symposium-group, was probably a leaky boat in more than one way. As I have noted already, it was leaky in the sense that it was constantly in danger of defection and dissolution. But it was leaky also in the sense that, even as it cohered, its boundaries were permeable and could be crossed by arguments of different kinds. The group certainly would have been aware of discourses other than its own—discourses that offered the very kinds of arguments that Alcaeus's poems seem meant to counteract.

Moreover, Alcaeus's poems were surely meant to be performed more than once, and they had the potential to be reperformed in other contexts and to circulate beyond his immediate circle. From this perspective, Alcaeus's “ship of state” and other stasiotic poems can be seen as a rhetoric of justification meant for potentially sympathetic audiences elsewhere. Alcaeus presents the course of action that he and his hetairoi have taken as the properly noble and heroic thing for manly men to do in the face of tyranny. For this reason Quintilian can say, centuries later, that “Alcaeus deserves to be awarded the golden plectrum in the part of his work in which he attacks tyrants, and even now contributes much to morals” (Institutio 10.1.63). But even in Alcaeus's time we can imagine that at least some of his poems could have been circulated in Mytilene and would have served as political propaganda, including his poems reviling Pittacus, just as Archilochus's invective poems against Lycambes and his family would have circulated in Paros as they caught on and were reperformed in various symposium gatherings.²³ Alcaeus's stasiotic and “ship of state” poems, in short, could have served to rally any groups who felt themselves unjustly deprived of their entitlements or oppressed by those in power. What the poems (or the remnants of them that we have) do not address, however, is the question whether the oppressor-enemy reviled in the poetry is in fact unjust; this point generally seems to be taken for granted. Nor does Alcaeus's poetry do much to construct an argument, so far as one can tell, about what constitutes just or unjust governance. Aside from reviling Pittacus for being a traitor to the faction and for lacking the qualities that define aristocratic status—thus producing such insult-epithets as “base-born,” polis-“gobbler,” “Paunch,” and so forth—the poetry that survives appears to offer no arguments at all about the actual quality of his (or for that matter Myrsilos's) rule.

Alcaeus, then, appears neither to have offered any strong argument to counter the opinions of those at Mytilene (and elsewhere) who thought that Pittacus's rule and his resolution of the stasis were just and wise; nor does Alcaeus appear to have attempted anything like bilateral accommodation. Whether his poems are meant only for the immediate circle of his hetairoi or for a more extended audience of like-minded aristocrats, he speaks primarily to those who can identify already with his sense of having been offended by a despicable regime, he demonizes the opposition, and he offers no counsel but an exhortation to fight on, as in this perhaps nearly complete poem (fr. 140) quoted by Athenaeus (Deipnosophistai 14.627a-b):

…
…
and the great hall gleams
with bronze, and for Ares all the ceiling is adorned
with shining helmets, down
over which nod white horsehair
plumes, for the heads of
men a glory; and bright bronze greaves
hang round and conceal
the pegs, defense against strong missiles,
and corselets of new linen
and hollow shields are thrown down on the floor;
by them are Chalchidean swords
and by them many belts and tunics also.
Of these there is no forgetting, since
we first and foremost have set ourselves upon this task.

Athenaeus, writing in the third century a.d., cites this poem in connection with a remark that “ancient” song-poetry could be an “incitement to bravery [andreia],” and adds that Alcaeus was “more warlike than is right” (14.626f-627a). Page's commentary notes Alcaeus's use of Homeric diction in his description of the weapons and armor—which are quite old-fashioned (e.g., bowl-shaped “hollow shields” and “Chalchidean swords” of bronze, not iron)—to invoke an archaic warrior ethic that is also not to be forgotten and that grounds the exhortation to the hetaireia's warlike “task.”²⁴ The hetairoi in symposium drink and sing, poetically surrounded by mythic fighting gear that seems to have been recently used and that is waiting to be taken up again by heroes as of old. The Homeric, mythic resonance endows the task at hand with an antique beauty and renders it a pleasant object of contemplation for the companionable men of Alcaeus's fighting band. Again, the “task” itself is taken as a given; the companions are sworn already and nothing remains but to fulfill the glorious work of honor.

Not all of Alcaeus's poems, of course, are stasiotic songs, and not all the stasiotic songs are devoted to that sort of exhortation. But in virtually every poem of which we have reasonably substantial fragments, Alcaeus, like Pindar, offers enthymematic arguments for his audience's judgment and response, and most typically amplifies the argumentative topics from which judgment is to be derived by means of mythico-narrative expansions. The mythos may be invoked, as in the previous fragments, as an allegorical screen through which to view and interpret present circumstances, or as a sort of proof by illustration or example, or both at once. Consider the following (fr. 38A).

Drink [and get drunk,] Melanippos, with me. Why suppose
[that when … eddying] Acheron's great ford
has been crossed you'll see the sun's pure light
[again]? Come, do not aim at such great things.
For indeed King Sisyphus Aeolus's son [supposed],
of all men being most thoughtful, [to master death?];
but even his cunning was ruled by fate, [and twice]
he passed over eddying Acheron, and a suffering
[was devised] for him to have by Kronos's son [the king, below](25)
the dark earth. Come, do not [hope for such a thing].
… while we are young if ever [now it is right]
[to bear] whatever of these sufferings [the god may give].
… the north [wind] …

The last, fragmentary phrase may actually be the beginning of another poem,²⁶ so it is possible that we have here a complete (though damaged) poem in twelve lines. It appears to belong to one of Alcaeus's periods of exile: he has “crossed over Acheron,” and like the dead he cannot go back. But the immediate frame for the poet's speech act more nearly resembles the paideutic-erotic setting of the Theognidea. Alcaeus counsels young, impatient Melanippos (“Darkhorse”) that now is not the time to attempt return: for now they should bear misfortune patiently and console each other over wine. If “the north wind” and the scattered words that appear to follow it in another fragment (38B) are in fact a continuation of this poem, we have some hint of what Alcaeus may be counseling Melanippos to do: “… the north [wind] … city … lyre … under the roof … share …”²⁷ The north wind suggests winter, a bad time for seafaring—or, metaphorically, for whatever action Melanippos might wish to undertake—and thus a time for sensible men to stay indoors and content themselves with shared companionship, wine, and song.

This poem invokes mythic narrative both as allegory and as proof by example. On one hand, by figuring exile as “crossing Acheron,” or in other words as death, the poem constructs an allegorical interpretation of the present situation that, as in fragments 208 and 6, limits the possible range of responses. If one accepts the notion that one is “dead,” at least for the moment, then there is no room for entertaining thoughts of “going back.” On the other hand, the admonitory tale of Sisyphus functions as an example that further “proves” and reinforces the inadvisability of bucking unpropitious circumstance. And of course Sisyphus's famous punishment is itself a metaphor for futile undertakings. For Melanippos to attempt now to “return” would be a Sisyphean exercise in futility: not only would he not regain what he has lost, but he would lose everything absolutely and irretrievably and would spend the rest of his existence in misery. (Sisyphus was able to return from death, temporarily, not by a heroic overthrowing of the ruling powers but by a clever trick: he arranged for his wife to omit his funeral rites, then told the underworld gods he had to go back and reprimand her; once back, he stayed until death came round again. It was this ruse, an act of hubris against the gods, that brought on Sisyphus' eternal punishment.) If we are to understand Melanippos's situation via the Sisyphean fable, we might say that he has cast his lot with Alcaeus's faction, and so for him the die is cast; he must now ride out his appointed fate. To attempt a Sisyphean return—which would be, in effect, to attempt some scheme or to cut a deal for himself alone—would be to renege on his commitments and thus to attempt to outwit destiny, which is a punishable act of hubris as well as an act of disloyalty to the group, which in this particular metaphoric framework seems to occupy the position of an underworld power. So, even as Alcaeus invites young Melanippos to put aside his dreams of going home and to settle down (for the time being) with wine and song and friends in shelter from the storm, the subtext of his argument also contains a subtle threat: stay with us, even on this side of Acheron, and like a manly man accept what “the god may give” or die forever.

It seems reasonable to infer that Alcaeus is making this sort of argument because Melanippos, or someone like him, is in fact thinking of returning—one way or another. Even if Melanippos is a fictive addressee figure, Alcaeus's argument works to maintain solidarity and commitment to the group by casting Melanippos's wishes into the category of the unthinkable and by reinviting him into the companionship of the hetaireia. As in fragments 208 and 6, likewise, the persuasive force of this argument largely depends on the listener's willingness to accept the allegorical construction and the example-myth as authoritative interpretations of the situation. And that willingness largely depends, in turn, on Alcaeus's authority as a speaker/singer of traditional sophia, and on the aesthetic appeal and psychagogic power of the mythical material as Alcaeus renders it in song. As long as this material seems authoritative, seems more or less to fit the situation, and fills the listener's mind, it becomes difficult to think of the situation in other terms.

I will consider one other poem (fr. 42), which is badly damaged but possibly (though not certainly) complete.

According to the tale, [because of] evil [deeds]
bitter [pain once came] to Priam and his sons, [Helen,]
from you, [and with fire Zeus destroyed]
holy Ilium.
Not so she that Aeacus's [noble] son,
[inviting] all the blessed gods to the wedding,
carried away from the [halls] of Nereus
an elegant maiden
to Chiron's house; [and he loosened the pure]
maiden's girdle; and affection [bloomed]
between Peleus and the best of Nereus's daughters,
and within a year
she bore a son, of demigods [the bravest,]
a blessed driver of chestnut horses.
But they perished for H[elen's] sake, [the Phrygians]
and their city too.

This poem apparently puts in play two legends: that of the marriage of Peleus (Aeacus's son) and Thetis—producing their demigod son, Achilles—and that of the rape of Helen, which brought destruction to the “Phrygians” (the Trojans) and their city. Two “marriages” or couplings are in contrast: one sanctified, and legitimate, and the other not. By portraying Thetis as an “elegant maiden,” parthenon abran, Alcaeus seems to place the sanctified-legitimate marriage within the framework of aristocratic guest-friendship and gift exchange. The adjective abra (or habra in the more “standard” Attic dialect) belongs to the family of words clustered around the name-notion of habrosynê, “luxury,” a central preoccupation of sixth-century aristocracy.²⁸ To describe Thetis the bride as abra, “elegant,” is in effect to define her as a refined, expensive delicacy and the marriage as an exchange of costly gift-goods cementing friendship between aristocratic houses (one of which, in this case, is actually a god's house). In contrast, the seduction and taking of Helen from her husband as stolen spoils is an act of hubris that violates the principles of such exchange, and so it brings divine retribution not only for the perpetrator but for his entire city.

Why is Alcaeus telling this tale? Page suggests that Alcaeus is offering an uncharacteristically moralistic argument about the differences between good and bad wives, a sort of didactic fable, perhaps in response to Stesichorus's famous (and vanished) poem of blame against Helen.²⁹ Burnett, on the other hand, has argued cogently that the poem is rather unlikely as a piece of moral didacticism and reads it instead as not about a comparison of wives or marriages but a reflection on the paradoxical waywardness of fate. The “good” marriage of Peleus and Thetis produces Achilles, who is in large measure responsible for the destruction of Troy, and dies there himself. In his view, all the characters in the Troy tale are caught in an unfolding tragic destiny that begins not only from the rape of Helen but also from a wedding attended and sanctioned by the gods: destruction has come as much from the good marriage as the bad by the inexorable working-out of destiny.³⁰ But this is to read the poem rather too much in a high new critical style, as if Alcaeus were Yeats, and it ignores the force of the final two lines as an enthymematic cap that lays admonitory emphasis on Troy's fate as punishment. And it is not Achilles the fallen hero that this poem invokes but Achilles the charioteer with his chestnut horses, Achilles the splendid warrior, Achilles the punisher.

It seems likely that this poem, even if complete, is part of some larger sequence (or a repertoire), the character of which can be surmised from another fragment (298) that also derives material from the Troy legend. This fragment, though longer than fragment 42, is clearly not complete. It consists of twenty-seven more or less legible lines (though the left-hand edge is damaged) followed by a scattering of words from the beginnings of nineteen other, mostly obliterated lines. Most of it narrates the rape of Cassandra within a precinct of Athena during the sack of Troy, and the consequences of Athena's anger. But the opening segment invokes the topos of “shaming” someone who commits injustice and declares that “we must put [a noose] around his neck and stone him [to death].” The explicit point of the narrative is that it would have been better for the Greeks to have punished the rapist (Locrian Ajax), because the unappeased anger of Athena led to the destruction of much of the Greek fleet in a storm during the return from Troy. Finally, among the one-word scraps the word “son of Hyrrhas,” meaning Pittacus, appears in the fragment's penultimate line. The point would seem to be that Pittacus, like Ajax, deserves to be punished for some crime that he has committed, and that if the punishment is not exacted some divine vengeance is likely to fall on Mytilene. Burnett remarks upon this fragment that “[g]nomic argument is abandoned [after the first few lines] for pure lyric discourse” as “[r]hetoric gives way to narrative.”³¹ But surely the narrative, as in Alcaeus's other fragments, and as in Pindar, is an integral part of the poem's enthymematic argumentation and a major source of whatever persuasive, rhetorical power it may have.

Let us now step back to fragment 42. While it is impossible to know just what specific circumstance Alcaeus is arguing about in this poem, its focus on sanctioned and unsanctioned marriages and on the divine retribution visited on the latter makes it at least possible that what is at issue is Pittacus's marriage to a Penthilid.³² If so, the point would seem to be that Pittacus—a person of foreign extraction marrying into the former ruling clan of the Mytilenean aristocracy, as part of a strategy to seize and consolidate tyrannical power—has entered into an unholy, unsanctified union that is likely to provoke divine anger and so bring disaster to the city. Underlying this argument, and warranting it, is a tacit assumption or set of assumptions to the general effect that, because Pittacus derives from “foreign” aristocracy and not from the traditional aristocratic clans of Mytilene, he therefore is an outsider with no right to marry in and for that matter no right to rule the city; since he has no right, his marriage to a Penthilid woman cannot be seen as occurring within a legitimate gift exchange framework, and therefore must be understood, along with his “gobbling” of the city, as a hubristic taking analogous to the rape of Helen (as well as, perhaps, the rape of Cassandra). If so, the Mytilenean nobles are or should be cast into the role of Homeric heroes at war with Troy. But this argument can have political effect, of course, only if Mytilenean audiences outside Alcaeus's circle are willing to make or accept such assumptions about Pittacus's marriage or to resent him from the start as an arriviste usurper.

In another fragment of identical strophic form (283), Alcaeus takes up the same general theme, focusing instead on the seduction of Helen and concluding again with reference to the destruction of the Trojans; the fragment may include a reference to Achilles' role in the slaughter. Page makes the point that “[t]he Lesbians had a more or less proprietary interest in the Homeric monuments of the Troad; and among the holiest of these was the tomb of Achilles.”³³ The deeds of Achilles were, for Mytilenean nobles, a favorite patriotic theme. It is possible that Alcaeus composed and performed songs about Achilles and the Troy legend generally as a sort of miniaturized version of bardic storytelling and that his symposiastic audience(s) would have delighted simply in hearing these tales retold. But the evidence of fragment 298, on the rape of Cassandra, suggests otherwise. Rather, it appears that Alcaeus is invoking—and amplifying, in greater or lesser detail—the materials of traditional epic legend in the service of lyric argument. The legendary materials function as allegorical screens for interpreting present events, as exemplary “proofs” for gnomic generalizations, and as a source of psychagogy. Insofar as the materials are vested with authority as the discourse of traditional sophia, Alcaeus's interpretations of events are given some credibility, and insofar as the legends can preoccupy the listener's mind, preclude other interpretive frameworks, and generate an emotive charge, they lend Alcaeus's arguments a sense of inevitability and a measure of persuasive power. Achilles is being invoked, in fragments 42 and 283, not simply as a patriotic hero figure that Lesbian audiences like to hear about, but also as a resonant figure for the sort of punishment/revenge that Pittacus, and the city that accepts him, deserves.

Alcaeus's hetaireia was a leaky boat, and it seems likely that his poetry—in its effort to sustain his perpetually losing group as a coherent and committed fighting force in opposition to the tyranny at Mytilene—is meant both to counter discourses originating from outside the group and also to circulate beyond it, at least among potential allies who can share the poet's sense of resentment and dispossession. But it also is apparent from the poetry still available to us that, although Alcaeus does offer argumentation to the judgment of his audience(s), he is arguing primarily to his friends. While myth and allegory typically are invoked as interpretive frames for present circumstances, and indeed as a means of reducing options for interpreting the present, the reasoning that sustains belief in the appropriateness of the frame is for the most part just assumed. Alcaeus can, perhaps, persuade an audience beyond his own hetaireia to accept the frame through sheer hypnosis, or through the aesthetic charm of his song; but his effectiveness probably is limited chiefly to those who share already, to some significant degree, his assumptions about the ethical quality of his enemies. For those who do share Alcaeus's assumptions, and in effect already are members of his hetaireia, his use of allegory and myth will chiefly serve the purposes of intensifying those assumptions and the group's oppositional resolve. From this perspective, Alcaeus's argumentation seems more suitable to sustaining the politics of faction than to persuading those not already convinced of the justice of his cause. Thus his relative lack of effect on Mytilenean opinion, which seems to have preferred his enemies overwhelmingly, and his apparently continual frustration.³⁴

But, to offer a brief last word in Alcaeus's favor, one might also say that his poetry could travel still beyond the bounds of his hetaireia and effect persuasion, in the sense that audiences removed in time (or place) from the original events could see the situations embodied in the poems as allegorical equivalents to their circumstances and could see in the stance(s) Alcaeus offers persuasive modalities of judgment and response. In such a case the poems then lose whatever character they may have had originally as practical political discourse: they in effect cease to be specifically about the situation in early-sixth-century Mytilene; “Pittacus” (or “Myrsilos”) becomes simply the name of a general tyrant type; and “Alcaeus” becomes the voice of epideictic argumentation on the general theme of “resisting tyranny.” An audience removed in time (or place) may be persuaded to identify with Alcaeus's response to his predicament or at least may feel the persuasive force of his argumentation, as well as appreciate the eloquence and aesthetic appeal with which he renders it. Or indeed the audience may feel, and be susceptible to, the psychagogic and persuasive force that resides in the poetry's aesthetic power. A person who feels stuck or stranded anywhere by adverse circumstance may, for example, find some consolation in the argument and stance of “Drink and get drunk, Melanippos, with me.” It is worth remembering too that, although Alcaeus's notion of the dêmos (or damos, in his Aeolic dialect) is limited chiefly to his own class, nevertheless much of his argumentation is about preserving the political rights and institutions of a dêmos—however defined—against the encroachments of one-man rule. Such a stance can be abstracted away, in different historical moments and different performance contexts, and reapplied in the resinging or recital of Alcaic song. Any who feel themselves oppressed or violated by what appears to them as unjust tyranny may feel the force of Alcaeus's arguments, even in perpetual defeat and exile, for sustained resistance to an unacceptable regime. This would seem to be what Dionysius and Quintilian have seen.

SAPPHO

Alcaeus (fr. 130B) provides us with a path to Sappho.

[Among the agnus castus trees?] … wretched, I
live possessing a rustic's portion,
longing to hear the assembly
being summoned, Agesilaidas,
and the council; what my father and father's father
have grown old possessing among these
citizens who do one another harm,
from these things I have been cut off,
exiled to the outer edges, and like Onomakles
here alone I have settled in wolf-thickets
… [leaving?] the war; for stasis
against … is [ignobly] taken back;
… to the precinct of the blessed gods
… treading upon dark earth
… meetings themselves I
dwell keeping my feet out of troubles,
where Lesbian women are judged for beauty
going to and fro in trailing robes, and all around rings
the wondrous echoing sound of the women's
sacred annual ululation
… from many [troubles] when will the gods
… the Olympians

This fragment is generally read as bitterly self-ironic. Driven out of Mytilene and forced to take refuge in what is probably the sanctuary of Hera, Zeus, and Dionysius—the oldest, largest, and most important shrine-complex on Lesbos … Alcaeus finds himself among elegant, elaborately dressed, aristocratic women who come and go, in what appears to be a beauty contest, during a women's festival that prominently features sacred “ululation,” ololygê, a loud and joyous outcry or triumphal singing. Alcaeus, unable to retrieve his patrimony, skulks amid (or nearby) the ululating and parading women as his manhood and nobility suffer deep humiliation.³⁵

Alcaeus's gloom aside, his poem provides a brief glimpse of women's culture on Lesbos, and of the sort of world in which Sappho and her circle moved. Indeed, if Alcaeus is describing a scene that he has witnessed, it is possible that Sappho, his contemporary, is actually there.

We really do not know much about women's culture or the contexts for women's poetry on Lesbos, but some cautious generalizations may be and have been based upon analogies with better-known practices elsewhere.³⁶ These include women's festivals like the Thesmophoria at Athens, and Alcman's maiden-songs at Sparta. At the Thesmophoria, a three-day festival in honor of Demeter thesmophoros—Demeter the law-giver or law-bearer—married citizen-women more or less took over and camped out in the city center. During this time they organized themselves in temporary civic structures resembling those in which the city's men participated, held assemblies, and elected archousai (female magistrates) to preside over the festivities, which seem to have included processions, singing/dancing, and feasting/celebrating, as well as the religious rites themselves, which were connected with fertility and childbirth (and involved the slaughter of pigs).

Margaret Williamson makes the point that, because Athenian law required that Thesmophorian women's activities be financed by their husbands, the political organization and ritual symbolism of the festival reflected the interests of the male elite, with leading roles played by the women of prominent families.³⁷ While this is probably true, and while one function of the Thesmophoria was very probably to regulate female sexuality—by having married citizen-women publicly signify their allegiance to the city's patriarchal code as a frame for their fertility—it is also worth noting that this and other women's festivals were an object of male fears about female sexual license. In Lysias's speech On the Murder of Eratosthenes, for example, the defendant (Euphiletus) mentions that his wife, having been seduced by Eratosthenes, used the Thesmophoria as a cover for intriguing with Eratosthenes' mother to prolong the adulterous affair (20). Whether or not this claim was true, it is evident that an audience of Athenian jurors could regard it as a possible scenario. Lucian's Dialogues of Courtesans (7.4) says that the celebrants at another women's festival, the Haloa, engaged in lewd joking and fantasies about adultery.³⁸ In other words, women's festivals were an object of male fears because they provided settings in which women were not in fact directly subject to their husbands' oversight; such festivals not only regulated women's sexuality and subjectivity but also gave their sexuality/subjectivity an opportunity to escape control. One might argue further that the requirement that husbands finance their wives' participation at the Thesmophoria was not only or even primarily an instrument of patriarchal regulation, since women did not control property anyway, but rather an instrument of compulsory permission: if a woman wished to attend, her husband legally could not prevent her by refusing to pay; and once she was there he could not determine what she did, or even know, since men were legally excluded from the proceedings.³⁹

The point is that festivals like the Thesmophoria produced a number of contexts for women's public discourse, including poetic public discourse, addressed to audiences of women. This does not mean that Thesmophorian women would have been making speeches and producing civic song that addressed the public issues that exercised their husbands. As Eva Stehle points out, women generally were not authorized to make such commentary, at least not directly, and to do so would have been regarded as unseemly.⁴⁰ But it does mean that women had, in settings like the Thesmophoria, a forum to engage in discourse on the topics that mattered to them as women and as representatives of the city's ever-competitive leading households.

Our second parallel for Sappho's possible performance-contexts is Alcman's partheneia, or maiden-songs. These reflect the Spartan institution—described by Plutarch in Lycurgus (14)—of female initiation groups, agelai, in which unmarried girls received an education that included training in athletics and choral song. Such songs were performed naked at public ceremonies. (Spartan boy choruses and adult male choruses also performed naked at certain festivals.) The function of the training was, in essence, to prepare the girls for their civic role as wives, and the choral performance of a partheneion functioned in part to present nubile virgins to prospective marriage-partners. Plutarch says, however, that the girl choruses also engaged in praise and blame of young Spartan men, so that those who had been mocked were stung as if they had been formally reprimanded by the city magistrates. While presenting themselves as desirable marriage-partners, the girls of the chorus also presented themselves as the embodied voice of community morality.⁴¹

One particular fragment of Alcman (3) reveals significant aspects of the character of these female initiation groups and the way that they were viewed, in choral performance, by the city:

Olympian [Muses], fill my heart
[with desire for new] song
full; and I [wish] to hearken
to the voice [of girls]
singing a lovely song [to the heavens]
.....will scatter sweet [sleep] from my eyes
… and leads me to go with the gathering
… most [rapidly] I'll shake my yellow hair.
… soft feet
[fifty lines missing]
with limb-loosening desire, more meltingly
than sleep or death she gazes;
and not a uselessly sweet [thing is] she.
Yet Astymeloisa requites me not at all,
[but] holding the garland
like a brilliant star
in the wide-spread heavens
or a golden shoot, or tender, bare
.....… she stepped with outstretched [feet;]
the hair-beautifying, moist charm of Kinyras(42)
sits [upon] her maiden tresses.
[Indeed] through the crowd Astymeloisa
[goes …] a darling to the people
… chosen
… I say;
… for if only a silver
.....… I would see if she would likewise love me
if she came closer, taking my soft hand,
and I instantly became her suppliant.
And now … the deep-minded girl
.....girl … me having
… the girl
… grace
[thirty unreadable lines]

This poem was composed to be delivered by a chorus of parthenoi, in (or in connection with) a procession: the singer says that her desire for maiden-song leads her to “go with the gathering,” where—after the fifty-line lacuna—we find a girl named Astymeloisa “holding the garland” that signifies her as the chorus or dance leader, stepping along “with outstretched feet.” The occasion may possibly be a festival of Hera, the Antheia.⁴³

Obviously, this partheneion was composed not by the band of girls that performed it but by their male chorus trainer, Alcman; and that is one reason for the song's authority as the voice of community morality (though Alcman himself was a foreigner in Sparta). Nevertheless it shows us two important features of the maiden chorus and the girl initiation group that composed it. The first—which has been most frequently remarked on—is the open display of erotic attraction among the girls. This display has generally been taken as an analogue and precedent for the gynaikerasteia or “woman-love” expressed in Sappho's poetry, since the terms of erotic desire seem strikingly similar. This resemblance has also encouraged a line of interpretation that views Sappho as a chorus trainer and teacher of girls, presiding over an initiation group that bears a certain (though limited) resemblance to the Spartan agelai, in which a part of a young, unmarried woman's education involved the development of her sexuality and her capacity for sexual pleasure.⁴⁴ Like the love-relationships between the men and boys of a hetaireia, erotic relations between the members of such initiation groups were acceptable and were not deemed inconsistent with heterosexuality in marriage. Female homosexuality was, as Burnett says, “neither sanctioned nor prohibited by the community,” in essence because it had no consequences that mattered to the patriarchal order.⁴⁵ The fact that Alcman has composed a song in which parthenoi declare erotic love for each other in choral performance at a civic event suggests that such desires are consistent with approved community morality. Indeed, insofar as the girls of Alcman's chorus also are presenting themselves as marriage candidates, their display of a developed capacity for erotic pleasure appears as part of their attractiveness to potential husbands: that Astymeloisa is not “uselessly sweet” is an important point. Something similar was likely true for Sappho's world as well. Lesbian women had a reputation in antiquity for uninhibited sexual proficiency; to “lesbianize” (lesbiazein) was to perform fellatio. On Lesbos as elsewhere in the Hellenic world, and perhaps especially on Lesbos, heterosexual and homosexual desires and practices were part of a single spectrum of “normal” sexuality for women as well as men and were not presumed to be mutually exclusive.⁴⁶ Sappho herself was not only a “woman-lover” but also, at the same time, a married woman and a mother, and she held a respectable position in society.

The second feature of Alcman's fragment—one that has less often been remarked on—is the characterization of the chorus leader, Astymeloisa, as going “through the crowd … a darling to the people” (melêma damôi). This expression has a distinct resonance, though it is expressed in somewhat different terms, with Hesiod's description of the eloquent basileus as likewise going “through the gathering, like a god admired with honeyed reverence, conspicuous amid the throng” (Theogony 91-92). The terminology does not exactly correspond, but there is no strong reason to expect that Alcman, working in a lyric idiom, would employ the dactylic hexameter formulae of Hesiodic epic. The name “Astymeloisa” means something like “City-darling” (or, more clumsily, “the beloved care of citizens”), and thus appears to be a type-name or title for the chorus leader, who has been “chosen” and projected into prominence most probably because of her performing skill and beauty, the very qualities that cause the chorus-singer to “melt” with “limb-loosening desire” and to make gestures of loving from afar.⁴⁷ Like the crowd that admires Hesiod's rhetor-prince “like a god,” the chorus-singer hopes to make herself Astymeloisa's “suppliant” and so signifies a communal attitude toward what Astymeloisa, in her role as the city-beloved “Astymeloisa,” embodies. The point is that, even if the girls of the chorus are performing an approved communal morality rather than their “own” subjectivity, and even if they are performing a song composed for them by Alcman, it is also true that a girl in Astymeloisa's position is cast into a significant public role and is endowed, while she performs, with a certain social prestige and power pertaining to that role. The song, in sum, projects the chorus-members and particularly the chorus leaders into an eloquence-performing “speaker-function” that is itself endowed with the sorts of attributes that Hesiod attaches to the Muse-beloved basileus and bard, even if those attributes cannot be attached to the girls themselves as girls in Spartan culture.⁴⁸

But Lesbos was, of course, neither Athens nor Sparta. Neither the Athenian Thesmophoria nor Alcman's maiden-songs can be taken as precise models for the context(s) of Sappho's poetry. First of all, as Denys Page has remarked, upper-class Lesbian women seem to have enjoyed more freedom than their counterparts elsewhere. They were neither subjected as girls to the compulsory, state-sponsored training of the Spartan agelai nor were they, on marriage, sequestered within their husband's house (as at Athens). Though they were, as elsewhere, excluded from direct political participation, it seems that upper-class Lesbian women were able to appear and associate informally in public and to “mix” in male as well as female society. They were able also to form women's “clubs” or associations comparable to, though probably not the same as, the male hetaireia, and possibly based on the model of a thiasos, a religious fellowship. And they were likely to be well educated, though the education was most probably received informally through the medium of female associations, particularly those devoted to the Muses.⁴⁹

Further, the chief women's festivals on Lesbos seem to have been less sharply focused on regulating women's reproductive powers. These festivals included the relatively informal Adonia, as well as more formal, state-sponsored rites in the great shrine of Hera-Zeus-Dionysus, where we find Alcaeus skulking in fragment 130B. As Page remarks, this cult center seems to have been founded originally as a shrine of Dionysus, with Hera and Zeus added later. Dionysus was an Asiatic import, transmitted to the Hellenic world from Lydia and Phrygia, and seems to have arrived in Lesbos at a very early date. The orgiastic Dionysian rite—concerned more with promoting than controlling vital energies (the force that through the green fuse drives the flower)—was primarily a women's festival and had offshoots in the rites of Artemis (Asiatic Cybele), which were also celebrated on Lesbos. At the shrine of Hera-Zeus-Dionysus, Hera was the preeminent deity, as she was for Aeolic Greek culture generally, while her association with Dionysus was unusual: it appears that the Lesbian-Aeolic cult and rites of Hera, which probably included the beauty contest described by Alcaeus, were grafted onto and combined with those of an older cult of Dionysus.⁵⁰

The Adonia, centered on the Aphrodite-Adonis myth, also was an Asiatic import. According to Margaret Williamson, the symbolism of this festival, unlike that of the Thesmophoria or other women's festivals devoted to mother gods, was less focused on fertility/childbirth than on sexuality per se. Its activities seem to have featured “enjoyable and private merrymaking … in which women were released from the burden of being responsible for national fertility and simply got together, without a script, to have a good time”; in Attic comedy, we find men complaining about being kept awake all night or prevented from conducting normal business by women's noisemaking during the Adonia (Aristophanes, Lysistrata 387-398; Menander, Girl from Samos 43-44).⁵¹ Festivals of Aphrodite-Adonis and Hera, as well as Dionysiac and Artemisian celebrations, would seem to have provided Lesbian women with occasions that had more to do with the affirmation than the disciplining of women's power as sexual beings.

These contexts—informal, symposiumlike women's gatherings and women's festivals, as well as wedding celebrations—provide the most likely settings for the performance of Sappho's poetry. An epigram in the Greek Anthology (9.189) describes her as leading the “Lesbian women” (Lesbides) in a dance procession to the shrine of Hera, holding a “golden lyre” and setting the tune; and among Sappho's surviving fragments are a hymn to Hera and legendary materials from the Troy-tale connected to the shrine (fr. 17, possibly 44).⁵² It seems likely that Sappho would have played some role in the festival proceedings witnessed in Alcaeus's poem, either as a performer in her own right or as a trainer of girl choruses (or both). Ancient writers also credit her with hymns to Artemis (Philostratus, Apollonius of Tyana 1.30; “Menander Rhetor” 9.132), though virtually no trace of these remains.⁵³ And we have fragments of epithalamia that clearly are connected to wedding festivities. Aphrodite, however, is overwhelmingly the predominant deity in Sappho's extant poetry, while references to Adonis occur as well (e.g., fr. 96, 140[a], 168). It is possible that at least some part of Sappho's verse was intended for performance in women's gatherings during the Adonia, but by far the majority of what survives, and virtually all the poetry that has sustained her modern reputation, appears to be most suitable to symposiumlike gatherings by a circle of hetairai. These could have been social gatherings that took place during the Adonia or that simply met, without any particular festival-context, at various times and at some appropriate meeting-place: a house, most probably, or a shrine precinct suitable for a meeting of a female thiasos devoted to Aphrodite and the Muses.

At this point it is worth recalling Hesiod's phrase “conspicuous amid the throng,” meta de prepei agromenoisin, since what is meant is a crowd of commoners gathered in a public meeting-space. “Throng” renders agromenoisin, a past (aorist) participle of the verb ageiro, “gather together,” which is used by Homer to signify herded swine (Odyssey 16.3). Hesiod's rhetor-prince and Alcman's Astymeloisa both are made distinctive by virtue of a trained excellence and impressiveness—including the hint of cultured luxury in “the charm of Kinyras” (an imported, expensive, perfumed oil) on Astymeloisa's hair—that sets them apart from ordinary folk and that makes them powerfully attractive, widely admired, and effective in public. Concern with such distinction is pervasive in Sappho's extant poetry. In one of her more famous fragments (96), for example, a departed companion is said now to be “making herself conspicuous (emprepetai) among Lydian women” like the moon after sunset, or in other words, to be presenting herself impressively, outshining all the bright stars around her, even in the land of luxury where noble women are especially refined. In another fragment cited and partially paraphrased by Athenaeus (fr. 57), Sappho derides Andromeda, one of her competitors according to Maximus, by saying “[w]hat country girl [agroiôtis] enchants your mind … done up in country stuff [agroiôtin stolan] … not knowing how to raise her fineries above her ankles?” The word “done up,” epemmena, suggests cookery and thus meniality; and “fineries,” ta brake, is an ironic swipe at a commoner's hopelessly gauche, unstylish, and crucially underfunded effort at dressing up in clothes that she doesn't quite know how to wear. Sappho's point is the low, bumpkinesque quality of Andromeda's circle. Andromeda's hetairai, unlike Sappho's, are not “conspicuous amid the throng,” much less among Lydian women. In the beauty contest described in Alcaeus's poem, the women who parade in trailing robes amid the ululation are most probably being judged not by men but by each other, while the “beauty” in question, phua, is a matter of bearing or “stature”; this is no Miss Lesbos contest. The women are competing with each other for preeminence in matters of cultured “conspicuousness,” refinement, and impressive self-presentation.

It seems likely that Sappho played some role in training upper-class young women to be “conspicuous amid the throng”—not only in daily life but also, and most important, as performers of song in public and private contexts, as this was a sine qua non of aristocratic accomplishment—and this training probably took place through informal association at private gatherings. A papyrus fragment of a second-century (a.d.) commentary on Sappho's poetry says that “she in peace and quiet trained the noblest girls, not only those of local extraction but also those from Ionia” (fr. 214B). “In peace and quiet” translates eph' hêsychias, which could also be rendered as “at leisure,” “in peacetime,” or “in a quiet and sequestered place”; “the noblest girls” translates ta arista, which more precisely means “the best female persons” and thus could mean “women” also (though the verb “trained,” paideuousa, suggests paides, girls, rather than gynaikes, mature women). The commentary's statement that Sappho's associates were not only local arista but also from other parts of Ionia is more or less corroborated by the Suda's much later testimony that her “students” (mathêtriai) included Anagora of Miletus, Gongyla of Colophon, and Eunika of Salamis (test. 2). Further, Philostratus's novel Apollonius of Tyana, which is roughly contemporary with the papyrus commentary, mentions a Damophyla from Pamphylia (a Greek settlement in what is now southwestern Turkey) “who is said to have associated with Sappho, and to have composed the hymns they sing to Artemis of Perge in both Aeolian and Pamphylian modes”; moreover, Damophyla “is said to have gathered girl associates (parthenous homilêtrias) and to have composed poems both erotic and hymnal, in Sappho's manner,” while she “copied” (parôidêtai) her hymns to Artemis from those of Sappho (1.30; test. 21).

It would be a mistake to think of Sappho as the head of an official “school” for girls or as a priestess in charge of a thiasos (though she may have played some role in a cult of Aphrodite and the Muses); these once popular views, along with views of Sappho as a sort of archaic Greek geisha or musical prostitute, have long since been discredited. But is it less difficult to imagine her, as Maximus does, in a quasi- or protosophistic role: that is, as a person who has attracted or “gathered” to herself an informal circle or “salon” of friends, devotees, and apprenticelike followers by virtue of her sophia, wisdom-skill, in the cultivated arts that counted most for “conspicuousness” among aristocratic women in Mytilene and elsewhere—and who, by virtue of her reputation for such sophia, would be a mentor-figure with whom the “best” families might wish their daughters to associate. As such, Sappho would seem to be a precursor for such later figures as Aspasia and Diotima, who survive for us now mainly through caricatures and references in Plato, Plutarch, and elsewhere.⁵⁴ Further, the references to Sappho's “students” in the testimonia, and especially the non-Lesbian students, suggest a picture consistent with Gregory Nagy's account of archaic rhapsode societies such as the Homeridai (the “sons of Homer”) or the followers of Archilochus.⁵⁵ As Nagy suggests, the chief means of poetic preservation and dissemination in the predominantly oral world of archaic Greece, and especially in the seventh to sixth centuries, was the reperformance and reembodiment of the “original” poet's voice by subsequent generations of followers: the Homeridai as reembodiers of “Homer” in the reperformance and indeed the recomposition of what we might call Homer-songs, and the followers of Archilochus as reperformers/recomposers of “Archilochus-songs,” most typically (especially in later centuries) in symposiastic contexts. And so, it seems quite possible, with Sappho too.

The fact that Sappho's “students” seem to appear nowhere outside the ancient biographical notices suggests that they were, for the most part, learning to rhapsodically reperform “Sappho-songs,” including hymns and epithalamia for festival occasions as well as erotic and other “private” songs for symposiumlike women's gatherings. Though we probably should not imagine anything as formal as a professionalized guild of “Sappho-singers” like the Homeridai, Philostratus's reference to Damophyla does suggest the existence of women who were Sapphic reperformers, some of whom may have become poets (that is, original composers rather than recomposers) as well as song teachers in their own right. Even if Philostratus' Damophyla is fictional (as she is generally thought to be), she clearly is presented as a probable fiction meant to be consistent with what Philostratus's audience knows about the world: it would seem that circles of “Sapphic” performers and followers existed, at least in some places, and at least in the time before the repertoire of Sappho-song was written down, collected, and organized into a definitive “edition” by Hellenistic scholars sometime between the third and first centuries b.c.⁵⁶

Sappho's circle, then, would appear to have been an informal fellowship somewhat like a male hetaireia and in some ways resembling or prefiguring the sophistic circles of later centuries. It probably included both parthenoi who were there as “students” or followers of Sappho and married women, gynaikes, who were there as Sappho's associates and friends. And it probably was much more permeable, more “leaky,” than Alcaeus's faction: probably not so much a “boat” but a fluctuating network.⁵⁷ First of all, the membership was more unstable and probably was in constant flux, as younger women joined the group and left again upon their marriages—some of them arriving, like Eunika, from as far away as Salamis, and some, like Anactoria, departing for Lydia (fr. 16, 96), depending on the arrangements their families made. Others who stayed in Mytilene may have remained in the fellowship beyond their marriages, and surely some did, but as with Alcaeus's hetaireia there would have been shifting allegiances and defections. One fragment excoriates a certain Mika for choosing “the friendship of Penthilid ladies,” calls her an “evildoer,” kakotropê, and says “I will not allow you” to join in the musical and other pleasures of the group (fr. 71); another faults Atthis for tiring of Sappho and “flying off” to Andromeda (fr. 131), despite the fact that “I loved you … once long ago” (fr. 49).

The reference to “Penthilid ladies” raises a second cause of the group's permeability. As Eva Stehle points out, women's groups in Mytilene probably “formed a system of political communication separate from, but interlacing with, men's symposium groups.”⁵⁸ That is, like the quasi-political women's organizations in the Athenian Thesmophoria, women's groups in Mytilene probably reflected the factional alignments of their families, so that the discourse and rivalries of women's circles were traversed and affected by, and were part of, Mytilenean city politics. In one fragment, which Maximus cites as an example of Sappho's “Socratic” irony, she says “I wish the Polyanactids' daughter a very good day” (fr. 155); the conspicuous invocation of the family name, rather than the girl's own name, seems to indicate a basis for enmity. (Another badly damaged fragment [99] also seems to indicate hostility to the Polyanactids, though it is hard to tell.) Elsewhere, Sappho expresses concern for the shame that her brother's misadventures may bring upon “us” and expresses hopes that he will recover from his errors and become “a joy to his friends and a misery to his enemies” (fr. 5); what seems to be at stake is the relative standing and reputation of noble houses/factions jockeying for position and prestige.⁵⁹ Sappho distances herself, her family, and her circle from her brother's misdeeds and thereby reasserts her (and “our”) respectability within the city. Finally, Sappho appears to have been exiled to Syracuse for a time (test. 5, fr. 98), perhaps the same time that Alcaeus was exiled to Pyrrha by Myrsilos (c. 605 b.c,), which suggests that she, her family, and her circle were implicated in the stasiotic struggles then going on in Mytilene. If Sappho suffered one or more periods of exile, it is likely that much of her circle would have been dispersed and that she would have had to reconstitute a circle from the society available to her; the fact that there was until Cicero's time a highly valued portrait statue of Sappho in the Syracusan prytaneion (Cicero, Against Verres 2.4.125-127; test. 24) suggests that she may have established a Syracusan following while there. Unlike Alcaeus's group, Sappho's circle was not so much held together as continually reconstituted.

A third and related cause of permeability is the fact that, though Sappho's poetry speaks primarily to the women of her fluctuating circle, or figures them as addressees, Sappho's confidantes do not constitute her only audience. This is so in part because of the “traversing” of women's circles by the concerns of city politics and in part because of the relatively greater freedom that Lesbian women enjoyed (compared, at least, with Athenian women) and the apparent tendency in Lesbian culture to separate men's and women's spheres less sharply. While men were excluded from the Athenian Thesmophoria, we find Alcaeus observing the women's doings at the festival of Hera; men did not participate, but apparently they were permitted to be there. The same was true for the Adonia. And it was probably true for other women's gatherings as well.⁶⁰ If “mixed” company was possible on Lesbos, then it is possible too that men could at least sometimes be present when Sappho performed her songs—as at the salonlike gatherings of Aspasia, at Athens, over a century later.⁶¹ And in general, of course, the culture of Lesbian women was still enclosed within a dominant patriarchal order that never could be fully excluded from their discourse.

Beyond Sappho's immediate, primary audience of hetairai there was always a secondary audience of men. This was, moreover, an audience with which she clearly was successful, as witnessed most simply by the fact that male writers and scholars in antiquity compiled and edited Sappho's poems, and canonized her—even as they maligned and mythologized her—as a “tenth Muse” and one of the greatest of lyric poets. The fact that she was parodied in Attic comedy suggests that her poetry was, in fact, controversial or disturbing to conventional patriarchal culture: it pressed the boundaries of acceptability. The fact that she was canonized suggests her ability to persuasively maintain a controversial position, making “the weaker case stronger,” within the wider realm of Hellenic culture. Sapphic imitations by such later poets as Catullus and Horace attest a tradition of male reading and reperformance of Sappho-songs, and we know that, even in Sappho's lifetime, her songs already were being performed by men at male symposia, and as far away as Athens. According to Aelian, Solon (who was Sappho's contemporary) heard his nephew sing a Sappho-song at a symposium and asked the boy to teach it to him; when asked the reason for this request, he replied “So that I may learn it and die” (as quoted by Stobaeus, Anthology 3.29.58; test. 10, tr. Campbell). Plutarch, writing in the late first or early second century a.d., nearly seven centuries after Solon, remarks on Sappho-songs that still were being sung at men's symposia (Sympotic Questions 622c, 711d).⁶² Sappho's songs could travel well, and did, quite far beyond the boundaries of her circle.

By considering her songs as enthymematic arguments—insofar as we can observe this in some of her key fragments—we might approach an understanding of Sappho's power. We might begin with what is certainly the most famous fragment of them all, which “Longinus” quoted (and so preserved) as an illustration of “sublimity” (10.1-3).

[FR. 31]

He seems to me an equal to the gods,
that man who sits opposite you
and hearkens close to your sweet
speaking
and lovely laughing—truly it
makes my heart shake in my breast;
for when I see you briefly, I cannot
speak at all,
but my tongue is broken, a faint
fire quickly spreads beneath my flesh,
and I see nothing with my eyes, and my
ears roar,
and my sweat pours down, and a trembling
seizes me all over, and I'm more moist than
grass, and I seem to myself scarcely
short of dying.
But all is to be borne, since [even a pauper?](63) …

Eva Stehle has argued that this and other erotic poems of Sappho's cannot properly be placed in a symposiastic setting, in essence because its intensely personal address, and the implied closeness of speaker and addressee, would violate the basic symposiastic function of promoting or maintaining group solidarity. In consequence, Stehle argues, this poem (and others like it) could not have been intended for performance at a women's gathering and must have been given instead as a written text to an individual friend or lover—perhaps on the occasion of her departure—for her to perform for herself in privacy, thereby keeping Sappho “with” her even in separation. Sappho's erotic poetry thus embodies a then unprecedented use of writing to create and communicate a private, “lyric” subjectivity (in the romantico-modern sense), one that, because it is so intensely private, provides the addressee with a model of female identity that both escapes from and resists the traditional gender norms imposed by patriarchal public culture.⁶⁴

Stehle's argument is provocative and ingenious, but I think it is unlikely. One reason for my doubt is the general lack of evidence that writing was used as a primary means of communication or medium for poetry in the late seventh and early sixth centuries. (The earliest surviving Greek alphabet inscription, the so-called Dipylon jar from Athens, dates to roughly the beginning of Sappho's lifetime.) There is, in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, a piece of pottery that shows an image of Sappho sitting on a chair and reading a scroll while surrounded by female figures holding a lyre and a garland above her head; but it dates from the fifth century b.c., when written poetry-texts were becoming more common. Another pot from the early fifth century shows Sappho and Alcaeus together, both holding lyres. And the earliest known image of Sappho, dated to the early sixth century, shows her holding a lyre and striding forward as if leading a procession.⁶⁵ That image reflects how poets in general and Sappho in particular were understood. In short, the evidence that Sappho would have been likely to use writing as a primary medium of communication, or to compose poems as “letters” or gifts to individual friends, is weak.

Another consideration is that, on one hand, there is no strong reason to believe that what I deliberately have been calling symposium-like women's gatherings would have been precisely the same as men's symposia or would have served exactly the same purposes. Alcaeus's hetaireia was a tightly knit political faction with a relatively stable membership whose coherence as a fighting unit had to be sustained; Sappho's circle, with its fluctuating personnel, may have been more like a salon devoted to the pursuits and pleasures of cultivated women—or like a sophist's circle, with friends, associates, and students gathered round a master performer famed for wisdom-skill, sophia, in some art—or like the late-fifth-century “salons” of Aspasia and Diotima. Could fragment 31 not have been performed in such a setting, as an epideixis that mimetically embodies the speech of a lover to a beloved? Or an argument dramatistically presented through the figure of apostrophe?⁶⁶ Is it necessary to consider the poem as a “love letter” to an actual, specific person, especially when the addressee remains unnamed? (Consider the “speech of Lysias” in Plato's Phaedrus.) On the other hand, there is no strong reason, either, to believe that a poem like fragment 31 could not have been performed in symposiastic (as well as other) gatherings. Could Sappho not have composed this poem, and taught it to her friends and devotees, as part of a repertoire available for reperformance in symposia? Certainly one likely reason for the poem's dissemination and survival, over the centuries from Sappho to her Hellenistic editors and finally to “Longinus,” would have been its continued popularity as part of such a repertoire. If the poem had really been meant as a “letter” or gift for a single, specific person, who would then perform it to herself in solitude, it is difficult to understand how it would have been disseminated and preserved. The fact that “Longinus” has not quoted the entire poem and has omitted at least its final strophe (though he “cites” the remainder by stating its opening phrase) indicates that he expects his reader to be familiar with it.

Consider this poem from the Theognidea (1299-1304):

Boy, how long will you flee from me? O, how I run after you and plead! I pray that there might be some limit
to your anger. Yet you with your raging, headstrong thymos flee, having the merciless êthos of a kite.
But stay with me, and give to me your favor. Not for long will you possess the gift of Aphrodite, the violet-crowned.

Clearly this poem is more emotionally restrained than Sappho's fragment 31. Theognis generally speaks with “manly” circumspection. But this poem also casts itself as a “personal” lover's declaration and complaint: like the speaker of Sappho's poem, or like Alcman's maiden-singer gesturing toward Astymeloisa, Theognis is overwhelmed by the force of Aphrodite embodied in the boy and is reduced to the status of a suppliant, or indeed of a “pauper” who must beg, while his passion goes unrequited (though for different reasons). As in Sappho's poem the beloved is unnamed, and figures as a stock addressee-figure. My point is that there is little question that Theognis's poem, even though it seems to be a private declaration, is meant for symposiastic reperformances. Why not Sappho's poem? The difference in emotional intensity cannot be taken as decisive evidence to the contrary. That difference may be the product simply of differential gender norms for both emotional experience and expression.

So what is happening in Sappho's famous fragment 31? It is important to keep in mind that the poem, as we have it, is incomplete: the fragment's final line is the beginning of what was at least one more strophe. What we have, in other words, is the amplification of a topos that served as the setup and as a source of persuasion for a now-missing enthymematic cap that cannot possibly be reconstructed (unless it turns up in an Egyptian papyrus-dump someday). Catullus 51, which is an imitation of this poem, clearly substitutes a different ending—”[i]dleness, Catullus, does you harm,” and so forth—and so can be no help. The amplification reaches a cap of its own in the climactic declaration that “I seem to myself scarcely short of dying,” but the poem's cap cannot be reconstructed precisely because an enthymematic “conclusion” does not follow by logical necessity from what precedes it, but functions as a selection and foregrounding of one among many inferential possibilities at a particular moment within a discourse, and derives persuasiveness not only from the overt discourse that has preceded it but also from the tacit presuppositional (ideological, cognitive, perceptual, etc.) frames brought to it by an audience. We do not know, and cannot know, specifically what argument Sappho meant this poem to make.

But it is obvious enough that it is an erotic poem, and evident that Sappho has amplified the general topos of “I'm overcome with love whenever I look at you” in order to invest the poem's closing stance (whatever it was) with persuasive force. This is, in effect, “Longinus's” point about the part of the poem that he has cited: Sappho's “excellence” and indeed her “sublimity” in this passage resides in her ability to portray erôs by selecting and combining the most outstanding pathêmata that accompany and constitute it, rendering it as not a single thing but a “congress of emotions” (pathôn synodos; 10.1, 3).⁶⁷ By rendering the general topos through a virtual narrative of the details constituting erôs “whenever I look at you,” Sappho endows it with considerable presence and psychagogic power: her audience can project themselves into, and indeed are drawn into, an entire scenario that is both astonishing in its vividness and resonant with their own experiential knowledge. “Longinus” says, immediately after citing this passage, “are you not amazed?” and then remarks that “all such things occur with lovers” (10.1.3). It is striking too, and a demonstration of “Longinus's” point, that nearly all readers of this poem, especially modern ones, have tended to regard it as a cri de coeur, a mimesis of the moment of overwhelming passion itself, when Sappho is in fact describing it, with considerable self-control, as an “emotion recollected in tranquillity”—she is speaking now, in an apostrophe, of a speechless state that overcomes her “whenever I see you”⁶⁸—though the description is indeed evocative and intensifies its effect through an accumulation of polysyndeta leading to the climactic declaration. Even “Longinus” gets caught up in this passage's extraordinary psychagogy and speaks as if Sappho is exhibiting rather than describing the “symptoms” of erotic love.

It is not entirely clear to us, however, just what the full scenario is. Where is the speaker, and to whom does she speak these lines? And who is the godlike man that sits opposite the beloved? There is a largely now-discredited history of interpretation that regards the poem as meant for a wedding celebration: the man is the beloved's husband, and Sappho—or the speaker in the poem, or the girl or woman who performs it—is (or pretends to be) stricken with grief, or jealousy, at the thought of separation from her beloved friend, or she is presenting her lovestruck wonder at the bride as a form of praise.⁶⁹ But there is no particular reason to suppose any of this; certainly “Longinus” does not suppose it. The woman and man may or may not be married, and the occasion at which they sit facing each other is not necessarily a wedding celebration and is not necessarily the occasion of the poem itself either. Perhaps Sappho has invoked an image of a typical dinner party in Mytilene. Probably the poem is meant to be performed at a women's gathering, or a “salon.” Moreover, even if the woman and man in the poem are married, and if the woman is part of Sappho's circle, there is no particular reason to suppose that her husband displaces Sappho in her affections or that she is going away. Another, perhaps more credible line of interpretation regards the poem as a sort of hyberbolic compliment, not for a bride but for a friend or lover: “anyone who can look at you and hear your voice and not be swept away is more (or less) than human.”

Anne Burnett fairly persuasively suggests that Sappho is, on one hand, appropriating and refashioning a traditional praise topic that can be found in Pindar and, on the other hand, responding to “one of the stock philosophical debates of her time,” regarding the question of what man could claim (and when) to be like a god, the usual answers being he who experiences the bliss of the wedding day or he who has won an athletic victory. Sappho, then, shifts the debate by suggesting that it is not so much the fact of being married and thus possessing a beautiful wife that makes “that man” blessed enough to be “an equal to the gods” but the sheer fact of being near to and experiencing (without dying) the presence of a woman as conspicuously impressive as one of Sappho's dear companions.⁷⁰ Nevertheless, it is to “you,” the woman, that Sappho directs her apostrophe, while “you” remains an inspecific person: she is, in effect, whoever it is that Sappho loves and is any and all of her hetairai.

One might pursue this line of thought a little further. The poem can be seen as setting up a contrast between two typical scenarios. In one, the otherwise undelineated “that man,” a type, sits opposite “you,” also a type, at some occasion: apparently calmly, perhaps blandly, he takes in the pleasures of her “sweet speaking and lovely laughing”; she is for him an ornament to the banquet, objectified in his gaze. In the other scenario, Sappho (or whoever speaks) is overwhelmed by erôs even at a glimpse of “you” or of the scene, and she fully feels the force of what Theognis calls “Aphrodite's gift” or indeed the embodiment of Aphrodite's power in the woman's presence. But this contrast is a bit too simple. What “that man” is “hearkening” to is the woman's ady phôneisas, which can be rendered as not only “sweet speaking” but also “sweet sounding” or vocalizing, a vocalizing that spills over into “lovely laughing,” gelaisas imeroen, or more precisely a laughter that causes yearning and desire (imeros, or himeros in “standard” Attic dialect). So it is not simply that she says “sweet” things, but that she speaks “sweetly” with cultivated grace and skill, with a woman's eloquence that is pleasant and beguiling and that includes not only the speaking itself—though that is the focal point of attention—but also, probably, the impressiveness of her entire bodily self-presentation, her delivery, as she vocalizes. Further, “that man,” though he may seem to be an impassive, godlike figure, is “hearkening,” hypakouei, a verb that means not only “listen to” but also be obedient, answer to, heed, accept, comply, give way, submit. The verb hypakouô signifies the response of the ruled to those who rule them. Thus, while the man in this scene may be maintaining an outward demeanor of “manliness” or emotive self-control, what Sappho sees is a virtual theophany of Aphrodite manifested as persuasive power in the woman's act of speaking.

Sappho's described response to her glimpse of the woman's presence, or to the scene itself—the “it” of “it makes my heart shake” ambiguously refers to either—suggests that it is a glimpse of Aphrodite, or of a divine impressiveness and power, that she is responding to. The verb that I have rather lamely translated as “shake,” eptoaisen—which others have rendered equally unsatisfactorily as “tremble,” “flutter,” or even “cower”⁷¹—derives from petomai, which means “fly” (as of birds and insects) and by extension dart, rush, move quickly, make haste, be on the wing, flutter. Since Sappho is speaking of the kardia in her breast, her “heart” as physical organ as well as seat of emotion, the general sense is of a suddenly quickened heartbeat, a palpitation, as well as a metaphorical suggestion that her heart “takes flight” in a sudden emotional rush. To say that “my heart flutters” seems, in English, too weak a phrase for what Sappho signifies. In another fragment, Sappho uses eptoiase to signify the excitation of desire in one of her companions, Abanthis, at the sight of Gongyla (fr. 22). More specifically, she says that “yearning,” pothos, “once again flies round you […] the lovely one [tan kalan]; for her dress [katagôgis] excited [eptoaise] you when you saw it, and I rejoice.”⁷²Katagôgis may signify not only a woman's dress but also anything that descends, trails down, wraps or winds around, provides enclosure, and is seductive; and “the lovely one” may signify either Gongyla or the glimpse of Aphrodite that she projects, and at which Sappho rejoices (Aphrodite, “the Cyprian,” is mentioned two lines down, just as the fragment trails off in incoherent scattered words).⁷³

Sappho says this in the context of “bidding” or instructing Abanthis to “sing of Gongyla,” and it seems that what Sappho does in fragment 31 is precisely, or is a model for, what Abanthis is asked to do. Abanthis and Sappho celebrate the apparition of Aphrodite in a beloved, an apparition whose presence is known by its effects on a beholder, which are the effects enumerated in fragment 31. This enumeration on one hand makes persuasive Sappho's climactic declaration that the sudden, heart-shaking congress of pathêmata that she undergoes is a “near death” experience, an erotic swoon, and the persuasiveness of this declaration in turn enforces the inferential likelihood that the cause of what she feels is Aphrodite's briefly glimpsed apparition. Sappho's shaken, paralyzed speechlessness is very like the terrified response of queen Metaneira, in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, to that goddess's sudden revelation of herself (she had been disguised): “[a]nd [Metaneira's] knees were straightway loosened, and for a long time she was speechless, and forgot to pick her darling child up from the ground” (281-283). In sum, Sappho's portrayal of her response as a “near death” experience also justifies her implicit claim that she has seen an apparition of divinity and so justifies in turn her explicit declaration that it takes an “equal to the gods” to closely gaze at and listen to “you.” Indeed, by the end of the fragment, the person addressed as “you” may be Aphrodite as much as the nonspecific woman in the figured scene.

Fragments 31 and 22, then, both portray being stricken suddenly with erôs as the result of a briefly glimpsed virtual theophany of Aphrodite. Moreover, they portray this virtual theophany as effected through the speech and clothing of Sappho's conspicuous, impressive, cultivated friends: Gongyla's trailing dress and “your” sweet utterance and bodily presentation (or what rhetoric manuals would later call “delivery”). “Aphrodite,” then, is figured as a persuasive/seductive effect that is produced by means of the cultured arts that Sappho and her companions practice—arts that include knowing how to sing, how to talk, how to walk, how to wear fine clothes, and in general how to present oneself as a woman, as well as how to experience love and pleasure. “Aphrodite” is not embodied in Andromeda's “country girl” who lacks the sophia, the know-how, that Sappho's companions share. Women who do possess it are endowed with an extraordinary and indeed holy power, and by virtue of its possession, moreover, they require extraordinary persons as their equals and companions. “That man” to whom “you” speaks in fragment 31, though he is not the focus of the poem, does figure as the sort of consort, or husband, that Sappho's friends deserve: his act of hearkening, his susceptibility to persuasion effected by means of art (as opposed to brute force) suggests that he too experiences, though perhaps less intensely, the manifestation of Aphrodite that so shakes Sappho's heart. This fact makes him praiseworthy, and indeed makes him “an equal to the gods,” at least for the time.⁷⁴

What I am suggesting is that fragment 31 is in some ways a poem about “rhetoric”—though that term does not exist in Sappho's world—or about “eloquence” figured as an art of erôs, a technê erôtikê of persuasion/seduction, embodied in the kind of women that Sappho loves and celebrates, and in the kind of speech act that Sappho's poem performs. Further, Sappho presents this art as constituting a realm of blessedness, in which “that man” and “you” take on the look of a quasi-divine couple: Aphrodite-Adonis, Hera-Zeus.

It is clear enough, I hope, how this poem addresses itself as an act of argumentation to the women of Sappho's ever-fluctuating circle—how it functions to persuade them of their power and significance as cultured women who can present themselves effectively, and how it affirms, like much of Sappho's poetry, the affections that tie them even more closely to each other and the culture they share than to the men they happen to be paired with (as elegant items of gift exchange in marriage contracts).⁷⁵ The “proof” for both assertions lies in Sappho's amplified account, her narrative, of the sudden erôs that overcomes her at the virtual theophany that occurs “whenever I see you briefly” sitting in conversation with “that man.” But the poem also makes a case to men, and largely by the same means, for the kind of women and the kind of love that Sappho celebrates. Indeed, like Alcman's maiden-songs this poem makes a case to the wider community about what kinds of women are best and most desirable: “that man” is blessed whose companion or wife is the cultured, conspicuous, eloquent sort of woman who can inspire such love in Sappho. At the same time, moreover, it argues what kinds of men are best: namely, those able to value and “hearken” to the art of eloquence embodied in such women, and so to inhabit the blessed realm it constitutes. This is a significant argument, when one considers the political situation in Mytilene when Sappho first performed this song.

What is perhaps most striking about Sappho's argumentation is that, unlike Alcaeus, she does not (or does not always) invoke conventional topoi or mythic frames simply as authoritative filters for controlling an interpretation of the present, or as a means for placing present circumstance under the sign of a traditional sophia which itself remains beyond examination. Certainly Sappho does invoke traditional beliefs and mythic resonances. But, as we have seen in fragment 31, Sappho can, and at least sometimes does, appropriate and reconfigure conventional topoi in order to shift, or rearrange, traditional or prevailing value-hierarchies: that is, to assert the values of her women's circle within a space otherwise dominated by the patriarchal values of archaic Greek aristocracy, and so to make the lesser case greater.⁷⁶ Moreover, as Denys Page has noted, Sappho's language seems remarkably “independent of literary tradition … [and] close to the speech of every day.”⁷⁷ One way to say this is that Sappho both appropriates tradition and marks, through the voice that she projects, her independence from it (or her dialectical relation with it) as a specific, individual woman—her capacity to differ. In Sappho's own “sweet speech,” then, we hear not simply the repetition and invocation of tradition as a source of authority, but also the transformation of tradition in a woman's voice that apparently derives authority and persuasiveness from the vividness and psychagogic power of its own self-presentation and the argumentation that it offers.

Let us consider two more fragments—16 and 1—which, after fragment 31, are the best known and certainly the most substantial examples of Sappho's poetry. In fragment 16, which possibly (though not certainly) contains a complete poem, we get what is perhaps the clearest view of Sappho's argumentative procedure.

Some say a host of cavalry, others infantry
and others ships upon the dark earth
are most beautiful, but I say it is what-
soever one loves;
and one can easily make this understood
by everyone, for the much admired
beauty of humankind, Helen, her husband
who was most noble
she put aside and sailed to Troy
and neither child nor loving parents
did she keep in mind, but was led astray
… by [love?]
… unharmed for …
… lightly …
… and has reminded me now of Anactoria
who is not here;
and I would rather see her lovely walk
and the bright glance of her face
than Lydian chariots and armored
marching troops.
… impossible to happen
… humankind … but pray to share
[nine lines missing]
unexpectedly.

It is possible that the fifth strophe, with its reference to “Lydian chariots and armored marching troops,” is the end of the poem and that what follows are the paltry remnants of three strophes of another poem (parts of the first two lines and the twelfth line).⁷⁸ In any case, it is clear that the first five strophes do constitute a complete enthymematic argument.

One conspicuous feature of this argument is that it is explicitly confuting the very code of value that is invoked in Alcaeus's “hall of armor” poem, where indeed nothing is finer than the sight of military splendor and the call to martial heroism that it embodies. To a certain degree, Sappho's opening priamel may seem initially to destabilize the principles of judgment by which “some” have attempted to define the “finest thing.” Insofar as the phrase “whatsoever one loves” implies that what makes something “finest” or “most beautiful” (kallistos) is not an inherent quality but the attitude by which it is perceived, what is introduced is not a fourth and trumping candidate for “finest thing” but a different and disruptively relativistic principle of definition. Anne Burnett argues that this opening parodically reduces conventional masculine modes of disputation, especially about such questions as “what is most beautiful,” to absurdity.⁷⁹ But the sense of a parodic reduction or destabilization is fleeting at most, for Sappho's offering of “proofs”—the story of Helen and her own longing for Anactoria—quickly establishes erôs as the “finest thing” and indeed as a trumping term to the varieties of military splendor. “Whatsoever one loves” becomes the person one loves, or whatever it is about that person that inspires one's love. This is made clear by the poem's (or the fragment's) enthymematic cap: the sight of a beloved such as Anactoria really is “the most beautiful thing on earth” and preferable to the sight of “Lydian chariots and armored marching troops.” So there is, after all, a principle of judgment. There is a quality that inheres in persons like Anactoria (or in the impressive way that they present themselves) that calls forth erôs, and this is the best and most beautiful thing there is, on earth, for human beings.

Sappho's use of the Helen tale as a “proof” that will “easily make this understood by everyone” is both conventional and revisionary. Conventionally, Helen functions as a familiar illustration of the notion that the force of erôs, the “madness” of love induced by Aphrodite, can overwhelm all other attachments and allegiances: Helen abandons her noble husband, violates her marriage oath, and so forth. But Helen also represents, conventionally, an image of sinfulness, both her own and that of Paris. With Alcaeus, the “rape” or theft of Helen constitutes a violation of the principles of guest-friendship and gift exchange, bringing a divinely sponsored punishment to Troy. With Sappho, however, such notions of guilt and retribution seem not to figure in at all. What is emphasized instead is Helen's excellence. Helen is the “much-admired beauty of humankind,” poly perskethoisa kallos anthrôpôn, that is, the best of all women (and indeed of all human beings). It is because of this status, according to legend, that Aphrodite awards her as a prize to Paris—in exchange for judging Aphrodite the most beautiful of goddesses—and sets in motion the workings of fate that lead to the fall of Troy. But Troy's fate is not important here; it is not even mentioned. Rather, if we think of the war (and the fate of Troy) at all, the important point seems to be that both sides fought over Helen because of her status as the world's most excellent woman; and in the end Helen herself went home unharmed. That which inspires erôs is the ruling power, for the sake of which all else happens; and that thing is embodied superlatively in Helen, and (to some lesser degree) in Anactoria. It seems that what Sappho says about Helen and love would be true whether the Trojan war had taken place or not. (And indeed one could argue from this perspective that the cause of the war was not Helen's action but the will of men to regard her leaving as a theft of property requiring, as a point of honor, punishment of the “thief” and retrieval of the goods.)

Sappho, then, emphasizes elements of the Helen-tale that are not emphasized, for example, in Alcaeus, while deemphasizing or simply dropping elements that usually are more central. Further, another traditional feature of the myth is Helen's more or less passive victimhood: she is possessed by a mania visited on her by Aphrodite, and is raped or stolen by Paris. This is true even in Gorgias's Helen. There were also versions of the tale, as what is known about Stesichorus's famous lost palinode suggests, in which Helen was defended through the claim that she never went to Troy at all (but was spirited off instead to Egypt); but again she is essentially passive. In Sappho's version, however, Helen is the one who acts: she “puts aside” her husband and “sails” to Troy, and “forgets” her child and parents. Sappho does construe this as being “led astray,” as she probably must: it would be difficult, in the early sixth century (as now), to argue that abandoning one's children or parents is a good thing. Still, the general sense of Sappho's presentation, as with Gorgias's Helen more than a century later, is that Helen's actions are justified and blameless even though they contravene traditional morality. Because she has glimpsed in Paris an erôs-inspiring vision sent by the goddess, the erotic mania that she feels and that she acts on is not only “heart-shaking” (as in fr. 31) and not only troubling to the usual order of things but also holy.

Sappho's appropriation of the Helen tale is revisionary both because she shifts its emphases and, more important, because she appropriates it in service of a larger claim that is, in fact, a challenge to the traditional ethic of the warrior-aristocrat (such as Alcaeus), for whom erôs appears chiefly as a symposiastic pastime to take up slack between rounds of fighting. As an apparently popular drinking-song of Anacreon says, “[b]ring water, bring wine, dear boy, bring us flowery / garlands; have them brought, that I may box against Love.” This is “Love” regarded as something to do when drunk, along with playing games like cottabus.⁸⁰ Sappho's version of the Helen tale is still sufficiently traditional to function with some authority as a “proof” for the counterclaim she offers to that ethic, while the counterclaim itself is not a complete rejection of it either (nor, realistically, could it be). Certainly the notion that a beloved is beautiful in one's eyes or that love compels people to do strange things or that one is “conquered” by “limb-loosening desire” would not have been startling and could have passed as more or less standard poetic sentiment at a symposium. Anacreon might say the same. And certainly Sappho's poem does grant that a host of cavalry, ships, or infantry is a splendid sight. But Sappho's claim that erôs or the quality that calls it forth is the highest and overruling value, the best of all things on earth, and better explicitly than martial splendor, proposes a reordering of Hellenic culture's normal (or predominant) value-hierarchy. The degree to which Sappho's version of the Helen tale (with its shifted emphases) still remains authoritatively “traditional” for her male and female audiences—the degree to which they can perceive it as a warranted interpretation of the myth—is also the degree to which it is effective as a source of persuasion for her larger, more disruptive claim, and “easily makes this understood by everyone.”

This larger claim may not, however, be so “easily understood.” For Sappho turns, after two lines that are mostly lost, to a second “proof,” namely her longing for the absent Anactoria, which immediately becomes an enthymematic cap. Sappho's yearning replicates, in personal rather than mythic terms, the holy desire that made Helen “stray” with Paris. Both derive from the same source: the erôs-producing apparition of Aphrodite in a beloved. This is the heart-shaking glimpse that arises for Sappho from Anactoria's “bright-glancing” face and “lovely” (eraton) walk. (And probably from other qualities as well, since Anactoria generally is regarded as the departed companion of fragment 96, who shines like the moon amid the women of Lydia: it is worth noting that “bright,” lampros, also signifies splendid, radiant, distinct, brilliant, magnificent.) Insofar as the audience's experiential knowledge enables them to identify with Sappho's yearning as something that they themselves have felt or (if not themselves) as something that people feel, this yearning functions as a “confirmation” of the version of the Helen tale that Sappho has invoked. It is not just a fabulous tale but something that really does happen, even now, in varying degrees of intensity; most people really do yearn more for absent lovers than for the sight of a marching army, as splendid as that may be; and a magnificent beauty like Helen's and like Anactoria's produces a yearning more intense than usual.⁸¹ This reinforces the Helen tale as “proof” of Sappho's general contention. At the same time, the tale as Sappho has configured it reciprocally justifies her yearning for Anactoria as something more than “womanish” nostalgia and makes her enthymematic declaration that Anactoria would constitute a finer sight than “Lydian chariots and armored marching troops” something more than emotional caprice. The audience is asked, instead, to view that declaration as a warranted assertion of the fundamental truth of Sappho's general claim about what really matters most to human beings—a specific instantiation, in a specific person's life, of a deeper mythic paradigm that instantiates itself as well in her listeners' lives.

Sappho's argument, moreover, implicitly defines and warrants her yearning for Anactoria as a justified wish to “stray,” and this may be the most ideologically disruptive aspect of the poem. If the mostly obliterated three strophes that followed Sappho's enthymematic declaration were a continuation of this poem, it seems possible that the phrase “impossible to happen” introduced a new line of argument about her blocked desire to “stray.” Sappho has no realistic way to go to Lydia, and neither Anactoria nor Sappho occupies a social position that gives them the degree of agency available to men—neither has the material resources to play the role of Paris to the other's Helen. From this topic the argument may have turned (perhaps) to some concluding, consolatory hope that love or an excellence like Anactoria's might come again “unexpectedly.” If this is what the poem did, Sappho's avowal of the limits placed on her as a woman would have defused (for male audiences) the dangerousness of Helen's example, while at the same time reasserting the validity of Sappho's desire and of her general contention about what is “most beautiful” and best. This is utter speculation, of course, but it is interesting to contemplate not only women's gatherings but also, and especially, men's symposia taking in an argument about the rightness of a woman's wish to wander through the world and finding it persuasive. Moreover, if we think back again to the stasis convulsing Mytilene in Sappho's lifetime, Alcaeus's “hall of armor poem” and his overwhelming concern with enforcing factional solidarity, and Pittacus's shift of allegiances, it is truly remarkable to think of this poem, with its demotion of martial ideals and its defense of “straying,” being performed at gatherings of Lesbian women and men.

Fragment 1, while it is the only certainly complete poem by Sappho that survives, and is second in fame only to fragment 31, may in some ways be less typical of her usual argumentative procedure.

Ornately throned immortal Aphrodite,
wile-weaving child of Zeus, I beg you,
do not with aches and sorrows overwhelm,
lady, my heart,
but come here, if ever and otherwhere
when hearing this voice of mine from afar
you acquiesced, and leaving your father's golden
house you came
in your harnessed chariot; and the beautiful
quick sparrows brought you over the dark earth
with thick-whirring wingbeats from bright-shining heaven
through the middle sky,
and quickly they arrived; and you, O blessed one,
with a wide smile on your immortal face
asked what I've suffered this time and why
I'm calling this time,
and what do I most wish would happen to me
in my maddened heart; whom shall I persuade this time
to bring you back in her affection? Who, O
Sappho, does you wrong?
For if she flees, soon she will pursue;
and if she does not accept gifts, nevertheless she'll give;
and if she does not love, soon she will love
even against her will.
Come to me now, release me from hard
anxieties, and make fulfilled all that my
heart desires to be fulfilled; and you yourself
be my ally.

This poem seems less typical essentially because it takes the form of a cletic hymn—an invocation to a deity (whose name is adorned with suitable epithets), a reminder of past services, and a request. It probably was the first poem of the first book (of nine) in the canonic edition of Sappho's verse.⁸² If so, one might guess that it was given this position by Hellenistic editors because they considered it a “prelude” to Sappho's oeuvre, like an invocation to the Muse in bardic poetry or like the invocational hymns that were chanted by rhapsodes at the beginning of a performance.⁸³ Editors, in short, may have seen this poem as invoking the central deity-muse and the central theme(s) of Sappho's poetry, as well as embodying her characteristic style and verseform (the “Sapphic stanza”) while introducing her distinctive voice (and indeed her name, much as Theognis's invocatory poem introduces his name as a “seal” upon the Theognidea). Sappho's fragment 1 introduces and sets the stage for all her poetry.

Recent readings have tended to regard Sappho's use of the cletic hymn in fragment 1 as an instance of playful genre-bending—an instance of the tendency we have observed already to reconfigure traditional materials in the service of other purposes.⁸⁴ This poem appropriates and reconfigures traditional materials in other ways as well. But I would like to retain the idea that it could have functioned, in performance, as the proëmium or “prelude” to (some part of) the Sapphic repertoire and as a means of investing the poetry that followed with an additional dimension of persuasive power. For as such this poem is quite extraordinary.

What is most extraordinary about this poem is its management of voice, especially when we consider it as something to be performed, either by Sappho to her friends or by later performers of Sappho's poetry in women's (or men's) gatherings. I have deliberately omitted the quotation marks usually attached by translators to the speech of Aphrodite—from “whom shall I persuade this time” to “even against her will”—in part because there would have been no such punctuation to mark the shift of speaker in a performance and in part because an absence of such marking and the resultant potential for blurring the transition seems essential to the poem's effect. (There would have been, of course, no such punctuation in the ancient editions of Sappho's poetry; nor is there any in the standard modern editions of the Greek text.) While both Sappho and Aphrodite speak in the poem, one performer is performing all the lines; and this performer is not necessarily Sappho; and there is no sharp boundary between them. (Or the performer becomes all three at once.)⁸⁵

In performance, the performer reembodies Sappho's voice, though it is not necessarily apparent that Sappho has been speaking until the fifth strophe, where she is addressed by name by Aphrodite. By this means Sappho's “signature” is placed on the performance, and Sappho is brought before the audience, or materialized, as the one who speaks: the song announces that the performer is “doing” and is indeed “becoming” Sappho for the duration (of this and all the poems that follow). At the same time, the poem narrates with charming digressiveness Aphrodite's hearkening to “this voice of mine from afar” and her travel by sparrow-drawn chariot down through the sky from heaven. But this narration, which ostensibly is reminding the goddess of her previous acquiescence to the speaker's requests, is delivered apostrophically (as indeed the whole poem is delivered) in second-person address as if the goddess is already present and as if her swift journey down from heaven is happening now, in the moment of speaking.⁸⁶ The psychagogic effectiveness of the description, insofar as it beguiles the audience to visualize the journey, makes it “present” for them even as it is narrated in past tense. This confusion or conflation of past and present is exploited and intensified in the speech the goddess delivers on arrival. The first part is delivered as indirect reported speech, in the speaker/performer's voice, with a shift into present tense—”and you … asked what I've suffered this time and why I'm calling this time, and what do I most wish would happen to me in my maddened heart”—while the second part, which begins in the middle of a line and is set off by not a period but a semicolon,⁸⁷ shifts abruptly to direct, present-tense address in the voice of Aphrodite herself: “whom shall I persuade this time to bring you back in her affection? Who, O Sappho, does you wrong?” What follows from this, as Aphrodite's voice continues, is a quasi-magical formula that constitutes the goddess's fulfillment of Sappho's request: “For if she flees, soon she will pursue,” and so forth.

The effect for the audience is one of voices emerging from voices: from the performer emerges Sappho's voice, and from Sappho's voice emerges Aphrodite herself, who is now present and speaking in the poem even though the speech is represented as having been spoken in the past. Sappho, and through her the performer, suddenly has become the speaking goddess, and the audience receives an astonishing “glimpse” of the goddess in her presence.⁸⁸ Readers have remarked on the triple repetition of “this time” (dêute) in Aphrodite's speech (twice in Sappho's report of her utterance and once in her direct utterance) as marking a certain playful humor. The goddess seems to say, “what is it now, Sappho? What do you want this time?” as if in gentle, wide-smiling reproof of one who calls her just a little too often.⁸⁹ This may be so—for certainly playfulness is one of Aphrodite's attributes, and surely the seemingly familiar closeness between the goddess and Sappho is crucial to this poem's point—but the triple repetition of “this time” (which again sounds like a magic formula) also serves to emphasize that the event being narrated not only happens “then,” in the past, but also “now” and always, in every instance of the “this time” in which the poem is performed. Aphrodite, then, is already present and speaking in the poem, in the “now” of the poem's utterance, and is already speaking the very things that Sappho is calling on her to come and speak. Thus, when Sappho's voice returns in the final strophe to ask the goddess to “make fulfilled all that my heart desires to be fulfilled” and to “be my ally,” within the poem's act of utterance it already has happened, and the request already has been granted.⁹⁰

In this way the poem acts as, or like, what speech-act theory calls a performative: it brings into existence the very state of affairs that it invokes—or at least creates a persuasive illusion of doing so.⁹¹ Aphrodite is present in and through Sappho, who is present in and through the performer's reembodiment of her voice. Aphrodite is Sappho's (and the performer's) “ally” and familiar, and Sappho (and the performer) speak with an authority derived from, or backed by, this relationship. In sum, this poem establishes by way of its performative effect an implicit claim to bardlike authority.⁹² This claim is made persuasive to the degree that the performative is persuasive; and the performative is persuasive to the degree that the “theophany” of the goddess in and through Sappho's voice achieves sufficient psychagogic, illusionistic power to beguile the listener's mind into acceptance. The fact that Sappho was regarded in antiquity as a “tenth Muse” and as the “female Homer” suggests that she was, in fact, fairly persuasive in this claim.

Other aspects of this poem's argumentation are worth remarking on. The first is Sappho's characterization of Aphrodite. The epithets that Sappho attaches to her name in the poem's opening invocation—poikilothronos (“ornately throned”), athanata (“immortal”), and pai Dios doloploke (“wile-weaving child of Zeus”)—reflect traditional formulas but at the same time seem to be at least partly new inventions. These epithets on one hand stress the sorts of attributes one might expect, emphasizing Aphrodite's divine status and the poikilos, “ornate” beauty of her throne in Zeus's golden house. On the other hand, the epithets also stress her status as a goddess of subtlety and persuasion. Poikilothronos, as Page points out, “is not found elsewhere, and the idea expressed in it is not at all common in [ancient] literature”; and it has, as Page also notes, a punning resemblance to poikilophronos, which in fact occurs in some of the surviving manuscripts of this poem and which means “cunning” or “clever.”⁹³ Like Theognis's poikilos thymos, it suggests a variegated, adaptable “heart”/sensibility (or phrên). Doloploke, an expression that Sappho may have coined, portrays Aphrodite as a girl “weaving” in her father's house—but she is weaving dolos, the basic meaning of which is “bait” and which extends to stratagems and clever contrivances for catching, beguiling, or deceiving something or someone.⁹⁴ Like Hesiod's Muses, who can confer on their poet (when they wish to) the power to make anything whatever seem believable, Aphrodite is thus invoked as a figure who presides over an art of “weaving” beguilement, seduction, persuasion. And indeed this is precisely what Sappho is asking for: as the goddess says, “whom shall I persuade [peithô] this time?” and so forth. This characterization of Aphrodite as poikilo-thronos/phronos and as doloploke, as a goddess of persuasion (whose throne is suitably “ornate”), folds back into the poem's performativity: insofar as Sappho successfully accomplishes her illusionistic effect, she demonstrates in herself the “wile-weaving” power of Aphrodite and signifies, once again, that her request for an “alliance” has already been fulfilled.

Second, Sappho's request for Aphrodite's help in love-persuasion, and for Aphrodite to become her “ally,” symmachos—and Aphrodite's reply—portray that love persuasion as an agonistic contest. Someone “pursues” and someone “flees”; someone offers “gifts” and someone “accepts”; and someone “soon” is brought to love “even against her will.” Likewise, at the beginning of the poem, Sappho asks not to be “overwhelmed” with “aches and sorrows”: that is, to be not the one who loves unrequited but the one who is loved (and pursued and given gifts, etc.). Page duBois suggests that Sappho figures “love” within an “aristocratic drive for domination, in the agonistic arena of Greek social relations,” as a struggle in which the successful lover dominates and a conquered beloved submits; and according to duBois, such a scenario cannot be assimilated to “some … vision of nonviolent eros” projected by an essentializing feminism.⁹⁵ To persuade another to love and give sexual favors is to be victorious; to fall in love is to be defeated or subjugated. Symmachos means “fellow fighter,” and is a term with military resonance. Notably, the poem's enacted interchange between Aphrodite and Sappho resembles, and parallels, the scene in Pindar's Olympian 1 where Pelops calls on Poseidon and asks for assistance in the great, life-and-death contest that Pelops is about to face (in which he will “win” Hippodameia's hand in marriage). Sappho represents her love affair through the mythic typology of aristocratic combats and trials of excellence and casts herself in the role of the god-beloved hero. Once again, this self-portrayal both supports and is reciprocally justified by the persuasiveness of the poem's illusionistic and performative effects: insofar as Aphrodite's voice appears to emerge from (and merge back into) Sappho's, and insofar as her support as symmachos already has been granted, Sappho does indeed appear to be god-beloved and god-assisted.

Another way to put duBois's point is to say that Sappho's account of love as an agôn involving conquest and defeat appropriates traditional presuppositions (and representations) as part of the grounds of this poem's argument. There clearly is a resonance with, say, Anacreon's representation of himself as “boxing with Love”; in one fragment (346[2]), he says that he has been “boxing with a tough opponent” but now can raise his head again, and gives thanks that he has “escaped love's bonds completely, bonds made harsh by Aphrodite.”⁹⁶ But duBois's characterization may oversimplify. For in asking Aphrodite to be her symmachos in persuasion, Sappho is indeed assuming that she herself will pursue, give gifts, and so forth, and that “success” or “victory” will consist of becoming in turn the one who is pursued, and so forth, and who finally, perhaps, consents to love—and so is “conquered” also (as she has been, say, by Anactoria). This scenario does presume a sort of reciprocity, insofar as lover and beloved in effect switch roles, trade places. Unlike Anacreon's love boxing, moreover, it does not necessarily involve the erotic conquest of an adolescent by an adult but may involve erôs between adult gynaikes who are social peers. And even in Anacreon, to “lose” a contest with “Love” does not always mean to be subjected in love to another. Sometimes, it simply means to fail to persuade, or to be rejected.

[FR. 358]

Once again with his purple ball
golden-haired Eros strikes me,
and with the girl in fancy sandals
          summons me to play;
but she, for she is from well-built
Lesbos, with my hair,
for it is white, finds fault,
          and opens toward someone else.

Old, drunk, white-haired Anacreon in this poem is a comically bested boxer of Love, having been “defeated” by a younger fellow symposiast in competition for the Lesbian girl's attentions; and she is “lesbianizing” the winner.⁹⁷ Anacreon's desire, the “summons” of Eros, has been aroused at sight of the girl but he cannot fulfill it.

Further, to equate persuasion with “domination” with violence as if all three terms were interchangeable is to blur some extremely important differences.⁹⁸ This is especially so when we are considering not an Anacreon fumbling after a flute-girl (or a prostitute) from Lesbos but Sappho contesting for love among girls and women who are, probably, her social equals. There is an immeasurable difference between “conquering” a social peer erotically (or in other ways) by persuading them (with gifts, speeches, and other overtures) and, say, putting a knife to someone's throat and demanding sex. Even to say that “if she does not love, soon she will love even against her will” does not imply violent subjection in the sense of physical coercion. “Even against her will” translates kôuk etheloisa, a participial phrase that also could be rendered as “even not intending [it].” The verb thelô signifies willing, wishing, or purposing some future event: this participial phrase suggests not so much forced compliance as the breaking down of resistance to the seductive/persuasive effect of the lover's self-presentation.⁹⁹ “She” does not (now) want/intend to be “in love” with Sappho (or perhaps anyone), but soon she will find that she is “in love” anyway, overwhelmed by the force of desire inspired in her by the persuasive effect of “Aphrodite” in Sappho's self-presentation, even while she still is thinking “I don't want/intend to be in love.” The point is that her mind (or heart) will change and that she soon will, indeed, be pursuing Sappho though now she is indifferent.

What seems important here, however, is less the question whether Sapphic erôs is “dominative” or “reciprocal” (or something else) but rather Sappho's portrayal of female agency: woman as persuader and as “hero” in an erotic agôn, as the one who “conquers” rather than a passive object to be conquered, defined by male desires, or traded as an elegant object of gift exchange. Further, as suggested by duBois's recognition that Sappho's love scenario is embedded in “the agonistic arena of Greek social relations”—or as suggested also by Theognis's portrayal of his relation with Kyrnos (or his unspecified boy-addressees)—what is at stake is not only the satisfaction of Sappho's erotic desires but also a question of factional affiliation.¹⁰⁰ To love Sappho, to be persuaded to love her, is to become a member of her circle as opposed to some other, such as Andromeda's or that of the “Penthilid ladies.” The women of Sappho's circle are, as her poetry claims, the best, the most accomplished, the most impressive, the most refined in their pursuit of luxuries and pleasures; and the men who sit “opposite” them, in the blessed realm their cultured discourse constitutes, are likewise excellent. And the women of Sappho's circle are the best because they are devoted to the cultivation of the Muses, the pursuit of refined pleasures, and “wile-weaving” persuasion, and so forth, as opposed to the “Penthilid ladies,” whose clan has been most notable in Sappho's time for beating people with clubs and for provoking (possibly through an outrageous rape) a period of stasiotic bloodshed, and as opposed as well to the circle of Andromeda, who courts the favors of uncultured, unimpressive, and probably socially unequal “country girls.” Sappho, in sum, portrays herself and the women of her fluctuating circle as engaged in a contest of persuasions, a contest that is embedded in and part of the factionalized sociopolitical competition of Mytilene.

In fragment 1, then, we find a quasi-bardic invocation in which Sappho calls on Aphrodite to assist her in a contest of persuasions—an erotic agôn with social and political implications—and argues indirectly, by way of a performative effect, that what she asks for already has been granted. The proof is the poem's illusionistic power, the psychagogic effectivity of Sappho's management of voice, as “Aphrodite” comes down from heaven and then emerges, abruptly, briefly, teasingly, playfully, and astonishingly, from within Sappho's speaking. And what fragment 1 announces, in a performance, is that the audience will now experience the persuasive, seductive force of Sappho's Aphroditean art. This lends considerable authority to her verse.

A corrective note is probably in order here. Certainly Sappho represents the interests of archaic aristocracy, and the emergent interests of aristocratic luxury-consumption and (competitive) display in the seventh and sixth centuries b.c. Sappho's disdain for Andromeda's “country girl” sums up that orientation. So does her straightforward remark in another fragment, where she mentions having grown too old to dance with young girls and concludes “but I love luxury [egô de philemm' abrosynan] … and for me this love [eros] has obtained the brilliance and beauty of the sun” (fr. 58; one could also read abrosynan here as “elegance”).¹⁰¹ It is clear that Sappho's sympathies are not democratic. Judging from her banishment at the same time that Alcaeus was banished, it seems likely that her family and her circle were out of sympathy with the Myrsilos-Pittacus faction and would have been unhappy with Pittacus's populist appeal as aisymnêtês, “elected dictator.” One can guess what she thought of Pittacus's politically opportunistic marriage to a Penthilid woman. It is not impossible that Sappho and Alcaeus belonged to the same clan, or moved in overlapping circles.¹⁰²

Even so, however, Sappho does speak as the voice of an ideological shift, asserting the values of habrosynê and of what Maximus calls her technê erôtikê—which is an art of persuasion, and an art that seems to be centered in the type of women's culture exemplified by her circle—over the older, more archaic, aristocratic (and patriarchal) ideal of martial valor that Alcaeus remains committed to. This is not a simple opposition, or a zero sum game or combat in which one set of values cancels and replaces the other; rather, it is a suasory reordering of the traditionally predominant value-hierarchy of Hellenic culture. The values that Alcaeus represents are not “rejected” but absorbed within and subordinated to those that Sappho represents, in a contest of persuasions regarding what is best and most desirable for human beings. It is worth noting that the values of Alcaeus are, in essence, precisely those that have brought on the stasis in Mytilene and that sustain it: although Alcaeus longs, on one hand, for the council and assembly where his ancestors were entitled to speak and wield political authority, on the other hand his politics, like those of the Penthilidai (apparently), ultimately reduce to brute force in service of the interests and entitlements of his faction. Alcaeus's aristocratic politics, in Mytilene as in other sixth-century Greek poleis, have come to catastrophe. Sappho pursues (women's) politics by other means and proposes as superior the êthos of her circle: an êthos in which habrosynê, cultivated excellence, or the thing that calls forth erôs in human beings, is the highest good; in which persuasion understood as an erotic agôn figures as the medium of social competition and the constitutive principle of a realm of blessedness; and in which cultivated, “conspicuous” women exercise a measure of agency as persuaders. Indeed, Sappho's argument demonstrates that Alcaeus's longing (and perhaps also his gloom as he skulks alongside the festival of Hera, listening to the women's ululation) is in effect a confession of the superiority of her position. In promoting a counterhegemonic scheme of values, in other words, “making the lesser case the greater,” and in her role as the leader of a fluctuating circle of friends, lovers, associates, and students devoted to cultivating the poetic and other arts that constitute the excellence she celebrates, Sappho plays the protosophistic sort of role that Maximus assigns to her.

Both Alcaeus and Sappho, as I suggested at the outset of this chapter, can be understood as offering lyrical argumentation to an audience that consists primarily of the members of their circles, most typically through performances in symposia or symposiumlike gatherings: argumentation indoors, so to speak. As I also suggested, such a context implies a “closed” argumentative system, in which a great deal of homogeneity can in principle be presumed, so that the poet can simply “express” or dramatize ethical positions and modalities of judgment that the audience can be expected to agree with already. Such a situation, in fact, requires little more than a rhetoric of recapitulation, a means of reiterating, intensifying, and solidifying the group's shared attitudes and identity. But in both Alcaeus's and Sappho's case such a simplified image does not quite hold. Alcaeus's “boat” is leaky, his argumentation must meet counterdiscourses from both within and outside the group, and at least to some degree that argumentation is meant to be projected beyond the group as a rhetoric of justification. Sappho's circle is probably still more permeable, and her argumentation engages with, reappropriates and reconfigures, and contests—rather than simply invokes (as Alcaeus often seems to do)—what have traditionally been the dominant schemes of value in Lesbian and Hellenic culture. My point is that it is not the insulation of the “inside” group, or a privacy that supposedly enables the expression of an untrammeled “lyric subjectivity” freed from the pressures of community morality, that makes either Alcaeus's or Sappho's poetry a distinctive, significant cultural force. And this is so especially in the case of Sappho. It is not because her poems are private communications to her nearest and dearest friends that they are and have been so compelling to so many for so long. Rather, just the opposite is true: because they offer enthymematic argumentation that engages with the discourses of a wider audience “outside” her inner circle, Sappho's poems have traveled far.

Notes

1. For both Alcaeus and Sappho, I am using the Greek text provided in Campbell 1982; all my citations of fragments and testimonies follow Campbell's numbering. The epigraphs appear as Alcaeus testimony 20 and Sappho testimony 20.

2. On the images of Sappho perpetrated by male writers in antiquity (and after), see Gubar 1984; De jean 1989; Williamson 1995 5-33; and Stehle 1997 262-288. For a provocative reinterpretation of Sappho's place in the history of sexuality, see du Bois 1995 127-145.

3. Russell 1981 6.

4. The first of Alcaeus's ten books of poetry appears to have been devoted to hymns. See Campbell 1982 fr. 306C-311. For discussion of Alcaeus's hymns and heroic narratives, see Page 1955 244-290.

5. Stehle 1997 213-215, 264-265; Campbell 1982 fr. 160 and 142. Hetaira could also be taken to mean “courtesan” or prostitute, a sense that seems to have been applied to Sappho in at least certain strands of the biographical tradition, beginning probably with satiric portraits in Attic comedy (we know of several comedies whose titles included her name, all of them now lost). But Athenaeus, writing in the third century a.d., says that “even today free women (eleutherai gynaikes) and young girls (parthenoi) call their intimates hetairai, just as Sappho did” (Deipnosophistai 13.571d). “Small gathering” means, as Stehle remarks, about fourteen to twenty-two participants, as these are the numbers that could be accommodated by the traditional size and layout of the dining-rooms in which symposia were held.

6. Trapp 1997 xi-lv.

7. Likewise, as Havelock 1982 11 suggests, the “proto-intellectuals” who gathered at the courts of tyrants in the sixth and early fifth centuries were poets—such Pindar or Simonides at Heiron's court, or the poets that Pisistratus brought to Athens—but by the later fifth and early fourth centuries were sophists.

8. Burnett 1983 107-108.

9. Page 1955 243; quoted in Kurke 1994 67-68. In antiquity, however, Alcaeus was often viewed as a proponent of “liberty” or opposition to tyranny; see Campbell 1982 test. 7, 21.

10. For a fuller account, see Burnett 1983 107-120, to which my brief account is chiefly indebted; and Page 1955 149-243. See also Campbell 1982 xiii-xvii.

11. Page 1955 149; the translation here is Page's.

12. As Burnett 1983 109 n. 13 points out, the name Smerdis (which seems not to be an aristocratic name) may be evidence of a popular revolt against the Penthilids—or, more likely, of such a revolt being used by one or more of the noble clans as a means to seizing power.

13. Page 1955 177; Kurke 1994 76-77. Damos is the same as dêmos. As Kurke argues, the damos that Alcaeus speaks of is an increasingly wealthy landholding citizenry not limited to nobles—the damos who, in the seventh century, would assemble in the agora to hear the judgments and decrees of the basileus and aristocratic council.

14. McGlew 1993 79-81, 95-97. On Pittacus's popularity, see also Kurke 1994 90-92.

15. Page 1955 179-197; Burnett 1983 151-155; Gentili 1988 197-215.

16. Words appearing in brackets represent the conjectural restorations accepted in Campbell 1982 for damaged parts of the Greek text; suspension points represent parts of the Greek text lost beyond restoration. In some cases I have followed the readings of Lobel-Page 1955 and Page 1955.

17. Campbell 1982. See also fragment 306C(c), a second-century (a.d.) papyrus scrap from a badly crumbled commentary on Alcaeus, which also declares fragment 208 to be about Myrsilos.

18. Page 1955 179; Campbell 1982 fr. 114. Pyrrha was located on the opposite (western) side of Lesbos from Mytilene.

19. The allegorical nature of Alcaeus's “ship of state” poems is also recognized in a few bits of commentary preserved in papyrus fragments. See Campbell 1982 fr. 306.

20. Burnett 1983 156-181; Stehle 1997 216-218.

21. Gentili 1988 199, 202-203, 213-214; see also Kurke 1994 concerning Alcaeus's use (and violations) of traditional high poetic diction.

22. Page 1955 184-185.

23. Tradition says, of course, that Lycambes, who broke his oath with Archilochus—a marriage-contract in which he had promised his elder daughter to the poet—was driven to suicide, with his daughters, as a result of the damage that Archilochus did to their reputation. Even if we accept the notion that “Lycambes” may be a fictive name for a type, it seems likely that Archilochus had a target whom he was attacking through that figure, and that the story about a suicide may have some basis in actual events. See Miller 1994 9-36. It does appear, moreover, that there was an actual Lycambid family on Paros. See Rankin 1977 47-56.

24. Page 1955 210-223. See also Burnett 1983 124-126.

25. “Kronos's son” would be Zeus.

26. Campbell 1982 fr. 38A n. 2.

27. Translation of Campbell 1982. Fragment 38B consists of about one word each from five sequential lines and a single letter from a sixth.

28. On the archaic ideology of habrosynê, see Kurke 1992.

29. Page 1955 278-281.

30. Burnett 1983 190-198.

31. Burnett 1983 200.

32. See Page 1955 171-174 and Stehle 1997 234-237. In fragment 70, Alcaeus says “let [Pittacus], married into the family of the Atreidae, devour the city as he did in company with Myrsilos” (tr. Campbell); the Penthilidai claimed descent from the Atreidai—via Penthilus, the son of Orestes, the grandson of Atreus.

33. Page 1955 281.

34. Kurke 1994 90-92 comments on Alcaeus's alienation from and relative ineffectiveness with “the Lesbian damos, his intended audience and community.”

35. For readings of this remarkable poem, see Page 1955 198-209; Burnett 1983 176-181; and Stehle 1997 230-234. The identities of Agesilaidas and Onomakles are unknown, though perhaps it is enough to recognize that Agesilaidas (“Leader of the people”?) is the poem's addressee and that Onomakles is an example of wretchedness in exile.

36. The chief sources for my rather brief discussion here are Page 1955 140-146; Burnett 1983 209-228; Williamson 1995 103-109; and Stehle 1997 262-278. On women's festivals in the ancient Greek world, see also Farnell 1896-1909; Detienne 1977; Burkert 1985; and Kraemer 1992.

37. Williamson 1995 105.

38. Stehle 1997 118.

39. It should be noted, however, that this “compulsory permission” had limited force, since only another man could prosecute the man who refused to pay for his wife's participation.

40. Stehle 1997 71-118.

41. Stehle 1997 32.

42. A perfumed oil; Campbell 1988 fr. 3 n. 6.

43. Campbell 1988 fr. 3 n. 2.

44. Burnett 1983 210-228. Stehle 1997 262-278 usefully complicates and partially refutes this picture in ways that I presently will be agreeing with.

45. Burnett 1983 226. The “consequences that mattered” involved virginity of brides (defined in terms of heterosexual penetration), reproduction, and the paternity of children.

46. Blundell 1995 83; see also duBois 1995 7-15.

47. On girls' names in Alcman's poetry—such as Hagesichora, “Chorus-leader”—see Calame 1995 179-183. For a detailed account of Spartan girl choruses, see also Calame 1977 vol. 2; which Stehle 1997 73-93 modifies.

48. Stehle 1997 73-93 remarks on the ways that Alcman's maiden-songs negotiate the problematics of this role, by having the parthenoi disavow the appearance of appropriating to themselves the otherwise “male” public authority and agency that properly belong to the speaker-function that the song projects them into. I am not sure, however, that at least some of these gestures cannot be treated as figures of aporia and aposiopesis that ultimately function as hyperbolic praise. One might also compare the chorus-speaker's gestures toward Astymeloisa to Sappho's famous, and similar, gesture in fragment 31—which no one reads as Sappho's avowal of her lack of agency.

49. Page 1955 140-142. On thiasos and symposium, see Gentili 1988 72-106.

50. Page 1955 60, 168-169.

51. Williamson 1995 107; see 106-109, 115, 126-128.

52. As Page 1955 60 remarks, there seems to have been a Lesbian version of the Troy-tale, in which Agamemnon—from whom the Penthilids claimed descent—and Menelaus stopped in Lesbos on the way back from Troy and together invoked the aid of Hera for their safe return. See Sappho fragment 17 and Alcaeus fragment 129. Sappho fragment 44 narrates the marriage of Hector and Andromache.

53. Fragment 44A may be part of a hymn to Artemis, though that is far from certain, and the attribution of the fragment to Sappho is itself doubtful.

54. Jarratt and Ong 1995; Swearingen 1995; Glenn 1997 36-49.

55. See Nagy 1990a, 1996.

56. Photius's Library does, however, mention “passages from Book 1 of the Epitomes of Pamphila, daughter of Soteridas” among the compilations of one Sopater the Sophist, a figure of the fourth or fifth century a.d. (test. 32; tr. Campbell 1982). Whether this Pamphila is a garbled version of Philostratus's Damophyla of Pamphylia—who would have lived a good ten centuries before Sopater, and even longer before Photius—I cannot say. Sopater's compilation apparently included also “Book 8 of Sappho,” as well as the Tales of the Exploits of Virtuous Women by Artemon the Magnesian. Sopater seems to have been interested in distinguished women of the Aeolic/Ionic and “Asiatic” East Greek world.

57. Or, perhaps, a Deleuzian “rhizome”; see Deleuze and Guattari 1987 3-25.

58. Stehle 1997 283.

59. Williamson 1995 136-140.

60. Williamson 1995 106-107. If Sappho's circle met at her (or someone else's) house during the Adonia—or at any other time—they probably would not have met in the reception/dining room used for men's symposia, the andrôn (literally the “men's room”). They more probably would have met upstairs, in the women's quarters, the gynaikônitis. (Some of the Adonian activities also took place on rooftops.) If they met elsewhere in the house—such as the ground-floor family room or the central courtyard—they would have been in trafficked areas where other members of the household, including men, and others might come and go. Depending on their location in the house, then, the women at a gathering would have been accessible in varying degrees to male eavesdropping, overhearing, or direct observation, even if men were not explicitly included. I am here following the description of a typical Greek house, based on excavations of fifth-century structures at Olynthos (near modern Thessalonika), described in Phylactopoulos 1975 2:456-459.

61. Jarratt and Ong 1995 15. Cicero De Inventione 1.31 includes an account of a “Socratic” conversation between Aspasia, Xenophon, and Xenophon's wife, from a now lost dialogue by a follower of Socrates named Aeschines. Aspasia was, of course, from Miletus (an Ionian Greek city on what is now the west coast of Turkey), which may suggest an East Greek tradition, going back at least to the time of Sappho, in which women played sophist-like roles with gatherings that could include men as well as women.

62. Nagy 1996 219.

63. Page 1955 26 considers this bracketed phrase, which appears in “Longinus,” corrupt. Page also notes that the first part could be read as “[a]ll must be ventured (or endured),” or even “[a]ll has been ventured (or endured),” depending on the remainder of the sentence, which is missing. I have followed Snyder 1997 33 and Irwin 1974 67 in reading chlôrotera de poias as “more moist than grass” rather than the more usual “greener than grass.”

64. Stehle 1997 288-318.

65. All three images are reproduced and discussed in Williamson 1995 6-7 and figs. 1, 2, 4.

66. In fragment 55, Sappho excoriates an uncultured woman, or perhaps a rival (such as Andromeda), saying that after death she will lie forgotten and unseen in Hades because “you have no share in the roses of Pieria” (tr. Campbell); it seems unlikely that this poem would have been delivered directly to the victim of its rather intense invective; it would have been presented, among Sappho's friends, as an apostrophe. This poem can be understood to promote group solidarity by projecting a blame-figure of “what we are not”; fragment 31 can be understood, conversely, to promote group identity by projecting a praise-figure of “what we love,” like Astymeloisa in Alcman's maiden-song.

67. This discussion actually leads into, and introduces, “Longinus's” account of “amplification,” auxêsis, which in Peri Hypsous is the figure of figures for “sublimity.”

68. Burnett 1983 233; Stehle 1997 290.

69. In another fragment (44), which narrates the marriage of Hector and “elegant Andromache” (abran Andromachan), the scene ends in songs of praise for the “godlike” couple.

70. Burnett 1983 235-238. Burnett says that Sappho's “proof” of this contention is “almost Euclidean.”

71. Page 1955 19; Campbell 1982 fr. 31; Stehle 1997 289.

72. Translation of Campbell 1982.

73. Snyder 1997 31-35, 38-44 discusses Sappho's representation of erôs as bodily disruption in these and other fragments.

74. Snyder 1997 34-35 notes that Sappho's evocation of “that man” as an “equal to the gods” parallels Odysseus's praise of Nausicaa at Odyssey 6.158-161: “That man is blessed in heart beyond all others, / whoever bestows upon you dowry gifts and takes you home. / Never have I seen such a one with my own eyes—/ neither man nor woman. Awe takes hold of me as I gaze upon you” (tr. Snyder). Odysseus is, of course, attempting (successfully) to persuade Nausicaa to help him; he has just awakened, shipwrecked and naked, on the beach of Phaeacia. If Sappho's audience recognized this resonance, they would also see Sappho (or the speaker of the poem) in the role of an Odysseus-like persuader, exercising a kind of agency typically gendered as “male” in traditional Hellenic culture.

75. Stehle 1997 293-294, somewhat similarly, sees this poem as foregrounding and affirming the woman's agency, her ability to present herself effectively to others rather than be simply an object of their gaze, and so to “define the situation” rather than be the passive object of men's “willful desire.”

76. DuBois 1995 163-194 argues that Sappho's poetry makes a case for the culture of “Asianism” (as it would later be called), which has always stood as a disruptive, troubling “other” to the masculinist, “Atticizing” traditions of Western civilization. On Sappho's “subversion of tradition” and “challenge to the Homeric inheritance,” see Snyder 1997 16-17, 63-77.

77. Page 1955 30.

78. Campbell 1982 fr. 55 n. 1; Page 1955 5⁵.

79. Burnett 1983 281-290.

80. Campbell 1988 fr. 396. Campbell attaches a comment on this poem, from Demetrius On Style 5, that “the rhythm is exactly like a drunk old man.” Campbell notes that the poem is cited not only by Demetrius but also by Athenaeus and appears as well, with a portrait of Anacreon, in a second-century (a.d.) mosaic in Autun; it apparently was widely popular. Cottabus was a game that involved casting the last wine-drops from one's cup at a target.

81. In another fragment (23, from the same papyrus as fr. 22, which bids Abanthis to sing of Gongyla), Sappho explicitly compares a lover (whose name is lost) to Helen: “[for when] I look at you face to face, [it seems to me that not even] Hermione [is] like you, and to compare you to fair-haired Helen [is not unfitting].” It may be that in Sappho's discourse (and perhaps in the discourse of Lesbian women generally) Helen figured as the paradigm of womanly excellence.

82. According to Campbell 1982 fr. 1 n. 1, “[s]ince Hephaestion uses [this] poem to illustrate the Sapphic stanza, it was probably the first poem of Book 1.” It was preserved in its complete form by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who cites it—along with a passage from Isocrates—to illustrate the “polished” (glaphyra) or middle style (On Composition 23). Both, in short, regard this poem as the embodiment of Sappho's distinctive or typical style. All modern editions of Sappho's poetry accept fragment 1 as poem 1 of book 1 of her verse. On what little is known of the contents and arrangement of the nine books of Sappho, see Page 1955 112-126. There are other examples of cletic hymns in Sappho's remaining fragments, for example. fragment 17, which is a hymn to Hera, but I think it is fair to say that these are not her most characteristic poems.

83. See, for example, the Homeric Hymns, many of which (especially though not necessarily only the shorter ones) seem to have had this function; Thucydides (3.104.4) refers to the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo as a “proëmium.”

84. Jenkyns 1982 8-15; Burnett 1983 245-258; Williamson 1995 161-166;

85. My analysis here and hereafter is indebted to Nagy 1996 99-102.

86. Compare Hesiod's self-authorizing account of his encounter with the Muses (Theogony 22-35), which is given entirely as a third-person, past-tense narrative: “[a]nd once they taught Hesiod lovely song, as he was shepherding his lambs on holy Helicon,” and so on.

87. In the Greek text as edited by Lobel-Page and Campbell as well.

88. The effect is even more extraordinary if Sappho is herself the performer, for when Aphrodite says, “Who, O Sappho, does you wrong?” Sappho as performer is delivering these lines and for the moment ceases to be Sappho: as in mediumistic “possession,” Sappho is displaced by the goddess who speaks through her.

89. Page 1955 12-14; Jenkyns 1982 11.

90. To a certain degree, it is not clear that Sappho's voice “returns,” since again there is nothing in the poem to clearly mark the transition. It is possible for the listening audience, at a performance, to regard the final strophe as a continuation of Aphrodite's speech or as a fusion of Aphrodite's and Sappho's voices—and as suddenly directed outward to the listeners themselves: you come, you fulfill my desires, you be my ally. These imperatives would then appear as Aphrodite's command to them in fulfillment of her promises to Sappho in the preceding strophe.

91. The locus classicus for speech-act theory is, of course, the work of J. L. Austin and John Searle, while its most notable recent iteration has been in the work of Judith Butler.

92. Stehle 1997 299 also remarks on this bardic, authorizing move, though she does not address the performative aspect of the poem. See also the discussion of this poem in Snyder 1997 7-25.

93. Page 1955 5. Snyder 1997 10 and 222 n. 5 points out that this is a distinct departure from Homer's usual epithets, such as “laughter-loving.” Neuberger-Donath 1969 15-17 points out that poikilothronos does not occur elsewhere, while poikilophronos does occur in both Alcaeus and Euripides. Tinkler 1990 172-175 argues that Sappho's poikilothron' may not be from thronos, “throne,” but throna, “drugs.”

94. Page 1955 4-6; Jenkyns 1982 9; Burnett 1983 249-251. It is worth noting too that ploke derives from plekô, which can mean not only “weave” (fabric, baskets, etc.) or “braid” (hair) but also to contrive, devise, plot, or complicate.

95. DuBois 1995 9.

96. Translation of Campbell 1988. Anacreon may be giving his thanks to Dionysus, though the text is damaged and the reading is uncertain. If Dionysus has “helped” him to break free of Aphrodite's bonds, he is in some sense “god-assisted,” though what he may mean is simply that wine has helped him to forget.

97. Gentili 1988 95.

98. See McCloskey 1996, which offers a similar position. For that matter, see Hesiod at the beginning of Works and Days on the good and bad Strifes.

99. Burnett 1983 243 regards this poem as about, in part, the problems of courting “balky and changeable” young girls.

100. Williamson 1995 164-166 raises a similar line of argument.

101. These appear to be the last two lines of the poem; Campbell 1982 fr. 58 n. 3. The Greek text reads, egô de philemm' abrosynan, … touto kai moi / to la[mpron eros tôelio kai to ka]lon le[l]onche. Campbell reads abrosynê as “delicacy.” He also regards the meaning of these lines as “uncertain” and conjectures that the sense is “love has kept me alive”; but it seems that love of luxury or “elegance,” or the erôs that “elegance” calls forth, is what has kept the now white-haired Sappho going and indeed has brought her unsurpassable satisfactions.

102. Fragment 137, a dialogue-poem, is cited/preserved by Aristotle (Rhetoric 1.9. 1367a) as Sappho's reply to an indecent (or shameful) proposal by Alcaeus; and so it has traditionally been regarded. Modern scholars have doubted the identification of Alcaeus as the male speaker, although “Alcaeus's” speech is the only passage in Sappho's surviving poetry that uses Alcaic rhythm. If modern scholars are wrong, this fragment may be evidence that Alcaeus and Sappho belonged to the same or related groups.

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