Ancient Women Writers of Greece and Rome

Bartolo Natoli, Angela Pitts, Judith Hallett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000588583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte der griechischen Antike

Winner of CAMWS' 2023 Bolchazy Pedagogy Award.

Ancient Women Writers of Greece and Rome features the extant writings of major female authors from the Greco-Roman world, brought together for the first time in a single volume, in both their original languages and translated into English with accompanying commentaries.

The most cost-effective and comprehensive way to study the women writers of Greece and Rome, this book provides original texts, accessible text-commentaries, and detailed English translations of the works of ancient female poets and authors such as Sappho and Sulpicia. It takes a student-focused approach, discussing texts alongside new and original English translations and highlighting the rich, diverse scholarship on ancient women writers to specialists and non-specialists alike. The perspectives of women in the ancient world are still relevant and of interest today, as issues of gender and racial (in)equality remain ever-present in modern society.

Ancient Women Writers of Greece and Rome provides a valuable teaching tool for students of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies, as well as those interested in ancient literature, history, and gender studies who do not have proficiency in Greek or Latin.

Part IGreece

1Sappho

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003031727-3

None of the women writers of the Greco-Roman world rivaled Sappho’s reputation as a poet. That reputation enjoyed extraordinary longevity.¹ Epigrammatists from the Hellenistic period onward called her the “tenth Muse”, “a mortal Muse”, the “female Homer”, and her songs “the daughters of the immortal gods.”² A story preserved by a 5th-century CE writer is representative not only for what it says about Sappho’s reputation, but also for the tenuousness of the story’s reliability, mediated as it is through layers of sources that clearly drew from apocryphal myth and legend. The story, recorded by the 5th-century CE Stobaeus, who, in turn, attributed the tale to the 2nd- and 3rd-centuries CE writer Aelian, who, in turn, derived it from an unknown source or sources, placed the 6th-century BCE Athenian law-giver and poet Solon at a drinking party. At this symposium, Solon is said to have heard his nephew sing a certain song of Sappho’s. Solon then asked his nephew to teach that song to him. When another guest asked Solon why he would want to learn it, Solon is said to have replied: “So that once I have learned it, I may die.”³ Although this story is certainly favorable toward Sappho, its historicity is highly suspect. What it does reveal about Sappho is the degree to which her lyric compositions were, for centuries, hailed by the cognoscenti of the Greco-Roman world as worthy of reverence.⁴

We know very little about Sappho’s life with any degree of certainty, but a rich biographical tradition about her arose in antiquity, some of which was no doubt inspired by her poetry. It is probably wise to hold many of the accounts of her life in suspicion, as they often appear to be mediated through unreliable sources, including comedies, in which caricatures, stock characters, and formulaic plot-sequences offered up distortions to generate humor and laughter. Sappho’s image appears on several 5th-century Attic vases; and, we know that she was the subject of comic plays in the era of that great comic playwright, Aristophanes. These comedies no doubt provided distorted representations of Sappho—of her poetry and her life—for comic effect.⁵ Comedies entitled Sappho were authored by the 5th- and 4th-centuries writers Amipsias, Amphis, Antiphanes, Ephippus, Diphilus, Cratinas, and Timocles, and what little we know about these plays generally comes to us through the 2nd and 3rd- centuries CE writer Athenaeus, who reports, for example, that the comedy by Diphilus represented the lyric and invective poets Archilochus and Hipponax as the lovers of Sappho.⁶

We do not know the exact dates of Sappho’s birth and death, but a variety of ancient sources agree that she lived during the late-7th to early 6th-centuries BCE.⁷ Sappho mentions Mytilene in her own poetry, and a late-2nd or early-3rd century CE papyrus states that she was born on the island of Lesbos in the city of Mytilene, a city which Strabo called the “metropolis of the Aeolian cities” and cited as being situated 60 stades from the coast of Asia Minor.⁸ Mytilene was certainly close enough to the opulent trading hub of Sardis in Lydia, which may, in part, account for the richness of sensorial imagery in Sappho’s poems—the incense, golden drinking cups, highly wrought headbands, purple robes, and so forth—that evoke a synaesthetic and luxurious environment. Like many Greek cities in the archaic era, Mytilene experienced great political turmoil arising from conflict between rivaling aristocratic families and their supporters and the tyrants who emerged from those families, such as Pittacus, Myrsilus, and the Cleanactidae (the sons of Cleanax). The poetry of her Lesbian contemporary, Alcaeus, heavily critiques both Pittacus and Myrsilus, and Sappho refers to the “reminders of the exile of the Cleanactidae” in a very fragmentary poem in which she laments that she is not able to supply Cleïs (whom she references in another poem as her pais, which can mean either “young girl” or “daughter” in ancient Greek) with a delicately crafted headband, even though a girl with beautiful hair more blonde than a torch-fire ought to have such luxuries.⁹

The chronographical Parian Marble, a monumental inscription dating from sometime post 264–263 BCE, claims that Sappho was exiled from Mytilene to Sicily, while Critius the Elder was Archon at Athens (just before 595–594 BCE).¹⁰ It is, however, helpful to keep in mind that the Parian Marble also provides rather precise dating for what we would consider mythical persons and events, such as the rule of Cecrops, Athens’s first king, the life of Theseus, the Amazonomachy, and the Trojan War. A much later source (either Ovid or an anonymous imitator of Ovid) veers quite steeply into fiction by imagining an exiled Sappho who spurns the young women she had previously loved out of unrequited passion for the mythical ferryman, Phaon. Rejected by him, this source claims, she committed suicide by hurling herself from a legendary White Rock that has been shown to have mythic connections to the Underworld.¹¹ Imaginings of her life, her loves, and her death have inspired millennia of poems, plays, novels, operas, and works of art, and she has been represented as a literary genius, a prostitute, a Muse, a schoolmistress, a leader of a religious cult, a seducer of women, the world’s eponymous lesbian, and a morose suicidal.¹² That tradition is still going strong. Erica Jong’s bawdy (2003) novel, Sappho’s Leap, depicts a Sappho who is seduced by the poet Alcaeus, becomes involved in political intrigue on Lesbos, is married off to an old man, and leaves Lesbos to embark upon a series of casual, raunchy, amorous adventures with women and men as she journeys throughout the Mediterranean world.

Of Sappho’s actual life, very little is known. As we noted above, Sappho’s poetry twice mentions a young girl and (possibly) daughter, Cleïs, as well as two brothers, Larichos and Charaxos.¹³ A variety of ancient sources as early as Herodotus claim that Charaxos, a brother of Sappho, went to Egypt as a wine merchant, where he fell in love with a hetaira named Rhodopis or Doricha,¹⁴ and that he spent lavishly to purchase her freedom before returning to Mytilene. Herodotus claims that Sappho rebuked him soundly in her lyric poetry for these actions.¹⁵ Indeed, both brothers are mentioned by name in a papyrus published by the papyrologist Dirk Obbink in 2014. Obbink himself, who claimed that he had gained access to and permission to publish the poem through an anonymous owner of a private collection in London, dubbed the papyrus “P.Sapph.Obbink”.¹⁶ The poem’s provenance, as well as Obbink’s alleged and, if true, profound breaches of professional ethics, has since come under intense international scrutiny.¹⁷ The poem itself, however, at the t...