This article considers the position that Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans, and in particular the 5th dialogue, should be read as satire of philosophical literature. Or perhaps, satire as philosophical literature, specifically, the Platonic dialogue as comedy due to being assigned to non-elevated characters. Though, as the authors note, Plato himself drew on comedic elements. In Lucian, the dialogue format itself is one cue to the audience to look for philosophical resonances.
Greece
Covering the region equivalent to modern Greece in south-eastern Europe, but also the larger scope of Greek-speaking cultures, especially in the Classical period.
LHMP entry
Nossis was a female poet of the Greek Hellenistic period (approximately 2 centuries after Sappho), 11 of whose poems have survived. This article discusses how her work reflects a self-conscious identity specifically as a female poet and as one who sees herself as following in the tradition of Sappho.
Rather than investigating the original context of Sappho’s life and work, this article reviews the chronology of popular understandings and theories about that topic. The chronology jumps around a little in the article so bear with me. [Note: Also, I think the chronology misses some elements.]
Lardinois (who several years earlier wrote an excellent article digging into the actual known facts about Sappho’s life, and their likely interpretation – Lardinois 1989) examines the evidence for the context in which Sappho’s poetry was performed and the likely composition of her audience.
I probably should have been clued in to the angle of Devereux’s article by the word “inversion” in the title. This article is a modern psychoanalysis of Sappho fragment 31 (“He is like a god to me”), interpreting the emotional and physical reactions described in the poem as indicating, not romantic desire or even jealousy, but an anxiety attack triggered by Sappho’s recognition of her “abnormal” and “deviant” homosexual desires and her consequent shame at experiencing them.
I’m now going to walk back my claim that Downing 1989 had no relevant content, because Downing 1994 is a slight re-working of several chapters in that book, mostly restricting itself to laying out the mythological and historic material that she analyzed in the earlier publication. In this article, she omits the psychoanalysis and focuses on the texts, interpreting them in the context of a broadly-defined “woman-centered-woman” definition of “lesbian.”
Given that I found Downing 1989 to have little relevance to the goals of the Project, it may be unsurprising that I find Reineke’s critique of it to be similarly of only tangential interest. Reineke begins by spending almost half of her article in a detailed summary and rewording of Downing’s points (something that Downing complements in her reply). Reineke’s critique focuses primarily on modern psychological theoretical interpretations, adding in additional frameworks of analysis.
The poem by Sappho identified as “fragment 1,” which isn’t a fragment but the only surviving complete poem, is also the one where Sappho as a woman-desiring-woman is most overt. This is not only because she names herself within the poem, but also because it is specifically about asking divine help to attract the love of another woman.
Like Pellicia 1995, this article takes a stab at identifying and evaluating possible intended meanings contained in Anacreon’s “she doesn’t like my grey hair” epigram.
In the ages before people fought their academic battles in mailing lists and then blogs, the pages of academic journals often recorded back-and-forth rivalries over such details as the accuracy of translations and interpretations, proper credit for prior publication, and accusations of misunderstanding. This article is one of those: largely a record of detailed pedantic rivalry over whether a prior rebuttal to a previous article had correctly understood the original author’s position.
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