LHMP #518 Most 1995 Reflecting 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.]

In the 18th century, the primary “facts” associated with Sappho were Ovid’s story of her failed romance with Phaon and her subsequent suicide. This is exemplified in various novelizations of her life, including Alessandro Verri’s 1781 work, among others. Verri’s text specifically denies any homoerotic elements to her life, claiming they were slanders by poetic rivals, while other 18th century treatments don’t bother mentioning this topic at all.

Beginning in the early 19th century, a hypothesis arose to account for the conflict between the content of Sappho’s poetry (including its homoerotic themes) and the treatment of Sappho as a character in Athenian comedy (as heterosexually promiscuous), alleging that by the time of the comic treatment, nothing was remembered about Sappho’s work except that she was a famous poet, and the comic persona was simply invented to attach to that reputation. (This has the obvious problem that there’s plenty of evidence for Sappho’s body of work being very well known during that era.)

Skipping back to the image of Sappho during antiquity, the problem is complicated, including not only the content of her poetry, but the attribution of a husband (identified as “Kerkylas from Andros”, i.e., “Penis from Man-land”), a daughter, various brothers, many female companions (some of whom were specifically identified as her lovers), a number of male lovers, and a failed heterosexual relationship that led to her suicide. Over the centuries then and following, several strategies have attempted to make sense of these themes via “duplication, narrativisation, and condensation.”

Duplication solved the problem of incompatibility by positing two women of the same name who later became conflated. (This theory is found as early as the 3rd c BCE.) The usual division is into the poet Sappho, with the specified family members and female coterie, and a prostitute named Sappho, who takes ownership of the many male lovers and inspires the comedic character. Other divisions also appear. An 11th c Byzantine version of her biography separates out only a harp-playing Sappho who died for the love of Phaon, and assigns all the other attributes to another Sappho, include the highly detailed account of her family members and list of female lovers and pupils. The reduplicated Sappho continues to appear in Renaissance interpretations, though there is little coherency in how her characteristics are divided.

A minority approach among ancient authors (not included in the three themes mentioned above) was to reject certain details as fictional. More common was the “narrativization” approach, which organized the elements chronologically in such a way that they could all happen in a single lifetime. Ovid’s treatment in the Heroides is the earliest known version of this, where the poet Sappho has long since lost or become estranged from her family, has left the love of women behind, and late in life falls for Phaon to her detriment. A few Renaissance scholars adopted this approach but it came to dominate the discourse in late 17th century France, as in the biographical prefacy to Madame Dacier’s edition of Sappho’s poetry. In this version, Sappho’s homoerotic encounters might be dismissed or ignored according to the preferences of the biographer (and their concern for her reputation). Madame Dacier’s father, Tanneguy LeFevre, had imagined a rather more licentious Sappho, not having the handicap of literary identification that Dacier felt. But even those who included the homoerotic elements in this era, focused solidly on the heterosexual plot.

The primary logical flaw in following Ovid’s version of Sappho’s life is that Ovid also downplayed her poetic accomplishments, presenting her literary efforts as mediocre verses inspired by her doomed love for Phaon. This presented the contradiction of a famous poet who came to poetry late and badly.

The condensation strategy was seized on in the early 19th century by the Romantics, who re-centered Sappho’s poetry and envisioned her specifically as a Romantic poet, talented by tormented and doomed to tragedy because her fragile feminine nature was not capable of supporting the magnitude of her genius. Her sexuality is sidelined. At the same time, other writers take up the challenge of touching on her homoerotic reputation only in order to establish her innocence. (An interesting tactic given that her homoeroticism had scarcely been part of the debate in the previous century.) Earlier versions of Sappho as libertine were discredited in favor of “Sappho the schoolmistress.” This movement did tackle the task of tracing all the individual elements of her reputation back to their sources in order to refute the undesirable ones, but it also brought in an element of duplication: the poet Sappho versus the fictional character in Attic stage comedy. The “schoolmistress” theory required the reinterpretation her Sappho’s erotic language as idealized and non-sensual (an approach that aligned with the rise of romantic friendship culture).

The re-focusing on Sappho’s poetry (rather than the Phaon fiction) led, later in the 19th century, to a re-acceptance of the poetry’s homoeroticism, positioning Sappho as the banner-bearer and namesake of female homosexuality. [Note: This is one of the aspects where I feel Most is leaving out some essential chronology. Most says “we should remember that [the idea that Sappho was a female homosexual] was never widespread before our century,” but here I feel he’s overstating the case because references to Sappho as an icon of f/f sexuality occur regularly from at least the 16th century, even when other narratives were also popular.]

In conclusion, Most notes that while the complexity and contradictions of the source materials have contributed to the shifts in the dominant narratives about Sappho, those shifts have also reflected “contingent and temporarily fashionable prejudices about the nature of women, of sexuality, of poetry, and so on” which I think has solidly been demonstrated. It has been difficult to ignore the intensity of the emotion expressed in her poetry, even though much of the corpus has been lost, but the highly personal focus of the poems has made it possible to question the target of those emotions, either in general (men vs women) or in specific (her feelings about specific named persons). The aspects of her poetry that contributed to her popularity also made it easier for later ages to reinterpret those poems according to their own circumstances, and reinvent their own version of Sappho in parallel.