in turn led to the assertion that Sappho had a mother with the same name.) Who were the members of her circle? The Suda refers by name to three female ‘students’, and three female companions – Atthis, Telesippa, and Megara – with whom she had ‘disgraceful friendships’. But much of this is no more than can be reasonably extrapolated from the poems, since the extant verses mention nearly all those names. The compilers of the Suda, like scholars today, may have been making educated guesses.
Even Sappho’s sexuality, which for general audiences is the most famous thing about her, has been controversial from the start. However exalted her reputation among the ancient literati, in Greek popular culture of the Classical period and afterward, Sappho was known primarily as an oversexed predator – of men. This, in fact, was the ancient cliché about ‘Lesbians’: when we hear the word today we think of love between women, but when the ancient Greeks heard the word they thought of fellatio. In classical Greek, the verb lesbiazein – ‘to act like someone from Lesbos’ – meant performing oral sex, an activity for which inhabitants of the island were thought to have a particular penchant. Comic playwrights and authors of light verse portrayed Sappho as just another daughter of Lesbos, only too happy to fall into bed with her younger male rivals.
For centuries, the most popular story about her love life was, in fact, one about a hopeless passion for a handsome young boatman called Phaon, which allegedly led her to jump off a cliff. That tale has been embroidered, dramatized, and novelized over the centuries by writers from Ovid – who in one poem has Sappho abjectly renouncing her gay past – to Erica Jong, in her 2003 novel Sappho’s Leap. As fanciful as it is, it’s easy to see how this melodrama of heterosexual passion could have been inspired by her verse, which so often describes the anguish of unrequited love. (‘You have forgotten me / or you love someone else more.’) The added element of suicide suggests that those who wove this improbable story wanted us to take away a moral: unfettered expressions of great passion will have dire consequences.
As time went on, the fantasies about Sappho’s private life became more extreme. Midway through the first century AD the Roman philosopher Seneca, tutor to Nero, was complaining about a Greek scholar who had devoted an entire treatise to the question of whether Sappho was a prostitute. Some ancient writers assumed that there had to have been two Sapphos: one the great poet, the other the notorious slut. There is an entry for each in the Suda.
The uncertainties plaguing the biography of literature’s most famous Lesbian explain why classicists who study Sappho like to cite the entry for her in Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig’s Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary (1979). To honour Sappho’s central position in the history of female homosexuality, the two editors devoted an entire page to her. The page is blank.
The controversies about Sappho’s sexuality have never been far from the centre of scholarship about her. Starting in the early nineteenth century, when classics itself was becoming a formal discipline, scholars who were embarrassed by what they found in the fragments worked hard to whitewash Sappho’s reputation. The title of one early work of German scholarship is ‘Sappho Liberated from a Prevalent Prejudice’: in it, the author acknowledged that what Sappho felt for her female friends was ‘love’ but hastened to insist that it was in no way ‘objectionable, vulgarly sensual, and illegal’, and that her poems of love were neither ‘monstrous nor abominable’.
The eagerness to come up with ‘innocent’ explanations for the poet’s attachment to young women persisted through the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The most tenacious theory held that Sappho was the head of a girls’ boarding school, a matron whose interest in her pupils was purely pedagogical. (One scholar claimed to have found evidence that classes were taught on how to apply makeup.) Another theory made her into an august priestess, leading ‘an association of young women who devoted themselves to the cult of the goddess’.
Most classicists today have no problem with the idea of a gay Sappho. But some have been challenging the interpretation of her work that seems most natural to twenty-first-century readers: that the poems are deeply personal expressions of private homoerotic passion. Pointing to the relentlessly public and communitarian character of ancient Greek society, with its clan allegiances, its endless rounds of athletic games and artistic competitions, its jammed calendar of civic and religious festivals, they wonder whether ‘personal’ poetry, as we understand the term, even existed for someone like Sappho. As André Lardinois, the co-author of the new English edition, has written, ‘Can we be sure that these are really her own feelings? … What is “personality” in such a group-oriented society as archaic Greece?’
Indeed, the vision of Sappho as a solitary figure pouring out her heart in the women’s quarters of a nobleman’s mansion is a sentimental anachronism – a projection, like so much of our thinking about her, of our own habits and institutions onto the past. In Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Sappho and Alcaeus, the Poetess and four diaphanously clad, flower-wreathed acolytes relax in a charming little performance space, enraptured as the male bard sings and plays, as if he were a Beat poet in a Telegraph Hill café. But Lardinois and others have argued that many, if not most, of Sappho’s poems were written to be performed by choruses on public occasions. In some lyrics, the speaker uses the first-person plural ‘we’; in others, the form of ‘you’ that she uses is the plural, suggesting that she’s addressing a group – presumably the chorus, who danced as she sang. (Even when Sappho uses the first-person singular, it doesn’t mean she was singing solo: in Greek tragedy, the chorus, which numbered fifteen singers, regularly uses ‘I’.)
This communal voice, which to us seems jarring in lyrics of deep, even erotic feeling – imagine that Shakespeare’s sonnets had been written as choral hymns – is one that some translators today simply ignore, in keeping with the modern interest in individual psychology. But if the proper translation of the sexy little Fragment 38 is not ‘you scorch me’ but ‘you scorch us’, which is what the Greek actually says, how, exactly, should we interpret it?
To answer that question, classicists lately have been imagining the purposes to which public performance of erotic poems might have been put. Ancient references to the poet’s ‘companions’ and ‘students’ have led one expert to argue that Sappho was the leader of a female collective, whose role was ‘instruction leading to marriage’. Rather than expressions of individual yearning for a young woman, the poems were, in Lardinois’s view, ‘public forms of praise of the general attractiveness of the girl’, celebrating her readiness for wedlock and integration into the larger society. The late Harvard classicist Charles Segal made even larger claims. As he saw it, the strongly rhythmic erotic lyrics were ‘incantatory’ in nature; he believed that public performance of poems like Fragment 31 would have served to socialize desire itself for the entire city – to lift sexual yearning ‘out of the realm of the formless and terrible, bring it into the light of form, make it visible to the individual poet and, by extension, to his or her society’.
Even purely literary issues – for instance, the tendency to think of Sappho as the inventor of ‘the lyric I’, a single, emotionally naked speaker who becomes a stand-in for the reader – are affected by these new theories. After all, if the ‘I’ who speaks in Sappho’s work is a persona (a ‘poetic construct rather than a real-life figure’, as Lardinois put it) how much does her biography actually matter?
Between the paucity of actual poems and the woeful unreliability of the biographical tradition, these debates are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. Indeed, the study of Sappho is beset by a curious circularity. For the better part of a millennium – between the compilation of the Suda and the late nineteenth century – the same bits of poetry and the same biographical gossip were endlessly recycled, the poetic fragments providing the sources for biographies that were then used as the basis for new interpretations of those same fragments. This is why the ‘new Sappho’ has been so galvanizing for classicists: every now and then, the circle expands, letting in a little more light.
Obbink’s revelation
