Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading 1108491707, 9781108491709

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Texts and Abbreviations
Introduction: A Colicky Muse
Part I Reparative Reading
Chapter 1 Reparative Intertextualities: Sappho and Homer between Lesbos and Troy
Chapter 2 Sappho and Sedgwick as Reparative Readers
Part II Sappho and Homer
Chapter 3 Plaiting and Poikilia: The Materialities of Sappho’s Craft
Chapter 4 Aphrodite and the Poetics of Shame
Chapter 5 In the Bardo with Tithonos
Chapter 6 Sappho fr. 44V, or Andromache’s “No Future” Wedding Song
Chapter 7 Sappho’s Third Alternative: Helen and the Queering of Epic Desire
Chapter 8 Sapphic Remembering, Lyric Kleos
Epilogue: Homer’s Night, Sappho’s Day
Appendix:
On the Absence of the Newest Sappho Fragments from this Book
Works Cited
Index Locorum
Subject Index

Citation preview

SAPPHO AND HOMER

In this book, Melissa Mueller brings two of the most celebrated poets from Greek antiquity into conversation with contemporary theorists of gender, sexuality, and affect studies. Like all lyric poets of her time, Sappho was steeped in the affects and story-world of Homeric epic, and the language, characters, and themes of her poetry often intersect with those of Homer. Yet the relationship between Sappho and Homer has usually been framed as competitive and antagonistic. This book instead sets the two side by side, within the embrace of a nonhierarchical, “reparative reading” culture, as first conceived by queer theorist and poet Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Reintroducing readers to a Sappho who supplements Homer’s vision, it is an approach that locates Sappho’s lyrics at the center of timely discussions about materiality, shame, queer failure, and the aging body, while presenting a sustaining and collaborative way of reading both lyric and epic. melissa mueller is Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy (2016), co-editor of The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (2018), and series co-editor of Ancient Cultures, New Materialisms for Edinburgh University Press.

SAPPHO AND HOMER A Reparative Reading

MELISSA MUELLER University of Massachusetts Amherst

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 8ea, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108491709 doi: 10.1017/9781108666732 © Melissa Mueller 2024 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2024 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress isbn 978-1-108-49170-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Egbert and Tim

Contents

Acknowledgments A Note on Texts and Abbreviations

page viii xi 1

Introduction: A Colicky Muse part i reparative reading 1

Reparative Intertextualities: Sappho and Homer between Lesbos and Troy

2 Sappho and Sedgwick as Reparative Readers

19 35

part ii sappho and homer 3 Plaiting and Poikilia: The Materialities of Sappho’s Craft

59

4 Aphrodite and the Poetics of Shame

89

5 In the Bardo with Tithonos

109

6 Sappho fr. 44V, or Andromache’s “No Future” Wedding Song

132

7 Sappho’s Third Alternative: Helen and the Queering of Epic Desire

154

8 Sapphic Remembering, Lyric Kleos

175

Epilogue: Homer’s Night, Sappho’s Day Appendix: On the Absence of the Newest Sappho Fragments from this Book Works Cited Index Locorum Subject Index vii

193 197 203 227 230

Acknowledgments

This book has been with me for more than a decade as I moved house (several times), traveled up and down the East Coast (sometimes daily), and eventually settled in Amherst, MA, during the pandemic years of 2020–2. Throughout its long gestation, I have accumulated more debts to friends, family, institutions, colleagues, and readers near and far than I will be able to acknowledge here. Time off from my regular academic duties was essential, and I gratefully acknowledge the fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, in 2019–20 and 2021–22 respectively, without which I would not have been able to write this book. I also want to acknowledge the generosity of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for granting me research leave and supplementing these external fellowships. And I thank the National Humanities Center (NHC) for welcoming me as an American Council of Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt fellow during the 2019–20 academic year. I wrote nearly an entire first draft of this book in the NHC’s idyllic surroundings. My time in Durham, NC (though it ended abruptly in the spring of 2020) is etched in my memory as perhaps one of the most productive and enjoyable periods of my writing life, thanks to the beautiful writing space and collaborative ethos of the NHC, and the lovely lunchtime conversations and postprandial walks I shared with the other fellows. I was very warmly welcomed by the Classics community at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and benefited from conversations with Al Duncan, Sharon James, Suzanne Lye, Patricia Rosenmeyer, and Emily Baragwanath during the fall and winter of 2019–20. Additionally, getting to spend quality time with Emily and her daughters was one of the special perks of being in residence at the NHC. I am grateful, also, for the stimulating conversations about Sappho and Sedgwick I had that fall with Erika Weiberg and Amy Mars, and to the Classics Departments at Wake Forest University, UNC Chapel Hill, and UNC Greensboro for viii

Acknowledgments

ix

inviting me to present my work in progress, and for providing me with such wonderful feedback and hospitality. An individual fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2021–22 allowed me to resume work on the manuscript and bring this project to a close. During that year of writing, I was sustained by the companionship of fellow writers from the Third Spaces online writing group at UMass Amherst, especially in the sessions facilitated by Kiran Asher, Sonya Atalay, and Caroline Yang. The presence and support of fellow writers in the Five College Faculty Online Writing Group (especially during 2019–22), on a platform hosted by Cathy Luna, were vital and made the writing process feel less solitary: thank you Holly Hanson, Beth Jakob, Kristen Luschen, Joya Misra, and Lise Sanders. Similarly, I want to mention my fellow NHC writers and our accountability circle, which started in person and then migrated online: thank you Eugene Clay, Martha Rust, and Shuang Shen. Earlier versions of Chapters 4, 5, and 6 were presented as lectures during 2019–23. For inviting me to present my work (either in person or over Zoom), and for their insightful and productive Q&A sessions, I wish to thank friends and colleagues at Columbia, Cornell, the University of Chicago, the University of Edinburgh, Penn, the University of Iowa, USC, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UW–Madison, Wellesley, and Harvard. I also presented material from this book at the colloquium on The Tenth Muse: Resonances of Sappho in Greek and Latin Poetry, which I coorganized at UMass Amherst with Teresa Ramsby in 2017, the conference on Materiality, Representation, and Performance in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry held at the University of Edinburgh in 2017, the Aesthetics Roundtable II: Subjectivities, Senses and Surrounds at Barnard College in 2018, and the Langford Conference on Women at the Crossroads in the Ancient Greek World, held at Florida State University in 2019. Every chapter has undergone more rounds of revision than I care to recall, oftentimes in response to the incisive comments I received from readers, both official (i.e., the readers for the press) and otherwise. Special thanks go to Lilah Grace Canevaro, Claire Catenaccio, Debbie Felton, Kate Gilhuly, Simon Goldhill, Emily Greenwood, Ella Haselswerdt, Leslie Kurke, André Lardinois, Pauline LeVen, Amy Mars, Zachary Nickels, Sarah Nooter, Mui Ong, Kirk Ormand, Verity Platt, Lauri Reitzammer, Seth Schein, Mario Telò, Anna Uhlig, Chris van den Berg, Celsiana Warwick, and Hans Wietzke: your questions and comments, whether in written form or in conversation, have helped me more than you may know. An invitation from Lilah Grace Canevaro to visit the University of

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Acknowledgments

Edinburgh in 2014 was one of the earliest opportunities I had to share the fledgling ideas that grew into this book. I owe so much to Lilah Grace, not only for being such an astute reader, but for our collaboration on the Ancient Cultures, New Materialisms book series for Edinburgh University Press, which continues to be a source of intellectual sustenance. Meg Foster, Sarah Olsen, and Naomi Weiss provided a much-needed infusion of confidence along with transformative feedback during a book workshop held as two Zoom sessions in June 2022. Their comments and suggestions gave me the tools I needed to be able to finish. I also want to express my heartfelt thanks to Emily Greenwood, for seeing the potential in my writing at an early stage, and for helping me find my way to the very end. For their interest in and support of this project over many years I thank Afroditi Angelopoulou, Egbert Bakker, Emily Baragwanath, Brian Breed, Ginna Closs, Nancy Felson, Debbie Felton, Helene Foley, Laura McClure, Alex Purves, Pari Riahi, Dylan Sailor, Joëlle Tamraz, Victoria Wohl, and Nancy Worman. I would also like to thank Ella Haselswerdt, Rachel Lesser, Sarah Nooter, Alex Purves, Rioghnach Sachs and Anna Uhlig for sharing unpublished work with me. And I’m deeply grateful to Hal Sedgwick for permission to use the untitled collage of kimono fabrics by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as the cover image for this book. Adam Bell saved me from many infelicities at the copyediting stage, and Pam Scholefield was a wonderful indexer to work with. I could not have asked for a better experience of having the book reviewed and readied for publication at Cambridge University Press; I’m especially grateful to Michael Sharp and Katie Idle for responding to any number of emails and queries over the years. I dedicate this book to Egbert and Tim.

A Note on Texts and Abbreviations

I have used Voigt’s 1971 edition, Sappho et Alcaeus, for most of my selections from Sappho and Alcaeus, although I use different texts for Sappho fragments 22, 55, 96, and 98b and Alcaeus fragments 6 and 42, as is explained in the relevant notes. For the Tithonos Poem, I refer to the version edited by West 2005. I had access to Camillo Neri’s 2021 Sappho edition and commentary only after this manuscript had reached its penultimate form and was therefore not able to take account of this work. I refer to the OCT (Oxford Classical Text) editions of Homer, Hesiod, and the Homeric Hymns. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Campbell FGrH L-P PEG PMG P.Oxy.

Campbell, D. A. ed., transl. 1982. Greek Lyric. Volume I. Sappho. Alcaeus. Loeb Classical Library 142. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jacoby, Felix et al. eds. 1923–1958. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. Leiden: Brill. Lobel, E. and Page, D. L. 1955. eds. Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta. Oxford University Press. Bernabé, Alberto. 1996. ed. Pars I Poetae Epici Graeci. Testimonia et Fragmenta. Berlin: B. G. Teubner. Page, D. L. ed. 1962. Poetae Melici Graecae. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Grenfell, B. P., Hunt, A. S. et al. eds. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Oxford University Press.

xi

Introduction A Colicky Muse

Like many literary critics, I have a personal stake in what I read and how I read. I turned to Sappho for the first time, in a sustained fashion, at a moment when I had lost faith in the relay between reading and writing; reading no longer felt like the creative, generative process it had always been. My writer’s block, I later realized, was spurred by the critique-based tradition, whose high-stakes and competitive approach to interpreting literary texts had left me paralyzed – too aware of how I would be challenged to even want to risk committing a thought to paper. Sappho was what I read “just for fun.” It was my avocational, naïve readerly fascination with Sappho that instilled in me a feeling of kinship with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “reparative reading” and the related approaches of other queer theorists. This way of reading, to which I devote Part I of this book, finds aesthetic coherence and sustenance in literary forms and episodes typically characterized by their incompletion or failure; it also values the experiences and insights of nonprofessional readers.1 Only after I had already embarked on my personal venture, which felt both urgent and necessary if somewhat unfocused, did I learn that this style of reading was in fact part of a larger movement, one whose broader outlines I attempt to sketch in Chapter 2. Sedgwick and Sappho are both consummate readers, readers who relish the process of engaging with others’ compositions, and who center that experience – of falling in love with, resisting, and refashioning what they have read – within their own texts. I accordingly use the term “reader” in its broadest sense: for the act of listening to and being moved by texts and poems (whether heard or read), but also for writing or composing in 1

I borrow here from Lee Edelman’s reflections on reparativity and survival in Berlant and Edelman 2019: 43: “Assembling, conferring plenitude, giving the inchoate a sustaining form: the work of reparativity grounds itself in a notion of aesthetic coherence that opposes the incompletion, division, and defectiveness of failure.” These comments are in dialogue with Sedgwick 2003: 149–150. On reparative reading, see the section on “What Readers Can Expect to Find,” in this Introduction, and Part I.

1

2

Introduction

response to those “texts.” I think we can say, in the case of both Sappho and Sedgwick, that their intimate engagement with the works of other artists is very much on the surface of their own creations. Their works invite readers to contemplate not only the finished product but also what it means to have immersed oneself in the act of reading (in interpretation, response, recomposition). In theorizing reparative reading as an alternative to the style of literary criticism she (and many others) had been schooled in, Sedgwick brings this focus on collaboration and responsiveness to the foreground. Reading Sappho alongside Homer and Sedgwick will not help us recover the historically contextualized performances of either of these archaic Greek poets. But Sedgwick can help us hear some of the contemporary resonances in Sappho’s lyrics, by attuning us, for example, to Sappho in the act of reading, or by inviting us to read Homer and Sappho side by side, without the diachronic, hierarchical filter of historicist approaches (those that aim to reconstitute the original ritual and performance contexts for archaic Greek lyric).2 Reading Sappho with Sedgwick will also put us in touch with some of the queerer aspects of Homeric epic, as these are elicited by Sappho’s lyrics. I gesture here to the unusual cohabitation of beauty and brightness alongside shame and ugliness that one finds in her verses – and to the self-consciously nonheteronormative ways in which both female and male sexualities are evoked. A famously impossible term to define, “queer” receives one of its now iconic formulations in Tendencies, where Sedgwick describes it as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”3 This is perhaps the single most frequently cited sentence in Sedgwick’s entire oeuvre.4 As a working definition, it will serve us well.5 I appreciate in particular how it acknowledges that sexuality is both fundamental to and yet incommensurable 2

3 4 5

In Chapter 1, I elaborate on “side by side” (avuncular) reading, and I also discuss some possible scenarios for interactions between Homeric epic and Sappho’s lyrics on Lesbos; I maintain throughout this book that the oral-poetic contexts of archaic Greek performance culture can and should be brought into conversation with contemporary practices of intertextuality. For a complementary perspective on reading poetry as poetry, see the Introduction to Foster, Kurke, and Weiss 2020. Sedgwick 1993: 8 (emphasis in the original); notably, she introduces this formulation as “one of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to” (i.e., not as the definition). I will return to it in Chapter 2. See also duBois 2015: 158, in her chapter on queer Sappho: “The use of the word ‘queer’, once a pejorative term used to dismiss gay men, became a badge of honour, and came to define not just gay, not just lesbian, but also other forms of ‘non-heteronormative’ persons, that is, transgender, transsexual, transvestite, bisexual, intersex, sex workers and any other variety of proud deviance from what was once called ‘compulsory heterosexuality.’”

Introduction

3

with queerness.6 And how it does not try to define “queer” in any absolute sense. Sedgwick’s suggestive language invites supplementation.7 In invoking Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as this book’s queer Muse, I am attentive to Charles Martindale’s reminder of how important it is to balance historicist and presentist perspectives. Martindale (2006: 9) sounds cautiously optimistic when he insists that “we are not doomed either to a narrow and relentless presentism or to any form of historical teleology.”8 Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading is “presentist,” however, in more than one sense. It takes root in the present I share with others who have been looking for a way of reading that affirms our own pre-(or post?) professional experiences of loving literature.9 But it is also devoted to a genre – lyric – whose temporality foregrounds the present. Taking up universal and mythical themes, lyric nevertheless embodies them in the here and now, eliciting responses (visceral, verbal, aesthetic) from readers and listeners who may feel as if they are being spoken to directly and intimately by the poetic voice addressing them as “you.” Unlike the lyrics of most modern poets, Sappho’s poems come to us in a fragmented and mostly incomplete state, with holes and tears in the papyrus (or other material on which they have been preserved) turning up as blank spaces and brackets in our modern editions. The fragmentedness of Sappho’s lyrics presents readers with numerous challenges. But encountering her lyrics as fragments has also been regarded by some as essential to the aesthetic experience of reading Sappho.10 In an essay on the Tithonos Poem, Page duBois connects the fragmentary quality of that poetic text with our own fragility as mortal beings. DuBois (2011: 668) suggests that “the pleasure of the ancient text, in particular, may lie in part in the fact that all bodies fall into ruin.”11 Like the 6

See Muñoz 2019b: 153–157 on queerness and the incommensurate. As Karin Sellberg (2019: 189) aptly puts it, “[queerness] arguably has always involved an engagement with sexuality, but where the limits of this sexuality are to be set and what sexuality itself entails is by the very definition of queer theory (if there is such a thing) a notion that will and should continually be problematized.” 7 Fawaz (2019: 8) regards Sedgwick’s investment in certain works of art and her language of “tending towards” as coextensive with her commitment to queer studies, which, in his words, is “the first arena of humanistic inquiry to take seriously the public and political dimensions of erotic and affective desire, intimacy, attachment, and kinship; it is a theory, in short, of what we tend toward” (my emphasis). 8 Telò and Olsen (2022: 7) likewise in their Introduction to Queer Euripides embrace a mode of reading that pushes against “historicist contextualism and its ostensible distance from the past it aims to reconstruct.” 9 On the longer history of affective labor within the discipline of literary studies, see Lynch 2015. 10 See, for example, duBois 1995: 35–39; duBois 2011. On the early modern romanticization of Sappho herself as “the perfect fragment,” see Prins 1999: 3–8. 11 duBois 2011: 668: “. . . and that therefore the encounter with ancient objects offers not just the pathos of a fragment broken from a whole, but also the consolation of the persistence of these remnants.”

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Introduction

body of the singer lamenting her old age in the Tithonos Poem, Sappho’s “body,” her entire poetic corpus, has also been transfigured by time.12

The Middle Years Eve Sedgwick’s trio of books, published between 1985 and 1993 (Between Men, Epistemology of the Closet, and Tendencies), were foundational for the field of queer theory; in the later years of her career, as I discuss here and in Chapter 2, she turned her attention to what she called “reparative reading,” a less combative, less antagonistic way of interacting with texts than tends to be encouraged by the “paranoid” critical tradition (more on which, later). I never consciously set out to write a book on Sappho and Sedgwick by way of Homer. But stranger things have happened in middle age. I wrote most of this book while I was forty-six, although I had begun dreaming it at least ten years before that. And so, during that year of writing, I was especially attuned to the way that the number forty-six crops up in Sedgwick’s work – and the way middle age in general, the no-longeryoung body, are thematized in both Sedgwick and Sappho.13 Sedgwick herself was also at something of a crossroads by the time she reached the age of forty-six. As she recalls in “Making Things, Practicing Emptiness,” she had always loved textiles, but only in middle age did she free herself from linking her investment in textiles to her self-presentation, her self-adornment: It’s funny that it wouldn’t happen before age forty-six, or that it could happen then, but somehow I think I finally got it, that to tie my very acute sense of beauty to the project of making myself look beautiful was definitely a mug’s game. Apparently the notion of a visual or tactile beauty that might be impersonal, dislinked from the need to present a first-person self to the world, came as news to me – late, late news. But exciting!14

Liberated to pursue her love of fiber arts without the interference of her ego (her “I”), she discovers that her fingers are “very hungry to be handling a reality, a beauty, that wasn’t myself, wasn’t any self, and didn’t want to be.”15 12 13

14 15

On the vulnerability of bodies in and of poetry, see Nooter 2023, chapter 6. In “Trace at 46,” a poem Sedgwick wrote in 1977 when she was only twenty-seven, a character by the name of Trace is forty-six, turning forty-seven, and on the cusp of various transitions; it begins (Sedgwick 1994: 43): “In middle age his bodily outline / softens and fills in – partly, he supposes, / with femaleness.” Middle age here seems to bring with it a blurring of gender, as Trace’s once securely masculine body “softens and fills in.” E. Sedgwick 2011: 71. E. Sedgwick 2011: 75. Hawkins (2010) discusses Sedgwick’s attraction, in her later works, to nonidentity and nonbeing. And Snediker (2019: 206–207) rightly points out that “Sedgwick’s

The Middle Years

5

This love of impersonal beauty, beauty divorced from the needs or reality of the self, is also highly prized by Sappho. We might think here of Sappho fr. 16V, where, in addition to the outwardly beautiful Helen so familiar from epic and earlier mythical tradition, Sappho gives us Helen the aesthete, a Helen who pursues her own love of beauty, just as Sappho herself is drawn to the bright glance and lovely movement of Anactoria. The impersonal aspect of the beauty that moves both the listeners and the characters within this poem is embodied in that neuter form kalliston (fr. 16.3V). Intimately linked with desire, it is a beauty that mirrors the impersonal, nonself-oriented beauty that Sedgwick pursues, in her fabrics and in her theory. And lest the travails of middle age seem far removed from Sappho’s purview, let us also recall (in addition to the better-known Tithonos Poem, which will be discussed in Chapter 5) these verses (fr. 168B Voigt):16 δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα καὶ Πληΐαδες· μέσαι δὲ νύκτες, παρὰ δ᾿ ἔρχετ᾿ ὤρα, ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω. The moon has sunk as well as the Pleiades. And it is the middle of the night. The season passes by. And I sleep alone.

Most readers focus on the solitary voice – the woman who sleeps alone, without a lover by her side. We have been conditioned to read Sappho as a love poet. But what if, rather than hearing an expression of loneliness, we were instead to allow this voice to speak to us in more neutral, descriptive tones? Sappho experiences her life as an arc, just like the night itself, which is past its midpoint.17 Middle age is, in this respect, integrated into the celestial movements of moon and stars, and the diurnal rhythms of night and day. The solitude that accompanies the singer’s revelation comes from

16

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eventual migration to the differently capacity-making medium of textiles – precipitated by what she sometimes describes as a waning investment in authorial control – is as much an intensification of her long-standing attachment as it is a turning away.” Hephaestion does not quote these verses as belonging to Sappho, although they are preserved in his Enchiridion, along with three or four other Sappho fragments; some editors thus treat the poem as an anonymous fragment or a folk song (See Clay 1970). The poem was ascribed to Sappho by Arsenius, the Archbishop of Monemvasia (c. 1500) and it is attributed to Sappho in Campbell’s and Voigt’s editions. There may also be references to old age at Sappho frr. 21V and 63V; see Ferrari 2010: 203–204. Sider (1986: 59) observes of the term ὤρα that there are three ways in which it can be understood: “a) the time of the night, b) the season of the year, and c) the passing of Sappho’s life.” Preferring this last sense, he adds that it “both crystallizes the inchoate personal feelings underlying the first three lines and acts as a glide between the astronomical description of the poem’s beginning and its intensely personal last line.”

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Introduction

her coming to terms with the “season” of her own life, which glides past her (para) while she lies still, perhaps looking up at the night sky (though the woman who speaks is also asleep).18 The preposition para is worth pausing over, too. It indicates a sidling up to; but attached to the verb erchetai it also implies a brushing-past, a form of movement. The experience recorded here is one of stillness within movement: solitude, though not necessarily loneliness. What we hear is the tension between the depersonalization of the “I” and the seemingly personal account that this voice renders of a particular moment in a woman’s life. Like Eve Sedgwick, Sappho takes the middle years seriously, devoting attention not just to the beauty and vibrancy of youth but also to what comes after. And like Sappho, Sedgwick turns tending to what she terms a “colicky” muse into a source of poetry. In doing so, she reminds us that Sappho’s aspirations may not have been those that are typically ascribed to poets by the literary critics who read them.

Colicky Muses and the Moisopoloi As mentioned, Sedgwick’s early interventions in the emergent field of queer theory had happened by 1993, the year Tendencies was published.19 But by the mid-1990s, she had begun rethinking the mode of criticism with which she was already closely identified. Feeling that it was out of step with certain developments in her own life, including the loss of several close friends to AIDS and the diagnosis she received of what was to become a terminal cancer, Sedgwick sought to bring her critical writing practice more closely into alignment with her evolving sensibilities as a reader: so was born the style of reading she came to call “reparative.” But we can trace all the way back to her earliest years Sedgwick’s ambivalence toward the “paranoid” or “symptomatic” critique from which she would distance herself.20 For Sedgwick, being a critic had always been, at best, second best.21

18

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20 21

On the complexities of the present-tense voice as the sleeper’s voice, see Purves forthcoming. As Carson (2021: 9) remarks of the similarly confounding poem by Emily Dickinson (465) that begins, “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – ” that “it is unclear where ‘I’ am positioned in order to write a poem about a noise simultaneous with my own death.” The language of queerness does not emerge explicitly until Tendencies, but Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet were clearly instrumental in shaping debates that became central to queer studies. See Wiegman 2019 on Sedgwick’s role within the history of the field of queer studies. See Best and Marcus 2009 for a critique of Fredric Jameson’s “symptomatic reading.” Snediker (2019: 206) puts it well: “Far more than is usually acknowledged, Sedgwick’s investment as a critic in her own writerly style is unthinkable apart from her lifelong sense of poetry as a first calling.”

Colicky Muses and the Moisopoloi

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As she relates in an interview from 2006, Sedgwick had wanted in the first place to be a poet: I didn’t start out to be a critic. I started out to be a poet from very, very, very early on, but my muse was very fickle, and so there was a lot of time when I just couldn’t write. And so my sense of identity as that kind of a writer was kind of excruciatingly tenuous. So I found my way – I’m talking about college and graduate school here – into seeing myself as a literary critic.

I have taken this excerpt from a piece written by her husband, Hal Sedgwick, in which he discusses Eve’s often thwarted attempts to establish herself as a poet.22 The troubled relationship between the poet and her Muse also figures prominently in Sedgwick’s poetry. For instance, in the verses that open the collection Fat Art, Thin Art, the speaker asks, Who fed this muse? Colicky, premature, not easy to supply, nor fun to love: who powdered her behind and gave her food the years when (“still a child herself almost”) her mother was too blue?23

“Colicky” and “premature” are perhaps not the adjectives one would choose for Sappho. She was appreciated, especially in antiquity, for her smooth and polished style. Nevertheless, Sappho, who names herself in her own lyrics, becoming in this way both author and character, grapples also with her Muse.24 In a two-line fragment preserved for us by Maximus of Tyre (fr. 150V), Sappho tells her daughter, Kleis, not to mourn, for “there is no place for lamentation in the house of those who serve the Muses: this would not be appropriate for us (οὐ γὰρ θέμις ἐν μοισοπόλων ⟨δόμωι⟩ / θρῆνον ἔμμεν᾿⟨ . . . . . . . ⟩, οὔ κ᾿ ἄμμι πρέποι τάδε.).” Sappho identifies herself here as a member of, in her own coinage, the moisopoloi (those who tend to the Muses).25 We would 22 23

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H. A. Sedgwick 2011: 452. Sedgwick 1994: 3. Kent (2017: 136) argues that “writing poetry as Sedgwick theorizes it here constitutes a female-female (auto)erotic act” and that this poem and its Muse, who is so closely identified with as to be nearly inseparable from Sedgwick herself, “provides a counterpoint to Sedgwick’s male homoerotic identifications and desires” (113). I discuss this practice of self-naming, an almost autofictional blurring of identities, in Chapter 2 but acknowledge here that it results in my sometimes assuming that a female persona or “I” voice in her lyrics is “Sappho,” even when that voice is not named as such. Hauser (2016: 145) shows that the -πόλος suffix of μουσοπόλος “emphasizes proximity, engaged activity and a dynamic of care and guardianship towards the Muses.” This is the first occurrence of the word μουσοπόλος in Greek literature.

8

Introduction

call them poets.26 She never claims to have been anointed with a gift, or handed a staff, as Hesiod tells us he was.27 In her own lyrics Sappho presents herself as a poet cultivating her craft, tending to her Muse, working and reworking whatever comes to her in the way of inspiration or eros. In such a figure we may recognize a portrait of the woman as artist, especially if we consider that Aphrodite, for all intents and purposes, serves as Sappho’s “colicky” Muse. The irreverent tone of the Sappho-persona’s conversation with her ventriloquized Muse, Aphrodite, in the first poem of her collection – the Hymn to Aphrodite, as it is often called – echoes both the playfulness and the pain concealed in Sedgwick’s voice (from both the interview and the verses quoted from Fat Art, Thin Art). Both Sappho and Sedgwick are, moreover, obsessed with similar themes: desire, sexuality, bodies, beauty, shame, reputation, mortality, and the very art of making music, a process that each one figures as a kind of plaiting. Trace, the protagonist of Sedgwick’s poem, “Trace at 46,” is a musicologist who suffers from writer’s block (“Why can’t he work on getting the current chapter written, /on Fauré?”) while having affairs with at least two women, one of whom – Cissy – is a young composer living in New York City. Cissy’s composition, “Aquarelle,” which is being performed as we read the poem, fluidly blends different sounds, Gamelan instruments with Western, and also features a Javanese god who, with his “tone-deaf and high and irresolute” and yet “transfixing voice” oversees “the plaiting together of lines female and male and divine.”28

Reparative Reading (Sedgwick, Klein, and Sappho) The term “reparative” comes from Eve Sedgwick, who adapted it from Melanie Klein, a psychoanalyst probably best known for her work in the field of object-relations analysis.29 Klein focused on the normative patterns of development in the human infant. Using the “play” technique she developed for observing and decoding their unconscious, Klein argued 26 27 28

29

For this interpretation, as opposed to a cult in honor of the Muses, see Lasserre 1989: 116–118, Ferrari 2010: 147, and Hauser 2016: 141–146. See Hes. Th. 30–34. For Hesiod’s self-designation as therapōn (servant) of the Muses (Hes. Th. 100), see Hauser 2016: 144–145. Sedgwick 1994: 68. Sappho’s own use of the verb plekō (“plait”) is distinctive: unlike a woven text, the fibers that are plaited together retain their separateness, so that individual threads can still be recognized even as they join together to form a composite new whole (see further Chapter 3). For Kleinians, object-relations analysis is relevant for the period before children have gained verbal fluency and before the onset of the Oedipal complex; see further Mitchell 1998.

Reparative Reading

9

that very young children oscillate between two primary positions.30 They are “at one” with the mother when their primal needs (for nourishment, affection, etc.) are satisfied, and in the earliest months of life may view the mother’s breast as an extension of themselves.31 But when their primal needs go unmet, these same infants phantasize, to use Klein’s spelling, about destroying the part-object (i.e., the breast) that has frustrated their attempts at controlling it.32 Hurtling in this way between love and hate, satisfaction and aggression, they occupy two successive positions, which Klein termed the “paranoid-schizoid” and “depressive” positions.33 When the aggression-fueled “paranoid” phantasies in turn yield feelings of fear and guilt, the infant reverts to a “depressive” position from which she undoes her earlier destruction, healing the mother with her “reparative” feelings. Klein thought that the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, which first manifest in the earliest months of life, remain with us into adulthood, becoming permanent facets of our personality.34 Like its psychoanalytic namesake, “reparative” reading emerges from the depressive position, and takes a less aggressive approach to its object of study. If we were to use (mixed) metaphors to describe the process of making sense of a work of literature, we might say that for the reparativist, reading’s affect (the feeling one has while reading) is closer to that of inhabiting a text’s orbit rather than sparring with it, or trying to breach its façade. Instead of interpreting an inherently alien textual artifact, the reader becomes absorbed into the fictional world that is created through her engagement with the text.35 I find Sedgwick’s notion of reparative reading helpful for understanding Sappho’s reception of Homeric epic. In my experience of reading her, Sappho is not a typically paranoid (or even agonistic) reader of Homer. Her lyrics are not overtly competitive with epic, nor does she primarily turn 30

31

32 33

34 35

Positions are, according to Juliet Mitchell 1998: 27, an atemporal status, “a mental space in which one is sometimes lodged.” For a concise introduction to these ideas, see Klein and Riviere [1937] 1964. See, however, Rose 1998: 144, alluding to a Klein work of 1944: “Even when the feeding situation is satisfactory, hunger and the craving for libidinal gratification stir and reinforce the destructive impulses” because “what the infant actually desires is unlimited gratification.” Mitchell (1998: 22) explains that the unusual spelling of phantasize/phantasy is used by Klein to indicate that the process is unconscious. For Klein (Klein and Riviere [1937] 1964) love and hate coexist from the earliest stage of infancy; even as babies “in our unconscious phantasy we make good the injuries we did in phantasy, and for which we still unconsciously feel very guilty” (68). Mitchell 1998: 21. In recent years, paranoid reading has come to be viewed as nearly synonymous with standard practices of literary criticism. See especially Felski 2012 and 2015, and Chapter 2.

10

Introduction

to Homer for self-authorization. Sappho focuses on moments from the epic repertoire where a character makes what looks like a “bad” decision (Helen leaving her husband, daughter, and parents and following Paris to Troy). Or she responds to feelings of weakness and humiliation (Aphrodite being wounded and taunted by Diomedes in Iliad 5, for example) and calls our attention to the emotions themselves, and the capacity of the injured to endure. Some readers of the Iliad have assumed that Aphrodite’s silence when she leaves the battlefield is a sign of her defeat. But as I suggest in Chapter 4, her bodily posture also signals shame. The intensity of that emotion – one which is often accompanied by a sense of failure – characterizes the experiences of lovers in Sappho’s lyrics.36 A focus on shame and emotional upheaval, followed by healing (or simply survival), will thus be integral to the mode of reparative reading I develop in this book as a baseline for reading Sappho. But it is important also to acknowledge the moments of levity and playfulness, as well as brash, sexual humor one encounters in Sappho’s lyrics.37 Just as soon as you may think you have captured the poet’s tone and affect, another fragment challenges your description. In an essay they wrote for the volume Reading Melanie Klein, Judith Butler (1998: 181) remarks that one of the dangers of being a “paranoid” critic is that one risks “emerging objectless and without attachment in the world.” Anxiety and suspicion may, in fact, destroy those potential attachments (whether to persons or texts). Tavia Nyong’o (2010: 245) similarly describes non-reparative reading as a critical strategy that “explains too much, explains too well and, ultimately, explains away the more worthwhile local readings that a critic may produce.” In certain instances, such a critical strategy raises the bar so high that the critic ultimately “translates every possible phenomenon into yet another sign of the ubiquity of ideology or disciplinary power.”38 Paranoid reading strategies thus risk subsuming and flattening whatever comes within their purview.39 By 36

37 38

39

By “failure” I mean not only the lack of success in getting the object of one’s desire, but failure as the repudiation of normative behaviors, or as a form of resistance to achieving culturally sanctioned forms of success. On “queer” failure, see Chapters 4 and 5. See also the chapters in the “Failure” section of Olsen and Telò 2022. See especially the section on “The Doorkeeper’s Sandals” in Chapter 3. Anker and Felski 2017: 15. For critique’s paranoid disposition, see Latour 2004. Castiglia (2017b: 5) sees in “hope” a chance to remedy this: “literary critics, persistent in their suspicion, have overlooked the centrality of hope to cultural theorists who have described its socially transformative powers.” They are, in this regard, what Silvan Tomkins deems a “strong theory,” a theory designed to explain a wide variety and quantity of disparate data. See further, Sedgwick and Frank 1995: 27n22: “Tomkins suggests that the measure of a theory’s strength is not how well it avoids negative affect or finds positive affect but the size and topology of the domain which it organizes and its methods of determining that domain.”

What Readers Can Expect to Find

11

contrast, reparative reading “gives up on hypervigilance for attentiveness,” as Heather Love (2010: 237–238) puts it, preferring “acts of noticing, being affected, taking joy, and making whole.”40 Even so, it is not always possible or even desirable to forego the “big truths” and organizing impulses spurred by paranoid reading (as I explore at greater length in Chapters 2 and 6).41

What Readers Can Expect to Find The reparative approach I chart in Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading does not aspire to be an exclusive, or overarching, theory. It is a form of experiential – and experimental – reading, one that seeks to set the contemporary reader’s investments in Sappho’s poetry side by side with those of imagined listeners from ancient Greece, and to situate Sappho herself as a “reader” of Homer. I am less interested in reconstructing, in strict historicist terms, exactly which parts of the Homeric repertoire were available for Sappho to engage with than I am in teasing out some of the ways that affect, character, and myths familiar from (what we know of) Homeric epic reemerge, transformed, in Sappho’s lyrics. Rather than systematically locating and analyzing the Homeric turns of phrase and metrical schemes that crop up in Sappho’s verses, I speculatively explore Sappho’s reworkings of, among other things, humiliating failures, affectladen gestures, and heroic artifacts from the Iliad and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. More broadly, I am interested in the personal attachments that develop between readers (both ancient and modern) and their texts, and I try to acknowledge throughout this book that the very act of reading (i.e., how we respond, both emotionally and intellectually, to what we read) can be both quirky and idiosyncratic. I take my cue here from Sedgwick’s own resistance to deploying an objective scholarly voice, even in her academic writing, and her frank acknowledgment of the crippling, thwarting effects such a scholarly posture can have. No doubt this attitude will strike some of my readers as, at best, whimsical, and at worst, navel-gazing and selfindulgent. To them my response would be that readers are in fact all of these things (i.e., whimsical, navel-gazing, and self-indulgent), and to

40 41

See also Lin 2017: 77: “Creativity coincides with the desire to repair the damaged objects and make good the injuries inflicted.” See especially Love 2010.

12

Introduction

pretend otherwise is to subscribe to a fiction upheld by the literary critical professoriate. Partly because Sedgwick’s contributions embody the sort of insightful idiosyncrasy that is, in my view, central to reparative reading, I have tried to make room for them, not simply as a theoretical framework but rather as a sort of parallel readerly voice, guiding our explorations of Sappho’s own “readings” of Homer. In particular, I have woven elements from Sedgwick’s biography, and from her auto-theoretical writings and her memoir, into my overview of reparative reading in Chapter 2.42 I have, however, avoided taking a biographical approach to Sappho’s lyrics, and I bracket the critical obsession with the question of Sappho’s sexuality.43 I have found that these scholarly pursuits shed little light on Sappho’s poetic voice and her literary engagements with Homeric epic. Although my “reparative” approach is neither overtly antagonistic to, nor in competition with, other styles of reading, it nevertheless will allow us, I hope, to move beyond the idea that Sappho must at some level be trying to subvert, to challenge, or override “Homer” and the Homeric tradition. In Sappho’s case, there has been a mostly unquestioned assumption that she must be hostile to the military ethos of heroic society – that, in her lyrics, she seeks to replace epic, or challenge its dominant position in literary culture. At the very least, Sappho is seen as turning to Homer as a source of legitimation and authority.44 This way of reading Sappho is not wrong, but it presents us with only a very partial picture. Sappho’s lyrics also engage empathetically with epic, drawing out some of the quieter, domestic moments from within the Iliad and Odyssey. Sappho, for example, turns our attention to the scene in Iliad 22 where Andromache sees her husband’s corpse being dragged and mutilated by Achilles; there she casts off the “shining fastenings” which bind her hair, accessories which include a veil that was given to her on her wedding day by Aphrodite (22.466–72). Sappho fr. 44V enables the details of this extraordinary Homeric scene to hold our attention. We slow down and attend to language that would otherwise get drowned out by epic’s faster paced, action-focused narrative.

42 44

On “autotheory,” see Wiegman 2020 and Goh 2020. 43 See further Mueller 2021. Rissman tends to view the purpose of the Homeric allusions in Sappho as a borrowing of epic language to endow feminine themes with heroic grandeur; for example, she notes that Sappho “repeatedly uses allusion to Homeric scenes and formulae to frame her narrative in heroic terms” (1983: 133). But the purpose may also be to alter how we read the epic scenes themselves by, for example, drawing attention to aesthetic effects that are passed over relatively quickly in the original.

What Readers Can Expect to Find

13

Sappho’s interactions with Homer at times resemble the passionate commitments and creative responses of fanfiction writers, who revise or amplify the storylines of canonical works.45 Fans may know their texts better than professional readers, but their reading comes from a place of empathy and emotional investment. Rather than interrogating texts, fans fall in love with fictional characters. They analyze their relationships; they obsess over the minutiae of their lives. Sappho’s poetic voice, I suggest, is intimately personal and responds to Homer not as a competitor but as a reader and fellow poet. She creates fissures in and expands upon the Iliad ’s fictional world. This does not mean that she herself was not ambitious for her own poetry. Sappho was widely recognized already in antiquity for her poetic achievements, and her reputation has only grown since then. Indeed, her innovative reworkings of Homeric language and motifs are only further testament to her artistry.46 But her attentiveness to the Iliad ’s minor characters, particularly those within Aphrodite’s sphere (such as Paris, Helen, and Andromache), and their experiences of shame, vulnerability, and failure, makes Sappho herself a sort of Sedgwickian reader avant la lettre. Sedgwick, I thus propose, is the ideal companion for my project of untangling Sappho’s intense and at times irreverent (though rarely straightforwardly agonistic) engagements with Homeric epic. Chapter 1 starts with a relatively brief overview of the Homeric tradition to which Sappho and her ancient listeners on Lesbos may have had access and then turns to different models of intertextuality, within both the oralpoetic and textual contexts. Here I also introduce the nonhierarchical, “avuncular” mode of intertextual interpretation as one that allows us to find common ground between poets, rather than focusing exclusively on their latent rivalries. Chapter 2 provides an introduction to reparative reading and the cultures of critique (and postcritique) within which it has emerged over the past several decades. These two opening chapters – which constitute Part I of the book – are designed to contextualize the closer readings and case studies that follow, on the themes of the 45

46

Willis’ (2006: 158) description of how this process works includes an even more active role for the fans/writers: “writing fan fiction first of all makes gaps in a text that the cultural code attempts to render continuous, and then, rather than filling them in, supplements these gaps with intertexts which are not docile.” Rissman (1983: 122–123) puts this well when she writes, of Sappho fr. 44V, that “the frequency with which Sappho in this poem employs epic phrases which violate the laws of her own Aeolic dialect, vocabulary and prosody . . . indicates that she is not unconsciously under the sway of Homer,” adding a bit later that “Sappho is in full control when she crosses the boundary between Aeolic monodic and epic usage” (123).

14

Introduction

materialities of poetic craft (Chapter 3), shame, failure, and periperformatives (Chapters 4 and 5), queer futures (Chapters 5 and 6), the queering of epic desire, and the poetic syntax of remembering and forgetting (Chapters 7 and 8). As I argue in Chapter 3, Sappho’s lyrics selfconsciously display traces of Homeric language – “plaiting” turns out to be an important metaphor. But where Sappho is critical of Homer, she seems more interested in ameliorating the wrongs suffered by individual characters in the Homeric poems than in contesting epic ideologies, writ large. Shame suffuses Sappho’s Hymn to Aphrodite, a composition that traces its lineage back to minor episodes in Books 3 and 5 of the Iliad. This type of affect-centered intertextuality amplifies and expands upon, rather than contesting and co-opting, Homer, as I argue in Chapter 4. Sappho’s lyrics respond to the absences and silences in epic, as well as to what is more explicitly present. Often, the body in Sappho can be understood as providing cues for the voice, with symptoms arising within the body prompting the singer’s recall of certain mythical parallels. In the Tithonos Poem, for example, the singer’s own groaning lament becomes intertwined with that of Dawn for Tithonos, but it also potentially channels Achilles’ mourning for Patroklos. Sappho ventriloquizes the voices of Homeric characters. This has been acknowledged in the case of Helen but, as I propose in Chapter 5, Achilles’ mournful lament also provides a surprising and powerful zone of contact between the worlds of epic and lyric. We will attend to features within epic (hair coverings, bright items of clothing and jewelry) that appear to gesture to Sappho’s own repertoire: Iliad 22, as mentioned already, includes a detailed description of Andromache’s elaborate headdress, with its shining hairbands (desmata sigaloenta). These appear to be distinctly Sapphic objects embedded within the Homeric narrative. As I elaborate in Chapters 3 and 6, however, we do not have to read Sappho’s preference for feminine adornment as in any way a repudiation of masculine armor, or of the heroic values such weapons evoke. This is because Sappho reconciles what the Iliad frames as mutually exclusive alternatives: love and war, in particular. Where the Iliad denigrates Aphrodite’s realm and those who dwell there, especially if they are men, Sappho fr. 16V questions the opposition between manliness and battle, on the one hand, femininity and Aphrodite, on the other. In Sappho’s lyrics, as will be explored in Chapters 7 and 8, both women and men transgress traditional gender ideologies, pursuing what to them is kalliston (most beautiful).

What Readers Can Expect to Find

15

As part of its representation of the wedding entourage of Andromache and Hector, Sappho fr. 44V invites us to reconsider the value of “undying fame” (kleos aphthiton). In Chapter 6, in a somewhat a different mode of reparative reading, I analyze what happens to this eminently heroic commodity when it is imported from martial epic into a poetic space where love, desire, and marriage overshadow military pursuits. Finally, there is an aspirational, even recuperative, impulse to some of my readings. An entire generation of gay male scholars and artists was decimated in the 1980s and 1990s by the HIV/AIDS epidemic; some of their works were posthumously curated by friends, family members, and colleagues. Sedgwick herself collaborated with her student and close friend Gary Fisher, editing and overseeing the publication of his poetry collection, Gary in Your Pocket, after his death.47 I begin Chapter 5 by reintroducing readers to a mostly overlooked essay on Sappho fr. 58 by John J. Winkler. Like Fisher’s poetry, Winkler’s essay on the Tithonos Poem was published posthumously (in the Journal of Homosexuality, in 1991); it deserves a wider readership.48 As a feminist living with a life-threatening illness in the 1990s, Sedgwick found that the “people with whom she had perhaps most in common, and from whom she might well have most to learn” were the people living with AIDS, the AIDS activists (of which she was one), and the people “whose lives had been profoundly reorganized by AIDS in the course of the 1980s.”49 This is the historical and cultural horizon within which both her theoretical and embodied understandings of queerness developed.50 And it is a context that continues, somewhat more obliquely, to shape how we understand things like queer temporality and queer sociality even today. As Ramzi Fawaz (2019: 9) has recently commented, Eve Sedgwick’s writings seem to be drawn irresistibly to how “people are made vulnerable to one another through physical illness and aging, desire (requited or not), loneliness and emotional need.” Reading these words, I think of Sappho, too. In tracing some of the reparative elements that characterize Sappho’s reception of Homer, we will encounter a poet whose voice, more than ever, retains the power to delight, console, and surprise her readers.

47 48 50

On this complex and controversial collaboration, which resulted in Sedgwick 1996, see Hanson 2011 and Muñoz 2019b. 49 See further Chapter 5. Sedgwick 1993: 14. See Fawaz 2019: 25–26, Nealon 2019: 168–170, and Chapter 2.

part i

Reparative Reading

chapter 1

Reparative Intertextualities Sappho and Homer between Lesbos and Troy

In Love as War: Homeric Allusion in the Poetry of Sappho, Leah Rissman opens our eyes (and ears) to the Homeric echoes in Sappho’s language; her analyses of how Sappho reshapes epic, one episode or epithet at a time, are both detailed and compelling. And yet, when it comes to the question of literary kinship – of how to situate Homer and Sappho vis-à-vis one another and the broader poetic landscape – Rissman defaults to a standard position: Sappho, she suggests more than once, elevates herself and her verses by alluding to Homer.1 Rissman’s (1983: 18–19) goal was, in part, to refashion the “naïve” Sappho; she was pushing back against what was at the time a traditional portrait of Sappho as a “guileless and simple archaic poet.” Rissman was, of course, justified in representing Sappho’s poetic craft as complex and sophisticated.2 It is the agonistic element of her critical framework, and the assumption that poets behave like paranoid readers of other poets, that I want to question here. These assumptions grant legibility to the elements of reception that fit within their remit, while erasing those that do not. In particular, I hope to avoid replicating the usual metaphor of paternity that scholars revert to when they describe the literary interactions between poets. Under such a model, which will be familiar to many readers as Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” a younger poet, who is figured as a son or daughter, either seeks approval from or challenges the authority of an older poet-father (or mother, though generally a father, since most canonized poetic figures are male). This model of intertextual reading also

1

2

For example, Rissman (1983: 51) interprets Sappho’s strategy in fr. 16V as one that is “meant to establish her as a love poet of epic greatness”; at Rissman 1983: 104, Sappho’s purpose is to “elevate the act of marriage by investing it with heroic grandeur” and at Rissman 1983: 121, the “love as war” metaphor more generally serves to “legitimize the concerns of women in a society where these concerns were considered to be of secondary importance.” See, too, Rissman 1983: 48 on Sappho’s “‘Alexandrian’ sophistication.”

19

20

Reparative Intertextualities

assumes that rivalries both professional and personal motivate the practice of poetic citation and canon formation. The literary kinship between Homer and Sappho that will emerge from my readings has little in common with these Oedipal dynamics. According to the Bloomian model, the burden on the young poet, as Mark Payne (2013: 300) puts it, is to “overcome the disabling influence of a father figure who already has his place in the canon.” Payne suggests that certain poets (even male poets) are better understood as mother figures, and that their conflicted feelings toward their literary offspring leave traces in the reception histories of their works. Sappho’s poems were, in fact, thought of as her immortal daughters already in antiquity. But in her poetic orientation toward Homer, I want to propose, Sappho was neither a dutiful daughter nor a parricidal rival. If we were to extend the familial metaphor in another direction, we might say that Homer, rather than being her poetic “father,” is instead a sort of uncle to Sappho. Indeed, in describing their literary interactions in terms of avuncularity, I am indebted to Richard Goodkin’s analysis (in Around Proust) of the Odyssean family dynamics that inform Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. If I tend to downplay the other lyric and elegiac compositions with which Sappho interacted, this is not because these other potential intertexts are objectively less important but only because I am more interested, in this chapter and throughout this book, in exploring the avuncular literary dynamics between Sappho and Homer.

Avuncular Poetics Richard Goodkin (1991: 19) observes of the Odyssey that “one of its most remarkable features is that it is a work almost completely lacking in any lateral family relations – that is, brothers and sisters.”3 Odysseus belongs to a line of single sons; he has a sister, but she is mentioned only once, by the swineherd (15.361–365).4 And one of the reasons Odysseus has to kill all the suitors and return home without his companions, Goodkin suggests, is that “both of these two groups are potential brother figures (whether companions or rivals) in a narrative that abhors the fraternal.”5 For Goodkin, the horizontal impulse comes under the rubric of avuncular narrativity. Proust’s novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, has many aunts and uncles. A key difference between the avuncular and the parental relationship is that 3 4

I’m grateful to Mario Telò for his help with this section on avuncularity. On Odysseus’ sister, see Ebbott 2017. 5 Goodkin 1991: 19.

Avuncular Poetics

21

the aunt or uncle lives fully in the present: aunts and uncles do not concern themselves with “a successful transition between the generations.”6 Avuncular time, in this regard, is time outside the forward-facing movement of the parental axis, which propels the current generation to produce the next generation, thereby seamlessly replacing themselves. Events that sidestep this parental axis provide the material for stories – in both Proust and Homer.7 The famous episode involving a madeleine, for instance, in Proust’s Combray, is generative for the entire novel because it allows Marcel to dwell in the more narratively fertile space of memory. “When Marcel remembers the experience of eating the madeleine with his mother and being reminded of Aunt Léonie, he is pushed off the parental axis (his mother, remembered voluntarily) and to the side (his Aunt Léonie, remembered involuntarily).”8 Thus, as he begins to narrate his novel (a parental impulse), Marcel is pulled not only backward in time but sideways as well.9 Once Marcel has been able to gain his footing as an avuncular narrator, the generative force of the Odyssey as an intertext has been spent. Similarly, in Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus’ avuncular heritage is linked to the wounding he receives while on a boar-hunting expedition with his uncles. This wound yields a scar, which in turn symbolizes his failure to kill the boar on his first try. As Goodkin (1991: 28) remarks, “the lesson of Odysseus’ scar is that one’s identity as a narrator is created as the result of an error, an initial failure to reach one’s goal.”10 Proust’s search for avuncular parallels is what drives his novel’s intertextuality with the Odyssey. In contrast with the Odyssey, however, Sappho’s world is replete with horizontal relations – the only vertical relationship that takes center stage is the one between Sappho and her daughter. The avuncular heritage of intertextuality, moreover, moves, as Goodkin (1991: 37) has emphasized, in two directions, both forward and backward, between source texts and those that engage them; it is never simply passed down from the older to the younger generation (from Homer to Sappho, for instance).11 Avuncular 6

Goodkin 1991: 21. Sedgwick’s (1993: 63–65) views on avuncularity are remarkably similar; I return to them in Chapter 8. 7 Sedgwick (1993: 1–20) also draws a distinction between normative heterosexual time and the temporality inhabited by those who self-identify as queer. See Chapter 2. 8 Goodkin 1991: 36. 9 Goodkin (1991: 36) suggests that Marcel is thus “made to realize that the narration itself will be one of a nondirect link between the generations, a story worthy of (and under the auspices of) Aunt Léonie.” 10 On Sappho’s poetics of failure, see Chapters 4 and 5. 11 Fowler (1997: 27) argues that the movement backward and forward against the diachronic flow of literary history is not a problem, “if we locate intertextuality . . . not in any pre-existing textual system but in the reader.” See also Barchiesi 1993, Hinds 1998, and Nicholson 2013.

22

Reparative Intertextualities

intertextuality is a nonhierarchical relationship, one that levels the playing field by setting poets (and their texts) side by side rather than in a relationship of mastery and apprenticeship – or father and son. “Avuncular” and “reparative” readings are thus both styles of reading that do not privilege conflict, competition, and hierarchy. They establish a sort of parallelism between the poets whose works are read in conjunction. This way of reading is also reminiscent of Sedgwick’s own fascination with the nonhierarchical and nondualistic; it meshes well with her preference for the relations of “beside.” As Karin Sellberg (2019: 196) reminds us, for Sedgwick “‘beside’ takes center stage.”12 By setting Homer and Sappho side by side, we de-emphasize the vertical influence of the supposedly earlier poet on the later one. Instead, we start to read Sappho and Homer in tandem, as audiences in antiquity surely did, who listened to their poetic repertoires not in strict succession but contemporaneously and repeatedly. But we also begin to appreciate the way that Sappho focuses on different types of familial and social relationships from those that are foregrounded in Homeric epic. Sappho’s lyrics revolve around mothers and daughters; a sister concerned with her brother’s activities abroad, and how these impact the familial name and finances; a woman who is consumed by sorrow, anger, jealousy, and shame, because she longs to be loved in turn by another woman. If it takes Proust, in Goodkin’s reckoning, to get us to attend to the avuncular moments embedded within the Odyssey, it may take Sedgwick to help us appreciate the queer tendencies that Sappho elicits from Homer. It is for this reason among others that I turn to Sedgwick, not as the “theory” through which to interpret Sappho but as a model for how to read. Sedgwick extends a queer literary patronage to our exercise of placing these two poets (Sappho and Homer) side by side within the embrace of reparative reading. In the next chapter, I offer an overview of how the term “reparative” functions within the discourse around paranoid-versus-reparative reading that was inspired by Sedgwick, among others. But in this chapter, I preemptively gesture to some of the ways in which I adapt the reparative readerly posture for intertextuality. In the readings ahead, I circle back frequently to the phrase “in tandem” reading, by which I mean that the verses of Sappho and Homer that I place side by side speak to one another as separate but equal participants in poetic repertoires with significant areas 12

Sellberg (2019: 196) adds that for Sedgwick, “beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivalling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations” (quotes are taken from Sedgwick 2003: 8).

Avuncular Poetics

23

of overlap. So, for instance, in Chapter 3, I consider how Sappho integrates key Homeric objects into her own lyrics (Ajax’s shield and the warrior’s mitra being two of the more memorable ones). But I do not suggest, as is often done, that the female poet’s primary goal in “citing” these martial artifacts is to boost her poetic prestige. Where gender is at issue, the feminine sphere demarcates a zone that is no less sophisticated and significant than the male; its élan does not depend on its peeking out from under the shadow of Homer’s battlefield poetics. Another reason to read Homer and Sappho side by side, rather than as part of a vertically calibrated literary tradition, moving in lockstep from the past into the present, is that this is how “readers” in antiquity would have approached Sappho’s poetic corpus. Conditioned as we are by our sense of literary history as unfolding along a diachronic continuum, with later poets inserting themselves into an already established canon, it can be difficult to retroject oneself back to a time and place where lyric, epic, and other poetic genres were performed synchronously. Ancient listeners were already sensitized to the ways in which poems (or songs) from these poetic traditions “alluded” to one another and reshaped audiences’ understandings of both epic and lyric, regardless of their absolute chronology. For these listeners, it was just as likely that Homer would engage Sappho as that Sappho would respond to Homer. Listeners in antiquity did not need to theorize this phenomenon as “bidirectional” intertextuality or “future reflexive” reading.13 Such an effect was already built into their oral-poetic performance culture. Someone listening to Sappho would also have had occasion to listen to Homer – who had not yet been boxed up and placed on a library shelf. Of course, “Homer” was understood to be older and more venerable, but rhapsodes and kitharodes sang his poetry as part of a tradition of live performance, in the same way they were beginning to sing the lyrics of Sappho and Alcaeus. When they listened to some version of Iliad 3 or Iliad 22 being performed, audiences in antiquity may have been reminded of the Sappho song they had heard earlier that year, or that week, perhaps a song featuring Hector and Andromache, or Helen. Sappho herself was one of these listeners; she also composed her songs in response to those of other singers.14 In fact, in fr. 106V, Sappho mentions a Lesbian singer (aoidos), 13

14

See Currie 2016: 17 on “bidirectional” intertextuality; Barchiesi (1993: 333) calls “future reflexive” a type of reading “where the writer has worked from the old towards the new,” thus allowing the reader to find “his way by means of clues that send him back from the new towards the old.” See also Lesser (2019: 194) on the “long side-by-side oral history” during which the Odyssey and Iliad poets “knew of each other and competed with each other in some form or another.” On Sappho’s interaction with other genres beyond epic, see Kurke 2021b.

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whom she regards as superior to those from other lands: πέρροχος ὠς ὄτ᾿ ἄοιδος ὀ Λέσβιος ἀλλοδάποισιν (“exceptional just like the Lesbian singer in comparison to those of other lands”). Scholars have long debated who this particular singer might be – Terpander is a favorite contender.15 But as Emily Hauser (2016: 140) proposes, Sappho may here be alluding more generally to the tradition of Lesbian singers of which she was a part; if so, this fragment would be “the earliest reference by a female poet to her own profession.” While I believe that ancient listeners interpreted Sappho’s poetry in some of the ways I sketch in later chapters of this book, it is not my aspiration to recover an historically accurate profile of such readers. Nevertheless, I offer the following reflections on intertextuality, both ancient and modern, as a provocation for us to imagine ourselves back into some of the more distant listening and “reading” practices that pertained in Sappho’s world. What are the various ways in which “Homer” may have resonated with listeners on Lesbos? And how can we extricate ourselves from the unhelpful biases of text-and-tradition-based literary critique? I first explore the place of Lesbos in Homeric epic and sketch some of the scenarios for listening to and interpreting Homer from Lesbos (figured here as both a real and a notional place). I then return to the more recent contexts in which intertextuality has developed as a mode of literary criticism in order to trace its intersections with “paranoid” reading practices. The goal here is to demonstrate that intertextuality need not operate solely in its paranoid critical register.

Listening to Homer (and Sappho) on Lesbos For our purposes in this book, when I refer to “Homer” or “Homeric epic” I am primarily referring to the major epics, the Iliad in particular; but my readings also touch upon Sappho’s engagement with the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (especially in Chapter 5) and the Odyssey. The precise form of the “Homer” to which Sappho and her contemporaries had access, however, is much more difficult to determine. It no doubt included versions of the Iliad and Odyssey, as well as material from what we now refer to as the Epic Cycle and the Homeric Hymns.16 Sappho’s “Homer” also included poetic 15

16

Power (2010: 258) hypothesizes that the Lesbian singers, “as they were proverbially known as early as the seventh century bce (cf. Sappho fr. 106), claimed to be descendants of Terpander, his ἀπόγονοι, members of his extended family, his genos.” For discussion of Sappho’s “Homer,” see Meyerhoff 1984: 46–75; West (2002: 210) argues that by 600 bce these hexameter poems had reached a recognizable fixed form because of written texts, and that “what Sappho and Alcaeus heard from the lips of rhapsodes consisted generally of poems (or

Listening to Homer (and Sappho) on Lesbos

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material that is no longer available to us today, as only a small portion of what originally circulated under the heading of “Homer” has survived in textual form.17 In the seventh and early sixth centuries bce, “Homer” was a fluid repertoire of songs that singers (aoidoi) composed and performed at festivals, or for other occasions. But by the end of the sixth-century bce, “Homer” had become associated with certain fixed texts. As Walter Burkert (1987: 46) writes, “creative improvisation had given way to the reproduction of a fixed text, learned by heart and available also in book form.”18 It was not until later in antiquity, however, that “Homer” came to be understood exclusively as the author of the major poems: the Iliad and the Odyssey “only gradually emerged as the only truly Homeric poems.”19 These were poems, moreover, that, regardless of their actual content, would have spoken differently to different audiences, depending on their geopolitical affiliations. Richard Rawles offers the useful reminder that “the Iliad took shape in a world where ways of identifying contemporary ethnicity with the heroic past were flexible and open and where it need not have been natural to assume that the Achaeans were ‘our side.’”20 As Achilles reminds Priam, who has come to plead for the return of his son’s body in the final book of our Iliad, his (i.e., Priam’s) kingdom at the height of his power was bordered by Phrygia, the Hellespont, and Lesbos (24.544).21 Lesbos was Trojan territory, its inhabitants the victims of several Achilles-led raids already alluded to within the Iliad.22 One product

17 18

19 20

21

22

portions of poems) that either already had a fixed identity or, if new, were intended to retain a fixed identity for the future.” Graziosi 2002: 244. For an engaging and sophisticated cultural history of the idea of Homer, see now Porter 2021. See Graziosi (2002) for a detailed treatment of how “Homer” evolved in antiquity. On the interaction between epic and lyric traditions, see especially Cassio 2005: 13–19, Nagy 1974: 134– 139, Nagy 2010: 238–250, Power 2010: 258–267, Steinrück 1999, West 2002, and West 2011: 28–47. Graziosi 2002: 165, also citing the remark by Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1884: 353 that “In 500 all poems are by Homer, in 350 only the Iliad and the Odyssey are truly by Homer.” Rawles 2018: 95, who adds, of early listeners of Homer in the eastern Aegean: “Such listeners may never have heard the Iliad we know, and we can do little more than guess how this tradition came to be reflected in our texts, but the tradition was close enough to the Iliad to be reflected in it.” Thomas (2019: 261) suggests that within several stories circulating among island historians “Lesbos was well within the orbit of Troy, as indeed it was geographically.” On Sappho’s Lesbos, see Thomas 2021. Achilles dies before Troy is taken but, as West (2011: 43) emphasizes, “there is repeated mention of his plundering and destroying other towns in the region, eleven on land and twelve from the sea.” These included Skyros, Lesbos, Tenedos, Lyrnessos, Pedasos, and Hypoplakian Thebe. Proclus’ Chrestomathia, in his Argument to the Cypria, suggests that Achilles’ destruction of the “surrounding” cities is a campaign following upon the Achaeans’ refusal to give back Helen and the property that was stolen with her. Instead, they “go out over the country and destroy the surrounding settlements”: ἔπειτα τὴν χώραν ἐπεξελθόντες πορθοῦσι καὶ τὰς περιοίκους πόλεις (Argumentum, section 11 in West 2003).

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of these raids are the seven Lesbian women, exceptionally beautiful and skilled at the loom, with whom Agamemnon seeks to lure Achilles back into battle in Book 9. These women from Lesbos may have offered Sappho and her contemporaries a narrative “hook,” a point of entry into potentially less familiar Iliadic lore. The number of women that Agamemnon lists is equivalent to the number of tripods (seven) that he has also included in his inventory of gifts (at Il. 9.122). And this number resonates with features of the musical and Muse-inspired traditions indigenous to Sappho’s island. There were seven Muses on Lesbos, rather than the nine of Panhellenic tradition.23 And these were originally “Mysian handmaids” (Musas therapainidas), whose importation to Lesbos, “mythicizes the actual flow of heptatonic musical technology from east to west during the Orientalizing period” (Power 2010: 388). Timothy Power refers here to the fact that the kithara, supposedly an invention of the Lesbian poet Terpander, also had seven strings. A variety of solo-song performed to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument, kitharōidia has much in common with rhapsōidia, although the fragments of kitharodic nomoi are much less well preserved today than are other forms of melic lyric;24 kitharodes were actively involved (from the tenth century bce onward) in the preIonian Aeolic epic tradition that treated myths relating to the Trojan War.25 Lesbos thus occupies a distinctive place in the landscape of archaic Greek song culture. The main actions of the Iliad and Odyssey revolve around Troy to the east, where war wages on for ten brutally long years, and Ithaca to the west, Odysseus’ homeland. But between war and return, Troy and Ithaca, are another set of stories staged against the backdrop of the Troad. These tales mostly focus on the already mentioned raids, on Lesbos and on nearby Thebe and Lernessos. But Sappho’s island is also represented as holding the key to the safe homecomings (nostoi) of several Achaean heroes.26 In the frequent appearances of “here” (τυίδε) in her lyrics, Sappho draws on mythical lore about Lesbos to create a sense of the 23 24 25

26

As reported by Myrsilus of Methymna FGrH 477 F 7b, c, on which see Power 2010: 387–388. On kitharōidia, see especially Power 2010. As evidence of this Aeolian epic tradition about Troy, which likely overlapped with the Ionic tradition, scholars have pointed to the hexameter-friendly forms of Priam’s name, Perramos/ Peramos, found in both Sappho and Alcaeus (see Bachvarova 2016: 406, citing West 1973: 191 and 2002: 218). On Nestor’s nostos, which involves a stopover on Lesbos and the solicitation of navigational advice from the gods, see Od. 3.168–175. This passage is taken as an intertext for Sappho fr. 17V by Ferrari 2014: 17.

Listening to Homer (and Sappho) on Lesbos

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presentness of the epic past in her listeners’ here and now.27 In fr. 17V, for example, Sappho prays that Hera “may appear near me,” Hera to whom the illustrious sons of Atreus also may have prayed, when, “after having accomplished many labors around Troy,” they departed for “here” (τυίδ’ ἀπορμάθεν[τες, 7), being unable to discover their route homeward. Their journey coincides with the beginning of the nostoi of those who were waylaid at various islands near Troy because Zeus “plotted a sorrowful nostos in his mind for the Argives” (Od. 3.132–133). Menelaos ends up on Lesbos (Od. 3.169), after first having put in at Tenedos. For Sappho, Hera’s helping of the sons of Atreus is the precedent by which she implores the goddess to come to her aid as well. Sappho’s appeal specifically alludes to the Atreids and ancient custom (κὰτ τὸ παλ̣[αιόν, 12),28 while τυίδε conjoins the time and place of myth with that of the song’s performance.29 Alongside these tales of Achaean nostoi, Lesbos also played a role in circulating the mythical lore about Tithonos, whose tragic love affair with the goddess Dawn is recounted by Aphrodite in her eponymous Homeric Hymn.30 Some have suggested that the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite even originated on Lesbos.31 Richard Janko demonstrates, both in his 1982 book and in a more recent 2017 article, that the Hymn has features of the Aeolic dialect and some shared vocabulary with Sappho.32 Thus the story of Tithonos, the human lover of Dawn who, through a tragic oversight, is granted immortality but not agelessness, may have been known to the inhabitants of Lesbos even independently of Sappho’s composition. Is it merely a coincidence that the Lesbian historiographer Hellanicus is our earliest witness for the tradition about Tithonos’ metamorphosis into a cicada? Janko (2017: 285–286) argues that “given Tithonus’ genealogy, 27

28 29

30 31 32

Lesbos is nowhere named directly, but as the deictic center of a number of Sappho’s songs, the island is evoked by the Greek place marker τυίδε, meaning “hither,” or simply “here,” a Lesbian Aeolic deictic form used with verbs of motion. No other archaic poets, as far as we know, make use of this deictic; when τυῖδε appears in later Greek authors, it has a distinctly Aeolic resonance, and may even have been heard as echoing Sappho. This is fr. 17.12V with Wilamowitz’s supplement. Calame (2009: 5) notes that “the place of the past action [is] indicated by the deictic adverb tuíde which means ‘here, under our eyes’ (v.7).” Although it is a spatial indicator, τυίδε has a relational rather than a specific sense here. We understand that Lesbos is what is meant only because we can project onto the song the perspective of its original performers and their audience. Τυίδε (like the English word “here”) derives its spatial sense from the location of its speaker. In Chapter 5, where I read the Tithonos Poem in relation to the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, I follow the modern convention of referring to this hymn by its title rather than its author. Janko (1982, 2017) argues most extensively for this, but Faulkner (2008: 49) also thinks it likely that the poem originated in the Troad, in Northern Asia Minor. Janko 2017: 285 and Janko 1982: 169–170 noting “parallels between HHymn to Aphr. 12–15 and Sappho 44.12–20, including the rare word σατίνη.”

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this tale must have been invented and diffused in the north-east Aegean before it became Pan-Hellenic in distribution.”33 Despite its turbulent political history, Lesbos produced writers and poets of Panhellenic fame, including Arion and Orpheus. These two are figures of myth, yet they mark the beginnings of a poetic tradition that also included Sappho and Alcaeus. The inhabitants of Lesbos clearly had a particular interest in how they and their island were represented in epic and other narrative art forms.34 Audiences in antiquity would not necessarily have traced “allusions” in Sappho to particular episodes of our Iliad and Odyssey, to the exclusion of a much more expansive Homeric tradition. But they were experienced at listening to Homer and Sappho side by side. Richard Martin (2001: 25) has argued that what is generally understood by “intertextuality,” that is, poetic voices self-consciously in dialogue with one another, existed even within oral-poetic song cultures. This sort of cross-referencing had long been considered the province of highly literate, text-based poetic traditions. But recently, that has begun to change.35 In what follows, I sketch several of the more promising approaches for understanding what I call (following Goodkin) the avuncular intertextuality between Sappho and Homer. In his book on the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, Kirk Ormand maintains that audiences raised on a culture of listening closely to hexameter poetry are as capable of parsing aural nuance as we are at decoding texts (2014: 12): I should make clear that I do not suppose that the operations of the Catalogue poet are identical to those of a poet such as Ovid, who has been brilliantly shown to write his Heroides as specific intertextual expansions of moments from set epic texts. But because not only the poets of Archaic Greece but also their audience could be presumed to know the broad scope of hexameter epic, performers of individual songs were able to 33

34

35

Faulkner (2008: 48–49) also notes the “numerous similarities of language and themes between Aphr. and the Lesbian poets” and argues that “they are substantial enough to suggest that the poet of Aphr. had access to a body of poetry similar to that which was available to Sappho and Alcaeus.” Faulkner favors a date in the latter half of the seventh century for the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite; since my arguments about intertextuality do not rely on establishing a strict chronological sequence, I, like Faulkner, place more importance on the similarity of language and themes, which suggests access to shared sources, if not direct allusion. But as Thomas (2019: 267) argues, when Lesbian writers show interest in the Trojan War it is not so much for “disembodied Homeric learning” but because this knowledge is “useful to Mytilene for maintaining her special interests there.” In addition to those discussed later, see the approaches modeled by Pucci 1995, Tsagalis 2008, Bakker 2013: 157–169, LeVen 2013, Nicholson 2013, Finglass and Kelly 2015, Currie 2016: 33–36, Canevaro 2018: 245–257, Rawles 2018, and Lesser 2019.

Listening to Homer (and Sappho) on Lesbos

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bring in references to episodes that existed outside their oral “text,” and thus produce new meanings and suggest, through implicit comparisons, new facets of the poem’s characters and plots.

Not every repetition of an epithet will necessarily be meaningful, since epithets are constituent features of formulas whose repetition is fundamental to the composition of these hexameter poems. Nevertheless, such repetitions are not random, and they can be taken to indicate something important about the scenes under consideration. As Jonathan Burgess (2011: 168) suggests, it would have been possible for phraseology “associated with specific mythological situations” to be strategically used so as to evoke those particular contexts. He offers as a case in point the “hurling-from-a-height” motif. This occurs in the description of the death of Astyanax in a fragment of the Little Iliad (PEG F 21) but also recurs in Books 6 and 24 of the Iliad, prompting Burgess to remark that in Book 6 of the Iliad, “the allusion is more indirect and complex.” It is not just transferred and repeated but actually inverted: “[T]he child recoils into the nurse’s bosom instead of being snatched from it, and instead of a murderous Greek it is his own father who reaches for him (though a father whose visage is hidden by a warrior’s helmet).”36 Because the language is that with which, traditionally, the hurling of Astyanax from the walls of Troy has been described, it carries the resonance of that specific scene into the very different context of Iliad 6. The allusion is not to a particular poem but rather to a particular motif which appears in different poetic contexts. And it is as a motif that it accrues meaning through repetition. Richard Martin (2001: 25), however, maintains that “even in the context of live oral composition, it is possible for one performer to ‘allude’ to and even ‘quote’ other traditions known to him and recognized by the audience.” Martin (2001: 27) presents the example of Odysseus using, in Odyssey 11, catalogue material that his audience would have recognized as stemming from, or overlapping with, other poetic contexts. Odysseus, in other words, behaves like a performer who is adept at recycling and reassembling chunks of verse from preexisting repertoires, just as rhapsodes do who are “creative interpreters and re-performers of a poetic tradition.”37 Such a recycling of already known material is not merely the unthinking reflex of the epic tradition, but rather the Odyssey poet’s pointed way of 36 37

Burgess 2011: 181. Martin (2001: 28) also points to the traces of live performance traditions within manuscripts: for example, Hesiod’s Theogony segueing directly into the Catalogue of Women. This is not an accident of textual transmission, but reflects the realities of performance, where a rhapsode might pivot from one song directly into another.

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characterizing Odysseus himself as a skilled rhapsode. To this we may add Nigel Nicholson’s astute observation that intertextuality’s remit extends even to informal oral traditions – or “texts” that have yet to attain a fixed form. It thus becomes less important to ascertain whether one poetic composition predates another in order to make a point about the potential intertextuality between them.38 One of the most promising features of intertextuality, according to Nicholson (2013: 11), is that it offers precisely such a model for describing “the relations between fixed texts and informal oral traditions.”39 Nicholson might claim, for instance, that we do not need evidence that the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite predated the Tithonos Poem to be able to make the case that Sappho interacted with the content of this hymn; his approach would posit that there was an oral tradition about the Tithonos myth (perhaps even one originating from Lesbos) with which Sappho’s composition was already in dialogue.40 Of all the models of intertextuality now available, my sympathies generally lie with those who, like Ormand, Nicholson, and Martin, allow for a more open-ended and sophisticated engagement on the part of both the poet and the listener. Adrian Kelly (2015) has argued that detailed allusion to Homer does not appear in the Archaic period before Stesichorus (and possibly Simonides), and even then, that not every Stesichorean nod to Homer should be construed as an allusion. Kelly’s parameters for determining allusion are narrow, and they essentially disqualify as Homeric any phraseology that might have appeared elsewhere in sources that are now lost.41 He assumes that if there is more than one possible point of reference for a particular allusion, it will not have been perceived as Homeric: “any allusion needs to be distinctively Homeric for an ancient audience to link it specifically with Homer rather than with the dozens, if not hundreds, of epic performances and tales in their experience.”42 I do not directly contest Kelly’s claim that it is difficult to pin down an allusion as Homeric. But my hope is to give expression to possible rather than necessary connections. It is true that “possibility” should also encompass allusions to compositions whose existence we have no way of affirming, because they are no longer extant. Yet why, I wonder, must we unduly 38 39 40 41

42

As Nicholson (2013: 11) argues, “texts can be in dialogue with other texts in the process of formation, or with texts that are possible in a given social formation but are not being actualized.” See also Nicholson 2016: 46–49. This, in fact, is quite similar to what Faulkner (2008: 49) argues. As Kelly (2015: 39) reasons, “typically lamentatory language or speech introduction formulae might generally augment the epic feel of Stesichorus’ poem, and in that way help to invoke the clearly Homeric allusions, but that is not the same thing as being allusions in themselves.” Kelly 2015: 39; see also Kelly 2020 and 2021.

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constrain our potential readings of the texts we do have simply because of the others that have not survived? None of the resonances between Homer and Sappho that I will be suggesting have any claim to being self-evident or universally acknowledged.43 But in reading Andromache’s weaving at her loom in Iliad 22 (as I do, for example, in Chapter 3), I propose that listeners would have been reminded of Aphrodite poikilothron’ while hearing throna poikil’. This is just the sort of verbal echo that those “reading” Homer with a Sapphic sensibility would have been primed to recognize.

Decoding the Text: Readers as Detectives A student of Roland Barthes in Paris in the mid-to-late 1960s, Julia Kristeva translated Mikhail Bakhtin from Russian into French, making his writings accessible for the first time to a Francophone readership. It was Kristeva who coined the term “intertextuality.” This coining is usually traced back to her essay “Word, Dialogue, Novel” published in Paris (in Semeiotike) in 1969 but not translated into English until 1980, as a chapter of Desire in Language. In this chapter, Kristeva credits Bakhtin with bringing texts into more dynamic dialogue with one another: “Bakhtin was one of the first to replace the static hewing out of texts with a model where literary structure does not simply exist but is generated in relation to another structure.”44 The meaning of any particular passage or text, in other words, does not emerge as a static phenomenon but as part of the dynamic dialogue between texts. Particularly significant for Kristeva (1980: 66) is Bakhtin’s insight that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations.”45 What matters here are not the intentions of individual artists but the interplay of language within and between their literary works. It becomes, in turn, the task of readers to discover the linguistic structures lurking beneath the surface. The move from authorial intention to textual signification is also mirrored in the vocabulary that critics deploy. Originally, “allusion” signified an intention on the part of the author/poet to reference a feature of an earlier literary work, whereas “resonance,” “echo,” or 43

44 45

Compare Kelly (2020: 275), who, in the course of arguing against prioritizing the major epics and the listeners who might be reminded of them concludes that “no individual recall needs to crowd out or prioritise any other.” And yet, reading poetry does require selectively dwelling on certain types of recall as opposed to others. Kristeva 1980: 64–65 (emphasis in the original). On this context, see also Edmunds 2001: 8–16. See Fowler 1997: 14, citing Conte 1986: 29, on how this applies to classical literature.

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“intertext” left it more ambiguous as to whether such verbal correspondences were deliberate or simply an effect noticed and appreciated by the reader (with no judgment at all on authorial intention). Within the field of Latin poetry, where intertextuality has flourished for decades as a privileged mode of criticism, scholars have debated these nuances of terminology.46 Richard Thomas, for example, preferred “reference” over “allusion” because of its more scholarly tone, which he thought was appropriate for the way that a verbal signal within one text encouraged the reader to remember, or revisit, another text; according to Stephen Hinds, Thomas found that “the word ‘allusion’ ha[d] implications far too frivolous to suit this process.”47 Hinds, however, suggests that “reference” does not do justice to the artistry and detective work involved in decoding complex allusions. For Hinds, the reward for the reader/scholar lies in being able to discover and decipher one of these concealed gems. In his influential study, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry, Hinds navigates a path between philological fundamentalism (where all allusions are tightly controlled by the author) and intertextual abandon, where the author plays no part at all in the composition of the text, and all meaning is created at the point of reception.48 In the midst of arguing for this commonsensical middle ground, however, Hinds reveals his (mostly unexplored) assumptions about poets: The bracketing out of the author is often hailed as a liberation of meaning from the private into the public realm. Nevertheless, there is no getting away from the fact that the production of a poetic text is in some very important ways a private, self-reflexive, almost solipsistic activity; and even the poet’s dialogue with the work of other poets can be a very private, self-reflexive and solipsistic kind of dialogue. These are truths sufficiently demonstrated in my own first chapter. The resistance which a reader encounters in the text because of that element of solipsism in the poet’s production of the text is not, of course, the only kind of resistance which the reader faces in his or her intertextual negotiations.49

Hinds conjures the poet as a solitary, romantic figure who is far removed from human social contacts as he conducts his “solipsistic” dialogue with 46 47 48

49

See Edmunds 2001, Schmitz 2007: 77–85, and the Introduction to Baraz and van den Berg 2013 for a helpful overview of the major trends. As quoted from Thomas 1986: 172n8 by Hinds 1998: 21 See also Fowler 1997: 24: “Intertextuality, like all aspects of literary reception, is ultimately located in reading practice, not in a textual system: meaning is realized at the point of reception, and what counts as an intertext and what one does with it depends on the reader.” Hinds 1998: 48–49, emphasis in the original.

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his Muse and his poetic predecessors. To what extent would Sappho and her audience have recognized themselves (and their fellow singers) in this description? What we are confronting here is not only the literary bias of intertextuality scholarship, but the peculiar (though rarely questioned) portrait of the artist as scholar. Literary critics have created poets in their own image, evoking them as solitary individuals who, from the privacy of their studies, greet their Muse, pen (or laptop) in hand. Is the artist really such a cerebral, silent figure? Undoubtedly, many poets work this way, but Hinds’ hardly qualifies as an adequate general depiction of the poet, especially not for cultures and historical eras where the personal library was a rarity, if it existed at all. The flipside of the poet-as-scholar is the reader-as-detective. As I have mentioned, Hinds criticized Richard Thomas’ choice of the term “reference” over allusion because, in his view, “it hardly conveys a sense of the deeply encoded artistry which gives to complex Alexandrianizing allusion, and to the detective work of a modern philologist like Thomas himself, its real fascination.”50 Detective work is the metaphor that Hinds chooses for the process of literary interpretation. The ability to decipher recondite allusions transforms the mere reader into a highly skilled philologist. In this respect, Hinds’ language resonates strongly with Sedgwick’s own reflections on paranoid readers, and her singling out of D. A. Miller’s readerly style in particular. In his 1988 book, The Novel and the Police, Miller himself wrote (in a formulation that would be taken up by Sedgwick) that “surprise . . . is precisely what the paranoid seeks to eliminate.”51 The paranoid reader-critic gets drawn into repeated acts of “exposure” and “demystification,” classic detective work.52 Literary scholars have long mined the canon for sympathetic figures after whom they could model their own engagements with poetry; in a somewhat circular fashion, they have also projected their paranoid critical postures onto those very “precursors.” Thea Thorsen’s co-edited volume Roman Receptions of Sappho offers just one recent example of how the intertextual relationships between poets from Greco-Roman antiquity have typically been reconstructed. Referring to a chapter by Richard Hunter, Thorsen (2019: 168n9) writes that “Hunter . . . argues extensively . . . [that] the style and strategies of Sappho are also congruent with [the] aesthetic movement in Augustan Rome.” Sappho, in other words, is thought to anticipate the competitive style of interacting with other 50 51

Hinds 1998: 23, my emphasis. Miller 1988: 164, cited by Sedgwick 1997: 10 (see Chapter 2).

52

Sedgwick 1997: 18–24.

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poets that came to be admired and imitated by the Augustan poets. By emulating Sappho’s supposedly eristic stance toward Homer, the Augustan poets in turn related to the past (and to earlier poets) in a paranoid fashion. And so the culture of anti-reparative critique was born. But literary criticism and poetic composition do not require that readers function as detectives. Particularly when we let go of the Oedipal (Bloomian) model for poets imitating other poets, it becomes much easier to imagine less antagonistic forms of intertextual engagement. It is this mode of reading (the antagonistic mode) that we will now recognize as marked, since we have reframed intertextuality as having both paranoid and reparative critical registers.53 In outlining some of the scenarios wherein ancient listeners of Sappho may have been reminded of similar episodes, or similar language, from Homeric poetry, I have encouraged us to take a step back from the hypertextual reading practices of our contemporary world. In the rest of this book, I return to this more familiar mode of reading, while still retaining a connection to the oral-poetic origins of Sappho’s poetry. I thus refer to Sappho’s lyrics as fragments or poems, but also as songs (which is how her earliest audiences would have encountered them); and I use the term “reader” to refer both to actual readers as well as listeners. But I hope that by returning, even if only briefly, to the performance cultures of archaic Lesbos, we have been able to appreciate that the practice of intertextuality, of how poets engage with one another (whether we want to frame this as allusion, reference, or echo), is not in itself dependent on there being a fully evolved (text-based) literary culture. In fact, as we have seen, the assumption that canon formation and poetic interchange are textual events has too often gone hand in hand with the idea that such poets are in competition for the limited spaces available in their shared literary canon. The “avuncular” style of intertextuality that I have traced here is one that sidesteps that zero-sum mentality. It is able to do so in part by letting go of the diachronicity of a textual literary tradition and by engaging with a Homer and a Sappho who are situated beside (and not hierarchically at odds with) one another; in this it emulates the posture of ancient listeners of Sappho and Homer. But this form of reparative intertextuality does not preclude any of the literary sophistication and nuance that, until recently, readers had been reluctant to ascribe to poets dwelling in an oral-poetic, performance-based literary culture like that of archaic Greece. 53

Sedgwick (1997: 9) also acknowledges that reparative and paranoid reading practices can coexist, and that the latter may offer “a way, among others, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge.”

chapter 2

Sappho and Sedgwick as Reparative Readers

The reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture – even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them. (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling)

The “reparative” in “reparative reading” is often defined against, or in opposition to, paranoid reading. For this reason, and also because of its capacious nature, it cannot easily be summarized in just a few sentences. I begin, therefore, by sketching a few of the ways in which reparative reading differs from intertextuality as it has been more traditionally practiced by classicists. And while I leave aside the particularities for the chapters that follow, I allow myself to make a more general observation here. Because of its obsession with literary authority and prestige, as well as with how these are negotiated between and among communities of readers and writers, intertextuality has devoted remarkably little attention to questions of bodily affect, sensation, and emotion. It requires some innovative maneuvering to demonstrate, for example, how an affect in one poem manifests in another. There is no direct path of transmission – no easy, verbal tag.1 What we find ourselves having to track instead are the subtle movements of the body – a downcast gaze here, a slight trembling there. Or, how artifacts within one poetic genre get taken apart and redistributed in another. How an epic assemblage, such as Ajax and his seven-layered shield, for example, reappears in Sappho as a doorkeeper with remarkably large sandals.2 Formal patterns of language and thematic repetition and variation remain important. But 1

2

Marchesi (2013) grapples productively with similar issues and develops the concept of the “verbal cloud” for places where intertextuality illuminates “the interplay between what is said and what is left unsaid” (108). See further Chapter 3.

35

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Sappho and Sedgwick as Reparative Readers

equally important are the attachments of poets and readers to literary works and to the emotional lives of their characters.3 In How Soon Is Now? Carolyn Dinshaw observes that, unlike professional readers, amateur readers are openly invested in their objects of study. Professionals practice detachment and objectivity, whereas “constant attachment to the object of attention characterizes amateurism.”4 Professionals have to follow a long course of study in the proscribed methodologies, skill sets, and areas of knowledge; by contrast, “amateurism is bricolage, bringing whatever can be found, whatever works, to the activity.”5 In describing the amateurism of medievalists, Dinshaw (2012: 29) asserts, moreover, that it “goes deeper than any technicality: it bears on their affections, their intimacy with their materials, their desires.” The same is true, I propose, of reparative readers, who, unlike their paranoid counterparts, “wear their desires on their sleeves.”6 Although professional readers are often emotionally invested in the texts they (or we) read, they/we have been conditioned against displaying those attachments openly and allowing them to inform our academic writing. For reparative and amateur readers, on the other hand, the act of reading satisfies a viscerally felt need. Having access to the right literature can feel like a matter of life or death, even though, ironically, the title “amateur” would seem to imply a weaker attachment to texts than those that sustain professional readers. I am reminded here in particular of how Sedgwick describes the sustenance she found in literature as a child, long before she had any notion of becoming a professional reader. Even before formalizing the idea of the reparative that first emerges in her 1997 Introduction to Novel Gazing, Sedgwick describes in Tendencies a reading practice that sounds remarkably prescient of this move. As a young reader, she was drawn to literature “as a prime resource for survival.”7 Placing herself in the company of other queer-identified readers, she explains how “we needed for there to be sites where the meanings didn’t line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and love.”8 This ends up involving reading not necessarily between the lines so much as in the margins and “against the grain, often, of the most accessible voices even in the texts themselves.”9 She describes how becoming a “perverse reader” was never a matter of condescending to 3

4 7

Reparative reading was pioneered by literary critics whose area of scholarly expertise was in gothic and sentimental literature (Sedgwick and Cvetkovich, respectively); around the same time, however, Wohl (1998) applied Klein’s notion of the reparative to reading Greek tragedy. Dinshaw 2012: 22, emphasis in the original. 5 Dinshaw 2012: 23. 6 Dinshaw 2012: 30. Sedgwick 1993: 3. 8 Sedgwick 1993: 3. 9 Sedgwick 1993: 4.

Sappho and Sedgwick as Reparative Readers

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texts but “rather of the surplus charge of my trust in them to remain powerful, refractory, and exemplary.”10 Sedgwick terms this “ardent reading” and adds that this “doesn’t seem an unusual way for ardent reading to function in relation to queer experience.”11 It is, if anything, this trust that I, too, see as vital to the practice of reparative reading. A trust, in our texts, that they will not so much withstand our efforts to pry (resistant) meaning out of them as that they will guide us in our interactions with them and continue to refract meanings beyond any we could possibly imagine for them in the present moment. That, at least, is my hope for what I have been referring to as the “reparative” mode of intertextuality. As Scott Herring (2018: 12) perceptively acknowledges, the word possibility is a “constant refrain” throughout Sedgwick’s corpus, and the many ways in which queer theory especially “has adopted her theorizations of the reparative” since her death has made good on Sedgwick’s investment in the value of possibility.12 There is a queer component to reparative reading (both in its original conception as well as in the multiple directions it has taken since Sedgwick’s death), as there is, too, in amateur reading. Dinshaw (2012: 30–31), in fact, observes that “the concepts that typically characterize amateurism – immaturity, belatedness or underdevelopment, inadequate separation from objects of love, improper attachment, inappropriate loving – sound just like what a developmental psychologist trained within the paradigm of a normative life course might say about the sexual ‘deviant.’” The queerness of Sappho’s reparative readings of Homer will be one of this book’s persistent themes, as we locate and orient ourselves around the nonbinary, nonheteronormative vantage points from which Sappho often seems to be reshaping her Homeric material. Thus, while a focus on power, authority, and mastery may be unavoidable, I deliberately background these as the privileged terms that have dominated literary culture and critique over many decades, and I do so in order to make room for their queerer cousins – things like failure, vulnerability, and shame.13 10

11 12

13

From this, Kruse (2019: 135) evolves her own theory of an erotic ethics of reading, pointing out that in Tendencies, “Sedgwick openly pursues a passion-driven form of ethical ‘overreading’ to make ‘invisible . . . desires visible’ and thus provide herself (and the larger queer community) with sustenance to survive.” Sedgwick 1993: 4. Telò (2020: 35–36) adapts Sedgwick’s “ardent reading,” a form of reparative reading. Or, as Berlant writes in their co-authored piece with Lee Edelman 2019: 54: “I read for what Eve makes possible, for her belief in the work of concepts to make the unbearable livable and the nonrelational part of intimacy a part of what’s potentially sustaining in attachment.” Especially relevant here are Love 2007 and Halberstam 2011. On uncles and aunts as queer family members, see “Tales of the Avunculate: Queer Tutelage in The Importance of Being Earnest,” in Tendencies (Sedgwick 1993: 52–72).

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Sappho and Sedgwick as Reparative Readers

A number of Sedgwick’s signature ideas – her recuperation of shame as a generative affect, as well as her celebration of sexual difference reaching beyond the binary of hetero vs homo-sexuality – find their way into my readings of Sappho. I therefore devote much of the rest of this chapter to sketching out Sedgwick’s contributions (primarily for readers who may be unfamiliar with her work).14 I want to underline however, that even though I assign these topics their separate sections, they are in practice fully imbricated in one another. It is impossible, for example, to disentangle Sedgwick’s thinking about shame from her understanding of its formative role in queer experience. And for that matter, the term “queer” itself has attained a much wider remit than its origins as a recuperative term in relation to “deviant” sexuality would suggest. Queerness is predicated on the existence of the binary trap, and the fact that most people still assume that sexual identities are unchanging, inalienable possessions which we simply “have,” and in most cases are born into. It was in reaction to this cultural reality that, in “Queer and Now,” Sedgwick aligned the “queer” with what gets remaindered by those classifications (1993: 8): “That’s one of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”15 A core component of queerness, as it was originally construed, is its application to same-sex object choice, for both men and women. And yet, the resonance of “queer” does not limit itself to sexuality.16 In fact, as Sedgwick (1993: 8–9) wrote even in the 1990s, “a lot of the most exciting recent work around ‘queer’ spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses, for example.”17 It is even possible, Sedgwick reminds us, to conduct queer 14

15 16

17

See Sedgwick 1990: 22, where “Axiom 1: People are different from each other” is first presented. This iconic statement from Epistemology of the Closet, followed up by Sedgwick’s comment that “it is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-evident fact,” has generated a rich theoretical afterlife (see, for example, the essays collected in Berlant 2019). For a more critical response to Axiom 1 from the perspective of trans theory, see now Lavery 2020. Goldberg (2019: 125) observes that “that figuration perhaps means to grasp and generalize the relation of sex and gender by way of a rather sexily gendered figure, a textile as much as a text.” See also Berlant and Edelman 2014: 19, with Edelman arguing that queerness is “less an identity than an ongoing effort of divestiture,” and Berlant responding that queerness is “also [. . .] an attentiveness and will to make openings from within the overwhelming and perhaps impossible drive to make objects worthy of attachment.” Emphasis in the original. See the Introduction to Olsen and Telò 2022 for some of the more recent developments in queer and trans theory.

Sedgwick on Shame

39

readings of heterosexual desire, so long as the approach is one that, rather than reinforcing the “self-evidence” of heterosexual identity, questions its naturalness.18

Sedgwick on Shame Sedgwick had a tendency periodically to revisit her earlier works, and to revise, refine and rewrite them, sometimes even more than once. She did this with her groundbreaking essay on Melanie Klein and reparative reading, and also with a piece called “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” the first version of which was published in the 1993 (inaugural) issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.19 In this piece she formulates a notion of performativity that is not explicitly theatrical and a notion of queerness that traces its lineage back to the affect of shame.20 For Sedgwick, shame is not something that can simply be excised or replaced with a more positive emotion, such as pride.21 Here, as elsewhere, Sedgwick resists the simplistic division of this affect into “good shame” and “bad shame.” As she writes in “Shame and Performativity” (published in Henry James’s New York Edition, a collection edited by David McWhirter), it has been all too easy for the psychologists and the few psychoanalysts working on shame to write it back into the moralisms of the repressive hypothesis: whether “healthy” or “unhealthy,” shame, as I’ve pointed out, can be seen as good because it preserves privacy and decency, bad because it colludes with self-repression and social repression. Clearly, neither of these valuations is what I’m getting at; I want to say that at least for certain (“queer”) people, shame is simply the first, and remains a permanent, structuring fact of identity: one that, as the example of Henry James suggests, has its own, powerfully productive and powerfully social metamorphic possibilities.22

18

19 20 21

22

Sedgwick 1993: 9. I take up this provocative claim later in this chapter in the section on “Queering (Heteronormative) Desire.” And in this context it feels appropriate to acknowledge Muñoz’s (2019b: 158) remark that “while Sedgwick would refer to herself as a married woman, it was often in an effort to show how conventional language failed to grasp her own fundamental sense of queerness.” Sedgwick revised and published this essay several more times before it reached its final form as the first chapter of Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Sedgwick 2003: 35–65). On shame, see Sedgwick and Frank 1995: 1–28, 133–178, and Chapter 4. See the Introduction to Halperin and Traub 2010 on the legacy of “gay pride,” and for their reflections on the events (political and otherwise) that occasioned the “Gay Shame” conference in 2003 from which their volume arose. Sedgwick 1995: 239, emphases in the original.

40

Sappho and Sedgwick as Reparative Readers

The example of Henry James that Sedgwick refers to has to do with James’ own revisiting of his already published works in order to provide prefaces for them (on the occasion of their republication), and the relationship that emerges in this writing (of the prefaces) between the older James and his younger self. As Sedgwick frames it, this is a relationship that can be analyzed along the lines of a parent tending to his offspring, but it also has an intersubjective component, and this, as Sedgwick adds, is “almost by definition homoerotic.”23 In reading his prefaces we come to know James in the role of editor and “parent” – one who must resist the urge to tidy up and rewrite the literary offspring of his younger self, and who greets their foibles and flaws with a combination of pleasure and embarrassment. Rather than a potentially paralyzing affect, shame becomes “performatively productive” in so far as it allows James to integrate and represent, with the benefit of maturity and hindsight, his earlier works to new audiences.24 It is, indeed, the American psychologist Silvan Tomkins (1911–91) who deserves credit for promoting a more nuanced understanding of shame. In the Tomkins reader (Shame and Its Sisters) that they co-edited, Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank describe how they fell in love with Tomkins’ writings despite (or, perhaps, because of) its distance from the psychoanalytic and postmodern understandings of self and emotion that were in vogue at the time. For Tomkins, as they explain (Sedgwick and Frank 1995: 5), there are a basic set of affects that humans are hardwired for. These include shame, interest, surprise, joy, anger, fear, distress, disgust, and contempt (or “dissmell”). Tomkins claims to have “discovered” shame in 1955, while observing an infant expressing shame at around seven months of age.25 Shame then became a keystone affect in Tomkins’ psychological writings and, thanks to Sedgwick’s editing and promotion of Tomkins’ work, in queer studies more generally. One of Tomkins’ basic insights into shame is that it is predicated on interest. We only feel shame over what interests us, and only when we are made to feel self-conscious in that interest (whatever its object happens to be). Shame itself represents an interruption of that more pleasant experience of cognitive and emotional engagement. And because one acutely 23

24

25

Sedgwick 1995: 215. Perhaps not coincidentally, Sedgwick herself also provided prefaces for new editions of her earlier books. See Gallop 2019 on the resultingly queer temporality for readers who are introduced to a book they have not yet read as if it is already in the past. See Sedgwick 1995: 219: “James, then, in the prefaces is using reparenting or ‘reissue’ as a strategy for dramatizing and integrating shame, in the sense of rendering this potentially paralyzing affect narratively, emotionally, and performatively productive.” Tomkins 1963: 363. This is thought to correlate with the moment when the infant is first able to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar faces (see further Timár 2019: 200).

Sedgwick on Shame

41

senses oneself being observed, shame generates its own negative feedback loop – whereby the gaze and attention of others uncomfortably heighten our discomfort at being the object of scrutiny.26 The experience of shame is unpleasant, but because it is integral to the creation and constitution of identities, shame is not something that can simply be purged.27 Sedgwick thus posits shame as being foundational to queerness.28 It is not a positive identity marker, in the way that ethnicity or race can be, but rather something that generates and legitimates “the place of identity – the question of identity.”29 In their Introduction to Shame and Its Sisters, Sedgwick and Frank observe, provocatively, that the posture of shame (“the lowering of the eyelids, the lowering of the eyes, the hanging of the head”) is also the posture of reading: “We (those of us for whom reading was or is a crucial form of interaction with the world) know the force-field creating power of this attitude, the kind of skin that sheer textual attention can weave around a reading body.”30 Reading mimics the posture of shame and it shares with shame the body’s desire to escape the present here and now; by reading, we retreat into another world – and yet this can be a very public, performative posture as well. As Sedgwick and Frank (1995: 21) point out, “Freud refers our sometime fascination with the sight of a child entirely caught up with playing, to ‘primary narcissism’, as if something about sustained and intense engagement simply is theatrical, trances themselves entrancing.”31 Sappho does not overtly thematize shame in her lyrics, unless we perhaps discern its pigment in the “blush” of the ripening apple in Sappho fr. 105V (οἶον τὸ γλυκύμαλον ἐρεύθεται ἄκρῳ ἐπ᾿ ὔσδῳ . . .).32 But it would be hard to overestimate the generative force shame has for Sappho’s corpus. Both Aphrodite’s subjective experience of shame in the Iliad and the way she shames others, particularly Helen, are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4. Shame, as I argue there, helps us make sense of the doubleness of Sappho’s Aphrodite, her comforting, consolatory 26

27 28

29 30 32

As Sedgwick and Frank (1995: 22–23) put it: “Unlike contempt or disgust, shame is characterized by its failure ever to renounce its object cathexis, its relation to the desire for pleasure as well as the need to avoid pain.” See especially Sedgwick and Frank 1995: 238, and Chapter 4. Sedgwick 2003: 63: “Queer, I’d suggest, might usefully be thought of as referring in the first place to . . . an overlapping group of infants and children, those whose sense of identity is for some reason tuned most durably to the note of shame.” Sedgwick 2003: 64. Edelman (2004: 24) elaborates on the nonidentitarian strand of queer theory and politics. Sedgwick and Frank 1995: 20–21. 31 Sedgwick and Frank 1995: 21. Grand-Clément (2011: 66), however, also notes the possible connection with shame, or aidōs, in fr. 105V; the term aidōs also appears in fr. 137V.

42

Sappho and Sedgwick as Reparative Readers

persona in Sappho 1V, for example, as well as her absence and harshness elsewhere in Sappho. And like shame, failure, too, has recuperative potential, whether it happens to be Aphrodite’s humiliating injury on the battlefield (in Iliad 5) or the infelicitous prayer uttered by Dawn in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. The Tithonos Poem (the subject of Chapter 5) is where the singer mourns the loss of her own youth and recalls for our consideration the similarly doomed affair between the goddess Dawn and her human lover, Tithonos. The problem of asynchrony – of two beings who are trapped in fundamentally distinct temporalities – accounts for the queer feeling we may experience as we listen to the lament performed by the first-person voice of the Tithonos Poem. It is a lament that exposes to view the (by cultural consensus) “uglier” parts of the singer’s self, her white hair and wobbly knees, aspects of aging not normally given public articulation in connection with women: they become a stand-in for the unvoiced, unarticulated transformation that Tithonos, our mythical human, is destined to undergo as he creeps ever closer, along the spectrum of old age, toward his final dehumanized form. (Although Sappho fr. 58 does not directly allude to his metamorphosis into a cicada, it would have been a well-known feature of the myth for Sappho’s listeners.) Part of the consolation the singer (or “Sappho”) seeks from the Tithonos myth may be that the transfiguration to be undergone by Tithonos is that much more intense and extreme than her own; he will forsake his humanity entirely, while she has simply lost her youth and beauty. But both are “failures” by the normative aesthetic standards of the time. And, as I discuss in the next section, just like Eve’s premature eulogy for her dying (but not-yet-dead) friend, Michael Lynch, the Tithonos Poem makes viscerally real how time itself can torque our experiences of mortality.

Queering (Heteronormative) Desire Sappho has been variously heterosexualized, homosexualized, masculinized, feminized, alienated and displaced within her own poetry, but a queer remainder persists in the poet’s voice and the voices within the poems.33 It is the queerness of these voices that reparative reading can also help us recover, although that project will always remain partial and incomplete.34 33 34

I am grateful to Emily Greenwood for this formulation. On normative and non-normative sexualities in ancient Greek literature, see Snyder 1997, Boehringer 2007, 2014, and 2021, Lardinois 2010, Holmes 2012: 92–110, Ormand 2018, and Lesser 2023.

Queering (Heteronormative) Desire

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As I mentioned already in the Introduction, I am less interested in Sappho the queer woman poet than in the queerness of Sappho’s poetics,35 and in how her poetry carves out space for previously illegible positionalities. Sappho’s lyrics put pressure on epic’s heteronormative worldview, yet when we read Homer with Sappho, we take a step back from the more familiar, agonistic mode of critique. It is not always easy, however, to separate out the fictional from the biographical persona. With Sappho, the “I” is so memorably conflated with the name of the poet, with the “Sappho” within the text, that it is, at times, irresistible to read her lyrics as a form of autofictional poetry. If not biographical in the strictest sense, her lyrics at the very least invite us to imagine that these songs emerge from the poet’s intensely lived life; we accept that personal suffering, and a sense of shame and failure, are integral to the literary and aesthetic effects of her poetry.36 Just as with Sedgwick’s writing in A Dialogue on Love, there is no place for the reader to hide; we are called into the bedroom and cast into the role of voyeur and confidante. Much of the scholarship on the question of Sappho’s sexual orientation has been informed by the binary logic of the cultures (from the present day extending back into the nineteenth century and earlier) that have produced the scholars pursuing this line of research.37 We expect to be able to label Sappho as either heterosexual or homosexual, straight, lesbian, or bisexual, even though as historians of antiquity we understand that the very concept of a sexual orientation did not exist before the modern era. In a provocatively titled essay, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” Sedgwick (1993: 117) explains that “most of us now correctly understand a question about our ‘sexual orientation’ to be a demand that we classify ourselves as a heterosexual or a homosexual, regardless of whether we may or may not individually be able or willing to perform that blank, binarized act of category assignment. We also understand that the two available categories are not symmetrically but hierarchically constituted in relation to each other.” Because of the rigidity and ubiquity of categorizing (and in this way defining) humans by our sexual preferences (i.e., object choice), it has been difficult to avoid assigning Sappho to one or the other of these two camps, even though there is reason to believe that “Sappho” and the world 35 36

37

On this distinction, see Mueller 2021. But see Haselswerdt 2016 on Sappho as a queer poet. Whether or not they are things that have happened to her personally, Sappho’s verses vividly present paradigmatically female experiences. See Lardinois 2021 for an excellent overview of the tradition of reading Sappho as “personal” poetry. See, for example, Winkler 1990: 162–163 on Sappho’s Victorian editors (Lobel and Page) being “tone-deaf to her deeper melodies.”

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created by Sappho’s lyrics grant readers access to a multiplicity of gendered and sexual identifications. Often, the assignation of gender to a particular singer or persona within a poem is delayed (perhaps deliberately). When it is revealed, this may be done only obliquely, through, for instance, the gendering of an adjectival or participial form modifying the person in question.38 Richard Janko has noted the absence of explicit gender-markers in Sappho’s Tithonos Poem; the effect is that we do not know for sure whether the speaker/singer of the poem is male or female. The ode is thus, in his view, “unisex,” all the more so in that the gender of the addressees has also been left unspecified.39 Because it does not assign fixed gender roles, “this poem could be performed by a man as easily as by a woman, and addressed to boys or both boys and girls just as easily as to girls.”40 The only part of the poem that specifies the gender of the lover and beloved is the mythical exemplum of Dawn and Tithonos, but even here, as Janko (2017: 276) argues, the syntax is subtly complex enough as to confirm that “the lack of gender-markers in the earlier part of the poem is deliberate.”41 The long history of Sappho reception has proven again and again that Sappho’s lyrics appeal to multiple readerships, from “straight” women and men to gay (or bi-) men and women, lesbians, queers, nonbinary, trans, asexual, and questioning individuals. So, rather than attempt to answer a question about the poet’s sexual orientation whose structural premises are deeply flawed, I focus here (and in the readings ahead) on the ways that Sappho’s lyrics can be read as queering the overtly heteronormative worldview of epic.42 I also focus on what I have elsewhere characterized as the “queer” affect of her lyrics:43 for example, the ways in which reading Sappho may make us unusually aware of being embodied – and of our sensory interactions with the world around us – while at the same time taking us to the limits of human experience, where meaning breaks down (perhaps especially those meanings that are constituted through binary logic). 38 39

40 41 42 43

On ambiguities surrounding the gendering of speakers and personae in Sappho, see Bär 2019 and Sachs 2023. Janko 2017: 275: “Nowhere, in the text as it is plausibly reconstructed, does the speaker indicate her sexual identity, nowhere does she even indicate the sexual identity of the young people whom she is addressing, and nowhere does she signal whether the speaker’s and the addressees’ desires incline towards others belonging to the same sex, to the opposite sex, or to both.” See also Janko 2005. Janko 2017: 275, adding that “not even the fawns to which the speaker is compared in line 6 are gendered: the word is a neuter diminutive.” See further Chapter 5 on Dawn and Tithonos. See Haselswerdt 2023 for a subtle and compelling account of Sappho’s body, as read through the lens of artists’ books. See Mueller 2021.

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In “White Glasses,” her ode to her dying friend, Michael Lynch, written at a time when Sedgwick thought she would be reading these words at his memorial service, she confesses to seeing herself in Michael, a gay man, although she admitted that their “most durable points of mutual reference are lesbian.”44 In the temporal lag between drafting Michael’s eulogy and delivering it, Michael experiences a resurgence of life, while Eve herself is given her first diagnosis of what would become a fatal cancer. Their shared experience of illness brings her and Michael even closer together, and paradoxically also sharpens for Sedgwick the ambivalence she has always felt in her female body: “One of the first things I felt when I was facing the diagnosis of breast cancer was, ‘Shit, now I guess I really must be a woman.’”45 The self-deflecting wit is characteristically Sedgwickian, as is the incisive depiction of heteronormative sexual identity as prosthetically directed, inscribed in and through the body’s visible curves and its typically feminine signatures. Sedgwick (1992: 203) articulates the anger and exasperation of women who have been reassured by no doubt well-meaning doctors and caregivers that “with proper toning exercise, makeup, wigs, and a well-fitting prosthesis, we could feel just as feminine as we ever had and no one (i.e., no man) need ever know that anything had happened.” Although she identified as a gay man and indeed describes in moving terms her childhood crush on her French teacher, Monsieur O., and her obsession with learning more about the reasons for his expulsion from her school (a moment of discovery that men could love other men, and pay for this dearly), Eve Sedgwick nevertheless lived her adult life as a married, heterosexual woman.46 Sappho, similarly, was both a married woman and a mother, according to the ancient biographical tradition. And she was closely aligned with her native Lesbos, an island that, in antiquity at least, was perhaps most famous for being the homeland of hypersexualized 44

45 46

Sedgwick 1992: 198. Originally published in The Yale Journal of Criticism, this essay is reprinted as the final chapter of Tendencies (Sedgwick 1993: 252–266). Jane Gallop 2011, chapter 3 offers a thoughtful reading of both this piece and the memorial for Craig Owens in Tendencies. Sedgwick 1992: 202 On Monsieur O., see Sedgwick 1987: 116, 131 and 1993: 206–209. In their pieces for the Reading Sedgwick volume, both Hal Sedgwick and Melissa Solomon describe Eve’s protesting of his unfair dismissal from his job as Sedgwick’s first attempted publication. As Solomon (2019: 240) writes: “Your mother still worries and wonders whether she did the right thing when she prevented you, in elementary school, from publishing a letter to the editor in the Bethesda newspaper in defense of your gay teacher who was being persecuted for his homosexuality. At the time, she understood herself to be rightfully protective of you, still a child, who would be caught in the middle of public debate if such a letter were to be published. Now she worries that she picked the wrong side of right, especially given your career path and your own intellectual, emotional, and political interests. I suggested the possibility that her prohibition was a kind of foundational turning point without which your future might not have progressed in the direction it did.”

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heterosexual women (lesbiazein, in Greek, means to perform fellatio).47 Whatever these biographical tidbits amount to, they are a reminder that we should not assume that the object of desire toward which one orients oneself publicly and legally is necessarily the same as that toward which one is drawn in fantasy, or fiction. Sedgwick also questions whether it is necessary – and desirable – to adopt a single, self-consistent sexual identity over the course of one’s entire life. The world Sappho creates likewise gives us insight into the remaindered lives that manifest only on the margins of epic: the heroes whose homecomings are short, sweet, uneventful; the sister waiting for her brother, rather than her husband, to return home;48 the women tearfully remembering female friends and lovers who have left them; the intense pleasures these women shared, whether by having sex together or masturbating in one another’s presence; the heartache of a woman who finds herself kept far away from the woman she loves; the sadness of a singer who longs for her days of youthful choral dancing. These are the subjects of Sappho’s lyrics, and oftentimes they mark themselves as queer specifically in relation to how they develop the latently queer potential of Homeric epic, which – for reasons of gender, genre, and style – mostly steers clear of these passions and problems.49

Finding Meaning in Materiality Sedgwick’s turn toward the reparative in the later years of her life went hand in hand with an increasing commitment to making things. In Chapter 5, I will discuss the life-sized dolls Sedgwick crafted and the exhibition held at the City University of New York (CUNY) in 2000 of which they were a part; this was just one of the venues in which Sedgwick’s work as a fiber artist was publicly recognized.50 But those who are interested in what prompted her turn away from the “hermeneutics of suspicion” toward a more reparative mode of reading should read Sedgwick herself on her evolution as a visual artist.51 She was well established as 47 48

49 50 51

On the sexual reputation of Lesbos in archaic and classical Greece, see Gilhuly 2018: 91–116. This was originally an allusion to the Brothers Poem, on which see the Appendix. But a journey ending in a safe homecoming is also the leading concern of Sappho fr. 5, which opens with the speaker’s request that the Nereids deliver her brother to her ἀβλάβη[ν, “unharmed.” As argued by Fantuzzi 2012. See, however, Mueller 2023a for a different perspective. On Sedgwick’s fiber art, see Hawkins 2010, Edwards 2019 and 2022, and Goldberg 2021. The phrase “hermeneutics of suspicion” was coined by Paul Ricoeur to describe a style of interpretation fueled by the suspicion of, and the desire to expose, a text’s hidden meanings. See further Ricoeur 1970, Felski 2012, and Guillory 2022: 85–86.

Finding Meaning in Materiality

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a literary critic and founder of the emergent field of gay and lesbian studies by the time she took up fiber arts, and she describes the process not so much as the assumption of a new identity, but rather, in terms of a “meditative practice” – one alert to “the possibilities of emptiness and even of nonbeing.”52 In a posthumously published essay, “Making Things, Practicing Emptiness,” which I mentioned already in the Introduction, Sedgwick (2011: 113) explains how her crafting life intersects with her life as a professional literary critic:53 I’ve learned to look in Buddhism for something I now realize I’ve always found in Proust: a mysticism that doesn’t depend on so-called mystical experiences; that doesn’t rely on the esoteric or occult, but rather on simple, material metamorphoses as they are emulsified with language and meaning. Which is why the title of this most recent body of work is “Works in Fiber, Paper, and Proust” – not works “on,” but works “in,” reflecting my interest in using Proust’s language and thought as a medium, one with a texture and materiality comparable to other artistic media, that can be manipulated through various processes to show new aspects.54

Sedgwick describes the textile works displayed in the above-mentioned exhibition neither as illustrations of her entanglement with Proust, nor as attempts to evoke the time, setting, or atmosphere of Proust’s works. Proust, rather, is the raw material that Sedgwick shapes with her hands into a new artifact. In Chapter 3, I argue that Sappho adopts a similar approach to the Iliad: for her, Homer is as much “physical” matter as he is poet; his words are her substance. An essential component of her poetic process is the reshaping, replaiting, and reassembling of epic word-matter into something new. Other academics have similarly found something of a refuge in avocational practices. Ann Cvetkovich (2012: 191) shares how she discovered that doing repetitive, nonintellectual work was an effective antidote to the highstakes activity of academic writing: “As forms of practice, daily rituals such as crafting, knitting, and other hobbies, as well as yoga, running, and other forms of exercise, belong to what I want to call a utopia of ordinary habit.” Cvetkovich’s “utopia of ordinary habit” resonates well with the kinds of crafting Sedgwick was drawn to as she confronted the imminence of her 52 53 54

E. Sedgwick 2011: 69. The exhibition she refers to, “Works in Fiber, Paper, and Proust,” was hosted at Harvard University in 2005 and at Dartmouth University in 2007 (E. Sedgwick 2011: 120–121n8). E. Sedgwick 2011: 113.

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own death. Although she confesses to having had a lifelong fascination with fabrics and textiles, it was only in the mid-nineties (her cancer re-emerged in 1996) that this took a more active form and that she found herself falling “suddenly, intrusively, and passionately in love with doing textile work.”55 She had intuited the return of her cancer in the neck pain that was misdiagnosed for several months before being confirmed as a symptom of the cancer that had metastasized to her spine: “I just found myself cutting up fabrics, especially old kimonos, which I’ve always been fond of, to make into other fabrics – appliqués, collages, and an odd kind of weaving that used scraps of already-woven cloth as its weft material.”56 One of those “kimono patchworks” in fact provides the cover image for this book. And it is to Jason Edwards (2019: 79) that we owe the brilliant insight that these fabric assemblages embody certain characteristic features of Sedgwick’s epistemologies and performativities, particularly “the endless volleys between the paranoid-schizoid work of destroying the object and reparative attempts to reconstitute it.”57 Sedgwick’s situation was exceptional. She was catapulted by cancer into a reckoning with how to live. As she puts it, this reality (the reality of death) “became suddenly very material and pressing, in a way I don’t think it tends to be for healthy people in their forties.”58 It is worth keeping in mind that this is the existential “reality” that underpins Sedgwick’s eloquent formulation of reparative reading. But if the diagnosis of a recurrent terminal cancer was pivotal for Sedgwick, she was not alone in having reached a point of no return with “critical” reading. Ann Cvetkovich, whom I quoted earlier, reveals in her absorbing book Depression: A Public Feeling that her first academic book was written in a fog of extreme self-doubt and depression. Perhaps not unrelatedly, that book, although well received in its field, was taken to task by Sedgwick and Frank for its deployment of “affect” as a monolithic category.59 In a manner that is typical of much paranoid reading (and literary criticism in general), Cvetkovich’s argument proceeds along familiar pathways: first introducing the reader to the barely concealed subtext, it then exposes that “secret” to view. The critic’s deconstruction of that hidden truth (i.e., that such-and-such an identity is socially constructed) constitutes the knowledge and power that are gained through the act of reading. 55 58 59

56 57 E. Sedgwick 2011: 71. E. Sedgwick 2011: 71. See in particular Edwards 2019: 75–79. E. Sedgwick 2011: 70. See Sedgwick and Frank 1995: 15–19; the book they criticize is Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers University Press, 1992).

Finding Meaning in Materiality

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In her subsequent books, Cvetkovich adopted a more reparative readerly style, exploring archives of feelings and affects in their various material embodiments. The arc represented by the professional trajectories of Sedgwick and Cvetkovich (among others) makes me think that there may be more than a coincidental connection between reparative reading and what Cvetkovich calls the “utopia of ordinary habit.”60 If part of what reparative reading allows us to do is reclaim that early found love of fiction, which offers us immersion in another mind, place, and body,61 then there are intrinsic similarities between this mode of reading and daily practices such as running, crafting, and knitting which, by occupying our hands or our body, allow the mind to enter a meditative state.62 Scott Herring (2018), in fact, makes just such a connection explicit, when he repeats, with Sedgwick, that the depressive position is “an anxiety-mitigating achievement that the infant or adult only sometimes, and often only briefly, succeeds in inhabiting.”63 In drawing our attention also to how Sedgwick characterizes the history of literary criticism as “a repertoire of alternative models for allowing strong and weak theory to interdigitate,”64 Herring (2018: 11) brings to the surface the metaphor of crafting that has interwoven itself into Sedgwick’s theoretical writings: “interdigitate” is a verb that embodies the fingers’ involvement in reparative acts. To bring our discussion back around to Sappho, and to the material investments of her poetry, I want to acknowledge that reparative reading allows us to bridge what has often been seen as an irreconcilable divide between language and the material world. For Sappho and her contemporaries, the art of composing poetry was inseparable from other ritualized and social performances; song was something that would rarely if ever have been experienced in isolation from the singer’s bodily and vocalized performance of lyrics. When we analyze song, what we are actually doing is extracting a part from an organic whole: the song as part of a choral songdance, or of the singer’s appearance (with an instrument) in a performance space, likely with other singers (and dancers). In this book, I do not speculate at any length about possible performance scenarios for archaic lyric, but I do want to challenge the implicit assumption many scholars 60 61

62 64

Melissa Gregg (2013) draws our attention to the “utopia of ordinary habit” in her autobiographical piece, “Stepping off the conveyor belt.” See E. Sedgwick (2011: 120–121n8) on how in using “Proust’s language and thought as a medium” she has made things which “reflect the transformative potential of a prolonged immersion in someone else’s mental world, a way of being ‘in Proust.’” For example, E. Sedgwick 2011: 75. 63 The quotation is from E. Sedgwick 2011: 136. Sedgwick 2003: 145.

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(still) have today that somehow the poets of archaic Greece were not all that different from scholars or poets today with their cerebral, disembodied methods of composing and circulating their works.65 Although it is a way of reading that was developed in communion with a text-based literary tradition, not with the oral-poetic performance cultures of archaic Greece, reparative reading encourages us to reconnect the verbal with the material. It thus allows us to reimagine Sappho’s lyrics in their more organic material environment (i.e., as the bodily, voiced, and danced poetic events they once were).66 I think that this would have been appealing to Sedgwick, in so far as her later writings, especially on fiber arts and bookmaking, often return to the false dichotomy between materiality and language. Just as “a wish to either deny or instantiate the real materiality of language has been an animating motive in both the philosophical literature and the art of the West,” Sedgwick (2011: 106) acknowledges that “the latter of these wishes, the wish to instantiate that materiality, has obviously animated a lot of my work as well.” My readings of Sappho are similarly attentive to the way materiality figures in her lyrics, both as a mode of interpreting Homer and as a metaphorical register for thinking through the compositional process itself, poetry as poiēsis (“making”), which is the subject of the next chapter. Fiber arts and textiles will be recurrent motifs throughout this book.

Queer Futures The future has turned out to be one of the most contested realms in postSedgwickian queer theory. Looking back on developments in queer theory over the past several decades, one typically finds the field divided into two spheres: those subscribing to the so-called “anticommunal” or “antisocial” turn, as delineated by the likes of Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman, and those who resist the idea that for queers, there is no future sociality and relationality because such concepts and communities are incontestably heteronormative. One of the sticking points for an anticommunitarian like Edelman is the centrality of what he calls reproductive futurism. “Reproductive futurism” posits that contemporary (American) society’s notion of a political future is soldered to the nuclear family and to the apparent necessity that this familial unit sustain itself via heterosexual reproduction. 65 66

See Chapter 1. For a related way of reading not lyric but tragedy, see the essays in Telò and Mueller 2018. My approach here complements the attention given to lyric kinesthesia and bodily movement in Peponi 2004, 2015, and Olsen 2017, 2019.

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In Chapter 6, I put Edelman’s “reproductive futurism” to the test, by teasing out the relations between the epic idealization of “undying fame” (kleos aphthiton) and its embedding in the context of Sappho fr. 44V, a song which seemingly celebrates the wedding of Hector and Andromache. Andromache’s son will be killed – an event already foreshadowed in the Iliad – and I align the audience’s foreknowledge of his death with the apocalyptic vision of the child in Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Duke, 2004). I argue that Astyanax’s death symbolizes the end of civilization, the complete and utter destruction of Troy. The wedding song (Sappho fr. 44V) thus embraces a double vision: a queer, childless future, on the one hand, and the heteronormative futurism predicated on marriage, on the other. But that chapter is one of several readings, and chapters, that place lyric and epic side by side, with the goal of exploring some of the ways Sappho’s lyrics enact a queer turn on recognizably Iliadic themes. In order for epic Aphrodite effectively to be transformed into Sappho’s lyric Muse, shame and its generative potential are indispensable; the reading I offer in Chapter 4 thus has lyric imagining a future that in part repairs Aphrodite’s Iliadic trauma. This positioning of lyric as epic’s queer future finds more sympathy with the queer utopianists – for whom futurity itself is not foreclosed – than with the anticommunitarians. Whereas Edelman promotes a view of queerness as naming “the side of those not ‘fighting for the children’” (i.e. the side of those not invested in the heteronormative values of reproductive futurism),67 José Esteban Muñoz (2019a: 11) argues, provocatively, that queerness resides only in the future: To some extent Cruising Utopia is a polemic that argues against antirelationality by insisting on the essential need for an understanding of queerness as collectivity. I respond to Edelman’s assertion that the future is the province of the child and therefore not for queers by arguing that queerness is primarily about futurity and hope. That is to say that queerness is always in the horizon. I contend that if queerness is to have any value whatsoever, it must be viewed as being visible only in the horizon.

You may be reminded here (especially in Muñoz’s use of the preposition “in”) of Sedgwick’s own framing of reparative reading in connection with possibility and hope.68 Sedgwick was a mentor to Muñoz when he was 67 68

Edelman 2004: 3. Compare Castiglia 2017a: 212, arguing that hopefulness and critique are not necessarily in conflict, and encouraging us to think more deeply about how critique might be “revitalized for a new critical era.”

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a graduate student at Duke University; he acknowledges her influence explicitly when he identifies his own commitment to the future as a form of reparative reading, noting that “paranoid reading practices have become so nearly automatic in queer studies that they have, in many ways, ceased to be critical.”69 Muñoz (2019a: 12) clarifies that his “utopian readings are aligned with what Sedgwick would call reparative hermeneutics.”70 Let us, then, recall what Sedgwick (2003: 146) herself says about hope and futurity in Touching Feeling: Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates. Because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.

Reparative reading is a kind of reading that believes in the possibility of a future that is different from the present, and a present that might have been different from itself. This flexibility in imagining alternative scenarios resonates strongly with what we earlier noted about reparative reading and its skeptical stance toward strong theory and master narratives – its preference for dwelling in the possible. One way that reparative readers do this is by keeping the future open: not open-ended, but open in the sense that we remain receptive to the potential for creativity and renewal to emerge from antisocial, pessimistic scenarios and the futures they seemingly foreclose.

Paranoid versus Reparative: Do I Have to Choose? As Rita Felski (2012) argues, critique “promises the engrossing pleasure of a game-like sparring with the text in which critics deploy inventive skills and innovative strategies to test their wits, best their opponents, and 69 70

Muñoz 2019a: 12. But Muñoz’s utopia is also receptive to radical negativity, the kind of negativity that doesn’t end up being synonymous with the antirelational, no-future negativity of someone like Edelman who romanticizes queer negativity (2019a: 13): “Radical negativity, like the negation of negation, offers us a mode of understanding negativity that is starkly different from the version of the negative proposed by the queer antirelationist. Here the negative becomes the resource for a certain mode of queer utopianism.” In conversation with Edelman, Lauren Berlant articulates an appealing middle ground when they describes themself as “committed to the political project of imagining how to detach from lives that don’t work and from worlds that negate the subjects that produce them” (Berlant and Edelman 2014: 5). Edelman (2014: 34) emphasizes instead the “violence (psychic, physical, emotional) of sexual normativity, its targeting of what it sees as ‘unbecoming’ with regard to sex.”

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become sharper, shrewder, and more sophisticated players.” But in treating the text (or poem) as an opponent to be sparred with, we burden it with a deceptive agenda that can have a distorting effect on our readings. It is ongoing, exhausting work, moreover, to have to defend oneself preemptively against the impression of seeming naïve or simplistic – to be always on the lookout lest one seem to be taken by surprise.71 This, after all, is the paranoid reader’s worst fear. The turn, then, to reparative reading, reflects a desire on the part of those schooled in agonistic critical practices for an alternative to – or a temporary release from – the constraints and imperatives of critique.72 “To read from a reparative position,” as Sedgwick (2003: 146) describes it, “is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new.” But does reading reparatively necessitate giving up on traditional forms of critique? Is it, in another words, an exclusive commitment? This is a question I have often been asked, and I want to reassure any skeptics who may have read this far that, in short, the answer is “no,” because for the reparativist, reading is not a zero-sum game. You do not have to commit monastically to one mode of reading. Nor do you even have to practice reparative reading to reap its benefits. Even a passing acquaintance with what reparative reading aspires to will sensitize you to some of its metaphors and methods.73 In adopting a reparative approach, I have been keen to explore the places where Sappho’s lyrics also chart a “third alternative,” a way in between the either/or syntax of dualistic ontologies. As Sappho shows us, in reading the Iliad we do not have to buy into epic’s own zerosum worldview; this is particularly true of fr. 16V, where both Helen’s and Sappho’s choices are framed as involving a conflation of active and passive (the “middle ranges of agency”), and a skirting of the gender norms of Homeric epic (see Chapter 7). In this book, I have not deliberately exiled paranoid critique. Where it surfaces (and it will), I often allow it to speak uncensored. But I try to attend to those appearances and what they might mean, while letting the 71 72

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Rooney (2017: 141–145) argues, however, that despite its efforts to avoid it, “surprise may . . . evolve in the interstices of the avowedly paranoid.” Compare Budelmann and Phillips 2018: 1: “The appeal to ‘pleasure’ as the telos of reading is beguilingly simple (and recapitulates ancient models of reading), yet it plays only a minor role in recent criticism.” Many critics have successfully blended elements of critique and postcritique. Hensley 2013, for example, develops “curatorial reading” as a form of reparative reading (in line with Sedgwick’s practice) that nevertheless retains the political focus of paranoid critique. See also Berlant and Edelman 2014, and Love 2010.

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natural fluctuations (between paranoid and reparative positions) run their course. This oscillation between the two positions is, in fact, something Sedgwick addresses explicitly. The following is an excerpt from a conversation she had with Stephen Barber and David L. Clark in January 2000:74 Q: It strikes us when reading your recent work on the reparative and the paranoid that you stage those structures of thought as wholly imbricated, one with the other. Is reading, then, not so much a matter of proceeding reparatively or in a paranoid fashion, but much rather of oscillating between these two kinds of practices, these two styles of thought? EKS: You’re right about the oscillation; I think that has to do with why Melanie Klein calls these positions, rather than anything more fixed. And in practice, I think people actually do read that way; it’s just that what counts as an argument to make, at this juncture of critical theory, emerges from only one of those positions, the paranoid one. One notion of what criticism, and for that matter politics, might be is paranoid, and it is that through and through, so it has almost effaced the evidences of the reparative impulse and structure. Certain kinds of reading structures have a triumphal way of exponentially expanding their own rationale and venue.

Given the reader’s tendency to oscillate between these two positions, the question naturally arises why reparative reading is not better represented among the works of literary theorists. Sedgwick (2003: 150) was puzzled by this as well, and in Touching Feeling she observes that reparative reading has suffered the disadvantage of there being an inadequate theoretical language for describing what it does: “The vocabulary for articulating any reader’s reparative motive toward a text or a culture has long been so sappy, aestheticizing, defensive, anti-intellectual, or reactionary that it’s no wonder few critics are willing to describe their acquaintance with such motives.” (Reparativists have done a mediocre job with self-branding!) Whereas paranoid inquiry is driven by the desire to expose, reveal, and demystify, the reparative impulse is additive and accretive. Its method is less deconstructive than assimilative. At the same time, reparative readers are also drawn to some of the emotions and affects that have until recently been deemed too minor, messy, or ugly to merit sustained attention.75 This may be the right moment to acknowledge the ever-expanding forms of reparative reading. There has been so much written in recent years on this 74 75

For the full interview, see chapter 11 of Regarding Sedgwick; for the excerpts, see Barber and Clark 2002: 247. On “ugly” and “minor” aesthetics and feelings, see Ngai 2005 and 2012, and Park 2020.

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topic that the term itself has nearly lost its descriptive value.76 In the interpretations I offer of Sappho, I have chosen to cleave as closely as possible to Sedgwick’s own style of reading, not because others are, or would have been, any less valuable, but because the emergence of Sedgwick’s reparative reading practice from within the field of queer theory makes it an especially attractive model, in my view, for exploring Sappho’s responses to Homer. I have mentioned already Sedgwick’s nondualistic proclivities and how she was drawn in later life to the fiber arts. These are intrinsically appealing features of her profile, and they certainly inform my own orientation toward the texts I interpret, but they should not eclipse Sedgwick’s virtuosity as a literary critic and her achievements as a poet. She was someone whose ideas arose from and found expression in her passionate and personal encounters with language.77 Sedgwick’s focus was on the agency of knowledge – what knowledge does rather than what it is. Throughout her writings, she is alert to the performative power(s) of language. In the readings ahead we will follow Sedgwick’s lead in allowing each poem to chart its own path. Rather than a top-down approach using literary texts to shore up theoretical claims, the lyrics themselves will direct our attention to the contingencies and the attachments that they themselves sustain. 76

77

Not to mention the fact that there are reparative reading styles that go by different names, as in the case, for example, of “Surface Reading,” on which see Best and Marcus 2009, or “Just Reading,” on which see Marcus 2007. Indeed, these unique qualities are recognized by Sedgwick’s contemporaries. See for example, Butler 2002: 109: “Our sensibilities are in some ways profoundly different. She is a passionate literary scholar and innovative theorist, and my own formation is as a more conceptually linear philosopher, for better or worse. But I have needed the encounter with literature again and again in order to nudge me out from the tight grip of my conceptual threads.”

part ii

Sappho and Homer

chapter 3

Plaiting and Poikilia The Materialities of Sappho’s Craft

In Cissy, the continuous plait of different voices might be named Trace . . .

(Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Trace at 46)

She wore a dress once, oh my God, you remember the eclipse on Cyprus? It was like that. A national event. That dress was an emergency.

(Daniel Lavery, Dirtbag Sappho, Fragment 22)

Perhaps still best known for her contributions to affect studies and queer theory, Eve Sedgwick was also, as has already been mentioned, a fabric and book artist.1 In her posthumously published book, The Weather in Proust, she remarks “how different it is to work with physical materials.” In contrast to the disembodied state of writing, “one has at last the reassuring sense of a grounding in reality. I feel this wonderfully in my material practice,” she writes, “with the ways that paper, fabric, thread, and other supplies press back so reliably, so palpably, against my efforts to shape them according to models I’ve conceived.”2 Freed from the fantasy of mastery, Sedgwick appreciates the mediated agency of a craft that does not constitute her professional identity. This, she concedes, is in part what has allowed her to circumvent the neurotic striving for perfection and the “disturbing fantasy of omnipotence” that govern her other life, her writing life. For the “insane perfectionist” that Sedgwick confesses herself to be,3 the press-back from threads, paper, and fabric is reassuring. The reparative affect emanating from her hands to the materials and back again is almost palpable from her description. As I will suggest in this chapter, there is something of this sort of affective 1 2

To get a sense of Sedgwick’s creations, see especially E. Sedgwick 2011, along with Hawkins 2010, Goldberg 2021, and Edwards 2022. 3 E. Sedgwick 2011: 83, my emphasis. E. Sedgwick 2011: 79–80.

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materiality in Sappho’s evocations of poiēsis (“making”), although nowhere in her lyrics are women represented in the actual process of weaving or making cloth. Instead, weaving is the everyday craft whose perhaps otherwise reassuring rhythms prove unsustainable in the face of sexual desire (eros). But the resistance emanating from fabric, paper, threads – something that Sedgwick elsewhere calls the “middle ranges of agency” – is our starting point. And I begin by positing a connection between Sedgwick’s description of her materials pressing back and Sappho’s account of the lyre taking the place of the loom in the hands of the female singer.4 When she recalls her lover’s tearful, unwilling leave-taking, the singer of Sappho fr. 94V presents a memory that, because it is part of a song, conveys pleasure through pain. Immobilizing affects are transformed into curated performance; they are also triangulated through the imagery and materiality of Homeric language. In Chapter 2, I drew the comparison between Sedgwick’s fashioning of Proustian artwork with her hands and Sappho’s reshaping of Homeric verse. Here I return to that analogy and spell out in greater detail how Homer provides a tactile medium for Sappho’s verbal crafting, her poiēsis. The verb poieō, as Barbara Graziosi (2002: 42) reminds us, is “employed to describe the making of artefacts long before it is connected to poetry or other verbal expressions.”5 Sappho’s incorporation of “Homer” into her lyrics can, in this regard, be felt to be a more tactile, material process than our own literary critical terminology (“allusion,” “intertext”) would generally allow.6 In incorporating into her own lyrics the material creations of epic’s female characters, Sappho not only reshaped epic in her own image but also invented something entirely new from something old. This is a form of “making” (poiēsis) that can be figured as poikilia (ornamentation).7 It is also a reparative engagement with literary tradition, a form of borrowing and repurposing that does not necessarily stem from the younger artist’s urge to compete with or outdo a more established figure from the canon.8 In this chapter, then, I also consider the

4 5

6 7 8

See the section on “Dialogue(s) on Love” in Chapter 7 for my discussion of Sappho fr. 102V; on the “middle ranges of agency,” see E. Sedgwick 2011: 79 and Chapter 7. Moreover, in early sources poiētēs is not linked exclusively to written texts; on this term, see Grazioisi 2002: 41 and Ford 2002: 132–146. On the construction of female authorship in archaic and classical Greece, Hauser 2016. Although of course the Latin verb texo (to weave) supplies the root for “text.” On intertextuality more generally, see the Introduction and Chapter 1. See now Lather 2021 on the material facets of poikilia. I return to how Sappho characterizes her own poetic process (her poiēsis) in the penultimate section of this chapter. See my discussion of reparative intertextualties in Chapter 1.

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micro-poetics of Sappho’s reuse of Homeric materials: her engagement with epic artifacts, affect, plot, and language.9 It is by now something of a truism to acknowledge that all literary production derives from what came before. There is no such thing as starting from scratch when one is a songwriter or poet. And yet, singers devise different ways of signaling their debts. Our metaphor here, for the micro-poetics of Sappho’s process, will be that of re-weaving or rearranging already extant threads (a metaphor that I connect not only to Sappho’s language of “plaiting,” but also to her poetic craft, more broadly construed). By being attentive, moreover, to how Sappho handles the “raw” materials she extracts from epic, we also gain insight into the syntax itself of Homeric narrative – especially those telling moments when the forward movement of the Iliad ’s plot is interrupted. Weaving is nearly synonymous with domestic stability in the Iliad. When a woman is forced to stop her loom-work, we know that something momentous has happened. This is true of Hector’s wife, Andromache, who is at her loom when the sounds of lamenting voices cause her to drop her shuttle (at Il. 22.448). As Lilah Grace Canevaro (2018: 93) has recently observed, “the dropping of the shuttle . . . presages impending domestic upheaval; Andromache fears not only for her husband’s life but also for her domestic stability.”10 In Sappho’s world, by contrast, neither mourning nor death interrupts a woman’s weaving. Her own unfulfilled longing is what keeps her from her work – a disruption caused by a desire whose “narrative” impact parallels the effects of war on the plot of the Iliad.

The Lyre and the Loom Helen weaves a great web in Iliad 3 (125–128); Andromache is weaving in the women’s quarters when she learns of Hector’s death (Il. 22.440–441).11 When Odysseus first encounters Circe in the Odyssey, she is singing while weaving at an immortal loom, one whose “works” are pleasurably bright and fine.12 For years, Penelope wove by day a shroud for Laertes that she then unraveled at night. But in Homer, and in the Iliad especially, scenes of women’s 9 10 11

12

On intertextuality between objects in Homer and Hesiod, particularly the storage jar (pithos), see Canevaro 2018, chapter 5. For Andromache’s shuttle as intertwined with Hector’s deadlier fall, see Purves 2019: 41. Canevaro (2018: 64–67) compares Helen and Andromache, and the spatial setting of each woman’s weaving, noting that Andromache weaves, as a proper wife should weave, in the muchos (22.440– 441); Helen weaves in the megaron, a public space, and her web depicts a martial subject matter (cf. Il. 3.125–126). Od. 10.222–223; see also Od. 5.62, of Calypso’s weaving.

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weaving are interrupted by events considered worthier of epic narration. In Book 3, Iris, finding Helen embedding a narrative of war into the textile she is weaving, leads her away so that she may witness in person the duel between her husbands past and present (Menelaos and Paris). Perhaps playing off of the close connections in Homeric epic between women and weaving, Sappho figures weaving itself as the unwelcome intrusion. Verse-making is the craft to which the lovelorn young woman turns instead, when she might have been expected to be at her loom. In Sappho fr. 102V, in fact, the singer confesses that she is unable to weave: γλύκηα μᾶτερ, οὔ τοι δύναμαι κρέκην τὸν ἴστον πόθωι δάμεισα παῖδος βραδίναν δι᾿ Ἀφροδίταν Sweet mother, I am no longer capable of weaving at the loom, having been overcome by lust for a young boy (or girl) on account of gentle Aphrodite.

These verses are preserved by Hephaestion (a second-century ce scholar of meter) as an example of the “antispastic tetrameter catalectic,” a meter used by Sappho in her seventh book.13 But the choice of theme is revealing. A girl (a female voice) addresses her “sweet mother” and says that she is no longer able to weave at her loom. She confesses her desire for a young boy (or girl), which means she is likely not yet married. But is the weaving referenced literally the practice of cloth-making? Or is weaving evoked because of its association with the type of character (the sōphrosunē) that was considered ideal in a young woman? Why are the two – loom-work and eros – incompatible?14 Andromache Karanika (2014: 186) suggests that these verses may have been part of a wedding ritual, one in which the groom’s beauty (as in Sappho fr. 115V) “caused such desire in the heart of the girl that she can no longer concentrate on a domestic task like weaving.”15 The representation of weaving as being incompatible with eros invites us, in turn, to reflect on the speaker’s attitude toward “women’s work” (erga gunaikōn). We will return to the “loom” part of this equation. But first I want to dwell for a moment on the agentive force of “longing” or, more urgently, “lust” (pothos). It is because she has been “tamed” by her own feelings of desire that this girl finds herself unable to work. 13 14

15

On book divisions in the Alexandrian edition of Sappho, see Prauscello 2021. Fanfani (2017: 424n18) points out that “the motif of the opposition of love (seen as a distracting activity) to weaving is widely attested in a series of dedicatory epigrams in the sixth book of the Greek Anthology.” See also Tarán 1979: 115–131. Bowra (1961: 134) by contrast sees this fragment as an example of the kind of folk songs that “girls sang over the loom, lamenting their loves” (as quoted in Wilson 1996: 119).

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Pothos appears also in fr. 94V, where it occurs in the context of a sexual act. Sappho reminds her departing lover of the beautiful things they have experienced together. One of these memories is of her lover reaching orgasm, after rubbing herself with a flower-scented perfume. The two of them are garlanded in plaited wreaths of flowers, lying together on soft bedding (fr. 94.9–23V): αἰ δὲ μή, ἀλλά σ᾿ ἔγω θέλω ὄμναισαι [ . . . ( . )] . [ . . ( . ) . ε̣ αι ὀ̣ σ̣[ –10– ]καὶ κάλ᾿ ἐπάσχομεν·

10

πό̣[λλοις γὰρ στεφάν]οις ἴων καὶ βρ[όδων . . . ]κίων τ᾿ ὔμοι κα . . [ –7– ] πὰρ ἔμοι π⟨ε⟩ρεθήκα⟨ο⟩ καὶ πό̣λλαις ὐπα θύμιδας πλέκταις ἀμφ᾿ ἀπάλαι δέραι ἀνθέων ἐ̣ [ –6– ] πεποημέναις. καὶ π . . . . . [ ] . μύρωι βρενθείωι̣ . [ ]ρ̣υ[ . . ]ν ἐξαλ⟨ε⟩ίψαο κα̣[ὶ βασ]ι̣ ληίωι

15

20

καὶ στρώμν[αν ἐ]πὶ μολθάκαν ἀπάλαν παρ̣[ ]ο̣ν̣ων ἐξίης πόθο̣[ν ] . νίδων But if not (i.e., if you do not remember), I wish to remind you . . . and the beautiful things we experienced. Many wreathes of violets and roses and . . . you put on by my side . . . and you put many plaited garlands around your delicate neck, made from flowers . . . and with myrrh you anointed yourself . . . and in a queenly way, on the soft sheets . . . you would satisfy your desire . . . for tender . . .

The singer’s lover places wreaths of flowers around her neck. These wreathes are not only fashioned, that is, “made” artifacts, they are also plaited. Two terms that convey a sense of the process of crafting or making things – based on the verbs poieō and plekō – appear in participial and substantive forms (πλέκταις, πεποημέναις, 16 and 17). And both describe artifacts that amplify desire. For in the very next stanza, the lover, after applying myrrh to her own body, satisfies her longing. Plaited flowers are part of the build-up to the sexual climax expressed at ἐξίης πόθο̣[ν (23).16 16

Williamson (1995: 141–142) observes that flowers are often a sign of Aphrodite’s presence in early Greek poetry (see, e.g., Cypria fr. 6 West).

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Plaiting and loom-striking in Sappho do not, then, yield the traditional “works” (erga) – the textiles – that Homeric heroines craft with their own hands.17 Not only is there an elision of this type of domesticity in Sappho, but in its place are the songs which represent themselves as highly wrought, and in some cases even woven, artifacts. There are, moreover, architectural similarities between the loom and the lyre. And these, helpfully summarized by Snyder (1981: 195), are worth considering as we reflect on the parallel practices of weaving and music-making: “A Greek loom was a large, upright device, consisting of two posts and a crossbar at the top, from which the strands of the warp were suspended and held straight by weights attached at the bottom; a Greek lyre (of any of several types) had two arms and a crossbar to which were attached the instrument’s gut strings, held in place by a fastener at the base of the soundbox.” The verb κρέκω, as seen in fr. 102V, can thus apply either to the striking of the warp with the shuttle or to the striking of the lyre strings with the plectrum.18 This ambiguity is suggestive, reminding us that the very words that constitute these verses are themselves the product of the one “plectrum” having been exchanged for the other: each note sounding forth from the lyre signals one lost stroke at the loom. Weaving’s signature gestures have been excerpted from the material context of the loom, only to be figuratively (but also literally) reapplied to the realm of song-making. Stepping aside from the cloth web (the histos), the singer of Sappho fr. 102V takes up instead her musical instrument and begins to weave a song, privileging eros over erga, turning her attention to a kind of “work” that is compatible with lust (pothos). Similarly, the sorrow over a lover’s impending departure, which might make actual weaving an unappealing (even impossible) task, finds, in Sappho fr. 94V, some form of healing through the mediation of the lyre. The singer’s inability to weave in fr. 102V would seem, therefore, to indicate her distance from just such a social matrix where weaving is figured as work (erga). In moving away from the loom, and away from that object’s domestic context, which includes her mother, the girl may be reaching toward a different set of attachments: relations that are avuncular 17 18

On these types of Homeric objects see, for example, Mueller 2010 and Canevaro 2018, emphasizing that women in Homer are represented as creators rather than users of objects. On this double sense of κρέκειν, see Snyder 1981: 194–195 and Fanfani 2017: 422–425. For the overlap between the technical language of weaving and the lexicon of song-making, Harlizius-Klück and Fanfani 2016, Fanfani 2017: 423–424, and, on the self-presentation of new musicians, LeVen 2014: 71–112; on the sound of the weaving process itself, Moxon 2000; on craft metaphors for poetic composition, Nünlist 1998: 83–125, Ford 2002: 93–130, and Porter 2010: 263–275.

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(i.e., nonreproductive and noncompetitive) as opposed to patriarchal.19 Perhaps the very fact that she finds herself incapable of weaving should be read as a symptom of her resistance to incipient marriage. It can also be taken as a positive statement about the role of sexual desire in poetic inspiration. As Marilyn Skinner (2002: 62–63) has argued, Sappho and her Hellenistic emulator Nossis acknowledge Aphrodite as “patron” goddess of their craft. And there are other Sappho fragments that famously celebrate the all-female networks of choral dancing and singing that release the girls and women of Sappho’s circle from their usual domestic duties.20 There may also be an allusion in fr. 102V to the role of weaving in reinforcing traditional gender ideologies, which leave little room for women to experience desire of any kind. Perhaps the singer of fr. 102V finds the patriarchal constraints embodied in her loom unbearable. If Sappho’s reframing of the Homeric loom thus situates song-making athwart the traditional, heteronormative social order,21 the same may be true of the animals and artifacts from the Iliad that make their way into Sappho’s verses. These are no longer the heroic accoutrements of war that they were in Homer; they operate instead as self-consciously repurposed elements. And as such, they speak to the process of literary reception, of what it means to find “Homer” in “Sappho,” or to rediscover “Sappho” already in “Homer.” But they also assume a vitality of their own, wherein, as playful variants on epic models, they, too, spawn literary and cultural offspring. It seems entirely natural to us, as it probably did already to Catullus’ Roman readers, that his lover Lesbia would lavish her pet sparrow with love (and shed tears over its death). But did Catullus’ readers trace that sparrow’s literary pedigree all the way back to Ares’ (Iliadic) horses? I turn, now, to the provocatively off-kilter assemblages Sappho gives us in the doorkeeper’s sandals of fr. 110V and in the chariot-drawing sparrows of the first poem of her collection.

Epic Horses, Lyric Sparrows Sappho pulls apart epic object-matter, making new assemblages that gesture ironically to their Homeric predecessors. I use the term assemblage here rather loosely to refer to Sappho’s creation of artifacts whose distinct parts are recognizable from other contexts, although they take on an 19 20 21

On avuncularity, see Chapters 1 and 8. See further Jarratt 2002. On fr. 2V, which evokes a gathering en plein air with Aphrodite, see Ferrari 2010: 151–154. On the queerness of “athwart” see Sedgwick 1993: xii.

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entirely different valence when placed into the new configurations she has given them.22 In Sappho 1 Voigt, for example, the singer-poet recalls for Aphrodite the circumstances of an earlier visit (1.9–13):23 κάλοι δέ σ’ ἆγον ὤκεες στροῦθοι περὶ γᾶς μελαίνας πύκνα δίννεντες πτέρ’ ἀπ’ ὠράνω αἴθερος διὰ μέσσω·

10

αἶψα δ’ ἐξίκοντο· . . . and beautiful, swift sparrows led you over the black earth, fluttering their wings thickly, from the sky through the mid-air. And immediately they arrived.

No bird is ever named or otherwise given veritable “character” status in Homer.24 But many centuries later, sparrows would evoke the tradition of love poetry initiated by Sappho. Catullus’ Lesbia (whose name alludes to Sappho’s island) has a darling pet sparrow; Catullus envies the sparrow its intimacy with his mistress. In Catullus 2, he addresses the sparrow directly: Passer, deliciae meae puellae . . . (“Oh Sparrow, delight of my girl . . . ”). Object of Lesbia’s affection, the sparrow epitomizes the fraught femininity of Catullus’ creations, especially when these are self-consciously set against the backdrop of martial poetry.25 It is Sappho who banishes the Iliad ’s swift war horses from her lyrics, putting in their place “swift sparrows.”26 Substituting for these horses, Sappho’s sparrows reverse the direction of Aphrodite’s journey. The Iliadic goddess, having been wounded by Diomedes, borrows Ares’ chariot to flee to Olympus, where she takes refuge in the arms of her mother, Dione (see Chapter 4). The oncewounded Aphrodite is now Sappho’s projected healer, the one whose consolation and support the wounded singer seeks for herself. The singer of Sappho’s Hymn to Aphrodite prays for these sparrows to swiftly retrace the journey made by Ares’ horses, and to carry the goddess back down to the black earth. 22 23 24 25 26

On assemblages in Sappho’s Tithonos Poem, Kurke 2021a; for assemblages in archaic Greek poetry, see Lather 2021: 71–72 and 201–211. I use the text of Sappho 1 Voigt as it is printed in Budelmann 2018: 35–36 and I refer to this poem interchangeably as Sappho 1 Voigt (Sappho 1V) and the Hymn to Aphrodite. In both the Iliad and Odyssey, however, birds appear in connection with specific omens (not least of all Penelope’s geese). Lesbia’s sparrow would also go on to spawn literary progeny, such as Corinna’s parrot (at Ovid, Amores 2.6), on which see Hinds 1987: 7 and 1998: 4–5; on Catullus’ Sappho, see Young 2015: 166–181. On this substitution, Svenbro 1975, Stanley 1976: 312–313, Rissman 1983: 9, and Zellner 2008: 440.

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The language of Sappho 1V never once lets us forget that we are in a spin-off of Homer’s world, where such earth-to-Olympus flights originated. Sappho’s retooling of epic’s formulaic language also entails an implicit re-gendering of its semantics. In the case of Aphrodite’s descent, sparrows are to horses what marriage is to war. As winged creatures both small and delicate, sparrows are antithetical in almost every way to their equine antecedents, except in their speed of movement. The familiar epic expression, swift horses, where ὤκεες is paired with ἵπποι, appears numerous times in Homer and Hesiod; however, it can be traced back to a Proto-Indo-European ancestor formula.27 That formula was a figura etymologica, since the word for “horse” is itself cognate with “swift.”28 Not only are horses an essential component of Iliadic warfare, they are also closely connected in the epic imagination with virility.29 Menos (vitality, virility), a masculinity-implicating word (even used to refer to semen), is “one of the Homeric horse’s most salient and . . . characteristic possessions.”30 Ares’ immortal horses, moreover, are already winged in the Iliad. Having been goaded by Iris, who acts as their charioteer, these divine animals “willingly took flight” (μάστιξεν δ᾿ ἐλάαν, τὼ δ᾿ οὐκ ἀέκοντε πετέσθην, 5.366), spiriting the wounded Aphrodite back up to Olympus in no time at all (αἶψα δ᾿ ἔπειθ᾿ ἵκοντο θεῶν ἕδος, αἰπὺν Ὄλυμπον, 5.367). There is, nevertheless, something distinctly odd about all of this. Why have these noble beasts of war been tasked with chauffeuring the least warlike of goddesses? It is almost as if a Sapphic sensibility has infiltrated the Iliad, allowing us to catch a glimpse of the domestic and the sentimental elements (e.g., a mother consoling her daughter) that epic tends to relegate to its sidelines, or its similes.31 Ares does not customarily lend out his horses, but he makes an exception for Aphrodite, and that marginal frame from Iliad 5 becomes, of course, central to the orientation of Sappho 1 Voigt. The metamorphosis of epic horses into winged sparrows goes just one step beyond the Iliad ’s own depiction of Ares’ warhorses. Sappho has expanded on the singular detail of 27 28 29

30

31

For example, Il. 5.257, 8.88, 10.474, 10.520, 16.370, 16.380, 16.383, 16.833, 16.866, 23.373; Od. 3.496, and Hesiod, Scutum 61. See Svenbro 1975. See Katz 2010: 361 and Platte 2017: 10. By contrast, as Wilson (1996: 113) astutely points out, fr. 2V is the only place in Sappho’s corpus where horses appear, “but there they graze quietly, unfettered by chariots, and disconnected from human glory (cf. Alcaeus fr. 259) or the contests of men.” Platte 2017: 91; Platte (2017: 92–93) notes also that “sexuality and semen are things to which the IE horse is often connected, as they are a surprisingly prominent element of equine mythology.” The sexual connotations of the word menos are discussed by Nagy 1974: 265 (see also Van Sickle 1975). On epic menos, see Vernant 1991 and Chapter 6. On similes in the Iliad involving mothers and daughters, see Moulton 1977: 100–104, Mills 2000, Dué 2005, Gaca 2008, and Dué and Ebbott 2012. See duBois 1995: 45–50 on Sappho’s reception of Homeric similes involving the natural world or artisanal practices.

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the horses’ flight. She strips them of their equine figuration until everything extraneous to their airborne quality simply disappears, and we are left with winged creatures, the delicate sparrows drawing Aphrodite’s chariot.32 There are still traces of the epic formula at the base of this new lyric assemblage. The listener who hears ὤκεες στροῦθοι in Sappho will also hear the substitution of sparrows for horses, στροῦθοι for ἵπποι. Such a generic reconfiguration is not unique to Sappho 1V. In fact, the playful repurposing of language between genres is perhaps the one commonality shared by the otherwise very different Sappho fragments I bring together in this chapter.33 As we turn, then, to Sappho fr. 110V, the tone will shift yet again. This time, however, we move from the light and ludic to a bawdy, more overtly sexual humor.

The Doorkeeper’s Sandals Although her iambic voice has recently come in for greater appreciation, bawdiness is still not a quality one associates with Sappho’s lyrics.34 If we were to give some of the lesser-known fragments the attention they deserve, that might change. In fr. 110V (the three-line fragment quoted below), for example, we encounter a doorkeeper with unusually large feet. These verses also contain the jarring juxtaposition of a heroic-sounding adjective with the baser materiality of the footwear to which it is applied:35 θυρώρωι πόδες ἐπτορόγυιοι, τὰ δὲ σάμβαλα πεμπεβόεια, πίσσυγγοι δὲ δέκ’ ἐξεπόνησαν The doorkeeper’s feet are seven fathoms long and his sandals are made from the hides of five oxen; ten cobblers labored over them.

Five, seven, and ten. Two lines of verse tally the layers of ox-hide, the size of the feet for which the sandals were made, and the number of cobblers who worked on them. The characters themselves are neither named nor individualized. If the “doorkeeper” is a stand-in for the bridegroom, the emphasis on the tremendous size of his feet bears comparison with Sappho fr. 111V, which, like fr. 110V, belongs to the poet’s epithalamic oeuvre: 32 33 34 35

When asked who the best horses are, the Muse of Iliad 2 responds that they are the mares of the son of Pheres who are “swift like birds” (ποδώκεας ὄρνιθας ὥς, 764). On Sappho’s experimentation with different genres, see Kurke 2021b. On “iambic” Sappho, see Rosenmeyer 2006, Dale 2011, Martin 2016, and Steiner 2021: 78–83. On sexually explicit metaphors in Sappho, see Winkler 1981: 77–84. While fr. 110V certainly packs an iambic punch, it is classified among the poet’s wedding songs. On Sappho’s epithalamia, see Page 1955: 116, Ferrari 2010: 117–128, and Prauscello 2021: 227–229; on the songs which were sung outside the bedchamber of the bride and groom, see Ferrari 2010: 123–125.

The Doorkeeper’s Sandals ἴψοι δὴ τὸ μέλαθρον, ὐμήναον, ἀέρρετε, τέκτονες ἄνδρες· ὐμήναον. γάμβρος †(εἰσ)έρχεται ἶσος Ἄρευι†, ⟨ὐμήναον,⟩ ἄνδρος μεγάλω πόλυ μέσδων. ⟨ὐμήναον.⟩

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5

On high the roof – Hymenaon! – raise it up, carpenter men – Hymenaon! The bridegroom comes, equal to Ares, , much larger than a large man.

The carpenters are exhorted to “raise high the roof beam,” presumably to accommodate an outsized, or “through the roof,” erection. The bridegroom, moreover, is compared to Ares, not in the sense that he is in any way equipped to fight like a god, but for his magnificent stature, and perhaps also his sexual prowess. Ares, after all, is the consort of Aphrodite, most famously so when he is caught in the fine web of Hephaestus’ spinning, as recounted by Demodocus at Odyssey 8.266–369. Each of these epithalamic songs by Sappho contains not only sexually explicit themes but more subtle, genre-based riffs as well. I have already noted that the bridegroom in fr. 111V is perhaps likened to Ares. This comparison, assuming that the textual reconstruction of line 5 is correct, comments metapoetically on the valuation of marriage relative to war. The mention of “ten cobblers” in Sappho fr. 110V has a similar effect. Most translators rightly stress the quantity of the material over the quality of craftsmanship: “His sandals are five cows’ worth of leather,” translates Aaron Poochigian, or they are “made from five ox-hides,” in the words of David Campbell. Both are correct translations of pempeboeia in this context. Size is what is being emphasized. The sandals are so large that they have consumed the hides of five oxen and the labor of ten cobblers. What gets lost in translation, however, is that the epithet itself sounds distinctly Homeric.36 In particular, it brings to mind Homeric Ajax and his famous sevenfold-thick shield.37 In its Iliadic context, heptaboeion (“sevenfold-thick”) specifies that the shield, having been made from seven layers of leather, is practically 36

37

I write that it sounds Homeric because the epithet πεμπεβοείς does not appear in extant hexameter verse. However, the shield of Achilles is described as having “five folds,” as Hephaestus makes it at Il. 18.481–482: “And five were the folds of his shield (πέντε δ’ ἄρ’ αὐτοῦ ἔσαν σάκεος πτύχες); and in it he crafted many beautiful things with his skillful mind.” Ferrrari (2010: 124) notes the bridegroom’s assimilation to the Homeric Ajax, who is referred to as ἠΰς τε μέγας τε / ἔξοχος Ἀργείων (Il. 3.226–227), “exceptionally brave and big among the Argives.”

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impenetrable.38 It is the ideal heroic weapon for the Iliad ’s greatest defensive warrior, as Hector discovers upon breaching the shield’s eighth layer of bronze (Il. 7.245–246): καὶ βάλεν Αἴαντος δεινὸν σάκος ἑπταβόειον ἀκρότατον κατὰ χαλκόν, ὃς ὄγδοος ἦεν ἐπ’ αὐτῷ. And he struck the fearsome sevenfold-thick shield of Ajax, through the topmost bronze, its eighth layer.

Pempeboeia by contrast refers not to the thickness of the sandals but to their overall surface area. At issue here is not a particularly well-crafted pair of shoes but simply a very large pair of feet. For the shield of Ajax to be transformed into the doorkeeper’s gigantic sandals entails a whole host of generic reconfigurations. A heroic weapon has been downgraded to a pedestrian accessory. Men wear their shields in battle but their sandals only for mulling about town. Feet, moreover, make contact with the ground. They are one of the lower extremities, a surrogate for the penis in some cases, and a distinctly comic body part.39 Diogenes Laertius 1.81 (Alc. T 429) reports Alcaeus’ insults regarding the tyrant Pittacus, whom Alcaeus characterized as σαράποδα and σάραπον (“splay-footed”), because he had large feet and apparently shuffled with them.40 Whether or not this is true, it at least confirms that large feet could be singled out as a form of physical ugliness. The shield covers the torso, protecting from danger the “higher” regions of the body (the lung-like phrenes and the thumos, both seats of manly vigor), whereas these particular sandals are worn by a doorkeeper, a man of liminal stature whose very reason for being is, in fact, to guard the threshold. He may be a stand-in for the bridegroom, but he can also be considered a forerunner of another familiar stock character type: the doorman who obstructs the passage of the desperate lover, forcing him to compose his lament while sitting outside the locked bedroom door of his mistress.41 As mentioned already, the sandals of this particular doorkeeper have an epic-sounding epithet attached to them: pempeboeia. The shield of Ajax has its own noble pedigree within the Iliad; even the “leather-cutter” who 38 39

40

See also Αἴαντα σακεσφόρον ἥ[ρω (Ajax the sakos-bearing hero) at Bacchylides 13.104. “Feet are frequently found as sexual puns and innuendoes in ancient comedy,” as Sumler (2010: 467) notes in his study of the catalogue of sandals in Herodas’ seventh Mime. On the erotics of feet and footwear, see also Henderson 1991: 44 and Levine 2005. Ferrari 2010: 90–91. 41 On the origins of the paraclausithyron, see, for example, Copley 1942.

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crafted the weapon has his name (Tychios) recorded.42 Contrast to this the ten nameless cobblers who are an interchangeable and anonymous collective; the doorkeeper himself is also an unnamed, antiheroic figure. The heroic epithet thus provides a meta-commentary of sorts on its own dislocation and repurposing, inviting us to consider the stakes of transposing part of an epic assemblage into lyric’s fictional world, of transfiguring “Homer” into “Sappho.” Having the temerity to detach an epithet from its heroic object, Sappho opens up her verse to the pleasures of the prosaic. Indeed, in his treaty On Style, the obscure Hellenistic scholar Demetrius alludes to how, in these very verses, Sappho employs “pedestrian” rather than poetic language.43 And here we may want to come back to the appeal of crafting, especially as an amateur art form. Sedgwick, as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, found comfort in the middle ranges of agency that she experienced in collaging and in the fiber arts. While Sappho’s artistry involves language rather than fabrics, she nevertheless gives us granular, materialist insight into her poetic craft. Her lyrics are a verbal collage. We may also be reminded of Sedgwick’s passion for cutting up old kimonos and reassembling them (see Chapter 2). One of those reassembled kimonos provides the cover image for this book, symbolizing not only Sedgwick’s but also Sappho’s reparative poetics.

Kleis’ Headband and Gongyla’s Dress In Sappho’s topsy-turvy world, language associated with Homeric shields is taken apart and reassembled so that the doorkeeper’s sandals become a travesty of the heroic, a genuinely “para-epic” assemblage. There are traces of the Iliad everywhere in Sappho – but always, when epithets are refashioned, there is a clear delineation between the present and the past. “Homer” supplies supple matter for reshaping into new forms, articles of clothing in particular, yet there is never any doubt as to where the old ends and the new begins.44 But there are also less obvious ways in which Sappho incorporates Homer into her lyrics, and one of these – to which I turn now – is the appropriation of heroic affect for distinctly Sapphic objects. 42 43

44

At Il. 7.220–221 Tychios is described as the “best of the leather-cutters.” From On Style, 167 (= S 110b L-P), as translated by Campbell: “In different vein Sappho makes very cheap fun of the rustic bridegroom and the door-keeper at the wedding, using prosaic rather than poetic language.” (ἄλλως δὲ σκώπτει (ἡ Σαπφὼ) τὸν ἄγροικον νυμφίον καὶ τὸν θυρωρὸν τὸν ἐν τοῖς γάμοις εὐτελέστατα καὶ ἐν πεζοῖς ὀνόμασι μᾶλλον ἢ ἐν ποιητικοῖς.) For a different approach to Homeric weapons, see my discussion of Alcaeus 140V in the final section of this chapter.

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In the case of the “headband” (mitra) that the singer of fragment 98b L-P wishes to obtain for her daughter, there is no dismantling of a preexisting Homeric assemblage.45 The interaction between epic and lyric happens instead on the surface, and in the space between the Homeric and the Sapphic senses of mitra/mitrana:46 σοὶ δ’ ἔγω Κλέι ποικίλαν [ οὐκ ἔχω πόθεν ἔσσεται [ μιτράν⟨αν⟩· ἀλλὰ τὼι Μυτιληνάωι [ But for you, Kleis, I am not able to obtain a colorful headband from anywhere; but to the Mytilenean (bring your complaints, or similar)

Sappho regrets not being able to procure such a headband for her daughter, Kleis. Made in Sardis, the mitrana has been read as a status symbol, its acquisition signaling both wealth and a taste for eastern luxury goods.47 It is a prestige object but also perhaps a metaphor for the exquisite artistry of fashioning lyric verse.48 Kleis is missing a headband that would have been appropriate for her to wear on an occasion when girls’ clothing and adornments were most admired – during their participation in choral dancing. While the occasion’s details are not specified, the headband’s absence from Kleis’ head tells its own story, one that may intersect, as Franco Ferrari 2010 has suggested, with the politics of austerity and the sumptuary laws enacted during this time, perhaps by Pittacus during his reign as tyrant of Lesbos.49 In the Homeric context, mitra refers to a piece of armor that was generally worn underneath both the breastplate (thōrax) and the war belt (zōstēr). The word occurs four times in the Iliad. In three of those instances,

45 46 47

48 49

I print Lobel-Page’s text of fr. 98b, which differs from Voigt’s in treating πόθεν ἔσσεται as an indirect interrogative rather than, as Voigt prefers, as a parenthetic question. See Ferrari 2010: 7–8 on “the Mytilenean,” and whether (as he thinks is likely) Pittacus is implied here. Ferrari 2010: 5. Other intricately crafted lyric “artifacts” from Lydia include the sandals in Sappho fr. 39V, a barbitos that the Lesbian poet Terpander supposedly imported to Greece (Pindar fr. 125M), the pektis, or stringed instrument, that Sappho herself was known for playing (fr. 22.11 and fr. 156) and the purple headband of Lydian manufacture that is named among the “beautiful things” at Alcman 1.67–69. Compare, for example, Pindar Nem. 8.14–15, where the headband (μίτραν . . . πεποικιλμέναν) can be taken as symbolizing the poet’s verbal art. Ferrari (2010: 13) takes into account the specific political context in which the song is likely to have been composed: “If then Sappho says to Cleis that she cannot procure a Lydian headband for her, this is not a matter of an embarrassed confession uttered sotto voce, but a statement that had a precise pragmatic function. In this perspective the headband becomes a deixis of absence.”

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it is mentioned in connection with Menelaos’ wounding at the hands of Pandaros (4.134–138): ἐν δ’ ἔπεσε ζωστῆρι ἀρηρότι πικρὸς ὀϊστός· διὰ μὲν ἂρ ζωστῆρος ἐλήλατο δαιδαλέοιο, καὶ διὰ θώρηκος πολυδαιδάλου ἠρήρειστο μίτρης θ’, ἣν ἐφόρει ἔρυμα χροός, ἕρκος ἀκόντων, ἥ οἱ πλεῖστον ἔρυτο· διαπρὸ δὲ εἴσατο καὶ τῆς. And the bitter arrow sank into the place where the war belt was fastened; it had been driven through the exquisitely crafted war belt, and had pushed its way through the elaborately decorated breastplate and the mitra, which he wore as the bulwark of his skin and protection against missiles, and which offered him his best defense; even through this it went.

Menelaos has been struck by an arrow which goes through his war belt and breastplate before lodging itself in his mitra (waist guard), the last line of defense. The waist guard is described here as a “bulwark of the skin and protection against missiles” (ἔρυμα χροός, ἕρκος ἀκόντων, 137). We know from elsewhere (e.g., Il. 4.187) that the mitra was fashioned from metal. Like its cloth cousin, the metallic mitra is a band wrapped around a specific part of the body (for men the waist or torso, for women the head). When worn by a warrior, it does its work invisibly; its primary function is protective. The female mitra is, by contrast, a kosmos (an adornment), designed to attract attention and to enhance a woman’s beauty. That the same word is used for defensive armor and feminine accessory reinforces the semantic resonances between the worlds of war and marriage. Jean-Pierre Vernant (1991: 38) puts this well: “[w]hat military panoplies are to the body of a warrior, jewelry, iridescent fabrics, breast ribbons, ointments, and rouge are to a woman’s body.” Like the soldier arming himself for battle, the girl dressing for a choral performance readies herself for an agonistic event. Every aspect of her visible self will be scrutinized, and her success will depend not only on the quality of her singing and dancing but also on how her overall appearance captivates the senses. Amplifying the parallels between male and female agonistic spheres are the affects that circulate between these highly ornamental surfaces and their viewers.The affects and emotions that are typically associated with weapons (especially shields) in Homer are elicited in Sappho by items of clothing and textile appurtenances. These conjure the feelings of awe, fear, desire, and recognition that weapons provoke in the Iliad – in an “affective recoding” that goes beyond simply drawing a symbolic equivalence between the spheres

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of love and war. Objects of dress, bodily adornment, and feminine headdress are likely to have had more meaning for a female audience. In Sappho’s traditional culture, weapons of war are always already gendered masculine. But when clothes occupy the prominent place in Sappho’s songscape that is filled by armor in Homer’s, the audience is encouraged, at the very least, to read from a feminine position, and to recognize that choruses of dancing and singing girls have replaced the ranks of fighting men. Here I am reminded of Sappho fr. 16V, where desire (eros, or “whatever one loves”) is the leading force behind valuation (see Chapter 7). And here, too, Sappho’s preference for feminine adornment is not a rejection of masculine armor and the heroic world symbolized therein. Rather, the desirability of each type of object will depend on its viewers, with the language used by Sappho still bearing traces of Homer. Kleis’ mitrana is shadowed by the Homeric warrior’s mitra, just as the doorkeeper’s sandals evoke Ajax’s shield. And while none of the objects described in her verses should be considered “real” – in the sense that they would have had a life outside their song-life – some types of things are more likely than others to have been among the possessions of Sappho’s listeners.50 The presence of these objects in her lyrics, then, raises the stakes for audience engagement, bringing into sharper focus to and for whom certain songs were meant to speak. The overlap in the language and similes used for women’s dress and men’s armor reflects their similar aesthetic heritage, hinting at the parallel lives of men and women in heroic poetry. To describe, for instance, the exquisite craftsmanship that goes into the making of both textiles and metalwork the adjective daidalos is often used.51 The robe (heanon) that Athena gives Hera to wear for her seduction of Zeus has “many elaborate design features” (daidala polla) woven into it (Il. 14.179). Textiles are “weapons” of war no less than shields, swords, and shiny helmets. In their manufacture as daidalic works of art, and in their impact on viewers, textiles equip women with an agency comparable to the male warrior’s battle strength (his menos and alkē). The “arming” of Hera in her boudoir

50 51

On the attention given to cherished female possessions in Sappho’s lyrics, Wilson 1996: 103–106. See Morris 1992: 3–35 for a detailed discussion of daidal- words in Greek epic; the adjective is most often used of armor but far from fixed in its meaning or application, as Morris (1992: 30) emphasizes: “Scholars have tended to force the words into a consistent pattern of technical properties, exclusive to metal, for example . . . but their only consistent feature is the cost, complexity, and reputation of their craftsmanship.” More recently, Fanfani (2017: 431) has pointed out the inter-craft crossover in the language of poikilia and daidaleos.

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in Iliad 14, as she prepares to seduce her husband, with potentially gamechanging implications for the war, provides an important precedent for the way feminine beauty in Sappho’s world builds on her listeners’ familiarity with epic arming scenes. Sappho’s eroticizing of the Homeric arming scene comes through most clearly in fr. 22, a song where the speaker commands Abanthis to “sing Gongyla” (9–14):52 .] . ε . [. . . .] . [. . .κ]έλομαι σ᾿ ἀ̣ [είδην Γο]γγύλαν̣ [Ἄβ]α̣νθι λάβοισαν ἀ . [ πᾶ]κτιν, ἆς̣ σε δηὖτε πόθος τ̣ . [ ἀμφιπόταται

10

τὰν κάλαν· ἀ γὰρ κατάγωγις αὔτ̣α[ς σ᾿ ἐπτόαισ᾿ ἴδοισαν, ἐγὼ δὲ χαίρω. I exhort you, Abanthis, to sing (of) Gongyla, taking up the lyre (pāktin), while desire once again flies around you, the beautiful one . . . for her dress (katagōgis) terrified you, taking your breath away when you saw it; and I rejoice.

Gongyla’s dress is where desire and joy converge.53 The word used here for “dress” – κατάγωγις – is unusual.54 A nominalized form of the verb “to lead down” (κατάγω), it suggests an active sort of agency. Jeffrey Walker (2000: 236) asks us to imagine a garment that “descends, trails down, wraps or winds around, provides enclosure, and is seductive.” And certainly the reaction of the woman who looks at it affirms that this is no ordinary dress: “It terrified her, taking her breath away (ἐπτόαισ’, 14).” The woman singing these lines delights in that effect (ἐγὼ δὲ χαίρω, 14). Although the context is very different, the emotional charge produced by Gongyla’s dress is comparable to that of Achilles’ armor in Book 19 of the Iliad. There, Thetis finds her son weeping over the body of Patroklos when she brings him his armor, newly minted, from Hephaestus’ workshop. The god has

52 53

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I adopt Campbell’s text of fr. 22, which includes West’s σ᾿ ἀ[είδην in line 9 and, in line 10, Lobel-Page’s [Ἄβ]ανθι as well as Γο]γγύλαν, as proposed by several different scholars. See also Ferrari 2010: 188–190. Stehle (1997: 304) similarly notes that “the dress itself is an object onto which desire is deflected to generalize it.” See also fr. 57.2V, on Andromeda’s dress, which Ferrari (2010: 23–26, 40) interprets as Sappho’s sleight to Andromeda’s “rusticity”; I discuss this dress also in Chapter 8. On clothing as a visual component of habrosunē, marking the wearer’s affiliations and affinities with the East, Kurke 1992: 96. Ferrari (2010: 190) describes the katagōgis as a “long-sleeved cloak that came down to the feet, an expensive himation suitable for a young girl to wear in public.” I am very grateful to Naomi Weiss for helping me develop the discussion of katagōgis both here and later in the chapter.

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made him “famed weapons,” unlike the armor of any other mortal warrior, and beautiful too: κλυτὰ τεύχεα . . . καλὰ μάλ’ (19.10–11). As Thetis sets the daidalic weapons down in front of Achilles, there is a loud reverberation (19.13): τὰ δ᾿ ἀνέβραχε δαίδαλα πάντα. Fear takes hold of the Myrmidons, so much so that they are forced to avert their gaze. All, that is, except for Achilles (19.14–20): Μυρμιδόνας δ᾿ ἄρα πάντας ἕλε τρόμος, οὐδέ τις ἔτλη ἄντην εἰσιδέειν, ἀλλ᾿ ἔτρεσαν. αὐτὰρ Ἀχιλλεὺς ὡς εἶδ᾿, ὥς μιν μᾶλλον ἔδυ χόλος, ἐν δέ οἱ ὄσσε δεινὸν ὑπὸ βλεφάρων ὡς εἰ σέλας ἐξεφάανθεν· τέρπετο δ᾿ ἐν χείρεσσιν ἔχων θεοῦ ἀγλαὰ δῶρα. αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ φρεσὶν ᾗσι τετάρπετο δαίδαλα λεύσσων, αὐτίκα μητέρα ἣν ἔπεα πτερόεντα προσηύδα·

15

20

But trembling took hold of all the Myrmidons, and not a single one dared to look directly at the weapons, for they felt dread. But Achilles as soon as he looked, felt a deeper surge of anger, and in him his eyes shone forth frighteningly beneath his brows, like a flash of fire. But he rejoiced holding the shining gifts of the god in his hands. Moreover, when his mind had rejoiced in looking at the carefully crafted objects, he turned at once to his mother, addressing her with winged words.

There is a spectrum of emotions in these lines. Not only do the weapons elicit starkly different reactions from their divided audience (the Myrmidons, Achilles), but even within Achilles they inspire both anger and joy. The Myrmidons feel nothing but fear. Their first instinct is to avert their gaze, turning away from the terrifying brightness and the crushing noise. Just looking at the weapons frightens them. The same objects, when Achilles sees them, deepen the hero’s anger: the sight of them gives rise to a surge of cholos, the bile that fuels anger (19.16). In gazing at them, moreover, Achilles starts to take on their material properties. His eyes shine fiercely and brightly like a flame (σέλας) – an interesting detail given that the sheen of the weapons is elsewhere described as bright like the moon.55 Jean-Pierre Vernant (1991: 37) even remarks that the hero’s weapons “are like a direct extension of his body.”56 But as soon as Achilles takes the armor in his hands he feels joy, and he registers this emotion while also looking at the weapons: δαίδαλα λεύσσων (19.19). Turned into a substantive of pure perceptual experience (if 55

56

At Il. 19.374–378 there is a light like the brightness of the moon, which is said to emanate from Achilles’ shield. Vernant (1991: 37) associates the brightness of Achilles’ eyes with the menos that “burns in the warrior’s breast.” For new materialist readings of the animacy of weapons in the Iliad, see Purves 2015 and Lather 2021: 64–94.

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we take daidala as the direct object of leussō), the weapons are fully one now with the delight they elicit in their viewer. The woman whose desire for Gongyla was catalyzed by the sight of her dress is drawn into a similar whorl of terror and excitement.57 As we have seen, the verb Sappho uses (at fr. 22.13–14) to describe the effect of the dress is πτοιέω, which means “terrify,” but also “excite, make breathless.” Sappho repurposes language and affect that is more commonly used in Homer of armor and martial clothing. (At Odyssey 22.298, for example, it is Athena’s aegis causing “terror.”) A material extension of Gongyla in motion, the dress is more than a metonym, its power having seemingly been amplified by Gongyla’s absence. “That dress was an emergency,” concludes the ironic reworking of fr. 22 in Daniel Lavery’s Dirtbag Sappho (included as the second epigraph to this chapter).58 It is a statement that appears less hyperbolic when we consider the similarity between this dress and the weapons of Achilles. In looking at his armor, the Myrmidons proleptically feel fear. They temporarily inhabit the minds and bodies of those who will come face to face with this formidable warrior; their terror expresses their helplessness in the face of insurmountable death. But the Myrmidons are Achilles’ comrades. In reality, they have nothing to fear from him. It is the objects themselves that transmit this affect, overwhelming even the friendly onlooker with dread. In this way, it becomes nearly impossible to separate cause from effect, agency from instrumentality. Who, or what, is the trigger for these strong emotions? Is it the woman herself, or is it her dress? Is it the warrior, or his weapons? Homer, it seems, was aware of the complex embedding of emotion in certain objects, and the way that both desire and fear can be construed as visually contagious affects. Moreover, the Iliad itself makes the suggestive analogy between armor and clothing, implicitly demonstrating their parallel roles in the lives of women and men.59 We can see this in two “dressing” scenes: Hera’s dressing for her seduction of Zeus in Iliad 14, and the arming of Achilles for battle in Iliad 19. Both descriptions highlight the sensory features, especially the brightness, of certain accessories.60 The analogy can be pressed 57

58

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Snyder (1997: 42) describes this phenomenon as “the total affect of the beloved,” which includes “the flow of the drapery of her garment, the way she wears it, the texture of the material, and the implied movement of the woman’s body itself.” I have benefited from the excellent discussion of Lavery’s poetry in Rioghnach Sachs’ 2023 King’s College London dissertation (for which I was an external examiner), Towards a “Sapphic Mode”: Relocating Sappho’s Poetry in the History of Sexuality. Vernant 1991: 38, and further developed by Brillet-Dubois 2011. For scenes of arming, see Arend 1933: 92–98. Morris (1992: 20) has referred to the description of Hera dressing for seduction in Iliad 14 as “an arming scene in drag.” Brillet-Dubois (2011: 109) calls it a “love” aristeia.

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further by looking at the network of overlapping metaphors in the Iliad for armor and jewelry. The symptoms, for instance, of limb-loosening desire are similar to those that overcome the warrior at the moment of death, a correspondence that further strengthens the connection between the woman who is “dressed to kill” and the Homeric warrior.61 First, Hera. She retreats to the room that her son has made for her and to which she alone holds the key (14.166–168).62 When she is securely locked inside, she proceeds to wash and anoint herself with ambrosial nectar, whose scent reaches all the way to the sky (14.174). After she has bathed and perfumed herself, Hera “plaits” her shining locks of hair (χερσὶ πλοκάμους ἔπλεξε φαεινούς, 176); and she puts on a dress that Athena has made for her, and into which are woven many decorative features, daidala polla (τίθει δ᾿ ἐνὶ δαίδαλα πολλά, 179).63 Hera clasps it shut with golden pins (14.180), in a gesture comparable to the warrior’s fastening of his greaves with silver pins (cf., 19.369–370). Next, she puts on a girdle with a hundred tassels and earrings with three drops.64 Finally, she covers herself with a veil (krēdemnon). Like a soldier, she has “armed” herself from bottom to top, leaving for last the fastening of her headgear, a veil rather than the warrior’s helmet.65 Hera’s clothing differs in its detail, but it has the same radiant and daidalic quality as the armor of Achilles.66 Charis shimmers from her earrings – χάρις δ’ ἀπελάμπετο πολλή (14.183) – and the newly made veil with which she covers her head is as “bright as the sun” (λευκὸν δ᾿ ἦν ἠέλιος ὥς, 14.185). When Aphrodite asks Hera to tell her what she desires, she adds, in language that is reminiscent of Aphrodite in Sappho 1V, that her thumos bids her accomplish it if she can (14.195–196): αὔδα ὅ τι φρονέεις· τελέσαι δέ με θυμὸς ἄνωγεν, / εἰ δύναμαι τελέσαι γε καὶ εἰ τετελεσμένον ἐστίν.67 Hera asks for philotēta and himeron – love and desire. So then Aphrodite undoes and takes off the himas (belt) from her waist, an object that is described as 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

Brillet-Dubois (2011) argues that the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite in its narrative structure and details “links the tale of Aphrodite’s seduction of Anchises to the Achillean aristeia” (108). For complementary readings of Hera’s deception of Zeus, see Canevaro 2018: 213–219 and Lather 2021: 197–201. Willcock (1999: 230) suggests that “the final operation on the cloth stands for Athena’s whole task of weaving and making the dress.” Compare the hundred gold tassels on Athena’s aegis at Il. 2.448 (τῆς ἑκατὸν θύσανοι παγχρύσεοι ἠερέθονται). She also puts on her sandals, almost as an afterthought, at 14.186 (ποσσὶ δ᾿ ὑπὸ λιπαροῖσιν ἐδήσατο καλὰ πέδιλα). Compare Hera’s robe (14.179) and Achilles’ shield (19.380). Compare Sappho 1.26–27 (ὄσσα δέ μοι τέλεσσαι / θῦμος ἰμέρρει, τέλεσον) where the singer in her own voice begs the goddess to accomplish what her heart desires.

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being “stitched” (κεστόν) and also “many-colored” (ποικίλον), and as having every sort of beguilement fashioned into it (14.214–15).68 In the description of Achilles’ arming, his shield receives by far the most attention. It is like the brightness of the moon that appears for sailors who are being carried out to sea unwillingly, away from their friends (19.374–78). “So did the brightness from Achilles’ shield, well-crafted, reach the air” (ὣς ἀπ᾿ Ἀχιλλῆος σάκεος σέλας αἰθέρ᾿ ἵκανε / καλοῦ δαιδαλέου, 19.379–80).69 Achilles’ helmet also shines like a star – ἡ δ᾿ ἀστὴρ ὣς ἀπέλαμπεν (19.381). We have seen the terror that the weapons on their own inspired in the Myrmidons. We have also seen the breathless excitement mixed with fear that Gongyla’s dress elicited from its viewer (Sappho fr. 22). The effect of Hera’s “armor” on Zeus is comparable to the intensity of the viewers’ emotions in both of these scenes; when he sees her, Zeus is so “enveloped by lust” that he is incapable of turning his mind elsewhere until he has satisfied his desire.70

Plaiting and Poikilia An important word with several notable appearances in Sappho’s slim corpus, poikilia speaks at the most basic level to the craftedness of her songs.71 Fabric, leather sandals, a hairband, and toys: these are some of the materials and objects designated as poikilos. Markedly feminine they are, indeed. What are “sparkly” sandals and hairbands when placed next to heroic armor, or even an exquisitely crafted piece of furniture? And yet, despite their status as women’s things, they are skillfully made and culturally valued objects. The value of certain artifacts has been enhanced, moreover, by listeners’ awareness of their “double” lives. Artifacts I earlier referred to as “assemblages” even gesture to their twin-artifacts from epic: the Homeric blueprints for our lyric materialities. We saw earlier that in Sappho fr. 98b L-P the singer laments that her daughter Kleis will not be getting a colorful headband (mitra) from Sardis. The traffic in such luxury goods has become subject to regulation, thanks perhaps to the political machinations of the Kleonaktids, who have placed an embargo on all such luxury items, or ποικιλασκ . . . / ταῦτα (6–7). One 68

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Willcock (1999 ad loc) comments that “the article in question seems to be a strap worn beneath her breasts by Aphrodite, which she tells Hera to put inside her dress as a love-charm.” Brockliss (2019: 81) notes that there is a “parallelism in the role of floral imagery and the ποικίλον in Homeric descriptions of erotic encounters: both are associated with seductive, deceptive bodies.” See Brillet-Dubois 2011: 113–115 on the visual and affective parallels between this scene and Aphrodite’s seduction of Anchises in her eponymous Homeric hymn. Il. 14.294: ὡς δ᾿ ἴδεν, ὥς μιν ἔρως πυκινὰς φρένας ἀμφεκάλυψεν. On poikilia in Sappho, see Grand-Clément 2011: 459–463 and Lather 2021: 127–141.

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senses here the tension between poikilos objects as markers (and makers) of elite status and prestige and their potential for being read ironically. In this respect, Sappho anticipates trends in verse-making that would become characteristic of Hellenistic (and later) poets. In Homer, poikil- epithets modify both metal artifacts (weapons, jewelry) and fabrics. As an adjective, the word attests to the intricacy and elaborateness of the ornamentation (i.e., poikilia) and its visible effects (e.g., shining, variegated, sparkly, wrought, ornate, colorful) rather than any intrinsic features of the materials from which such artifacts have been made. Poikil- words in Homer frequently modify the paraphernalia of war, that is, chariots (ἅρματα), “weapons” (τεύχεα, ἔντεα). The adjective also describes a “robe” (πέπλον) and the decorative components of textiles (ποικίλμασιν at Il. 6.294 and Od. 15.107, θρόνα ποικίλ’ at Il. 22.441). Twice it modifies the “belt” with which Hera seduces Zeus in Iliad 14 (ποικίλον ἱμάντα, 14.215 and 14.220) and only once (at Il. 16.134) a “breastplate.” Occasionally it qualifies an article of furniture. The bench, for example, that Odysseus places beside his guest Mentes (i.e., Athena in disguise) in the first book of the Odyssey is described as ποικίλον (1.132). Also ποικίλον is the fawn carved into the pin made of gold that elicits the admiration of all who see Odysseus wearing it (Od. 19.228). The fawn in the last example is characterized as poikilon in so far as it is “dappled,”72 an English word that conveys well that poikilia describes what is visible on the surface – whether that happens to be the particular coloring of an animal’s hide, an etching in metal, the paint on wooden furniture (or a statue), or the pattern-weaving of fabric.73 In the case of Odysseus’ golden pin, whose design includes a hound holding between its front paws this “dappled” fawn, the epithet poses a paradox. For the “dappled” effect to be realistic, it must have been artfully etched into the pin’s golden surface. Artifice, even guile, are key components of poikilia. Aphrodite is invoked as “wile-plaiter” (δολόπλοκε, 1.2) in Sappho 1V, a proleptic sense that relates to her ability to help Sappho “plot” revenge. This artifice, however, and the language of “plaiting” through which it is expressed, is also a verbal nod to lyric’s indebtedness to epic for its raw materials. We have seen here the way Sappho refashions a familiar metaphor (weaving as song-making, the woven garment as the finished song) into a meta-commentary which speaks to the female poet’s plaiting 72 73

In the translation of Richmond Lattimore [1965] 2007. Bolling (1958) remarks that the most common context seems to be one of “engraving.” See Nagy 2010: 301 on the parallelism of bronzework and pattern-weaving, for which poikillein is the verb of choice.

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together the disassembled threads of Homeric epic. Sappho does not grant representation to women weavers as they are depicted in Homer. Instead, she engages with the tensions between weaving and eros, between the lyre and the loom. Female singers throughout archaic Greece would have been pulled back and forth between these alternatives, just like the singer of Sappho fr. 102V. Traditional weaving is a form of domesticity, and as such it sits uncomfortably within the erotic remit of Sappho’s oeuvre.74 “Plaiting” (πλόκος, πλέκειν) and “variegated layering” – forms of poikilia – instead become the metaphors for Sappho’s reworking of epic language and themes. In Sappho, traditional modes of weaving are subtly cast aside in favor of a “wily” (dolos-inspired) appropriation of women’s work – a recasting of women’s work as something that produces poikilic objects, like the very garment of Aphrodite that is referenced in the first word of the Hymn to Aphrodite: poikilothronos. In fact, that first epithet contains something of a materialist history of its own, in miniature. The very first words of the Hymn to Aphrodite, which are also the first words of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho, are an address to the deathless goddess, invoking her as ποικιλόθρον’ ἀθανάτ’ ᾿Αφρόδιτα.75 The tendency has been to read ποικιλόθρονος, a new coinage, as referring to a “colorful” (or skillfully wrought) throne (θρόνος) on which Aphrodite is seated up on Olympus; but linguistically, it is just as likely that the epithet refers to Aphrodite’s flowery dress, which would result in an invocation to “deathless, colorfully-robed Aphrodite.” While it is true that θρόνος (throne, or couch) is a more common word in epic than θρόνα (flowers), the single occurrence of θρόνα in Homeric epic is at Iliad 22.441, where it is modified by the adjective ποικίλος (“multi-colored,” “variegated”).76 This unique 74 75

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On Sappho’s nonbinary poetics, see further Chapter 7. We can be fairly certain that this poem was placed at the beginning of the first book of the Alexandrian edition since it was quoted by Hephaestion as an example of the Sapphic stanza; as Budelmann (2018: 116) reminds us, “ancient metricians tend to quote opening lines, and since poems in the Sapphic stanza were collected in book 1 of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho (see test. 29 Campbell), it is likely that this poem was placed first in the edition.” See also the arguments of De Kreij, Colomo and Lui 2020, reinforcing the thesis that Sappho 1 came first in its book with evidence from P. Oxy. 2288, a second-century fragment containing this poem. On the organization of Sappho’s books by meter, and for the alphabetical ordering by first letter of the incipit of each poem in Book 1 (with the first poem being an exception), see Prauscello 2021: 221–224. On the frequent imitation of Sappho 1 in third-century bce poetry (another indication of its popularity and iconic status), see Acosta-Hughes 2010: 12–13, 17, 59, 70. For discussion of Sappho 1V, see Chapter 4. For example, Winkler 1996. On the connection to Andromache’s weaving, see Lawler 1948, Bolling, 1958, Putnam 1960, Svenbro 1975, Lasserre 1989: 205–214, Skinner 2002: 67, and Grand-Clément 2011: 460–461.

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pairing describes the colorful flower pattern Andromache weaves into her web, as she sits in her bedchamber (22.437–441): Ὣς ἔφατο κλαίουσ’, ἄλοχος δ’ οὔ πώ τι πέπυστο Ἕκτορος· οὐ γάρ οἵ τις ἐτήτυμος ἄγγελος ἐλθὼν ἤγγειλ’ ὅττί ῥά οἱ πόσις ἔκτοθι μίμνε πυλάων, ἀλλ’ ἥ γ’ ἱστὸν ὕφαινε μυχῷ δόμου ὑψηλοῖο δίπλακα πορφυρέην, ἐν δὲ θρόνα ποικίλ’ ἔπασσε.

440

So she (i.e., Hecuba) spoke, weeping, but the wife of Hector had not yet learned anything, for no truthful messenger had come to tell her that her husband had stood his ground outside the gates. Instead, she was in an inner chamber of the high-roofed house, weaving a purple textile folded in two, and sprinkling in it a pattern of multi-colored flowers.

For those accustomed to listening to Homer and Sappho side by side, the phrase θρόνα ποικίλ’ (at line 441) would have struck a familiar chord.77 Listeners would hear θρόνα as a component of the new epithet Sappho invents for Aphrodite at 1.1.78 Sappho, in fact, coins two distinctive epithets with which to invoke Aphrodite: ποικιλόθρονε and δολόπλοκε (1.1 and 1.2).79 Both adjectives are unattested in the Iliad and Odyssey, yet, according to Leah Rissman (1983: 3), they evoke Homeric compounds such as ποικιλομήτης and δολομήτης. And hence, as Rissman (1983: 3) aptly observes, they “can be considered Sapphic and Homeric at the same time.” Both, moreover, relate to the realm of textile-work with which women in Homer are so closely aligned, δολόπλοκε having at its base the verb πλέκω (for “plaiting”), while ποικιλόθρονος (if we accept that it is composed of ποικίλος and θρόνα) gestures toward Andromache weaving at her loom. In the case of the first epithet, the flipped order of the two words, from θρόνα ποικίλ’ to ποικιλό-θρον’ in itself models the very process of unplaiting to re-plait that has yielded this new verbal artifact. In Homer, the expression θρόνα ποικίλ’ is referentially connected to the “colorful sprinkling of flowers” that Andromache scatters into her web, a feature of the textile’s design as it is represented in the Iliad. Sappho reverses the order of noun and adjective, visibly breaking apart this Homeric “assemblage,” in a gesture that can be likened, metaphorically, to unweaving or unraveling 77 78 79

On avuncularity, and on reading Homer and Sappho side by side, see Chapter 1. Privitera (1967: 11–13) considers how Sappho’s coinage “reanimates” traditional Homeric epithets. See also Harvey 1957, Bonnano 1997, and Ferrari 2010: 164–165. Grand-Clément (2011: 461) rightly notes that in appealing to Aphrodite, Sappho is more interested in her capacity for weaving together various ruses (as is implied by doloplokos) than in her being “seated on a richly decorated throne”; the persuasive and erotic associations of flowers are fitting.

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an already woven entity.80 And, in so far as the act of epic narration in the Iliad is figured as a kind of pattern-weaving, Sappho’s unweaving of the pattern in Andromache’s diplax exemplifies her approach (qua poet) to Homeric epic.81 This, as I discuss in Chapter 1, is a distinctly “avuncular” approach, one in which Sappho links her own work to Homeric scenes and language rather than contesting, hierarchically, the older poet’s authority. In being put back together to form a distinctly Sapphic coinage (poikilothron’ ), the noun and adjective have had their original order transposed; the resulting verbal artifact thus serves as an epithet rather than a noun. It resonates as a repurposing rather than an allusion. Sappho has not simply incorporated a Homeric expression wholesale. She has plaited together (a form of play rather than work) preexisting strands, leaving the individual threads exposed, and making the process of “reparative weaving” visible on the surface of her own creation. A non-reparative style of intertextual interpretation might have argued that Sappho breaks up the Homeric assemblage in order to demonstrate her ability to one-up a poetic predecessor. I have resisted making that critical move here. If anything, Sappho has re-embodied in her lyrics the Homeric gestures of feminine handicraft, reaching beyond “Homer” into the world of the Iliad ’s female characters, and seemingly tracing her own artistic pedigree to their acts of poiēsis. In the Iliad (e.g., at 2.484–486), the Muses share their divine “eyewitness knowledge of the past” with select mortals.82 These firsthand accounts of the Muses are the highest form of knowledge within a Homeric epistemology. Mortals simply make do with the secondhand reportage of such events, that is, with “mere” kleos.83 By contrast, the Aphrodite of Sappho 1V is no more epistemically privileged than her mortal supplicant; Aphrodite is the one who asks Sappho what she suffers. The goddess is expected to appear in person. Nor is she in possession of the “script,” the ipsissima verba, that the Homeric Muse passes on to the inspired bard of epic. Sappho’s Aphrodite, unlike the Iliadic Muse, is a confidante, wise friend, and maternal ally.84 80

81 82 83 84

I use the term “assemblage” to indicate that the phrase θρόνα ποικίλ᾿, while not meeting the threshold for an epic formula, is recognizable as a semantic unit: one whose referentiality is to a material entity (i.e., the pattern-weave on Andromache’s loom). Nagy (2010: 278) argues that “the linking of the pattern-woven narrations of Helen and Andromache with the poetic narration of the Iliad is a matter of metonymy.” Ford 1992: 61. See, for example, Il. 2.484–487. For more on the category of “mere kleos” see the flyting episode in Iliad 20 between Aeneas and Achilles, as analyzed by Ford 1992: 64–67. She is a “mother” in so far as she occupies the “Dione” end of the Dione-Aphrodite equation; see further Chapter 4. On Sappho’s self-described relationship to the Muses, see fr. 150V and Hauser 2016: 141–146.

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In contradistinction to the heroic brand of kleos, with its privileging of an acoustic register of fame, the kleos that Sapphic poems imagine for themselves taps into tactile and visual registers of experience no less than aural. Metaphors for the art of song-making touch upon the crafting, reworking, and adornment of a preexisting repertoire. Moreover, the recomposition of that repertoire, as we are shown in the first poem of the collection, is always imminent, the goddess’ part, no less than Sappho’s own, being subject to the hazards of a real-time, future encounter, as we will explore further in Chapter 4. I have argued in this chapter that for Sappho, Homeric epic functions much like the fabrics and textiles that Sedgwick found herself drawn to, in her later years. From these raw materials, Sappho plaits epic-sounding epithets and repositions Homeric characters at somewhat unfamiliar angles relative to their Iliadic selves. Aphrodite doloplokos, a wily plaiter herself, becomes the Muse of Sappho’s avuncular poetics. And Homeric matter (objects as well as human and divine characters) press back in Sappho’s hands, showing us their own resiliency, their capacity to sustain both epic and lyric sensibilities in the minds of those of us who read them side by side.

Coda: Alcaeus 140V Before returning to Sappho’s Hymn to Aphrodite, the subject of Chapter 4, I want to look briefly at a poem by Alcaeus. This poem (fr. 140V) represents a very different, yet complementary, lyric reception of Homer, one where the martial artifacts of the Iliad are not re-plaited into new assemblages but allowed to remain recognizably what they were, even if in a somewhat degraded form. Alcaeus fr. 140V fetishizes the brightness of bronze armor. It is as if the Lydian chariots from Sappho fr. 16V had been emptied of their human cargo, and the weapons released from their human owners. What would these weapons tell us, if they were free of the mediating, meddling presence of human voice and body? We are first introduced to the brightness of the space itself – as if it were self-illuminating – and only then to the material through whose agency the room is lit. The “large house” (megas domos) glistens with light that emanates from the bronze weapons.85 In this respect, they

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There are likely at least two lines missing from the beginning of the poem. Most scholars now regard the setting for the poem as that of a private house or banquet hall; see Spelman 2015: 353n4 with reference to earlier literature.

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recall their epic antecedents from the Iliad which are also made of bronze (Alcaeus fr. 140.2–7V):86 μαρμαίρει δὲ̣ μέγας δόμος χάλκωι, παῖσα δ᾿ Ἄρηι κεκόσμηται στέγα λάμπραισιν κυνίαισι, κὰτ τᾶν λεῦκοι κατέπερθεν ἴππιοι λόφοι νεύοισιν, κεφάλαισιν ἄνδρων ἀγάλματα· And the large house gleams with bronze, and the entire ceiling has been adorned for Ares with shining dog-skin helmets, from the top of which white horse-hair tufts nod downward, adornments for the heads of men.

These are clearly helmets similar to those worn by Homeric heroes, but there is no clear source for their movement.87 If we compare to this the description of Paris arming himself in Iliad 3, where, after he places the κυνέη on his head, its horse-hair plume begins to nod menacingly from above (δεινὸν δὲ λόφος καθύπερθεν ἔνευεν, 3.337), we see how strange it is for the helmets in Alcaeus’ poem (helmets which are not being worn) to behave similarly. Our focus is drawn back once again to the objects themselves: their color, position, and movement. The helmets are bronze; the plumes nodding down from them are white. And the same adjectives (chalkios and lampros) carry over from the helmets to the objects we encounter next (7–9): χ̣άλ̣κια̣ι δ̣ὲ πασάλοις κρύπτοισι περικεί̣ μεναι λάμπραι κνάμιδες, ἔρκος ἰσχύρω βέλεος And bronze, bright greaves hide the pegs around which they hang, a barrier against a strong arrow

Rather than “nodding,” as the plumes do, the bronze greaves “hide” the pegs from which they hang. But why the delay between the initial adjective “bronze” (χ̣άλ̣κια̣ι) and the “greaves” (κνάμιδες) it modifies? Perhaps the gleaming bronze overwhelms the speaker’s senses, the luminosity of the metal being the first thing to catch his eye; only later is its surface shine attached to a concrete referent. The dynamism of objects hitting, assailing, 86 87

For example, ἔντεα μαρμαίροντα (Il. 12.195); χάλκεα μαρμαίροντα (Il. 16.663–664, 18.130–131, 23.26–27); τεύχεα μαρμαίροντα (Il. 18.616–617). Kenny (2019: 152) proposes that because in Homer νεύω is a gesture used to “signal assent or mark a promise” its transference to the helmets “is a minimal, but powerfully binding, expression of intention.”

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pushing back defensively against one another is conveyed in the epicsounding expression, ἔρκος ἰσχύρω βέλεος (“barrier against a strong arrow”).88 Where has this arrow come from, with its evocation of battles past? In a previous life, the helmets and greaves were brash defenders of men’s bodies. Now they hang suspended from the walls, empty and still.89 Physical suspension, a gleam of metal. Whether they were mounted yesterday, or have been hanging from their pegs for a century or more, the armor seems timeless. Like quasi-magical objects from the mythical past, their sheen suggests that they have arrived, untarnished, from the Homeric realm of combat. They hold the viewer’s gaze. Perhaps they have even inspired Alcaeus to compose these verses. According to Athenaeus (xiv 627ab), who preserves the fragment, Alcaeus “places greater value on manly achievements than poetic ones, since he was more devoted to war than was strictly necessary” (πρότερα τῶν κατὰ ποιητικὴν τὰ κατὰ τὴν ἀνδρείαν τίθεται, μᾶλλον τοῦ δέοντος πολεμικὸς γενόμενος). Henry Spelman (2015) suggests that Athenaeus’ introductory remarks have had a distorting effect on the critical reception of this fragment, by making it seem as if the song’s entire reason for being is to serve as a call to arms. “Alcaeus fragment 140 is not a goad to immediate, pragmatic action, as scholars have taken it to be,” Spelman (2015: 356) argues, “but an expression of dedication to an ongoing effort sustained over time.” Indeed, reinforcing this sense of a commitment sustained over time, we might note also the subtle diachronic shift that takes place as the speaker moves his gaze from ceiling to floor (10–15): θόρρακές τε νέω λίνω κόϊλαί τε κὰτ ἄσπιδες βεβλήμεναι· πὰρ δὲ Χαλκίδικαι σπάθαι, πὰρ δὲ ζώματα πόλλα καὶ κυπάσσιδες. τῶν οὐκ ἔστι λάθεσθ᾿, ἐπεὶ δὴ πρώτιστ᾿ ὐπὰ τὦργον ἔσταμεν τόδε.

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and corselets of new linen, and hollow shields, thrown on the floor. And (lying) beside them the sword blades from Chalkis. And beside them many war belts and tunics. It has not been possible to forget these, ever since we first undertook this task.

The shields and corselets are strewn on the floor below, in no particular order. These corselets are made of cloth, and the shields are hollow – “hollow” 88 89

See Kenny 2019 on the animism of these weapons. As Clay (2013: 21) observes, “the only movement in the poem is the movement of light on bronze.”

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(κοῖλος) is not an epithet used of Homeric shields. Helmets, greaves, corselets, shields: items which, if assembled, would create the semblance of a person. But on the walls and dispersed on the ground, the weapons are merely discarded items, an assemblage dismantled. The term spathē is, according to Denys Page (1955: 218), “used of a sword elsewhere only in comic or colloquial writing.” The movement traced by the poet’s eye (from walls to floor) in this sense mirrors the descent from a heroic to a contemporary, more prosaic linguistic register.90 As Dylan Kenny (2019) has recently argued, the poem combines two modes of description, at first (lines 3–10) emulating and evoking Homeric-style weapons, and then conjuring something much more mundane: “We move from a world of bronze to a mess of linen, iron, and skin, from characteristically epic equipment to objects at the margins of, even excluded from, the epic world.”91 The metal used to make the blades has come from Chalkis. But even though Chalkis is associated with the invention of bronze, by Alcaeus’ time “Chalkidian metal would not have meant bronze, but iron.”92 As we scan the items lying next to one another on the floor, we seem to be moving horizontally through space rather than diachronically through time. Likewise, the “belts” and “tunics” bring us fully into the poet’s own world. And the song ends (whether provisionally or because Athenaeus simply does not quote the rest) with a return to the “deed” (ergon) that unites the speaker and the community of men (presumably) whom he addresses. If Spelman (2015) is correct that the final two verses are a reminder to stay committed to a longer-term collective action, then the diachronic sweep of the weapons surveyed would reinforce, for the addressees, their sense of belonging to a community of warriors with deep roots in the past. Spelman (2015: 355) accordingly insists that οὐκ ἔστι λάθεσθαι in line 14 should not be read as an exhortation but as a statement: “It is impossible to forget” rather than “Let us not forget.” Strictly speaking, he is correct. And yet, if forgetting were not in fact imminent, there would be little need to proclaim its impossibility.93 The very utterance suggests that it may already be too late. Perhaps in the manner of Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” these weapons evoke the desire for the kudos and kleos of earlier times, while simultaneously attesting to the arrival of conditions that are less than ideal for achieving such lasting glory. 90 92 93

On this effect, see especially Burnett 1983: 124–125. 91 Kenny 2019: 152. Kenny 2019: 153. See also Page 1955: 220n2 and Bakhuizen 1976: 43. Clay (2013: 24) reads this line as an exhortation by Alcaeus to his audience to recall the arms in Odysseus’ storeroom at Od. 22.99–115.

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The ergon may be something that will bring fulfillment, but the fact that the aspiration itself needs reinforcing through the mediation of song points to an alternative (and much less optimistic) future. The song’s movement, moreover, from the glistening bronze on high to the linen corselets and hollow shields strewn below traces a narrative arc of decline. While the glories of the past hang suspended overhead, something to aspire to by turning one’s gaze skyward, the “present” (in the form of the contemporary weapons) lies scattered on the ground. Were these shields abandoned as their owners fled, pell-mell, more intent on saving themselves than preserving their collective reputation? We have no way of knowing (though the participial form βεβλήμεναι suggests that the newer weapons have been thrown down, perhaps in some haste). Alcaeus does not contextualize the scene he sketches. But brightness shines from above (from the bronze, from the past), while down below, at the level of the singer and his audience, there is disorder and confusion. The weapons are randomly disassembled, creating a somewhat humdrum visual effect. In her reuse of epic matter, Sappho irreverently breaks with the past. Her poetic acts of bricolage suggest a playful, regenerative attitude toward Homeric tradition; epic’s distinctive formulaic phrases and iconic objects do not lie stored up or suspended in a mausoleum. They are alive in and to the present, available for dismantling and repurposing. The weapons of Alcaeus fr. 140V are, by contrast, still striving to reenact the past. For Alcaeus, Homeric weapons represent the idealized form. The past is a superior realm – just out of reach. The space of song, and of domos, is where past and present converge. It may simply be a question of directing one’s gaze upward to see the direct line of descent from the dusty battlefields of Troy to the present-day combat zone of Mytilene, where the fight rages on.

chapter 4

Aphrodite and the Poetics of Shame

Shame – living, as it does, on and in the muscles and capillaries of the face – seems to be uniquely contagious from one person to another. And the contagiousness of shame is only facilitated by its anamorphic, protean susceptibility to new expressive grammars. (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling)

“The art of losing,” writes Heather Love, can be seen as “a particularly queer art.”1 Proclaiming the need for a politics “forged in the image of exile, of refusal, even of failure,” Love eloquently makes the case for attending to the failures, shame, and secrecy which more optimistic and future-oriented approaches to queer history tend to elide, if only by relegating them to the past.2 Her emphasis is on the feelings that have not been recognized as having political agency or utility. “Backward feelings,” Love (2007: 27) observes, “show up the inadequacy of queer narratives of progress.” I devote this chapter to what Love calls “the queer art of losing” and its attendant affect, shame. And I do so with the goal of reframing intertextuality as something more than a self-authorizing gesture. Reading is an experience that encompasses discomfort and pain as well as pleasure. I want to open up a space here where Sappho’s listeners can be imagined as surrendering to their feelings of vulnerability, a space where they may feel sympathy for, and find common ground with, the “losers,” the characters whom the Iliad and its readers have unjustly dismissed as “weak” or queer.3 1 2 3

Love 2007: 24. On queer failure, see also Halberstam 2011, the section on “Dawn’s Failed Prayer” in Chapter 5, and the section on “Helen and the (Queer) Art of Forgetting” in Chapter 7. Love 2007: 71. See, for example, Rissman 1983: 10: “Sappho’s extremely competent love-warrior Aphrodite is dissociated from her weak counterpart in Iliad V” (my emphasis); or Snyder 1997: 9, on the “helpless ninny that Aphrodite is sometimes made out to be in Homer’s Iliad (e.g., 5.330–430, where she is wounded).” On Paris as a queer or proto-queer character see Warwick 2019a, Lesser 2018 and 2023: 95–98, and Chapter 7.

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I thus dwell in what follows not only on the shared language that links these two poets but also on their very different approaches to failure.4 I will focus in particular on certain aspects of Aphrodite’s character that inform the Iliad ’s own framing of failure: how she vacillates between maternal and filial stances in Iliad 5, and how this movement shapes our understanding of Sappho 1V, where Aphrodite plays the role of divine surrogate mother to the lovesick singer. And I should make clear at the outset that my interests align with the way theorists such as Heather Love, José Esteban Muñoz, and Jack Halberstam have recognized the queer potential in what mainstream culture would characterize simply as failure. Alluding to James C. Scott’s “the weapons of the weak” (1987: 29), Halberstam argues that in recent years behaviors such as inaction and passivity have been reanalyzed as deliberate strategies for resisting power: “We can [. . .] recognize failure as a way of refusing to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline and as a form of critique.”5 Where this sort of failure becomes “queer” is in its potential to create alternative, sustaining modes of responding to mainstream, heteronormative culture. Lee Edelman (2004), for example, embraces the negativity of nonreproductive futurism, while Halberstam (2011: 70) suggests that both political and aesthetic possibilities “lie dormant” in normative notions of failure. When I refer to Aphrodite’s failure on the Iliadic battlefield, therefore, or to Dawn’s failure to ask for agelessness for her mortal lover in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (see Chapter 5), I, too, am inviting my readers to consider how Sappho reframes such episodes as queerly generative for her own lyrics. Styled as a prayer within which the poet impersonates both herself (i.e., a woman named Sappho) and the goddess of love, the Hymn to Aphrodite (Sappho 1V) opens the first of Sappho’s several books of poetry. Dione’s words of consolation to her wounded daughter in the Iliad provide the model for Aphrodite’s consolation of the similarly injured Sappho.6 “Courage, my child, and persevere, though you are deeply distressed” (τέτλαθι, τέκνον ἐμόν, καὶ ἀνάσχεο κηδομένη περ, 5.382), says Dione to Aphrodite, who has taken refuge on Olympus after her humiliating encounter with an overly zealous Diomedes. Barely known outside of her appearance in this episode with Aphrodite, Dione bears the feminized form of Zeus’s name (in the genitive).7 But her initial consolatory words gesture 4 5 7

As Love (2007: 71) reminds us, “engaging with and using the experience of failure as a resource is critical to the construction of a model of political subjectivity that we can all live with.” Halberstam 2011: 88. 6 Rissman 1983: 10. Dione is mentioned also in Hesiod’s Theogony (lines 17 and 353), and in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (93); but at Hes. Th. 17 she may be an Oceanid, not the mother of Aphrodite, as is pointed out by

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toward divine–human interactions: “We gods, many of us who have Olympian homes, have had to endure things from mortal men,” she explains to her daughter (5.383–384).8 Dione speaks with prophetic insight, as if she could already hear the future conversation her daughter will have with Sappho. In the Hymn to Aphrodite the singer Sappho occupies the Iliadic Aphrodite’s position as the wounded female, unequipped to meet the strenuous demands of combat. For her part, Aphrodite is depicted as taking on the consolatory role of Dione, becoming a sort of maternal figure to the poet.9 For Sappho’s audience, the smiling Aphrodite of the Hymn to Aphrodite (μειδιαίσαισ’ ἀθανάτωι προσώπωι, 1.14V) comes directly out of Homeric epic.10 As Rissman observes, Sappho evokes a specifically Homeric Aphrodite through the words παῖ Δίος (1.2), μειδιαίσαισα and χρύσιον (1.8). Each modifier in Sappho corresponds to a Homeric original: παῖ Δίος to Διὸς θυγάτηρ;11 μειδιαίσαισ’ to the epic φιλομμειδής, and χρύσιον to χρυσέην Ἀφροδίτην (“golden Aphrodite”).12 But listeners of Homer who are acquainted with Sappho will hear the Sapphic resonances already in Homer. The smile on Aphrodite’s immortal face in Sappho 1V gestures to the smiling Aphrodite of Homeric tradition, while also subtly assuring us that the goddess has finally been healed of her shame. Aphrodite’s smile indexes and at the same time responds to its epic antecedents. In the Hymn to Aphrodite (Sappho 1 Voigt), goddess and mortal woman enjoy a harmonious relationship: Sappho suffers often from the pangs of unrequited love and Aphrodite attends to her, offering words of support (and perhaps much more).13 But if Iliad 5 provides the model for Aphrodite as confidante, we will also find, in the Aphrodite of Iliad 3, a precedent for the altogether less benign portrayal of the goddess. Both the consoling and the vindictive Aphrodite of Sappho’s lyrics have roots

a scholiast (Διώνην: οὐ τὴν τῆς Ἀφροδίτης μητέρα, ἀλλὰ μίαν τῶν Ὠκεανίδων, τουτέστι τῶν Τιτανίδων). On the injuries and mortal vulnerabilities of the Homeric gods, Garcia 2013: 221–229. 9 Schlesier 2011: 425–426, noting also that Sappho may be assimilating herself to the figure of Achilles at the moment when his mother, Thetis, asks what has caused his grief (Il. 1.362). 10 On Homeric φιλομμειδής, see Boedeker 1974: 23–36; on its Sapphic appropriations, see Longo 1964, Stanley 1976: 307, and Rissman 1983: 11–13. 11 This form of address situates Sappho’s Aphrodite within the Homeric (as opposed to the Hesiodic) tradition (Schlesier 2011: 417). 12 Rissman 1983: 3 and 13. “Golden” does not modify Aphrodite in Sappho 1V but its placement between λίποισα and ἦλθες suggests epic χρυσέη Ἀφροδίτη (Rissman 1983: 15). 13 On the possible use of magic to help Sappho with her erotic woes, see Cameron 1939: 9, Winkler 1990: 172–174, and Petropoulos 1993. 8

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extending back to Homer. Sappho’s creations in this way invite us to revisit the goddess’ experiences with shame in the Iliad. I will consider several different Homeric episodes. In Iliad 3, the interaction between Aphrodite and Helen reminds us that Homeric Aphrodite is not averse to shaming a mortal woman whom she has favored in the past. From there I turn to Aphrodite’s own memorable experience of being wounded and humiliated by a mortal soldier in Iliad 5 and by Zeus in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite; I argue that Aphrodite’s shame, from her encounter with Diomedes, reemerges in the dialogic back and forth between “Sappho” and Aphrodite in Sappho’s Hymn to Aphrodite. The chapter closes with a reconsideration of Winkler’s influential depiction of the “double consciousness” of Sappho’s lyrics. In light of our close readings, I will suggest some ways in which we may want to expand upon Winkler’s framework, while also nuancing the notion of weakness that has carried over from the Iliad into modern scholarly discussions of Homer’s Aphrodite.

Shame Burns Brightest in the Eyes Aphrodite incites lust in gods, men, women, and all manner of creatures on land, sea, and sky. It is her “works” (erga) that the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite sets out to celebrate: “Tell me, Muse, about the deeds of muchgolden Kyprian Aphrodite,” it begins. Taming is what Aphrodite does to those who fall under her sway.14 It is an action (and a verb) that is also ascribed to Sappho’s Aphrodite. The singer of Sappho 1V launches her prayer with the plea that the goddess not “tame” her heart: μή μ᾿ ἄσαισι μηδ᾿ ὀνίαισι δάμνα, / πότνια, θῦμον, 3–4 (“Do not tame me in my heart, goddess-lady, with cares and pains”).15 But in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Aphrodite is the one whose heart has been subdued: Zeus injects her with lust for Anchises, and the moment she lays eyes on him she is infatuated (56–57): “Then, as soon as she saw him, the sweet-smiling Aphrodite was seized by desire, and longing violently overcame her mind (ἐκπάγλως δὲ κατὰ φρένας ἵμερος εἷλεν).” The adverb attests to the force of her desire.

14

15

Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 3–4: καὶ τ᾿ ἐδαμάσσατο φῦλα καταθνητῶν ἀνθρώπων, / οἰωνούς τε διιπετέας καὶ θηρία πάντα (“And she tamed the tribes of mortal humans, and winged birds, and all animals”). Rissman (1983: 4–5) points to the parallel “taming” language in the Apate of Zeus (at Il. 14.198–199, where Hera seeks Aphrodite’s help).

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Indeed, ἐκπάγλως, the adverb used to characterize the sudden onset of the goddess’ passion in the Homeric Hymn, recalls the very language Iliadic Aphrodite uses when she threatens Helen with retraction of her “friendship.”16 In Iliad 3, the strength of the goddess’ love for Helen will be matched by the animus she promises to turn against her, if the mortal woman disobeys her. In the Homeric Hymn, Aphrodite cannot yet know how her affair with Anchises will end, but the adverb warns us to expect an emotional recoil of similar intensity to the passion conceived. Sappho fr. 15V shows us the cruel side to Aphrodite’s persona in Sappho. The speaker mentions a goddess whom she (?) hopes that someone (perhaps Doricha) may find “very harsh” (accepting Wilamowitz’s restoration of πι[κρότατ]α̣ν in line 9).17 Sappho’s readers may have linked the “harsh” Kypris of fr. 15V to the Homeric Aphrodite’s upbraiding of Helen in Iliad 3. Just as she will intervene to save her son in Iliad 5, Aphrodite jumps in to rescue Paris, her mortal protégé, as he is about to be choked by his own helmet in Book 3. The duel with Menelaos has not gone well for him: Menelaos drags Paris toward the Achaeans when Aphrodite intervenes (3.371–372). After she has settled him in his fragrant chamber, Aphrodite goes to the high wall to retrieve Helen. She disguises herself as an old woman, taking on the appearance of one of Helen’s favorite woolworkers from home. But there are features of her divinity that she cannot conceal.18 Helen finds herself in awe of the old woman’s “beautiful neck” (περικαλλέα δειρήν, 396), and lovely chest, along with her “brightly flashing eyes” (ὄμματα μαρμαίροντα, 397).19 The ancient critic Aristarchus athetized the entire scene to which this description belongs.20 I assume here that these lines are authentic, and I draw attention in particular to the goddess’ penetrating gaze. Could her sparkling eyes be a sign of Aphrodite’s effort to control with her gaze the mortal woman’s affect? The eyes, famously, are the part of the body most closely associated 16

17

18 19 20

Il. 3.414–417. See Richardson 2010 ad loc. noting both Aphrodite’s use of ἔκπαγλα φίλησα “of her fondness for Helen at Il. 3.415, when she wants her to return to Paris,” and that the same expression occurs at 5.423 “in mockery by Athene of Aphrodite for her fondness for the Trojans (τοὺς νῦν ἔκπαγλα φίλησεν), after her wounding by Diomedes.” On Aphrodite’s affair with Anchises in the Homeric Hymn, see also Chapter 5. D’Alessio (2018: 41) comments that in its tone, the speaker’s wish “resembles a curse more than an ordinary prayer: ‘may she find you very harsh, or ‘harsher.’” Robbins (2013: 131–132) argues that contemporary scholars have downplayed the role of eros-fueled suffering and pain in Sappho’s lyrics. On this scene, see Canevaro 2018: 230–231. According to Cyrino 2010: 54, μαρμαίρω is elsewhere used to describe the “light glinting from metal” (i.e., from Achilles’ new armor at Il. 18.617) or the “gleam” of Zeus’s thunderbolt at Hes. Th. 699. See Schironi 2018: 481–484 on Aristarchus’ rationale for athetizing Il. 3.396–418, which she interprets as paradigmatic of his scholarly modus operandi.

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with the contagion of desire. This is no less true of Aphrodite herself, as she falls in love with Anchises, than for anyone else, divine or mortal. As Silvan Tomkins has noted, shame is a reflexive experience, one where the usually clear distinction between self and other is lost: In contrast to all other affects, shame is an experience of the self by the self. At the moment when the self feels ashamed, it is felt as a sickness within the self. Shame is the most reflexive of affects in that the phenomenological distinction between the subject and object of shame is lost.21

Tomkins also observes that the self “lives in the face, and within the face the self burns brightest in the eyes.”22 Keeping Tomkins’ observations in mind, we can visualize Aphrodite boring with her intense stare into Helen’s body and soul, as if willing her to resurrect a desire she no longer feels for Paris.23 Relevant here also are Sedgwick’s observations (building on those of Tomkins) on the face as the locus of the shame-humiliation affect. The epigraph to this chapter derives from Sedgwick’s reflections on the contagiousness of shame, which takes its most visible form “in the muscles and capillaries of the face.” Efforts to mask these physiological symptoms often include lowering the head and eyelids. But as Sedgwick notes, the more one tries to conceal feelings of shame, the more excruciatingly visible they become. The blush deepens as shame intensifies. Those witnessing this dilemma may find themselves feeling empathetic shame, sharing in the intense discomfort of the sufferer whose face has betrayed them. Verbal abuse raises the stakes even higher. Aphrodite rebukes Helen in the Iliad for refusing to return to Paris, and is in turn chided by her: “For that reason,” Helen challenges the goddess, “have you appeared by my side intent on deceiving me?” (τοὔνεκα δὴ νῦν δεῦρο δολοφρονέουσα παρέστης; 3.405). In Helen’s use of dolophroneousa (405, deceit-minded) we may hear the distinct echo of Sappho’s address to the same goddess as doloploke (at 1.2).24 But what comes next is nothing like the affectionate banter from Sappho 1V. Homeric Helen mocks Aphrodite, suggesting that she should prostrate herself before the mortal man and give up her divine status (“Do not return by foot to Olympus,” 407). To this, Aphrodite reacts with swift anger (3.414–417):

21 23 24

Tomkins 1963: 133. 22 Sedgwick and Frank 1995: 136. Earlier in Book 3, Iris had placed in Helen’s thumos “sweet desire” (γλυκὺν ἵμερον, 139) for her first husband, her native city, and her parents (compare lines 139–140 with Sappho 16V). Rissman 1983: 7.

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μή μ᾿ ἔρεθε, σχετλίη, μὴ χωσαμένη σε μεθείω, τὼς δέ σ᾿ ἀπεχθήρω, ὡς νῦν ἔκπαγλα φίλησα, μέσσῳ δ᾿ ἀμφοτέρων μητίσομαι ἔχθεα λυγρά, Τρώων καὶ Δαναῶν, σὺ δέ κεν κακὸν οἶτον ὄληαι. Do not provoke me, you wretched woman, lest, angered, I drop you, and I hate you just as vehemently as now I love you, and I devise hateful sorrows between the two sides, the Trojans and the Danaans, and you die a wicked death.

What does it mean to love someone ἔκπλαγα (“terribly,” “vehemently,” “exceedingly”)? To such a degree that it causes pain – and fear? From the verb ἐκπλήσσω (“to knock out of one’s senses”) the adverb suggests that even in her benefaction Aphrodite is terrifying.25 When she threatens Helen with ἔχθεα λυγρά (“hateful sorrows”), it is enough to silence the mortal woman. Helen covers her head with a veil and follows the goddess without speaking.26 The gesture of placing a robe or veil over her head (βῆ δὲ κατασχομένη ἑανῷ ἀργῆτι φαεινῷ, 419) indicates Helen’s desire to render herself invisible to the world, a feeling that, as we have observed, is closely identified with shame. Her downcast gaze, her silence, and selfveiling – all are clearly efforts at concealing shame.27 Those who have investigated the phenomenon of aidōs in ancient Greece know well that it manifests not only in verbal rhetoric but also in, or as, certain bodily postures, the most familiar in fact being that of the lowered head.28 Women, moreover, may exhibit aidōs by veiling themselves against the obtrusive gaze of (male) onlookers. But it is possible to encounter these bodily gestures in our texts without the word aidōs ever being used. Alex Purves (2019) has demonstrated that significant patterns of gesture in Homer are not always flagged by the exact same word(s). Perhaps for this reason, Helen’s self-veiling in Iliad 3 is not typically counted among the instances of aidōs worthy of a closer look, for the term itself is never used of her.29 My contention here, and throughout this book, is that Sappho was attentive not 25 26

27 28 29

On this adverb, see Worman 1997: 165. Il. 3.418–420: ῝Ως ἔφατ᾿, ἔδεισεν δ᾿ Ἑλένη Διὸς ἐκγεγαυῖα, / βῆ δὲ κατασχομένη ἑανῷ ἀργῆτι φαεινῷ / σιγῇ, πάσας δὲ Τρῳὰς λάθεν· ἦρχε δὲ δαίμων. (“So she spoke, and Zeus-born Helen was afraid, and she walked in silence, covering her head with a bright white veil, escaping the notice of all the Trojan women, for the goddess led her.”) See Worman 2002: 104 on how Helen’s veiled figure is both “singularly visible (i.e., immortally bright) but also difficult to see.” See Llewellyn-Jones 2003: 165–180 and Cairns 1993: 120–126, on women’s aidōs and sexuality. Compare Llewellyn-Jones 2003: 155, reading Helen’s gesture here as an expression of the “shame she feels for abandoning the people and the places she once loved,” rather than as a reaction to Aphrodite’s biting words.

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only to the Iliad ’s verbal echoes but also to the telling gestures of Homeric characters and their affect-filled interactions. Helen’s shame elicits our attention and also our sympathy on its own. But it does so all the more when placed side by side with Sappho’s Hymn to Aphrodite. Affect creates a bond between the two Aphrodites, and correspondingly between Sappho and Homer. The shame endured by Aphrodite in epic (in both Iliad 5 and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite) appears to grant her insight into Sappho’s lovesickness, while the goddess’ maternal affection for the singer recalls the similarly close (but fraught) relationship between Aphrodite and Helen in the Iliad. Dione’s embrace comforts her injured daughter in the Iliad. In just the same way, Sappho’s lyrics offer reparative healing to those who, like Iliadic Helen, may have borne humiliation in silence. Her lyrics also allow listeners to partake in the messiness and rawness of those experiences. Like shame, “works of art . . . can trigger passionate attachments and sponsor new forms of identification, subjectivity, and perceptual possibility.”30 Where others have turned away, Sappho invites us to linger over these raw emotions and the reparative gestures to which they give rise. At the crux of the suffering that Aphrodite endures is the experience of shame – of being ridiculed and mocked and of having her loss of face made public. On the battlefield with Diomedes, Aphrodite is physically injured and banished from the mortal sphere of war; in the Homeric Hymn, she is erotically shamed for falling in love with a mortal man. It is a fate she had successfully eluded until the present moment, even as she drove her fellow immortals to similar depths of humiliation.31 But shame – paradoxically, perhaps – is not a purely negative emotion. Recent research on this affect, inspired by Tomkins (and by Sedgwick’s reintroduction of Tomkins to a broader readership), highlights its more productive aspects, including the seemingly counterintuitive idea that shame is predicated on interest.32 As Tomkins puts it, “Without positive affect, there can be no shame: only a scene that offers you enjoyment or engages your interest can make you blush.”33 Commenting on the intertwinement of shame and interest, Elspeth Probyn (2005: 28) proposes that “blushing is the body calling out its interest.”34 And Sally Munt remarks that shame “is an adaptive emotion

30 31 32 34

Felski 2015: 17. See, for example, HHAphr. 49 where Aphrodite is described as “laughing sweetly” with regard to the way that she “mixes” immortals with mortal lovers of the opposite sex. See also my discussion of shame in Chapter 2. 33 Sedgwick and Frank 1995: 22. See also Sedgwick and Frank 1995: 22–23.

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across times and between spaces.”35 As we, then, turn our attention to Aphrodite’s wounding in the Iliad (the epic provocation) and Sappho’s lyric response to that “failure,” I want us to keep in mind the politics and the poetics of shame underpinning the singer’s appeals to the goddess of love.

Epic Provocation, Lyric Response Aphrodite’s own wounding takes place in the middle of Diomedes’ aristeia in Iliad 5. Early on in this book, Athena orders Diomedes to avoid fighting all the gods with the exception of Aphrodite, whose vulnerability apparently does not afford her the same protection against mortal aggression.36 In inviting Diomedes to pursue Aphrodite, Athena underlines the latter’s filial subordination to Zeus. Nevertheless, it is as a mother that Aphrodite will be attacked. Her son Aeneas is at risk of being killed by Diomedes (who has just killed Pandaros). If Aphrodite had not keenly observed this (εἰ μὴ ἄρ᾿ ὀξὺ νόησε Διὸς θυγάτηρ Ἀφροδίτη, 5.312), Aeneas would surely have died. In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the goddess prophesizes to her human consort (at 196–197) that he will have a long-lived and successful line of progeny. In the Iliad, no such predictions are made, but Aphrodite wastes no time in wrapping her arms around her dear son and tucking him into the fold of her bright peplos (5.314–317): ἀμφὶ δ᾿ ἑὸν φίλον υἱὸν ἐχεύατο πήχεε λευκώ, πρόσθε δέ οἱ πέπλοιο φαεινοῦ πτύγμ᾿ ἐκάλυψεν, ἕρκος ἔμεν βελέων, μή τις Δαναῶν ταχυπώλων χαλκὸν ἐνὶ στήθεσσι βαλὼν ἐκ θυμὸν ἕλοιτο. She draped her white arms around her dear son, and in front of him she placed the fold of her shining robe, to be a defense against missiles, lest any of the Danaans with swift horses take his life by striking bronze through his chest.

Although it is being likened here to a shield, Aphrodite’s dress is actually an extension of the bodily embrace in which she wraps her mortal son; as such it expresses the goddess’ maternal aspect.37 Aphrodite has been introduced to us 35

36 37

As Munt (2007: 28) observes, “in researching the material effects of shame upon various habitus, I became tremendously moved to discover the riches of what shame stimulated, to wonder at why it sometimes ‘didn’t take’, to take notice of its resistances, and to marvel at the enduring human aptitude to mutate shame into joy.” See Il. 5.129–132. Murnaghan (1992: 250) suggests that the maternal care Aphrodite extends to her grown son, in imitation of gestational nurture, effectively infantilizes him within the Iliad. On the significance of Aphrodite’s gesture, see also Monsacré 1984: 88 and Warwick 2019a: 13.

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just lines before this as daughter of Zeus (312). But in an enjambment, she is called, at 313, a mother (Διὸς θυγάτηρ Ἀφροδίτη, / μήτηρ, ἥ μιν ὕπ᾿ Ἀγχίσῃ τέκε βουκολέοντι, 312–313). When she herself is wounded, she will revert to her filial role, seeking support and healing from the arms of her own mother. But in the present scene, even while being formally identified as Zeus’s daughter, she fully embodies her maternal self, preempting the potential violence of the battlefield and holding up her dress (a notably feminine article of clothing) as a defensive weapon.38 Our attention is drawn to the “fold” of this dress (πτύγμα, 315) – a potentially significant detail when you recall that Sappho’s Aphrodite is invoked, at the start of Sappho 1V, as poikilothron’. This epithet, as we saw in Chapter 3, may refer to the colorful pattern-weave of her dress. The Iliad underlines that it is in the fold of her “bright dress” (πέπλοιο φαεινοῦ, 5.315) that she envelopes Aeneas. The description of Aphrodite’s dress becomes a Sapphic effect within the Iliad, one to which we are attuned because of reading Homer alongside Sappho. As we saw in the last chapter, both goddesses and mortal women may “arm” themselves by dressing in textiles with poikilic qualities. In this case, however, rather than displaying her strength, Aphrodite’s shield-dress, her weapon made of cloth, underlines her vulnerability. Aphrodite’s lovely garment, as it turns out, is hardly robust enough to protect her own body from injury. No sooner has she spirited Aeneas out of danger than Diomedes comes after her and easily punctures the robe that the Graces had made for her (337–338). The same robe, this time in all its ambrosia-scented delicacy, does nothing to protect Aphrodite from Diomedes’ bronze spear, which pierces the flesh of her wrist, just above the palm; ichor, the blood of the gods, seeps out. Aphrodite utters a sharp cry and drops her son, who is caught by Apollo, who hides him in a dark cloud. And Diomedes opens his mouth to taunt Aphrodite (5.348–349). In other hexametric contexts, Aphrodite belongs to the pre-Olympian generation of the Titans, but in the Iliad she is Zeus’s daughter. And it is as the daughter of Zeus that Diomedes addresses her, echoing the narrator’s description of her. He goes on, moreover, to denigrate her sex, referring to her as a beguiler of “defenseless women,” the only creatures upon whom she effectively uses her battle tactics. If she dares to venture back into battle, he predicts that she will shudder even while just listening to tales of war such as the Iliad itself proffers (5.350–351). Aphrodite, we are told, is terribly hurt by these words. Rather than stand up for herself, she slinks away in 38

Warwick (2019a) demonstrates that maternity in the Iliad is “to a large extent exempt from many of the other negative connotations associated with femininity” (11).

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shame (5.352): Ὣς ἔφαθ᾿, ἡ δ᾿ ἀλύουσ᾿ ἀπεβήσετο, τείρετο δ᾿ αἰνῶς (“So he spoke, but quivering, she walked away, for she was terribly distressed”). The intensity of her pain is communicated in both her bodily posture (she is trembling slightly) and in the narrator’s explanation of her retreat. The verb τείρω indicates a wearing down, causing pain to body and mind: Aphrodite experiences this to an excessive degree (τείρετο δ᾿ αἰνῶς).39 Yet what transpires in the Iliad as a tale of weakness and defeat will get spun very differently by Sappho. The concept of “queer failure” introduced earlier helps us place the traumatic dismissal of the Iliadic Aphrodite in a more positive light. The first thing to notice is that it is Diomedes’ act of violence that catalyzes the alternative world that will come to be inhabited by Sappho’s Aphrodite. His unjust dismissal of her creates the injury and traumatic rupture but, so, too, the opening from which Sappho’s deity emerges. Let us take a closer look now at the language with which Diomedes insults Aphrodite (5.347–352): τῇ δ’ ἐπὶ μακρὸν ἄϋσε βοὴν ἀγαθὸς Διομήδης· “εἶκε, Διὸς θύγατερ, πολέμου καὶ δηϊοτῆτος· ἦ οὐχ ἅλις ὅττι γυναῖκας ἀνάλκιδας ἠπεροπεύεις; εἰ δὲ σύ γ’ ἐς πόλεμον πωλήσεαι, ἦ τέ σ’ ὀΐω ῥιγήσειν πόλεμόν γε καὶ εἴ χ’ ἑτέρωθι πύθηαι.” Ὣς ἔφαθ’, ἣ δ’ ἀλύουσ’ ἀπεβήσετο, τείρετο δ’ αἰνῶς·

350

And at her, Diomedes, good at the war cry, shouted loudly: “Retreat, daughter of Zeus, from war and destruction. Is it not enough for you that you cajole strengthless women? But if you still must make war your business, indeed I think you will shudder even if you hear about it somewhere else.” So he spoke. But quivering, she walked away, for she was terribly distressed.

Why the particular focus here on “hearing about” (πυθέσθαι) war? Diomedes not only demeans the goddess, he includes in his put-down the whole race of “strengthless, unwarlike women” (γυναῖκας ἀνάλκιδας, 349) whom Aphrodite “cajoles” (ἠπεροπεύεις, 349).40 Being called ἄναλκις (without alkē, the warrior’s trademark defensive strength) is not an unusual insult in the Iliad, but it is almost universally applied to cowardly men, men who have not shown their best face in battle.41 Diomedes’ insult is 39

40 41

At this point, Iris takes her away from the throng, wracked with pain, and her beautiful skin darkened in color (μελαίνετο δὲ χρόα καλόν, 354). Kirk (1985: 97) suggests that Iris leads Aphrodite out of battle “in agony and with her skin darkening with the blood-like substance.” Aphrodite seems almost human in her physical vulnerability (see Garcia 2013: 174–180); on gods experiencing “immortal death” in the Iliad, Purves 2019: 57–59. See Winkler 1981: 69 (=Winkler 1996: 94). For example, Aigisthos, at Od. 3.310, or the Achaeans when they succumb to fear: Il. 15.326.

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different in that he includes all women, regardless of whether they are excellent or substandard representatives of their sex. The implication is that women are cowardly by nature, as is the goddess who leads them astray – Aphrodite, who has just shown herself unfit for combat. This is one of those moments that we can identify (with Halberstam) as having tremendous queer potential.42 For what the Iliad represents as an acute failure, Sappho seizes on as generative for her lyrics. Aphrodite’s cowardice and retreat not only get rehabilitated and reframed by Sappho in 1V but the Iliadic goddess’ attendant feelings of shame and humiliation will be processed very differently by the Iliad ’s Sappho-influenced readers (in line with their genre-inflected understanding of “failure”). Diomedes amplifies the insult when he says that Aphrodite is not even equipped to be a listener of Homer: she would shudder, he assumes, while merely hearing about war. The verb he uses for finding out about war, πυθέσθαι, casts this insult in metapoetic terms. As a verb that appears in contexts where epic itself is being counted on to transmit the memory of certain events to future generations, it is used, for example, by Hector. At Il. 22.300–305, he contemplates his heroic legacy, his kleos, just moments before dying:43 And now indeed evil death is near me; it is no longer far off, and there is no escape. And now I realize that this was for a long time appealing to Zeus and his far-shooting son, although they defended me willingly. But now fate comes upon me. May I not perish ignobly and without fame, but only after I have accomplished something great for those to come to learn about (ἀλλὰ μέγα ῥέξας τι καὶ ἐσσομένοισι πυθέσθαι).

Epic is the medium through which future generations will learn about (puthesthai) Hector’s valiant struggle. To “learn about” this and other kleosworthy actions is to be in the audience at a performance of epic poetry. What Diomedes tells Aphrodite is that she is too cowardly even to be among those listeners. In hearing Diomedes’ insult refracted through the lens of her Hymn to Aphrodite, Sappho’s listeners have a chance to anticipate – and to delight in knowing – how the rebukes left unanswered 42

43

The point is anticipated by Winkler (1981: 68–69) when he notes that if women “try to participate in men’s affairs – warfare or war poetry – they will, like Aphrodite, be driven out at spear point.” And indeed, it is hard to imagine that Diomedes’ speech would not have stirred feelings of resistance in Homer’s female listeners. Aphrodite, after all, was simply trying to save her son. The result of a warrior’s deeds not making it into the repertoire of klea andrōn is given expression by the epithet ἄπυστος, which Telemachos uses of Odysseus at Od. 1.242; formed from the alphaprivative and πυνθάνομαι, it clearly reveals the stakes of having others, in the future, learn about what one has done.

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in Homer will be taken up in lyric. The Iliad sidelines Aphrodite and her injuries. Sappho will foreground them.

Maternal Consolations Dione wipes away the ichor from Aphrodite’s arm and dissolves her physical pain. In the space of only two verses, Homer’s Aphrodite appears to have been restored to health (Il. 5.416–417). But though her wound has been physically healed, there is no moral remediation for Aphrodite. She simply slinks away. No one censures Diomedes. On the contrary, Athena conjures a ridiculous scenario for Zeus, wherein Aphrodite’s injury comes not from her attempt to forestall Diomedes’ deadly weapon but from her gentle caressing of the robes of the Achaean women (5.420–425). Perhaps she has pricked herself on a golden pin, Athena suggests.44 With this taunt, we come much closer to the all-female world of soft garments and golden accessories which will be the special province of Sappho’s poetry. A similar landscape constitutes Aphrodite’s arsenal in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, where her clothes and jewelry (including “scintillating,” or pampoikiloi, necklaces and flowery earrings, 87–89) perform a crucial role in seducing Anchises.45 But Athena regards such markedly feminine fare as ludicrous, at least in a martial context.46 Offering no corrective, Zeus merely smiles, and he addresses his speech to Aphrodite instead (5.426–430): Ὣς φάτο, μείδησεν δὲ πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε, καί ῥα καλεσσάμενος προσέφη χρυσῆν Ἀφροδίτην· “οὔ τοι, τέκνον ἐμόν, δέδοται πολεμήϊα ἔργα, ἀλλὰ σύ γ’ ἱμερόεντα μετέρχεο ἔργα γάμοιο, ταῦτα δ’ Ἄρηϊ θοῷ καὶ Ἀθήνῃ πάντα μελήσει.”

44

45

46

430

Currie (2016: 175) argues that “Athene’s mischievous question whether Aphrodite pricked her hand on a hairpin” is part of a “thinly veiled dig at Aphrodite’s involvement in . . . Helene’s elopement with Paris.” HHAphr. 86–91. On feminine adornment and visual seduction, see Worman 1997: 161–163, Worman 2002: 86–89, and Lather 2021: 206–209; Brockliss (2019: 78) observes that “the adjective παμποίκιλοι, with its connotations of bright, shifting appearances and its intensifying prefix, suggests the dazzling, overwhelming impact of Aphrodite’s jewelry on the young man.” On the seduction of Anchises, see Chapter 5, the section on “Dawn and Tithonos in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite” and Chapter 7, the section on “Aphrodite, Helen, and Paris (in the Iliad ).” And she herself takes off her colorful robe so she can don her tunic and aegis (and helmet) in preparation for fighting (5.734–735). The clothing she removes is described as soft, “colorful, and the work of her own hands” (ποικίλον, ὅν ῥ᾿ αὐτὴ ποιήσατο καὶ κάμε χερσίν, 735).

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Aphrodite and the Poetics of Shame So she spoke, and the father of gods and men smiled, and, calling her, he addressed golden Aphrodite: “Not to you, my child, have warlike deeds been given, but you should instead pursue matters having to do with marriage, things filled with desire, and as for those other matters, they will all be a concern to swift Ares and Athena.”

The division of labor is clear. As if prompted by Athena’s reverie involving beautifully clothed women, Zeus reasserts that Aphrodite’s field of expertise and skill is marriage: erga gamoio. Everything from desiring glances to weddings will fall under her purview. All the rest, that is, the deeds of war (polemēia erga), will be the concern of Ares and Athena. Indeed, for a better sense of the lingering shame that envelopes Aphrodite, we might compare Ares’ wounding by Diomedes in the same book of the Iliad. The war-god suffers what at first sight appears to be a much more serious injury. Diomedes drives the bronze tip of his spear deep into Ares’ lower abdomen, eliciting from the god a cosmos-rattling bellow (5.859–863).47 He requires the medicines of Paiëon, a god of healing, to be cured. But once he has been treated, bathed, and clothed in fresh garments, Ares is fully restored to health. He is also emotionally healed, even rejuvenated, and he takes a seat next to Zeus while “exulting in his glory” (5.906): πὰρ δὲ Διὶ Κρονίωνι καθέζετο κύδεϊ γαίων. There is no such closure for Aphrodite. After Dione consoles her, she is subjected to further mockery by Athena, and then, as we saw above, verbally dressed down by Zeus, who tells her she should know better than to meddle in the affairs of war. The contrast with Ares is telling. The Iliad ’s handling of Aphrodite and her injury becomes creative fodder in Sappho’s hands. Sappho reconciles the division between masculine and feminine labors, and between war and weddings. She applies the language of war to love’s labors in the first poem of her collection. It ends, famously, with Sappho invoking the goddess of love as her summachos (ally in war): “But you yourself, be my ally” (σὺ δ᾿ αὔτα / σύμμαχος ἔσσο, 27–28).48 Yes, Aphrodite can be both the expert in “desire-filled works of marriage” (ἱμερόεντα ἔργα γάμοιο) and at the same time an “ally” to Sappho. It goes without saying that Sappho’s injury has happened on the battlefield of love. But the subtle mixing of metaphors succeeds in placing Sappho’s Hymn to Aphrodite in a recuperative relationship with Iliad 5 47 48

Ares releases a cry which is so piercing that “trembling from fear takes hold of the Achaeans and Trojans” (5.862–863). Schlesier (2011: 426) reads this as an allusion to Archilochus fr. 108 West, which contains the first attestation of the term σύμμαχος: here the speaker calls Aphrodite’s husband Hephaestus to be his “ally.”

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and with the epic tradition more generally. Sappho’s concern is not just with the injustice “Sappho” has suffered recently (and many times in the past), but more obliquely and capaciously with the injustice Aphrodite has suffered at the hands of her fellow Olympians, an injustice which accordingly seems to be woven into the very fabric of epic as a genre. Sappho’s prayer to Aphrodite is modeled, at least in part, on Diomedes’ appeal to Athena at Il. 5.115–117.49 The relocation of Aphrodite’s “consolation” from Olympus to earth in Sappho 1V calls to mind not only Dione’s comforting of Aphrodite, but also Athena’s attentiveness to Diomedes in Iliad 5. Within the world of the Iliad, the male warriors – Achilles in Book 1, Diomedes in Book 5 – are the ones most in need of divine assistance, and the goddess looking out for them is Zeus’s daughter, Athena. Sappho’s cosmos requires instead the presence of Aphrodite, whom her poetry frequently calls down to earth, in this way suggesting that the gravitational pull that previously favored conversations between soldiers and the messenger(s) of Zeus now works in service of Sappho’s prayers to the formerly humiliated goddess of love.50 Indeed, the defeat endured by Aphrodite as she is taunted by Diomedes subtly loops back into the goddess’ ironically knowing questions to the singer-poet: “Whom once again shall I persuade to lead you back into her affection?” (1.18–19).51 Followed by, “Who, Sappho, does you wrong?” (1.19–20): τίς σ᾿, ὦ / Ψάπφ᾿, ἀδικήει; Having felt the sting of injustice herself, Sappho’s Aphrodite is in an excellent position to reassure the mortal woman that such defeats do not last forever (1.21–24V): καὶ γὰρ αἰ φεύγει, ταχέως διώξει· αἰ δὲ δῶρα μὴ δέκετ᾿, ἀλλὰ δώσει· αἰ δὲ μὴ φίλει, ταχέως φιλήσει κωὐκ ἐθέλοισα. For if she flees, soon she will pursue; and if she does not receive gifts, she will in turn give them; and if she does not love, soon she will love, even against her will.

49 50

51

See Winkler 1981: 67 (=1990, 167). On the more general influence on Sappho 1V of the Diomedes– Aphrodite encounter, see also Svenbro 1975 and Stanley 1976: 313. Sappho 1V famously alludes to Aphrodite’s previous epiphanies, and in fr. 2V, the singer calls the goddess to come “hither” from Crete. Stehle (1997: 317) points to her being in conversation with the gods as “the most striking aspect of Sappho’s self-creation” and Snyder (1997: 17) compares Aphrodite’s role in Sappho with the special relationship Odysseus and Diomedes have with Athena in the Iliad. On the interrogatives, see Purves 2014. On the textual issues in these lines, see Budelmann 2018 ad loc.

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These verses have often been read as Aphrodite’s promise to make the girl who spurns her reciprocate Sappho’s feelings. But, as Anne Carson’s classic reading of this poem emphasizes, Aphrodite’s statements do not contain a grammatical direct object. It is left unspecified to whom the girl will give gifts, and whom she will pursue, once the tables are turned.52 Moreover, as Carson also mentions, the lines fit into a well-known pattern of ancient Greek love poetry, where the lover (generally older) pursues without satisfaction an elusive beloved who is younger. Only when the girl herself reaches the same state of unrequited passion will the wrong done to Sappho have been avenged. Thus, Aphrodite’s consolation is not “a specific program of revenge tailored to Sappho, but a general theory of lover’s justice.”53 The hope she holds out is a philosophical one. It is based on the principle that, thanks to the unstoppable forward movement of time, the younger beloved will inevitably grow into a lover, and her flight from passion will be replaced by a compulsion that eludes her rational capacity to control it: she will love in spite of herself (κωὐκ ἐθέλοισα, 1.24). When Iliadic Aphrodite finds Ares and begs him for his two horses so she can return to Olympus, she mentions that she is in pain from being wounded by a mortal man (Il. 5.361); the brazen Diomedes would fight even Zeus. Ares, as we saw in the last chapter, lends her his horses and chariot and, with Iris as her charioteer, Aphrodite makes her way back to Olympus. When she arrives, she falls on her mother’s knees (ἡ δ᾿ ἐν γούνασι πῖπτε Διώνης δῖ᾿ Ἀφροδίτη, / μητρὸς ἑῆς, 5.370–371). At this point, Aphrodite transitions from being a mother to a daughter (Dione’s not Zeus’s). Dione embraces her and poses a question to her daughter which will make Sappho’s readers smile. First, Dione to Aphrodite (5.373–374): τίς νύ σε τοιάδ᾿ ἔρεξε, φίλον τέκος, Οὐρανιώνων / μαψιδίως (“Which of the Olympians, dear child, has done something rash like this to you?”). Sappho’s Aphrodite is slightly more succinct (1.19–20V): τίς σ᾿, ὦ / Ψάπφ᾿, ἀδικήει; (“Who, Sappho, wrongs you?”). Each maternal figure then comforts her “daughter.” Dione reminds Aphrodite that the immortal Olympians have suffered countless wounds at the hands of mortal men; she goes on to list several examples, the most relevant of which is perhaps Heracles’ injuring of Hera. But, she concludes, Diomedes is a fool if he thinks he is invulnerable; he too could lose his life. Every one of us is potentially weak and prone to injury. We are all vulnerable. 52

Carson 1996: 227.

53

Carson 1996: 230. See also Stanley 1976: 316.

“Double Consciousness” Revisited

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For Sappho’s listeners, then, Dione’s prophecy in the Iliad points toward its own fulfillment in the Hymn to Aphrodite. When we set these two scenes side by side, as listeners familiar with both repertoires are bound to do, Iliad 5 becomes the prelude to the conversation between Aphrodite and Sappho. There are several striking repetitions and revisions in Sappho’s poem. As a specific intertextual echo, one could point to αἶψα δ᾿ ἐξίκοντο (Sappho 1.13V) with its echoing of αἶψα δ᾿ ἔπειθ᾿ ἵκοντο at Il. 5.367. Reinforcing the parallel is that both passages involve a chariot that “flies.” The Homeric chariot will take Aphrodite up to Olympus, while, in Sappho, the sparrow-drawn chariot brings the same goddess from her father’s Olympian home down to earth.54 As Di Benedetto (1973: 122) already observed long ago, Sappho not only deliberately models her language and narrative conceit on the Homeric precedent but seems to have created a “situation that in certain aspects is the reversal of that in Iliad 5.” In Homer, the goddess is forced from terra firma in disgrace. Sappho has reversed this route and the loss of face it entails by having Aphrodite come instead to the aid of another injured party (even if only in the past).55 What Sappho gives us, then, is the imagined fulfillment of the queer future foretold by Aphrodite’s “failure” in Iliad 5. That future is queer not in a sexual sense but in so far as Diomedes’ triumphalism has been turned on its head, allowing Aphrodite’s humiliating exit to seed a genre and a poet who celebrate her “weakness.”56 Epic forecloses the possibility of such a future ever being included in the Iliad when it sends the silenced, quivering Aphrodite back into the arms of her mother. But as we have seen, Dione’s maternal embrace is precisely the reparative gesture from which Sappho fashions Aphrodite’s return. The fact, moreover, that Aphrodite’s “return,” in Sappho 1V, does not unfold in the poem’s realtime present (but resides instead in the singer’s memory, as something that has already happened, more than once) only reinforces the queer, nonlinear temporality through which Sappho’s lyrics respond to this epic provocation.

“Double Consciousness” Revisited John J. Winkler (1981, 1990) compellingly dubbed as “double consciousness” the manner in which Sappho’s lyrics, conceived from a female point 54 55 56

On these sparrows, see Snyder 1997: 11, Zellner 2008, and Chapter 3. The journey of Sappho’s Aphrodite is modeled in part on that of Hera and Athena at Il 5.788ff., who come down from Olympus to converse with Diomedes. See Page 1955: 7 and Stanley 1976: 312. On queer affect and sexuality, see further Mueller 2021 and Chapters 2, 5, and 7.

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of view, come to grips with a male poetic tradition, turning that song tradition into something more accessible and appealing to female readers.57 Winkler’s interpretation captures well the “bilingual” position of women in Greek society. Public (i.e., male) culture, he proposed, was accessible to women as well as to men, but women’s private culture remained opaque to most men.58 For Winkler, Sappho’s poetry, and particularly the first poem of her collection, exemplifies this double consciousness; here Sappho substitutes for the Olympian and heroic male viewpoint the perspective of a female poet invoking a spurned female deity: “This is how I, a woman and poet, become able to appreciate a typical scene from the Iliad.”59 Jane McIntosh Snyder (1997: 10) likewise credits the first two lines of Sappho 1V with announcing a “different Aphrodite – not the helpless, girlish whiner of the Iliad, but an immortal goddess.” I concur with Snyder that Sappho’s Aphrodite is an impressive weaver of wiles. And Winkler is, of course, right that women’s exclusion from the male arenas of war and politics is fundamental for understanding Sappho’s poetics. But we should also pay attention to how Sappho adapts the Iliad ’s few memorable scenes of domesticity: Helen weaving in Iliad 3, and Andromache’s interactions with Hector, as glimpsed in Iliad 6 and 22. As a sensitive reader of Homer’s female characters, Sappho is well aware of the gendered division of object-life in epic (as we saw in Chapter 3). Sappho thus shines a light on the possibilities, present already within the Iliad, for female artisanship and poetic creativity. We have seen, too, that for certain audiences, Aphrodite’s persona in the Iliad is already mediated by her “future” appearances in Sappho.60 While the politics of empowerment implicit in Winkler’s reading is appealing, the “double” part of his formulation may be too limiting; it imposes on Sappho binary formulations that the texture of her poetic language resists. 57

58

59 60

Although he offers no attribution, Winkler presumably encountered the notion of double consciousness in W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, where it is first introduced to delineate the particular subjectivity of, in Du Bois’ [1903] 1999: 10–11 words, “the Negro”: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” See especially Winkler 1990: 175: “Sappho appropriates an alien text, the very one which states the exclusion of the ‘weak’ women from men’s territory; she implicitly reveals the inadequacy of that denigration; and she restores the fullness of Homer’s text by isolating and alienating its very pretense to a justified exclusion of the feminine and the erotic.” Winkler 1996: 94. On the synchronicity of epic and lyric performance traditions in archaic Greece, see Chapter 1.

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Binaries, moreover, entail hierarchies. Patricia Rosenmeyer (1997: 140) has argued that Winkler’s notion of double consciousness appears to reinforce the “minority status” of Sappho’s female audience. Rosenmeyer thus proposes “a modification,” one that would allow us “to imagine Sappho and her female audience (within the context of poetic composition, performance, and appreciation) as the socially dominant group, the enlightened and privileged super-readers.” I have tried to follow Rosenmeyer in this, by privileging Aphrodite’s perspective over that of Diomedes, and by attending to the affects and experiences of mothers and daughters, in both Sappho and Homer. Once you are acquainted with the Aphrodite of Sappho 1V, you will no longer view the Homeric Aphrodite as the “girlish whiner” that she might have remained sans Sappho. You will have become sensitized, that is, to the ways in which epic denigrates its non-warlike, female Olympians. The epic Aphrodite is a “whiner” only in so far as her realm of expertise finds no outlet on the battlefield. She is a whiner in so far as Diomedes’ transgressions are condoned. The norms in place for judging behavior in the Iliad are incontrovertibly the norms of a masculine warrior culture. But Sappho trains her listeners to recognize these norms as gendered and heteronormative. Sappho-influenced readers of Homer, rather than simply viewing the goddess herself as helpless or weak, may focus instead on what Aphrodite does not say to Diomedes. Perhaps they also sympathize with the pain of her physical wounding and recognize in her experience of shame something of their own. When Aphrodite silently retreats, readers of the Iliad who are reading without the Sapphic filter may see simply the defeat of a weaker goddess. But queer “failure” in epic is a “win” for lyric. By reading reparatively we have rediscovered in Aphrodite’s humiliating retreat the generative potential of her shame. Sappho’s lyrics fundamentally reshape readerly experiences of the epic tradition. Indeed, one measure of the power of her lyrics is how they recalibrate our affective responses to Homer. Through contact with her poetry, our consciousness has been made more than “double.” The Sapphic listener will greet Diomedes’ disparagement of Sappho’s future Muse with the knowledge that Ares and his shortsighted insistence on war are not the only viable performance arenas for the gods. Sappho not only defamiliarizes for her listeners the masculine heroic ethos – the unspoken conditions of Iliadic valor – she also equips us to hear the unspoken messages that are being silently communicated through a certain movement (a slinking away, for example), or within a particular bodily posture – a lowering of the head, for example, or an unusual brightness of the eyes. As

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such, we do not simply replace one ideology (“war is best”) with another one (“love is best”), both of these being, of course, vast oversimplifications of the complex worldviews of each poet. We learn instead to approach the subject matter of each synaesthetically, giving as much attention to the rhetoric of the body as we do to that of the voice, feeling our way toward affect while listening for allusion. A perceptive and attentive reader of the Iliad – and of the shame and humiliation experienced by its female characters, both divine and mortal – Sappho, rather than attempting to outdo Homer, or to contest his canonicity, amplifies and recasts these “minor” episodes. Sappho is neither overtly competitive with, nor subservient to, the older poet. She does not aim to recreate the contours and feel of the “original.”61 Instead, in her avuncular and reparative orientation toward the Iliad, Sappho reintroduces us to some of that epic’s marginal characters.62 As we have seen, Aphrodite’s humiliation and distress in the Iliad are the enabling condition for Sappho’s Hymn to Aphrodite. The wounded Aphrodite of Iliad 5 now rules over a poetic world where there is nothing more important than the “works of marriage” (erga gamoio). She is by turns harsh and obliging. But thanks to Sappho’s having sensitized her listeners to these supposedly trivial encounters, the narrative landscape of Homeric epic has also been altered. Having read Sappho, one becomes that much more attuned to the complex facets of Aphrodite’s character in the Iliad. The flash of anger with which she responds to Helen in Iliad 3 anticipates the same goddess’ ability to inflict extreme suffering. Whether indeed she would shudder, as Diomedes had claimed she would while listening to Homer’s martial songs, the Iliadic Aphrodite’s banishment from the audience of epic serves as a powerful call – to all of us – to take part in a very different sort of listening experience. 61

62

Hinds 1998, chapter 4 analyzes Ovid’s Aeneid, a thousand-line recap of Virgil’s epic poem that is presented over two half-books of the Metamorphoses (books 13–14), as an exemplary tendentious reading because of how it backgrounds Virgil’s major characters and themes in favor of a strong focus on scenes of transformation in the Aeneid. I argue, similarly, that Sappho foregrounds epic characters and episodes that speak specifically to the concerns of her poetry. On epic-lyric intertextuality more generally, see the Introduction and Chapter 1. Winkler 1990: 176.

chapter 5

In the Bardo with Tithonos

now laughing mallards pull themselves together now swans make straight lines across water now webs on twigs now the rapid whisper of a grasshopper scraping back and forth as if working at rust

(Alice Oswald, “Tithonos: 46 Minutes in the Life of Dawn”)

In a brilliant interpretation of Sappho fr. 58 before it was supplemented by the Cologne papyrus, John Winkler (1991) suggested that Sappho represents herself in these lyrics as figuratively analogous to Tithonos.1 Finding in Tithonos’ appearance something more than “a negative example of aging,” Winkler noted first of all that the “great erotic goddesses who acted on their passions – Dawn, Aphrodite and Selene (the Moon)” – are well represented in Sappho’s works, and he went on to speculate that “it was not just Tithonos but the analogy Tithonos: Dawn: Sappho: goddess that structured her allusion to the myth.”2 Just as Dawn is incapable of releasing her human beloved from the strictures of senescence, so, too, is Aphrodite not always the sort of “ally” Sappho might have hoped for. Here, Winkler suggested, we are invited to imagine Sappho being carried in the arms of the goddess, as she grows ever weaker. The analogous image 1

2

Essentially a supplemented version of Sappho fr. 58.11–22 Voigt, the Tithonos Poem is derived from two different sources: the first (Π2), a second- or third-century ce papyrus, P. Oxy. XV 1787 fr.1, published by Grenfell and Hunt in 1922 and edited by Lobel in 1951 (i.e., in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, vol. XXI [2288–2308], London), appears as Sappho fr. 58 in Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, edited by Edgar Lobel and Denys Page. The second papyrus, Π1, or Cologne Papyrus inv. 21351+21376, a much earlier papyrus (from the third century bce) containing poems from an ancient anthology, was not published until 2004 (see Gronewald and Daniel 2004a and 2004b for the first edition, and for discussion of textual and interpretive issues, see Greene and Skinner 2009); this papyrus contains lines 11–22 of fr. 58 (lines that are also preserved from Π2), and presents them as a complete poem. Winkler 1991: 231. By “goddess” Winkler means Aphrodite.

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of Tithonos being carried by Dawn “is, like much in Sappho, a discrete but unmistakable lesbian image.”3 Winkler’s article has nearly vanished from the bibliographic record. It is rarely cited by scholars working on the Tithonos Poem.4 And this is no doubt in part due to its posthumous publication in The Journal of Homosexuality, a periodical not typically consulted by classicists. Winkler himself did not live long enough to develop his ideas further. Nor has his suggestion of a lesbian aspect to the Dawn–Tithonos romance (a romance I call “queer”) been taken up by others. I foreground the meta-history of Winkler’s unique contribution because of how well it aligns with Sedgwick’s own advocacy for the artistic works and contributions of those who died from AIDS.5 In Touching Feeling, Sedgwick connects the more thoughtful discourse that arose in the eighties around death and dying with the epidemic of AIDS (2003: 173): One effect of the sudden appearance of AIDS among young, educated, articulate men (among the many whom it affects) – especially because the disease is both gradual and so far incurable – has been the carving out of a cultural space in the West in which to articulate the subjectivity of the dying. This space, until the 1980s rather imperiously foreclosed by the melodramas of modern medical delivery, has now also become increasingly available to some others facing the likelihood of early death, and indeed to some of the aged.

Posthumously published, thanks to the efforts of his friends and colleagues, Winkler’s essay deserves its place in the scholarly conversation about the Tithonos Poem.6 I acknowledge my debt to it here and (implicitly) in my readings of the Tithonos Poem. In the last chapter we considered the generative power of Aphrodite’s “failure” in the Iliad. We took note of how actions and emotions that the Iliad deems weak and ignoble yield poetic substance for Sappho’s lyrics. In this chapter, I want to continue exploring failure, although in a somewhat different vein. The Tithonos Poem features a relationship between a goddess, Dawn, and a human, Tithonos – two figures whose unusual misfortunes are also described in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. There, 3 5

6

Winkler 1991: 232. 4 Recent exceptions include Kurke 2021a and Lesser 2021. See Muñoz 2019b on the collaboration between Sedgwick and Gary Fisher that resulted in Gary in your Pocket (Sedgwick 1996). Winkler himself died prematurely in 1990 of complications arising from AIDS: www.nytimes.com/1990/05/01/obituaries/john-j-winkler-46-a-teacher-of-classics.html A note appended to the biographical information about the author says that “correspondence may be directed to Professor A. A. Stephens, Department of Classics, Stanford University.” I have confirmed via email (on August 17, 2022) that the “Stephens” in question is Professor Susan A. Stephens.

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the relationship between Dawn and Tithonos stands out in marked contrast with two other divine–human love affairs: between Zeus and Ganymede, on the one hand, and Aphrodite and Anchises, on the other. In comparing and contrasting these three divine–human pairings, critics have noted that the relationship between Tithonos and Dawn, because it is neither procreative nor graced with eternal youth, represents the darker side of immortalization: Tithonos eludes death, but not old age. “In terms,” therefore, “of the mediating power of eros, Tithonos is a failure.”7 His failure to achieve immortality and agelessness can, moreover, be attributed directly to a mistake on Dawn’s part. Although Dawn had wanted to make her human lover immortal and eternally youthful, she somehow forgot to verbalize the second part of her wish – that Tithonos become ageless. Consequently, Zeus granted him immortality but did not release him from the necessity of growing old. Eventually, Dawn places him in a room and shuts the doors; whatever strength he has left is funneled into Tithonos’ voice. In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Aphrodite tells this story to Anchises to justify her refusal to immortalize him, and this is the version of the story that Sappho takes up in her Tithonos Poem: ὔμμες πεδὰ Μοίσαν ἰ]ο̣κ[ό]λ̣πων κάλα δῶρα, παῖδες, σπουδάσδετε καὶ τὰ]ν̣ φιλάοιδον λιγύραν χελύνναν· ἔμοι δ᾿ ἄπαλον πρίν] π̣οτ̣᾿ [ἔ]ο̣ντα χρόα γῆρας ἤδη ἐπέλλαβε, λεῦκαι δ᾿ ἐγ]ένοντο τρίχες ἐκ μελαίναν· βάρυς δε μ᾿ ὀ [θ]ῦμο̣ς̣ πεπόηται, γόνα δ᾿ [ο]ὐ φέροισι, τὰ δή ποτα λαίψηρ᾿ ἔον ὄρχησθ᾿ ἴσα νεβρίοισι.

5

τὰ ⟨νῦν⟩ στεναχίσδω θαμέως· ἀλλὰ τί κεν ποείην; ἀγήραον ἄνθρωπον ἔοντ᾿ οὐ δύνατον γένεσθαι. καὶ γάρ π̣[ο]τ̣α̣ Τίθωνον ἔφαντο βροδόπαχυν Αὔων ἔρωι φ̣ . . α̣θ̣ε̣ ισαν βάμεν᾿ εἰς ἔσχατα γᾶς φέροισα[ν,

10

ἔοντα̣ [κ]ά̣λ̣ο̣ν καὶ νέον, ἀλλ᾿ αὖτον ὔμως ἔμαρψε χρόνωι π̣ό̣λ̣ι̣ ο̣ν̣ γῆρας, ἔχ̣[ο]ν̣τ̣᾿ ἀθανάταν ἄκοιτιν.8 [You for] the beautiful gifts of the violet-robed [Muses], children, [be eager, and the] song-loving, clear-voiced tortoise-lyre. 7 8

Segal 1973/74: 208. In the terms devised by structuralist critics, failure has been woven into Tithonos’ very being. On the νῦν in line 7, see note 10.

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In the Bardo with Tithonos [But my once delicate] skin old age already [has seized, and white] has my hair become which once was black. And heavy has my heart been made, and knees no longer bear the weight of my limbs which once were as nimble at dancing as those of little fawns. I groan often over my present state, but what can I do? It is impossible, being human, to become ageless. For the story was that Tithonos once was carried by rose-armed Dawn to the ends of the earth – she was infatuated. He was beautiful and young. But with time, gray old age seized him, although his wife was immortal.

In these verses, “Sappho” (the singer, the “I”) describes how old age has visibly transformed her, turning her once-black hair white, and sapping her limbs of life and movement. By far the most common verbs in these lines are those for “being” and “becoming,” and these verbs describe both the singer and Tithonos. Their bodies were once beautiful, young, and nimble. The poem’s active verbs, verbs that involve “laying hold of,” “seizing,” and “grasping” (ἐπέλλαβε and ἔμαρψε, in lines 4 and 11), both have as their subject γῆρας (“old age”). Other verbs of motion derive from the more neutral-sounding φέρω and βαίνω, both of which attest here to the limitations of movement. The singer asserts that her once-supple limbs no longer carry her – γόνα δ’ [ο]ὐ φέροισι (5). The legs which once helped her dance like little fawns are now slow and heavy. Likewise, the goddess Dawn once went to the edges of the earth, carrying Tithonos, who was too weak to walk on his own (βάμεν᾿ εἰς ἔσχατα γᾶς φέροισαν, 10). The lyrics in this way present us with bodies suspended in both space and time. Dawn and Tithonos are entwined in each other yet stuck at the earth’s outer limits, while the singer herself moves rather stiffly, unable to bend her knees deeply. It is this “bardo” (i.e., liminal time and space) of dying that the Tithonos Poem so poignantly evokes. The poem creates for these bodies a bardo that is similar to the liminal space that Eve Sedgwick describes as being inhabited by the terminally ill – those who remain suspended for a time between the worlds of the living and the dead. I will turn in the next section to Sedgwick’s “bardo” writings, which come from the final stage of her career, a time when she herself was living with terminal illness. But I want to anticipate my broader argument here by suggesting that the unusual verb στεναχίσδω, which occurs in line 7 of the Tithonos Poem, is what performatively conjures Tithonos’ “bardo.” Eva Stehle (2009) has drawn attention to the division between the present time of the song’s performance and the past time of myth and memory, two

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different temporal realms that are respectively demarcated by νῦν and ποτα (both here and elsewhere in Sappho). Whereas νῦν is “a time of limitation recognized,” it also demarcates the temporality of speech acts, prayers, and assertions.9 To borrow from J. L. Austin’s conceptual vocabulary, the time of νῦν would be the time of the performative. The verbal utterance that comes closest to being a performative, in so far as it shares the first-person present, active, indicative form that is familiar from Austinian performatives, is “I groan,” in line 7: τὰ ⟨νῦν⟩ στεναχίσδω θαμέως (“I groan often over my present state”).10 If this is a performative, it is one that also embodies the very failure that it bemoans. The singer cannot alter who, or what, she has become. She can only lament it, while acknowledging the necessity for all humans to resign themselves to growing ever older. Aging is an inescapable part of the human condition. Stenachisdō is thus a central verb. Appearing midway through the poem, it has informed earlier interpretive work and will also carry much of the weight of my own argument(s) in this chapter. The first of my two arguments homes in on Dawn’s failure to request agelessness and explores how the periperformative force of that mistake resonates between the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and the Tithonos Poem; the second follows the singer’s lamenting voice back to the Iliad, picking up there the similarly mournful sound of Achilles bewailing Patroklos’ death. I have chosen to allow these essentially separate readings to sit side by side in a single chapter: I offer two different routes through the poem – interpretive pathways that do not necessarily intersect or meet up again at the end. In allowing my discussion to bifurcate in this way, I am also modeling a form of non-teleological, reparative reading. The goal here is not to produce one tightly argued thesis, but to allow the sounds and movements themselves, as they are embedded in both the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and the Iliad, to lead us where they will.

Sedgwick’s Bardo of Dying From the Tibetan bar- (in between) and do (suspended), “bardo” refers to that liminal period, in Buddhist belief, that occurs between death and rebirth.11 Sedgwick adapted the Tibetan bardo into a powerful metaphor 9 10

11

Stehle 2009: 124–125. Janko (2017: 271) supplies νῦν in place of West’s μέν solitarium. He notes that this creates better sense also as “an indication of time reinforces the contrast between past youth and present age, and νῦν often has the sense of ‘as things are’ and conveys a sense of resignation to current misfortune.” Compare Miller 2002: 222: “First a gloss on the meaning of ‘bardo’: The between-state that immediately follows death. Tibetan bar=in between, do=suspended, thrown.”

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for thinking about the liminal space/time that those diagnosed with a terminal illness must live through until death finally takes them. In theorizing the bardo of dying, Sedgwick turned not only to scholarly works and translations of, for example, the Tibetan Book of the Dead,12 but also to her own practice of crafting. Fiber arts, book arts, and collaging provided Sedgwick with a refuge from the perfectionist self-critique that was an ever-present component of her academic writing, as well as with a new medium for exploring Buddhist thought.13 At some point, Sedgwick created a number of life-sized (or Eve-sized) dolls out of fabrics of different textures, styles, and colors.14 These, along with a text from which she read aloud about the bardo of dying, and a slide show with images from a recent trip to Asia, constituted the multimedia event that Sedgwick curated at CUNY in the spring of 2000; it seems to have successfully fused the genres of scholarly lecture and art installation. In what follows, I draw upon accounts from three individuals, each of whom recorded her experience of this event. First, a description of the physical setting by Sedgwick’s CUNY colleague at the time, Nancy K. Miller (2002: 221–222): In the spring of 2000 the lounge belonging to the English program – a space resembling a bus station (alternately an airport gate area) – remained a huge, bare, loft-like zone of a waiting room (waiting to become a room). . . . The lounge remained a dreary affair except for one brief interlude when the space was filled by Eve. Let me explain. Eve filled the space with cloth figures she had made – stuffed forms dressed in blue leggings and tunics and draped with woven cloth – and hung from the ceiling. The figures were put into context one afternoon when she read a talk and showed slides from her trip to Asia.

At this point Miller interrupts her narrative to quote directly from a handout Eve distributed called “In the Bardo.” I include here only the final sentence: “The pieces in this show also mean to span such productive, highly-charged, and permeable boundaries as those between craft and art; between woven fiber (cloth) and nonwoven (paper, felt, soie mariée); between feeling and meditation, or gravity and lightness; at last, between 12

13 14

At E. Sedgwick 2011: 210–211, she describes her first encounter with Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (“a highly popularized, at the same time impressively inclusive introduction to Tibetan Buddhism”) and quotes also from Robert Thurman’s edition of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. On Sedgwick’s turn toward Buddhism, see also Chapter 3. See Edwards 2022 on Sedgwick as a book artist. For photos and further discussion of these creations, see Goldberg 2021.

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making and unmaking.”15 Because she had also agreed to review Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love and found herself unexpectedly moved by it, Miller interweaves reflections on that text with her recollection of the performance of “In the Bardo,” finding that the two media – memoir and cloth dolls – both evoke feelings of identification and recognition. For Maggie Nelson, who was also in the audience at Sedgwick’s “threetiered presentation” at the Graduate Center on March 31, 2000, the event brought Sedgwick’s deepening interest in fiber arts into conversation with “her own experience of the ‘bardo of dying.’” Nelson (2000) remembers in particular that Sedgwick explained that the bardo of dying, like other bardos, is “electric with spiritual possibility as well as with pain and loss.” According to Nelson, the intention of the “In the Bardo” installation was specified as being to celebrate “coming to loving terms with what’s transitory, mutable, even quite exposed and ruined, while growing better attuned to continuities of energy, idiom, and soul.”16 Nelson’s comments speak to a disjuncture that we can also locate in the Tithonos Poem, where Tithonos’ ever-aging, yet immortal, body continues to evolve, growing weaker, dryer, and more intangible by the day, while Dawn remains unchanging and divine. In her chapter on the “Pedagogy of Buddhism” in Touching Feeling, Sedgwick (2003: 173–174, emphasis in the original) observes: The bardo that extends from diagnosis until death makes some people seek out Buddhist teachings; in many Buddhist teachings, however, it is also itself viewed as an extraordinary pedagogical tool. Perhaps nothing dramatizes the distance between knowledge and realization as efficiently as diagnosis with a fatal disease. As advertised, it does concentrate the mind wonderfully (even if by shattering it) and makes inescapably vivid the distance between knowing that one will die and realizing it.

Experiencing imminent death as a personal revelation is very different from simply knowing abstractly that mortality is a part of life.17 The Tithonos Poem might be said to express the moment of the singer’s realization of what formerly she only knew death to be. In fact, we can summon lexical support for this thesis in the unusual imperfect tense of ephanto (ἔφαντο), which is used to introduce the mythical exemplum of Tithonos in line 9. Almost without exception, whenever a Greek author uses a verb of saying or speaking (φημί, λέγω) to introduce a myth which serves “as either confirmation of, or as a foil to” their own views on a related matter, the 15 17

16 Miller 2002: 224. Maggie Nelson attributes these words to Sedgwick at Nelson 2012. See also E. Sedgwick 2011: 207–209 on the gap between knowing and realizing.

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verb appears in the present tense.18 Scholars have therefore puzzled over the Tithonos Poem’s imperfect-tense ephanto. But, as Lowell Edmunds (2006: 24) proposed, ephanto can be taken as contrasting “(1) what Sappho used to hear about old age, but did not grasp, with (2) what she now understands about old age in general, or (1) what she used to hear and thought she understood, with (2) her present, contrasting view of her own old age” (emphasis in the original).19 Whether we choose to frame it as a more general realization about the nature of old age, or as a personal revelation, Edmunds’ schema underlines the distinction Sedgwick draws between knowing and realizing. In the Tithonos Poem, the singer’s present understanding, I would add, is her bardo-precipitated realization that, in her old age, she is on the cusp of a momentous transfiguration. Melissa Solomon, the third participant whose account I draw on, also responded to Sedgwick’s crucial insight that the bardo experience involves understanding what has only recently been made real.20 Solomon’s own extension of the bardo metaphor, however, was shaped by her application of Sedgwick’s concept to what Solomon calls the “lesbian bardo.” Exploring how author Erika Lopez represents the female protagonist’s transition from a heterosexual to a lesbian identity in her novel, Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing, Solomon likens the time before coming out to that of the bardo.21 Before “coming out,” she observes, there is a “coming to” the realization that will precipitate the transformation. Solomon is careful to emphasize, however, that since bardo-spaces are in no way determined by what will succeed them, there need not be an inevitable progression from “coming to” to “coming out.”22

18 19

20

21 22

Edmunds 2006: 23. Rawles (2006: 3) wonders whether ἔφαντο should be taken as alluding to “a poem or poems of the past in which Tithonus was treated,” while Kurke (2021a: 32–33) suggests that the imperfect, which is correlated both with a shift from direct to indirect speech and with the distinction between a plural choral voice and the voice of the individual singer, “subsumes this past choral voice into the ego’s present utterance” (32). Solomon (2002: 213n9) records the following from notes she took during a talk Sedgwick gave at the State University of New York (SUNY) Stony Brook in 1999: “the only sense in which I can think of reality nowadays: reality not as what’s true but as what’s realized, what is or has become real.” See Solomon 2002: 201–216 on the “lesbian bardo.” Solomon 2002: 208: “The definition of bardo necessitates dislinking, at every opportunity, prior intention from the path of change. As such, the before moments of, say, ‘coming out’ must be talked about and explored, to the extent it is possibe, as discrete moments and without positing them, to the extent that not doing so is possible, in any relation to ‘coming out,’ because in fact one cannot know in advance what sort of realization will follow from a bardo space.”

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The bardo that Sedgwick evokes is a dwelling in liminality whose end is not yet known. The corresponding bardo in the Tithonos Poem is, as I have already suggested, evoked through the iterative and unending sound of lamentation – the singer’s incessant groaning (stenachisdō thameōs). It is unclear when or how this lament will end. In fact, because of the lack of boundedness to the temporality of ta nun, one has the distinct sense of being permanently stuck in the singer’s lamentation. This is especially true if we assume that the poem ends directly after the mythical exemplum.23 Dawn finds herself in a predicament all too familiar to Sappho’s readers. She has been “overcome,” or perhaps “instructed” by eros.24 And because she fears what may happen to her beloved, she takes him to the ends of the earth, hoping to be able to outrun the inevitable (9–12).25 Many listeners will sympathize with Tithonos, focusing on the tragedy for him of eternal aging. But Dawn’s experience speaks to a different kind of loss. Although she is a goddess, she fails to protect her husband from old age, which bears down on him like a rapacious illness.26 Hers is the tragedy of eros fulfilled. Dawn wins her beloved, but he in turn is snatched from her by a force just as powerful as the desire that led her to pursue him. There would seem to be injustice here too but no point in calling Aphrodite down to earth, for no requital can be had. The Tithonos Poem approaches the tragedy of requited love from the viewpoint of both lover and beloved, pursuer and pursued.27 It gives us a different sort of lover’s injustice, showing in unsparing detail the limits imposed by mortality on Aphrodite’s powers. Elsewhere in Sappho the erotic crisis is brought on when the singer’s feelings are unreciprocated, either because the woman whom she loves is in love with another, or because her beloved simply fails to respond (e.g., fr. 1V), perhaps because she has had to leave Sappho and Lesbos (fr. 94V and 96). The crisis in the 23 24

25 26

27

I am grateful to Naomi Weiss for this point. The text of line 10 is lacunose, but the first two letters of the word following ἔρωι are likely to be δε, allowing Janko to propose δεδάθεισαν, which he translates as “in love instructed.” See also Kurke 2021a: 22–23. On the ends of the earth as a place of unending youth and prosperity in the Tithonos Poem, see Brown 2011. The two-line Mimnermus fr. 4 mentions Tithonos explicitly, as the one to whom “Zeus granted possession of unremitting old age, which is even more hateful and painful than death.” In comparing Sappho fr. 58 with Sappho fr. 31, Johnson (2009: 163) notes how the effects of old age and eros are “physical transformations caused by external factors,” not internal subjective states. In this regard the singer’s “I” has close affiliations with both members of the erotic dyad. Like Dawn, Sappho is a female who laments what old age has done to someone she loves. Like Tithonos, she experiences that aging in her own body and mind; she knows how it feels to have her limbs sapped of vitality.

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Tithonos Poem is not precipitated by any of these familiar scenarios. In fact, in the mythical paradigm toward which the singer directs our attention, the lovers – Dawn and Tithonos – remain physically proximate until the end,28 even after the passion between them has supposedly dwindled (if we supplement their story here with the embedded narrative of Dawn and Tithonos in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, as I do in the following section). Neither a lover’s rejection nor spatial separation has dissolved their erotic bond. Instead, a deep temporal disjuncture has come between them. As creatures belonging to two distinct temporal spheres – the one is human, the other divine – they find themselves growing ever farther apart, in age and compatibility. The affective core of the poem that thus emerges from the singer’s utterance of στεναχίσδω (7) can be heard as a cry bewailing what has been lost – by both Dawn and Sappho. For the singer, this loss does not involve a lover, but rather her own younger self.29 She laments the loss of her formerly youthful body and soul.

Dawn and Tithonos in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite Tithonos is a tragic figure in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. His story is told only to explain to another mortal, Anchises, why it is impossible for him to be given the (now) impossible gift of immortality. Once Anchises has discovered that the “girl” he has made love to is actually a goddess, as he had initially suspected, he begs Aphrodite not to abandon him (HHAphr. 188–89): “Do not let me live out my life, strengthless among humans, but take pity on me instead.” (μή με ζῶντ᾿ ἀμενηνὸν ἐν ἀνθρώποισιν ἐάσῃς / ναίειν, ἀλλ᾿ ἐλέαιρ᾿.)30 Anchises seems to be asking the goddess to make him immortal.31 That, at least, is how the goddess interprets his request. In response, she tells him the story of two mortals who met very different ends as a result of their sexual entanglements with gods: Ganymede, whom Zeus “snatched up because of his beauty,” went on to dwell among the Olympians, becoming their cupbearer. Out of pity for the boy’s father, Tros, Zeus made Ganymede “ageless and immortal, just like the gods” 28 29

30 31

Kurke (2021a) describes them as an “assemblage.” See Sedgwick 1995: 215, on the queer performativity of Henry James’ prefaces for the New York editions of his novels in which the older James comments on the follies and successes of his younger self. See further Chapter 2. Segal (1986: 44) notes that the fate Anchises fears, becoming ἀμενηνός (feeble), is “realized, or projected, into the figure of Tithonus.” See Giacomelli 1980 on the sense of ἀμενηνός and how it speaks to the anxiety that a single act of intercourse with a goddess might leave a mortal man impotent.

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(ἀθάνατος καὶ ἀγήρως ἶσα θεοῖσιν, 214). But Dawn’s beloved, Tithonos, suffered a less agreeable fate. Richard Rawles (2006: 2) has described the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite as a “privileged intertext” for Sappho’s Tithonos Poem. Rawles, like Janko (2005 and 2017), assumes that Sappho and her listeners were familiar with the version of the myth in which Tithonos eventually becomes a cicada. He argues that even if that element of the myth postdates Sappho, it would have been known and retrojected onto Sappho by later scholars and poets, including Callimachus.32 There is no explicit reference to the cicada in either the Tithonos Poem or the Homeric Hymn, but verbal echoes help to establish the figural parallels between Sappho and Tithonos. First, as already mentioned, the singer’s hair in the Tithonos Poem is like that of Tithonos in the Homeric Hymn: formerly black, now white (λεῦκαι δ᾿ ἐγ]ένοντο τρίχες ἐκ μελαίναν, 4).33 Next, in calling her heart (θῦμος) “heavy,” Sappho may be alluding to a kind of physical stasis similar to that which befell the Homeric Hymn’s Tithonos in the final stages of his descent into old age. Once “hateful” old age came upon him, he was “no longer able to move or to raise any of his limbs” (οὐδέ τι κινῆσαι μελέων δύνατ᾿ οὐδ᾿ ἀναεῖραι, 234). Sappho’s thumos, as Joel Lidov remarks, “refers to the organ which generates desires that can be acted on and gives impulse to motion.”34 Thus when the speaker of the Tithonos Poem says βάρυς δέ μ᾿ ὀ [θ]ῦμο̣ς̣ πεπόηται, γόνα δ᾿[ο]ὐ φέροισι (5), she refers not only to her emotional but also to her physical “heaviness.” Also worth noticing is the way the symptoms suffered by the Homeric Hymn’s Tithonos are mentioned by the singer of Sappho’s poem even before she explicitly cites the myth. It is as if her own physical malaise summons up the plight of the mythical Tithonos, her body cueing her voice, even as she already bewails her present condition. As Aphrodite tells Anchises in the Homeric Hymn named after her, Dawn has been struck by desire for the mortal whom she “snatches up.” In an attempt to secure for him the same immortal existence as Ganymede has, she asks Zeus to allow him to become “immortal and to live forever” (ἀθάνατόν τ’ εἶναι καὶ ζώειν ἤματα πάντα, 221), a wish that Zeus grants 32

33 34

On the version of the myth which includes the metamorphosis, see, for example, the scholion to Il. 11.1. For his part, Janko (2005 and 2017) emphasizes that Sappho likely knew this myth because of its apparently eastern Mediterranean roots. The fifth-century bce Hellanicus of Lesbos provides the earliest reference to Tithonos’ metamorphosis. For a more skeptical position, see Faulkner 2008: 276 and Nooter 2020. Compare HHAphr. 228–229. See Carrara 2011: 85 on the verbal echoes between the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and the Tithonos Poem. Lidov 2009: 95 and Di Benedetto 2004: 5.

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her (222). What Dawn in her rashness has forgotten to ask for, as Aphrodite explains, is eternal youth (223–224): “Foolish one, mistress Dawn did not use her mind and think to ask for youth, and for a scraping off of terrible old age.” (νηπίη, οὐδ᾿ ἐνόησε μετὰ φρεσί πότνια Ἠὼς / ἥβην αἰτῆσαι, ξῦσαί τ᾿ ἄπο γῆρας ὀλοιόν.) Consequently, Dawn and Tithonos enjoy a few good years together. But when the first symptoms of old age appear, turning Tithonos’ formerly dark mane and his black beard white, Dawn removes herself from his bed (228– 230). Physical degeneration progresses rapidly from there, impervious to Dawn’s attempts to forestall it through various treatments. Having already whisked him away to the ends of the earth (227), the goddess keeps her beloved carefully hidden inside, feeding him on ambrosial food and wrapping him in beautiful garments (231–232), as if old age were a rough layer of skin that could be exfoliated, or a sickness from which she could nurse him back to health, restoring his former vigor and good looks.35 When the Tithonos of the Homeric Hymn is no longer able to move, Dawn places him in a room and closes the gleaming doors. From this room, Tithonos’ “voice continues to flow forth unspeakably loud, though there is no strength left at all such as there was before in his supple limbs”: τοῦ δ᾿ ἦ τοι φωνὴ ῥεῖ ἄσπετος, οὐδέ τι κῖκυς / ἔσθ᾿ οἵη πάρος ἔσκεν ἐνὶ γναμπτοῖσι μέλεσσιν (237–238).36 With Sappho’s Tithonos Poem in mind as we hear this, we can easily make the connection between the first-person, aged singer, bewailing her condition over and over (στεναχίσδω θαμέως), and the ever-flowing voice (φωνὴ ῥεῖ ἄσπετος) of the withered Tithonos.37 Both sounds are intense and fluid in their repetitive, continuous quality. The verb ῥεῖ describes the “flow” of the sound of his voice. Whether, at the moment of this description, the voice belongs to a human or to some other creature, we are not told. Noting the legend that “the aged Tithonus turned into . . . a cicada, that can continue to sing forever,” Janko (2017: 280) suspects that it is this 35

36

37

As King (1986: 26) remarks, “gēras, old age, is also used of the cast skin of a snake (LSJ)”; it was therefore thought that “creatures which cast off their skins possessed a degree of immortality because they were never trapped in old age.” For the suggestion that the present-tense verb implies that Tithonos’ voice can still be heard, see Rawles 2006: 6, citing Smith 1981: 81. On the concentration of vitality in Tithonos’ voice (as symptomatic of a loss of menos), see Giacomelli 1980: 19; and on his voice as a form of “fourth-level of life” white noise, Nooter 2020: 9–10. The idea that the transformation to a cicada is already implied in the Homeric Hymn goes back to Kakridis 1930: 32, but has been taken up most enthusiastically by Janko 2005 and 2017; see, too, Rawles 2006 and duBois 2015: 148–149. Kurke (2021a) argues that the Tithonos Poem contains several assemblages of musical animals, thus priming “us to recognize the lurking possibility of Tithonus as cicada” (2).

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image that lies behind Sappho’s evocation of Tithonos.38 But if it was the poet’s desire to have her singing voice “confer glory beyond the grave,” why not make Tithonos’ cicada-metamorphosis more explicit?39 Moreover, there is a distinctly macabre quality to the poem’s focus on bodily degeneration. Only the opening couplet, where the “beautiful gifts” of the “violeted Muses” delight the senses of both participants and spectators, and the girls are invited to seek them, offset the singer’s own stillness of body and her intensely mourning voice.40 And there is another complication. In reality, cicadas sing for only a short time – when they come above ground they are already close to death. So the song of the cicada is hardly likely to shore up epic kleos of the sort that might be expected to “confer glory beyond the grave.”41 Because they are such short-lived creatures, sustaining themselves on nothing more than dew and song, they have a powerful investment in the present, in the now. Or, as Anne Carson (1986: 139) puts it, “oblivious to time, they sustain the present indicative of pleasure from the instant they are born.” Perhaps, then, the fact that there is no explicit mention of a future metamorphosis is in keeping with the present-oriented temporality of the cicada, a temporal focus that also characterizes Alice Oswald’s “Tithonos,” a few lines of which I have included as the epigraph to this chapter (notice the insistent repetitions of “now”).42 Sappho’s Tithonos Poem keeps the experiential focus on the 38

39

40

41

42

Janko here compares the Tithonos Poem with Alcman fr. 26, where the aged speaker, addressing a chorus of maidens, tells them his knees cannot support him and he wishes he could become a bird; see further Calame 1983: 474 and Lardinois 2009: 51–52. Janko 2017: 280. I assume here that the twelve lines (fr. 58.11–22) are a self-contained poem, but if one reads the sixteen-line version, with its reference to beauty and light, it is possible infer a happier ending. If the Tithonos Poem did end at line 22 of fr. 58, then fr. 58.23–26 belongs to a different Sappho poem and, more troublingly for some, the Tithonos Poem ends rather open-endedly, without making explicit the tie-in for the exemplum of Tithonos and Dawn. We now know, thanks to the transmission history contained in Π1, that at some point lines 1–12 (the Tithonos Poem) was treated as a self-contained poetic event. For arguments in favor of taking 11–22 of fr. 58 as a complete twelve-line poem, see Di Benedetto 2004, Luppe 2004, West 2005, and Bernsdorff 2005. Those arguing for the sixteen-line poem as the original form, which was shortened at a later time, include Livrea 2007, Yatromanolakis 2008, Boedeker 2009, Edmunds 2009, Lardinois 2009, and Lesser 2021. Olsen (2019: 289) suggests that if this is a monodic song being sung as a prelude to a choral performance, the singer’s image suggests “a form of kinesthetic empathy with the performers being addressed, recalling her own experiences of dance.” The cycle itself of cicada death-and-rebirth is everlasting and eternal, while the insect itself is alive for only a short time. As Segal (1986: 38) puts it, the cicada is “both the longest and the shortest lived of all creatures.” Compare LeVen 2021: 100: “cicadas are close to both death and immortality: after spending time underground, they are reborn to sing and die again, in an apparently endless replaying of the same scenario.” Ormand (2020) situates the Tithonos Poem in relation to the expanded, unbounded “now” of women’s time, which contrasts with the enduring immortality of male heroic kleos.

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bardo-state itself, on the being-in-between. In this state, the voice has a peculiar power, having subsumed into itself a vitality that was originally distributed more evenly throughout the body. As Page duBois (2015: 149) remarks, Tithonos’ “voice is the remainder, resisting consumption and obliteration, stubbornly persisting, irreducible.” In Homer, the verb στεναχίζω is several times used of nonhuman entities. More specifically, it twice describes the sound of gaia groaning beneath the weight of men seating themselves for an assembly (Il. 2.95), or beneath the feet of running soldiers (Il. 2.784). The same formulaic phrase is used in each instance: ὑπὸ δὲ στεναχίζετο γαῖα.43 In another context, the same verb captures the wailing noise made by Circe’s dwelling as it echoes back at Odysseus’ men the sounds of their own lament (περὶ δὲ στεναχίζετο δῶμα, Od. 10.454). Although in both instances one could argue that the source of the sound is human, the fact that the earth and a dwelling are subjects of this verb suggests that the sounds they make share at least the timbre of the nonhuman.44 So, too, the voice of Tithonos, at the end of the myth embedded in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, may already have acquired the nonhuman timbre of the insect he will soon become.45 Sappho’s Tithonos Poem alludes to a radical physical transformation that is on the horizon – one that is portended but never explicitly described. For this reason, some have questioned whether Sappho was even acquainted with this particular episode in Tithonos’ mythical biography. The singer does, however, appear to gesture to it. Through her lamentation for her lost girlhood she links herself with Dawn’s sorrow over Tithonos’ incessant aging, making it all the more compelling that we hear her present mourning as prefiguring his future transition. Part of the consolation the singer derives from conjuring this particular mythical exemplum is that Tithonos’ metamorphosis is that much more extreme than her own. He forsakes his humanity entirely. She, like Tithonos before his transition, retains at least her human status, if not the privileges of youth.

43 44 45

See also Hes. Th. 159 (ἡ δ᾿ ἐντὸς στοναχίζετο Γαῖα πελώρη) and 858 (στονάχιζε δὲ γαῖα πελώρη). On recovering timbre in ancient Greek music, see Weiss 2021. At Alcaeus fr. 347.3V, there is a cicada who sings sweetly but mournfully (ἄχει δ᾿ ἐκ πετάλων ἄδεα τέττιξ). Plato’s Phaedrus 259bc offers the classic myth about the origin of cicadas, but the story of their metamorphosis from human form is likely to have been in circulation much earlier. DuBois (2011: 669) observes that the cicada, whose body has so fully shrunk that he is only voice, “is a compelling figure for poetry, especially lyric poetry.”

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In her 1997 essay on reparative reading, Sedgwick notes how queer time is different from time as it is experienced heteronormatively. It is an argument she articulates through the narrator in Proust, who occupies an unusual, “revelatory space” (1997: 26): “this revelatory space would have been impossible in a heterosexual père de famille, in one who had meanwhile been embodying, in the form of inexorably ‘progressing’ identities and roles, the regular arrival of children and grandchildren.”46 Queer relationships are not generally subject to the same temporal rhythms as those imposed on heterosexual couples by the societal expectations for marriage and children (see Chapter 6, on reproductive futurism). For this reason, the passage through “queer” time is not a linear progression through the different social roles of husband, father, grandfather. In its running athwart of this teleological progression, the relationship between Dawn and Tithonos might also be deemed “queer,” and not only because there are no children explicitly mentioned.47 While it is true that in other versions of their story they have offspring, in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite children are not part of their future.48 Instead, their relationship bifurcates along two temporal tracks. Dawn remains ageless and immortal, while Tithonos grows ever older, with the result that Dawn soon becomes his caretaker. This is clearly what is implied by the description of her wrapping him in different fabrics and “nursing” (ἀτιτάλλειν) him on ambrosia.49 In his extreme old age, Tithonos has returned to infancy.50 Sappho’s own cry of despair can, then, be heard as also channeling the voice of this once-mortal man who has fallen between two cosmic eras (i.e., the eras represented by Ganymede and Anchises).51 Ganymede ascends to 46 47

48

49 50 51

See Goodkin’s related concept of avuncular time/narrative as described in Chapter 1. Cf. Segal 1986: 40; and, as noted earlier, Segal (1973/74: 208) describes Tithonos as a “failure” (i.e., he does not measure up well against the standards of heteronormativity). Lesser (2021: 132) argues that “Tithonos’s agedness, which embodies his queer deviance from the norms of masculinity, haunts the song and its portrayal of love between women or girls.” Tithonos is said to be the son of Laomedon and brother of Priam at Il. 20.236–238; in what is very likely the oldest version of the story, Tithonos lives, ageless and immortal, with Dawn, who rises from his bed each morning (see, e.g., Il. 11.1–2, and Od. 5.1–2). At Hes. Th. 984–985, we learn that to Tithonos Dawn bore Memnon and his brother Emathion. HHAphr. 231–232: αὐτὸν δ᾿ αὖτ᾿ ἀτίταλλεν ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν ἔχουσα / σίτῳ τ᾿ ἀμβροσίῃ τε καὶ εἵματα καλὰ διδοῦσα. King (1986: 20) suggests that “the eventual fate of the aged Tithonos can be used to show that human life ends in much the same way as it began.” Or so the story ends in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the cautionary tale being that for mortals it is best not to wish for the impossible: far better to be rewarded with biological immortality of the kind that Anchises is promised when Aphrodite tells him he will have “a son who will rule the Trojans and children will be born to his children in a continuous line (196–7).” His clan will live on, though he himself will age and die. See further Segal 1973/74 and Schein 2012.

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the realm of the gods, retaining his youth and beauty. Anchises, by contrast, is rewarded with neither immortality nor agelessness. Likewise, at the heart of Sappho’s despair, and of her turn toward Tithonos, is the request that Dawn has forgotten to make of Zeus: “Make him immortal and ageless.” We know from the case of Ganymede that Zeus has the power to grant agelessness. He has done this for his own mortal beloved, and he grants Dawn’s request, that Tithonos be “immortal and live forever and always” (222). Because Zeus presides over the cosmos, with its different classes of beings (god, human, and animal), the constraints governing perlocutionary utterances are met in his singular head-nodding gesture. But at the heart of this parable is the performative that has not been uttered, the “youth” (ἥβην, 224) that was not granted, because Dawn did not ask for it. This unuttered performative, I suggest, haunts the Tithonos Poem and motivates Sappho’s conjuring of Tithonos’ particular pathology.52 In its generative role, moreover, the never-registered request for youth functions somewhat like the Sedgwickian periperformative, one of those renunciations, refusals, or oblique, nonce references residing in the “neighborhood” of the performative.53

Dawn’s Failed Prayer and the Sedgwickian Periperformative “Periperformative” is a term Sedgwick coined to address the kinds of speech acts that cluster around what language philosopher J. L. Austin called “performative” utterances, that is, speech acts that do something by saying something. One of Austin’s ([1962] 1975) primary examples in How to Do Things with Words is the speech act “I do,” uttered in the context of a marriage vow. Such an utterance consists of an “I” and an implicit “you,” but it also implies a “they,” in that the witnesses of such ceremonial utterances give these speech acts their binding power. As Sedgwick (2003: 70) puts it, it is “the constitution of a community of witness that makes the marriage.” And when Austin delivered these lectures (in 1955), it was assumed that the performative would work only within the context of heterosexual marriage. As Sedgwick (2003: 71) points out, only a heterosexual male making appeal to the authority of church or state would have had the capacity to utter such a performative (under the sociolegal conditions pertaining when Austin gave his lectures): a male whose personal authority was constituted as well “through the logic of the (heterosexual) supplement whereby 52

Pace Boedeker 2009: 78.

53

Sedgwick 2003: 70.

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individual subjective agency is guaranteed by the welding into a crossgender dyad.” For queer witnesses of such a ceremony, or queer readers of Austin’s lectures, the marriage example functions in a far less straightforward manner. “Persons who self-identify as queer will be those whose subjectivity is lodged in refusals or deflections of (or by) the logic of the heterosexual supplement; in far less simple associations attaching to state authority and religious sanction; in far less complacent relation to the witness of others.”54 Such persons will therefore have a “queer” or oblique relationship to performatives of this kind, similar to the way that periperformatives allude to, without mimicking the syntactical form of, performatives proper (i.e., the first person, indicative, active verb). As Sedgwick (2003: 68) defines them, periperformatives “are not themselves performatives” but they are “about performatives and, more properly, . . . they cluster around performatives.”55 The first examples she provides involve negated versions of the performatives to which they allude (i.e., not “we dedicate” or “we hereby consecrate” but “we cannot dedicate,” or “we cannot consecrate”).56 Sedgwick explains, furthermore, that whereas the performative proper has an on/off mode, a “digital representation that seems to go with a temporal register,” the periperformative exists on a spatial spectrum, sometimes hovering between two central performatives.57 Performative utterances are temporally inflected interventions that challenge, and in some instances change, the ontological status of something, from one moment to the next. By contrast, as Sedgwick (2003: 68) argues, “the localness of the periperformative is lodged in a metaphorics of space.” It does not necessarily create an entirely new entity, as in the case of the performative “I do,” which makes out of two separate “I”s a new “we.” Rather, the periperformative subtly alters already existing social alignments and affective relations. In the novels from which Sedgwick drew her key illustrations, the most consequential epistemological moments occur not within a marriage but 54 55

56 57

Sedgwick 2003: 71, also noting there that “the emergence of the first person, of the singular, of the active, and of the indicative are all questions rather than presumptions for queer performativity.” Edwards (2009: 83) brings queerness to bear on the periperformative more explicitly than does Sedgwick herself when he writes that “in addition to considering the queer first-person performer, Sedgwick’s oeuvre also encourages us to think about ‘peri-performative’ spaces, or the queer contexts of performative utterances” (my emphasis). On Neoptolemus’ “would-be performative utterance” in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, see Telò and Mueller 2018: 8–9. Foster, Kurke, and Weiss (2020: 20–24) discuss periperformatives in Greek lyric. Sedgwick 2003: 68, emphasis in the original. Sedgwick 2003: 78–79: “As I amble farther from the mother lode of my own neighborhood, my compass need may also tremble with the added magnetism of another numinous center to which I am thereby nearer.”

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when one member of a married couple discloses something to a friend or lover that she would never say to her husband.58 These episodes include Charlotte Stant’s periperformative displacement of Amerigo’s marriage vow in Henry James’ The Golden Bowl and the “pathos of uncertain agency” exemplified in Lydia Glasher’s gift of diamonds to Gwendolyn, her former lover’s new wife, in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.59 As we pivot back to the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, we might say that, in its generative role, Dawn’s never-registered request for youth also functions somewhat like Sedgwick’s periperformative. This failed performative, I propose, is what motivates the exemplum of Tithonos in Sappho’s poem. In calling Dawn’s unuttered request a periperformative, I, too, am performing a recuperative move – one that is comparable to finding generative potential in a negative affect like shame, or to placing scare quotes around the “failures” of Dawn and Aphrodite. In doing so, I take my lead not only from Sedgwick but also from the writings of contemporary queer theorists, such as Heather Love and Jack Halberstam, both of whom have sought to reframe failure as more than simply the nonattainment of success. Sappho’s Tithonos Poem harbors at its core Dawn’s forgotten request. It alludes to this “failure” but at the same time transforms it into something unexpected and intriguing. Failure is, in this sense, fruitful. Sappho’s Tithonos Poem recovers the generative force of Dawn’s forgetfulness in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, just as Sappho’s Hymn to Aphrodite derives its creative impetus from Aphrodite’s martial failure in the Iliad (as we saw in Chapter 4). In the Tithonos Poem, the singer cries, “I often groan over my present state, but what can I do? It is impossible, being human, to become ageless” (τὰ ⟨νῦν ⟩ στεναχίσδω θαμέως, ἀλλὰ τί κεν ποείην; / ἀγήραον ἄνθρωπον ἔοντ᾿ οὐ δύνατον γένεσθαι, 7–8). “Ageless” (agēraon) at the beginning of line 8 is in the emphatic position, signaling that the impossibility – for humans – falls on the side of agelessness rather than immortality.60 “Old age, the example of Tithonus shows, is more inescapable than death itself.”61 58

59

60

61

At Sedgwick 2003: 73–78. See also Love 2007: 67–68 on Sedgwick’s allusion to a poem by Cavafy (Che fece . . . il gran rifiuto) in which his “No” can be read as the inverse of “I do” – in Love’s words, “a queer performative that is articulated in resistance to the heterosexual order.” The novel as a literary form, as Sedgwick (2003: 73) argued, thus “constitutes an exploration of the possible grounds and performative potential of periperformative refusals, fractures, warpings of the mobile proscenium of marital witness.” Boedeker (2009: 76–79) compares this adunaton to other adunata in Sappho and concludes that it is different in kind, being about a “permanent limitation of human nature” rather than a circumstantial impossibility. Boedeker 2009: 78.

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For this reason, the case of Tithonos, as opposed, say, to Ganymede or Anchises comes immediately to mind. Sappho’s declaration, at line 8, that “it is not possible for one who is mortal to become ageless” appears, in this way, deliberately to evoke that unspoken performative from the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. While on a first reading Sappho’s words can be taken simply as a declarative statement of the obvious (after all, most of us are aware of the fact that, unless we die young, we will not escape old age), in the context provided by the Tithonos myth, the periperformative force of the statement comes through clearly.62 The situation that Sappho now finds herself in, and that all of us will eventually, if we have not already, is a direct consequence of Aphrodite’s refusal to immortalize Anchises; for at that cosmic moment, humans lost their capacity to “upgrade” to the status of the gods.63 Tithonos is in fact the last among mortals to have had his mortality revoked because of a sexual relationship with a god. It is because of him that Aphrodite refrains from seeking immortality for her own mortal lover. Better for Anchises to die a normal human death (after having lived a human life) than to be forever caught in the in-between. Aphrodite foregoes immortalizing Anchises because she understands the broader consequences of Dawn’s failure. And so, too, does the singer of the Tithonos Poem. Acknowledgment of these consequences comes in line 8. Because of Dawn’s unuttered request, it is now a systemic impossibility (οὐ δύνατον) for anyone who is human (ἄνθρωπον ἔοντα) to become “ageless” (ἀγήραον . . . γένεσθαι). Dawn’s infelicitous speech act has had far-reaching consequences. And the example of Tithonos serves as a permanent reminder of this new cosmic reality.

Voicing Lament, Ventriloquizing Achilles In returning, one last time, to the sonic quality of Sappho’s lament, I want to draw attention to the somewhat unexpected resonance of στεναχίσδω.64 The first thing to notice is that this is not obviously a quality of sound one

62

63 64

One may well ask how a periperformative is to be recognized as such. There are no hard and fast rules, but because, as Sedgwick (2003: 75) puts it, they belong to the realm of ordinary language, “if a sentence sounds as though it’s probably periperformative, then it’s probably periperformative – and many, many sentences of all sorts are so.” See Segal 1973/74. For a complementary discussion of στεναχίσδω in the Tithonos Poem, see Kurke 2021a: 28–29.

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associates with reputation-making kleos: a song to carry the fame of the present generation of heroes into the future. As I have already mentioned, the present-tense orientation of στεναχίσδω suggests an almost sublime unawareness of the more distant future, or of the potential for present misery to be translated into future glory. The singer mourns the loss of her former vitality, yet there is no speculation about what the future holds. In its Homeric instances, when it does not capture the echoing of a dwelling or the groaning of the earth, the verb is used exclusively of men – and not just any men, but the leading heroes of the two epics. In the Iliad, the iterative form of στενάχω appears three times, and each time it is used of Achilles when he is at his most intense mourning for Patroklos. In Book 19, the elderly Achaeans encourage him to eat, but Achilles refuses, wailing all the while: ὅ δ᾿ ἠρνεῖτο στεναχίζων (19.304). A few lines later he explains that it is impossible for him to take nourishment when “terrible grief comes upon him” (ἄχος αἰνὸν ἱκάνει, 19.307). “Grief” (achos) is the middle syllable of στεναχίσδω (sten-ach-isdō), suggesting that, in its aural components, this verb of extreme lament in Sappho wraps itself around the grief that it expresses – the achos that is built into the very name of Ach-illes.65 The intensity of his mourning is, if anything, amplified in Book 23, where Achilles lays offerings on Patroklos’ funeral pyre and remains beside it as the body of his beloved goes up in flames; loud wailing accompanies both of these actions (Il. 23.172 and 225). This is the outer limit of human grief as it can be captured in language, or as a vocalizable sound. Elsewhere in Homer, στεναχίζω is used of internalized grief (i.e., of Menelaos at Il. 7.95), or as a synonym for intense suffering. There are several instances of this verb in the Odyssey, where Odysseus is either the subject of the wailing or its object.66 But its appearance in Sappho’s lyrics is unexpected, and disorienting. A verb that typically expresses the epic male voice appears here, in a lyric song about the loss of a woman’s strength and vitality. As Leslie Kurke (2021a: 28) observes, “with this evocative verb, the ego suddenly morphs into a mourning and isolated Homeric hero.” The verb στεναχίζω is, in a sense, already queered in the Iliad, thanks to its near exclusive application to Achilles in his inconsolable grief over Patroklos’ death.67 Would Sappho’s listeners have been reminded of 65 66 67

I am grateful to Mario Telò for this suggestion. See Nagy 1979: 69–72 and 78–79 for the etymologizing of “Achilles” as achos (grief) to the laos (people). See Od. 9.13, 11.214, 16.188, 16.195, and 24.317. On Achilles and Patroklos, see Clarke 1978, Davidson 2007: 255–260, Warwick 2019b, Lesser 2023: 190–197, and Mueller 2023a (all argue that the homoerotic subtext is already present in the Iliad ). For a more conservative reading, see Fantuzzi 2012: 187–198 and Austin 2021.

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Achilles’ intense lamentation over Patroklos? And if so, what are we to make of that? Patricia Rosenmeyer’s notion of “gendered ventriloquism” may be helpful here in helping us imagine how Achilles-channeled-through-Sappho may have resonated with Sappho’s listeners. Adapting Winkler’s theory of double consciousness, Rosenmeyer (1997: 138) proposes that “perhaps we can view Sappho’s allusivity as a kind of gendered ventriloquism in which the female poet incorporates parts of the forefather’s voice in her own work to achieve something she could not on her own.”68 This thesis is compelling, not least of all because it acknowledges the necessity of Sappho’s using Homeric language as a medium of expression. Although Rosenmeyer does not apply it to the Tithonos Poem, her concept of gendered ventriloquism aptly captures the dynamic between the Tithonos Poem and the Iliad, between Sappho’s voice and the voice of Achilles. Achilles’ cries of grief clearly come from another time, place, and genre. Imported into her verse, στεναχίσδω acts as a portal, funneling us back to his unquenchable grief, even as (within Sappho’s lyrics) it lurches forward into the failed romance of Dawn and Tithonos. And like Tithonos, both Patroklos and Achilles occupy their own bardo-spaces. For as long as he remains unburied, Patroklos hovers restlessly between the worlds of the living and the dead. Achilles is a liminal figure throughout the Iliad – but even more so after Patroklos has died. Achilles’ wailing lamentation is a paranoid cri de coeur. Such a cry, when it issues from this male hero, emblematizes his resistance to, and utter rejection of, the world that has deprived him of Patroklos. In Sedgwick’s (2006) words, “the paranoid/ schizoid position – marked by hatred, envy, and anxiety – is a position of terrible alertness to the dangers posed by the hateful and envious partobjects that one defensively projects into the world around one.” We can recognize in Achilles’ absolute refusal to be distracted (by food, for example, or sex) from his need to exact vengeance something of this drive toward the destruction of self and others. On the other hand, the depressive position, as “an anxiety-mitigating achievement” which one only intermittently “succeeds in inhabiting,” entails a resignation of sorts, and a recognition of limits.69 The singer’s lament in the Tithonos Poem arises from this depressive position. It is not the warrior’s cry of resistance, signaling his fury and hatred of the world, but rather the aging woman’s acceptance of the hand 68 69

For discussion of Winkler’s “double consciousness,” see Chapter 4. See Sedgwick 2007, summarizing Klein. Just as with the shift from the paranoid/schizoid position to the reparative position in the Kleinian model of relationality, the way in which στεναχίσδω is intoned varies from one context to the next.

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she has been dealt. The singer turns toward Tithonos not as a model of one who has successfully overcome mortal limits, or failed in trying to do so, but as one who has accepted “failure” from the beginning, by acknowledging the impossibility of agelessness and journeying, therefore, toward a different end, an end that includes death in rebirth. Tithonos is supported by his former consort, Dawn, whose reparative embrace extends, through Sappho’s own voice, to us, her listeners. In her ventriloquizing of Homer’s Achilles, Sappho recalls the warrior’s inconsolable grief. But because his lament is being channeled through her body, and is thus unmoored from its Iliadic anchor, the wailing resonates differently. Hers is a cry of resignation rather than rebellion. Her voice traverses his liminal space, taking us from one genre to the other, across the species boundary, and (very nearly) into the unknown that awaits all who are born human. We may feel that in the lived experiment of his ever growing older and physically wasting away an end of some sort is implicit: if this “end” does not come in the form of death – a plot point that the myth itself has foreclosed – then perhaps it can be conceptualized as a kind of rebirth, or transformation, into an entirely different sort of being. Tithonos’ bardo marks the transitional period during which he moves ever closer to becoming a cicada; this is the temporality within which Sappho’s Tithonos Poem evokes him. And so, without giving the game away (by, for example, alluding directly to the cicada), Sappho’s own groaning lament is entangled with that of the tragically situated Tithonos. We, as listeners and readers of this song, bear witness to their incipient transitions. We are part of the constellation of these performative, transfigurative events. Our poet’s carefully curated “Sappho” persona sings frequently about her desire for other women. By decentering the heterosexual matrix, Sappho’s lyrics foreground the queer and the nonheteronormative. Her poetry thus primes us to hear and feel such resonances even in a genre like epic, where they are not the main message. Similarly, affects and experiences like shame and failure take on new meaning in Sappho’s poetry. We have considered the heterosexual bias of the marriage vow with which J. L. Austin illustrates the perlocutionary effects of performative utterances. And we have discussed Sedgwick’s concept of the periperfomative, which carves out a space in which unscripted allusions to and renunciations of these normative cultural performatives can unfold.70 As Sedgwick (2003: 70) herself writes, “To disinterpellate from a performative scene will usually require, not another 70

Sedgwick (2003: 70) introduces the example, of “I dare you” to illustrate how the periperformative might work. There is no formula for deflecting or undoing the constraints of “I dare you” (the “you”

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explicit performative nor simply the negative of one, but the nonce, referential act of a periperformative.” Tithonos, I have suggested, is that “nonce” creature who has been impacted – we might even say created – by a periperformative of just this kind. In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite Tithonos functions primarily as a negative exemplum: Aphrodite will at all costs want to avoid replicating Dawn’s failed speech act with her human lover, Anchises. Yet, Sappho, as we have seen, turns Dawn’s forgetfulness into an occasion for a different kind of song – one that, while not exactly celebrating failure, at least offers a space for humans, gods, and other manner of creatures to come together, however briefly, in a shared moment of suspension in the face of an uncertain future. could say, “not on my account,” or witnesses could say “Don’t accept the dare on our account”) and these statements, according to Sedgwick, “would radically alter the interlocutory (I-you-they) space” of the encounter. But because there is no scripted, ready-made negation for “I dare you,” whatever it is that resists or deflects the dare is a periperformative rather than an explicitly performative utterance.

chapter 6

Sappho fr. 44V, or Andromache’s “No Future” Wedding Song

Often regarded as Sappho’s most “Homeric” composition, fr. 44V features Andromache and Hector on their way to Troy.1 The husband and wife-tobe are traveling between Thebe, Andromache’s homeland in the Troad, and Troy, Hector’s city. Once they arrive, Hector is destined to fall in battle to Achilles, and Andromache to be taken captive by Greek soldiers who will also hurl her infant son, Astyanax, from the city’s ramparts. Initially regarded with suspicion when it was first published (by Arthur Hunt in 1914) due to its epicizing meter and mythical subject matter, the fragment’s authenticity has not recently been called into question (nor has that of P. Oxy. X 1232).2 Whether or not it was an epithalamium (a song composed for performance at a wedding), however, is far less settled. While Wilamowitz, Page, and Rösler, and, more recently, Rissman, Burnett, and Pallantza view Sappho fr. 44V as a genuine wedding song,3 others have registered differing degrees of dissatisfaction with that assessment.4 There is no doubt that Sappho fr. 44V is a wedding-themed composition, and yet, this hardly makes it a straightforward celebration of 1

2 3 4

Sappho fr. 44V was placed at the end of Book 2 of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho’s poetry, a book devoted to poems in the Aeolic dactylic pentameter meter (on this meter, see Budelmann 2018: 140); as de Kreij (2022: 609) has recently demonstrated, however, fr. 44V “was not regarded as a regular part of the second book.” See Grenfell and Hunt 1914. It is assumed that the real-life bride and groom have either been left unnamed or were mentioned in the missing three or four lines at the beginning of the song. See Kakridis 1966: 22 and Rösler 1975: 276 for references to earlier scholarship: both identify Albin Lesky (1963) as an early objector to the commonly held epithalamion hypothesis. While Pernigotti (2001: 14–16) emphasizes the stylistic and narratological differences between fr. 44V and Sappho’s known epithalamic compositions (104–117), Dale (2011) discusses the ancient evidence for how the epithalamia were placed within Sappho’s corpus, for example, as a ninth book or distributed among the other books according to their meter. Dale does not believe that Sappho 44V was composed as an epithalamium. Levaniouk (2018) takes a slightly different tack, suggesting that female singers performed various kinds of songs at weddings, not just epithalamia, and that a song like Sappho fr. 44V would have been appropriate for such a context. For a balanced overview, see Wasdin 2018: 140–141 and 184.

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marriage. The very lack of consensus about the poem’s suitability for performance at a wedding attests to a fundamental ambivalence about its tone. For this reason (among others), we will want to attend closely in this chapter to matters of atmosphere and affect. Atmosphere in lyric poetry is itself a compelling topic. In a recent essay, Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi (2018: 164) reminds us that the sonorousness and musicality of lyric can act as a “dissolving medium,” reducing the semantic force of the words while amplifying their capacity to create “a certain atmosphere or mood that envelopes the listener.” Peponi traces the origins of this idea back to Platonic aesthetics, but she also acknowledges the influence for contemporary readers of Stimmung, a Heideggerian concept (often translated as “mood” or “atmosphere”), which Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has reanimated for literary studies. In Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature, Gumbrecht (2012: 74) observes that Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice “combines the protagonist’s ineffable feelings and the city’s weather – his material surroundings – in a fatal way.” Gumbrecht’s larger project involves reading for presence. It is an approach, he explains, that is “less a matter of disclosing the meaning that underlies the narrative than of setting free the potential it contains.” And such a potential, he maintains, “enables the reader to inhabit worlds of sensation – worlds that feel like physical environments.”5 We could say something similar about the veil that Andromache receives on her wedding day as a gift from Aphrodite (Iliad 22.468–472). Its presence in Iliad 22 creates a tragic context for Sappho fr. 44V and imbues with Sapphic affect the scene in the Iliad where the veil appears. The object casts its pall over Sappho fr. 44V, even as it buoys us with its momentary suspension of the Iliadic narrative. As a critic who regards Sappho fr. 44V as a genuine wedding hymn, Leah Rissman (1983: 135) admits that “the major difficulty posed by the epithalamial interpretation of fr. 44V stems from possible allusions to Andromache’s enslavement after Hector’s death, allusions that might serve to detract from the gaiety of an actual wedding celebration” (my emphasis).6 Nevertheless, as Rissman reasons, “in other poems, Sappho 5 6

Gumbrecht 2012: 75. For the verbal fabric of lyric as an atmosphere enveloping the listener, see Peponi 2018: 164–168. For Rissman 1983: 137–139, problems emerge at the microscopic level of allusion. In particular, she is concerned with the Homeric resonances of two adjectives: the first, ἐλικώπιδα, an adjective strongly associated with nubile girls, is used in Homer of Chryseis, at Il. 1.98 (137). This, in combination with Sappho’s reference to “holy Thebe,” which is also Chryseis’ hometown (see Il. 1.366–369), makes it likely in Rissman’s view that the poet deliberately links Andromache’s fate with that of Chryseis.

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likens a groom to Achilles or Ajax, whose fates were not much brighter than those of Hector and Andromache – and seemingly does so without introducing a gloomy note.”7 There is, in other words, no need to privilege these specific details of the myth. Anne Pippin Burnett (1983: 220n26) takes a similar approach, arguing that just as “we are not to suppose that when Sappho herself likened a bridegroom to Achilles (as Himerios says she did, Or. 9.16) she meant to introduce an ominous idea of death,” so too there is no reason to assume that Hector’s name would “necessarily darken the present song.” I do not dispute that mythical figures have full and complicated fictional lives, and that, when an episode in which they feature is not directly invoked, it may be considered to be irrelevant (as, for example, the death of Achilles bears no necessary relation to the figure of Achilles the bridegroom). But Sappho fr. 44V is not just about Hector and Andromache; it is about their wedding. The poem therefore invites its listeners to dwell on the future that they know will emerge from that wedding ritual. We are being asked, in other words, to contemplate what marriage to Hector will mean for Andromache and her offspring. Hector’s future death is not simply another episode in his life, disconnected from the present circumstances of the song. Rather, Andromache’s future enslavement and the death of her young son are a direct consequence of the wedding that fr. 44V celebrates. It is a question of cause and effect, not simply, “now this, then that.” While most wedding hymns are focused on the present blessedness and future prosperity of the bride and groom, fr. 44V is underpinned by its listeners’ awareness that there is no future. The bride and groom are headed into the abyss. In this respect, Sappho fr. 44V thematizes marriage in a distinctly queer manner.8 In “The Future Is Kid Stuff,” an article that was later expanded into his 2004 book, Lee Edelman (1998: 19) investigates “the pervasive trope of the child as figure for the universal value attributed to political futurity.” All politics, Edelman contends, is premised on the heteronormative imperative to reproduce. It is a logic that grounds itself in 7 8

Rissman 1983: 138. This line of reasoning (and the particular example of Achilles) goes back to Rösler 1975: 277. Throughout this book I am in sympathy with Sedgwick’s understanding of queerness as connected to a “continuing moment, movement, motive – recurrent, eddying, troublant,” which can be traced linguistically back to the word’s Indo-European root – twerkw, “which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart” (see Sedgwick 1993: xii); in this chapter, however, I rely on Edelman’s notion of queerness as a form of resistance to the political impasse posed by “reproductive futurism,” as discussed in the later section, “Sappho’s kleos aphthiton: A ‘No Future’ Poetics.”

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the supposed impossibility of imagining or supporting any other stance. Resistance to that position is framed as a future without children, or simply, No Future. Edelman (1998) launches his argument by deconstructing political sloganeering of this type: “We’re fighting for the children. Whose side are you on?” Against this, Edelman proposes what he calls “the impossible project of a queer oppositionality,” one that would “oppose itself to the structural determinants of politics as such, which is also to say, that would oppose itself to the logic of opposition.”9 Edelman uncovers and deconstructs a logic of opposition within the political discourse of the United States in the late twentieth century. This same sort of oppositional logic can also be found, I suggest, in Sappho’s recontextualization of the Homeric formula, kleos aphthiton (“unwithering fame, undying immortality”) which appears in the fourth line of fr. 44V (τάς τ᾿ ἄλλας Ἀσίας . [ . ]δε . αν κλέος ἄφθιτον).10 Edelman’s disquisition marks as political the very rhetoric that presents itself as self-evidently apolitical. He demystifies the fantasy of futurity as precisely that – fantasy. Sappho’s importation of kleos aphthiton into the alien environment of the “wedding song” produces a similar effect. Simply put, “reproductive futurism” is the idea that to be invested in the future, one must subscribe to the procreative sexual politics on which heteronormativity is predicated. Whether they were real or fictionalized, ancient Greek wedding songs celebrated and perpetuated reproductive futurism. To have a marriage ceremony performed under the banner of epic immortality thus feels distinctly odd. It is that “queerness,” as both an affect and a political ideology, that this chapter explores. Within its native epic context, aphthiton is a term with positive resonances; the hero’s name, his reputation, will be ever-lasting, and death-defying. The adjective signals immortality. But there is a less optimistic way of reading the alphaprivative, where the “withering” that is being negated is the natural ebb and flow of biological life. This life cycle is what is cut short by the kleos economy. Although present to a certain degree in the Iliad, particularly in Book 9, the anti-reproductive resonances of “un-withering” kleos are that much more striking in the context of a wedding song. This is not a full-scale reparative reading of the type offered in earlier chapters. I do not bring Sedgwick’s work directly into dialogue with 9 10

Edelman 1998: 19. On kleos aphthiton at Il. 9.413 as conveying “the transcendent notion of a poetic tradition that will last forever,” see Nagy 1990: 124 and, with reference to Sappho fr. 44V, Nagy 1974: 104–139.

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Sappho and Homer here, although her presence may still be felt, in so far as affect and atmosphere are primary concerns. The chapter also examines the zero-sum thinking about heroic fame that undergirds the epic expression for “undying fame” (kleos aphthiton), even in its lyric context. Such a focus could be considered a form of paranoid critique. But even as it exposes the fault lines of the Iliad ’s kleos economy, fr. 44V nevertheless offers, I argue, a distinctly reparative take on the veil of Aphrodite and its surrounding accessories in Iliad 22. Having experienced both the prehistory and the earlier-composed Homeric scene of Andromache’s fainting fall backward, one cannot help but be affected by the veil’s material properties. This queer object resonates between the worlds of epic and lyric. In allowing ourselves to become absorbed by it, we will have won a moment’s respite from Iliadic despair. The entire domestic setting of Andromache weaving at her loom gets subtly recalibrated into the backstory to which Sappho fr. 44V grants us access. As the soon-to-be wife of Hector and future mother of their son Astyanax, Andromache embodies the maternal ideal (both ancient and modern), and it is this idealization, this futurity, that Sappho fr. 44V both celebrates and challenges.

An Impending Arrival Because several verses are missing from the beginning of Sappho fr. 44V, the fragment as we have it opens with the Trojan herald, Idaeus, first proclaiming κλέος ἄφθιτον (at the end of line 4), and then launching into the description of the first part of the journey of Hector and his bride.11 The lustrous visuality of Andromache and her gifts are the subject matter of lines 5–10. In the second part of the fragment, attention shifts to the response in Troy. At line 11, Priam jumps up energetically, and the good news of Hector’s imminent arrival spreads throughout the city. The fragment consists almost entirely of reported speech up until Priam’s gesture; the catalogue of gifts concludes with ὢς εἶπ᾿ at the beginning of line 11, thus rounding off Idaeus’ report (modern editors add quotation marks). But just as soon as Idaeus has finished speaking, the “report” or the “rumor” (φάμα) travels to family and friends throughout the city “of broad dancing-places” (12). And once the news has spread, vehicles of transport

11

Idaeus is the single herald who accompanies Priam on his mission to reclaim Hector’s body (Il. 24.325, 470): see Schrenk 1994: 146; on the messenger/herald as a stand-in figure for the poet, Barrett 2002: 62 and 67.

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are made ready to carry the various groups (organized by age and sex) out of the city (11–20): ὢς εἶπ’· ὀτραλέως δ’ ἀνόρουσε πάτ[η]ρ̣ φίλος· φάμα δ’ ἦλθε κατὰ πτ̣όλιν εὐρύχο̣ρ̣ο̣ν φίλοις. αὔτικ’ Ἰλίαδαι σατίναι[ς] ὐπ’ ἐϋτρόχοις ἆγον αἰμιόνοις, ἐ̣ π̣[έ]βαινε δὲ παῖς ὄχλος γυναίκων τ’ ἄμα παρθενίκα[ν] τ . . [ . . ] . σφύρων, χῶρις δ’ αὖ Περάμοιο θυγ[α]τρεσ[ ἴππ[οις] δ’ ἄνδρες ὔπαγον ὐπ’ ἄρ̣[ματ π[ ]ες ἠίθ̣εοι, μεγάλω[σ]τι δ̣[ δ[ ] . ἀνίοχοι φ[ . . . . . ] . [ π̣[ ´]ξα . ο[

15

20

So he spoke; and readily, his dear father jumped up, and the rumor spread to his friends, through the city of broad dancing-places. Straightaway the sons of Ilus yoked mules to their well-wheeled carriages, and the whole crowd of women and [?]- ankled girls got in. Separately the daughters of Priam. . . And the men yoked horses to their chariots [all of them?] unmarried young men, and greatly . . . chariot-drivers . . .

The text becomes progressively more lacunose in this section of the fragment, particularly along the right-hand edges of the column. Readability peters out around line 20; at this point, there is a gap of at least several verses. But the focus seems to be on various groups as they are preparing to leave Troy. The “descendants of Ilus” are the subject, and they hitch mules to the σατίναι[ς], the wagons that were standard fare for wedding processions, and which generally carried women. Next, two groups of women board the wagons, both married and unmarried women (14–15), as do the daughters of Priam. Then the (presumably young) men attach horses to their chariots, and they all (men and women) likely set forth from the city to join the bride and groom as they make their way to Troy. Relatively many verses of this fragment are devoted to vehicles of transport. Perhaps the distribution by topic would appear less striking if more of the poem were preserved. But we should take note of how and why the wagons and chariots, along with the animals (i.e., mules and horses) that lead them, nearly eclipse the human characters. Priam is named, and we sense the excitement conveyed in his simple gesture of jumping to his feet. Yet that action is quickly dispatched, and the song’s focus shifts from this individual to groups, even classes, of people. We are soon among the “well-wheeled” wagons (i.e., σατίναι[ς] ὐπ᾿ ἐϋτρόχοις, 13), as though following the camera’s eye from Priam’s initial gesture down through the

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various quarters of the city to the land-transport vehicles, which will move them in orderly fashion beyond its gates. As with the poem as a whole, much of the action here is anticipatory. In the song’s final section (lines 21–end), the narrator’s perspective still tracks those traveling toward the event itself.12 Tightly organized bands of people have come together in response to both sonic and kinetic prompts. They meet up with Hector, Andromache, and their coterie. Accompanying them are a sweet-sounding pipe, kithara, and castanets, all of which mingle with the voices of girls singing a “pure song” (25–27): καὶ ψ[ό]φο[ς κ]ροτάλ[ων ]ως δ᾿ ἄρα πάρ[θενοι ἄειδον μέλος ἄγν̣[ον, ἴκα]νε δ᾿ ἐς α̣ἴ̣ θ̣[ερα ἄχω θεσπεσία̣ γελ̣[ And the noise of the castanets, and . . . the girls were singing a pure song, and the divinely sounding echo reached into the air . . .

As the heavenly sounds travel skyward, the streets fill up with mixingbowls brimming with myrrh, cassia, and frankincense – all mingled together, just like the instrumental notes. The voices of the girls are introduced in connection with the pipes, castanets, and kithara. Next, our attention turns to the cries of the older women – their ululation – and the high-pitched harmonious paean of the men who sing in praise of Hector and Andromache. Even in this poem of barely thirty-five lines there is a wide range of genres evocatively conjured through both scent and sound. Whether or not the song was performed chorally, the voices we are invited to hear are those belonging to choruses of girls, women, and men: three distinct groups, representing different segments of the population of Troy. Likewise, whether or not the poem was an epithalamium composed for performance at a wedding, the narrative context is closely modeled around the wedding hymn. It even conjures in its various sounds and movements the wedding celebration on the shield of Achilles from Iliad 18, another synaesthetic, immersive scene.13 This section of Sappho fr. 44V fully engages our senses, with its mention of spicy aromas wafting out of the mixing-bowls and into the streets. The brightness of the objects in the earlier verses is sensorily balanced by these aural and aromatic additions – the sights, sounds, 12

13

Pernigotti (2001: 18–20) observes that the wedding procession is narrated obliquely, presented through the multiplicity of sensations and perspectives it gives rise to rather than as a single monolithic event. See Il. 18.491–496.

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and smells of celebration, hymnic praise, the makarismos. And yet these voices intermingled with piquant fragrances also trigger darker associations. Troy, not incidentally, is the endpoint of the couple’s journey, if not of the song itself, which, because of its focus on “impending arrival” is able to sustain a “certain breathless excitement.”14 A number of readers have commented on how the poem seems to be suspended between different planes – geographical, narrative, and temporal. It tracks the bridal couple’s movements across the sea, from Thebe toward Troy, but stops just short of their arrival, picking up instead on the procession of Trojans out of their city to greet them. The action is poised on the cusp of a momentous arrival. But rather than stage that climactic entrance into Troy, the song fluctuates instead, almost tidally, between the two groups in motion. Like the everflowing Plakia, the song’s own movement is fluid: “Hector and his bride are ever approaching but never here.”15 As we wait, anticipating the moment of their arrival, the poem delays that telos, its own narrative movement caught up in a kind of temporal suspension. The lacunose text makes it even more difficult to track the linear progress that is made.16 We are on the verge of reaching Troy, on the precipice of a ritual event that will mark Andromache’s transition from a virgin bride into a wife (and, eventually, mother), but we are looking simultaneously backward to Thebe, where the journey began. In hovering between these two perspectives and stretching out the journey itself, fr. 44V seems to immortalize the transitory – the crossing of boundaries, or “transgression,” in the literal sense.17 It is comparable in this regard to Iliad 22, where we glean a glimpse of Andromache as she falls backward, fainting in grief as she recognizes that (her now-husband) Hector is dead. In both contexts (in both Sappho and Homer), we see Andromache on the brink, as she is about to experience a momentous change. These two transitional moments from Andromache’s life open up an intertextual dialogue between lyric and epic, their affects and their temporal perspectives merging here in Sappho (but also in Homer), so 14

15 16

17

The quotations are from Snyder 1997: 75, with emphasis in the original. Snyder also observes that “in the absence of the actual narration of the arrival of the bride and groom (at least in the extant portion), the piece is essentially a song about singing” (75). Burnett 1983: 223. As Sampson (2016: 59) most recently conjectures, the lacuna from lines 20–23 “must have included the couple disembarking” and from that point on the two parties would have proceeded together toward Troy (“they set out for Troy” is about all we can make of line 23). Wilson (1996: 147) locates a “transgressive” act within the marriage ritual itself, in the anakalypteria, the unveiling of the bride where “the gaze of the bridegroom and the wedding guests upon the unveiled, newly exposed face of the bride represents an act of touching, a crossing of boundaries, a violation that is preliminary but significant.”

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that it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish her bridal day from the moment she becomes a widow.18

Amidst All the Glittering Things Hector once traveled to the city of Thebe, Andromache’s hometown, to claim her as his bride. The Iliad relates this part of the bridal couple’s backstory; in fact, it does so at the very moment in Book 22 where Andromache rips off her wedding veil, the one, we are told, that Aphrodite gave to her on “the day that glancing-helmed Hector led her from the house of Eëtion, when he gave countless bridal gifts” (ἤματι τῷ ὅτε μιν κορυθαίολος ἠγάγεθ᾿ ῞Εκτωρ / ἐκ δόμου Ἠετίωνος, ἐπεὶ πόρε μυρία ἕδνα, 22.471–472). We will return to that scene. First, however, let us take another look at the gifts themselves, as Sappho fr. 44V describes them (5–10): Ἔκτωρ καὶ συνέταιρ̣[ο]ι ἄγ̣οι̣ σ’ ἐλικώπιδα Θήβας ἐξ ἰέρας Πλακίας τ’ ἀπ̣’ [ἀϊ]ν⟨ν⟩άω ἄβραν Ἀνδρομάχαν ἐνὶ ναῦσιν ἐπ’ ἄλμυρον πόντον· πόλλα δ’ [ἐλί]γματα χρύσια κἄμματα πορφύρ[α] καταΰτ[με]να, ποί̣ κ̣ι̣ λ’ ἀθύρματα, ἀργύρα̣ τ̣’ ἀνά̣ριθ̣μα ποτήρια κἀλέφαις.

5

10

Hector and his companions are bringing the quick-glancing, delicate Andromache from sacred Thebe and the (plains of) ever-flowing Plakia in ships over the briny sea. And there are many golden bracelets, and fragrant purple garments – patterned delights, and countless silver cups and ivory.

Notice the enjambment in line 8, with the word πόντον (“sea”) carried over from the end of the preceding line. Placed at the midpoint of this six-line section, “sea” acts as a verbal pivot between the human subjects (Hector, his companions, and Andromache) and the inanimate objects. In fact, starting with ponton, we hear a series of nouns in the objective (or accusative) case, along with their adjectives. There are no further verbs, prepositions, or subjects. The ships’ cargo, in other words, fills the next three verses. The messenger’s words detail, in carefully joined syntactic pairs, the objects themselves, as if in verbal imitation of the way they are stowed in paratactic rows within the ship’s hold: many “twisted golden bands and purple fabrics,” “colorful playthings and countless silver cups and ivory.” 18

See Levaniouk 2018: 183. See also Pernigotti 2001: 17 on the connection between the luxurious lifestyle of Sappho’s own circle of girls and “luxuriant Andromache” (ἄβραν Ἀνδρομάχαν, 7), whom Sappho models on the ideal wife of Iliadic Hector.

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I have divided the items of the messenger’s catalogue into separate sets, grouping them into human subjects and inanimate objects. Yet Andromache, who is (grammatically) in the objective case, arguably belongs with the cargo. She who has been led out from her father’s home sits among all the glittering things that constitute her dowry – the muria hedna mentioned by Homer.19 Andromache will reach Troy surrounded by things. There is no explicit mention of a dowry in Sappho’s lyrics, but the bridal history of Andromache’s veil in Homer foregrounds the conjugal context for Sappho’s audience, while both the wealth and beauty of Sappho’s Andromache find clear Homeric echoes. The epithet πολύδωρος (“with many gifts”) is applied to Andromache at Iliad 6.393 and 22.88.20 Yet there is something distinctively Sapphic in fr. 44V’s presentation of that dowry, particularly in the care that is given to describing each type of ornament, in terms of its precious materials (gold, silver, ivory) as well as its workmanship. The cups, trinkets, and fabrics are as verbally well-adorned as their human owners: ἐλί]γματα χρύσια (44.8V) “twisted golden bands”; ποί̣ κ̣ι̣ λ᾿ ἀθύρματα (44.9V) “brightly colored playthings”; ἀργύρα̣ τ̣’ ἀνά̣ριθ̣μα ποτήρια κἀλέφαις (44.10V) “countless silver drinking cups and ivory.” Brightness and glinting surfaces grace both the natural and artisanal worlds, creating a distinctly Sapphic aesthetic. We might think, for example, of how elsewhere in Sappho the shimmering leaves (αἰθυσσομένων δὲ φύλλων, 2.7V) complement the pleasing grove (χάριεν μὲν ἄλσος, 2.2V), to which Aphrodite is summoned. Stars hide their brightness (φάεννον εἶδος, 34.2V) when the moon shines in her fullness; Hera is invoked to appear, in her perhaps “pleasing form” (χ[αρίεσσα μόρφα, 17.2),21 and sailors lost at sea find themselves in the presence of “brightness” (γάνος, 20.2V) after “great gusts” have blown them about. The atmospheric shifts in the sky mirror these invisible movements, the inner turbulence felt by those who can only steer, pray, and long for that which is not present. Nevertheless, pleasure can be found in small and transient things: the vibrantly colored sandal strap that “hides” the foot (ποίκιλος μάσλης ἐκάλυπτε, 39.2V), the bright sparkle of Anactoria’s face (κἀμάρυχμα λάμπρον ἴδην προσώπω, 16.18V), which is more beautiful to behold than Lydian chariots and foot soldiers.22 Through these poignant 19 20 21 22

The abundance of objects is emphasized, with polla in Sappho fr. 44V line 8, picking up on the muria hedna of Il. 22.472. See Rissman 1983: 125. I print Campbell’s text of fr. 17, with the supplement in line 2 provided by Wilamowitz. On Anactoria, see Chapter 7.

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evocations of everyday pleasures mingled with hopes for divine epiphanies, the poet trains her listeners to attend closely to surfaces, to become attuned to the language and presence of objects. What to make, then, of these glimmering things? Are the objects traveling with Andromache purely Sapphic? Or does their brightness also refract Homeric shimmerings? Are we buoyed by them, or preternaturally pessimistic in their presence? In their variety and style, the objects among which Andromache travels call to mind the treasures with which Priam ransoms his son’s body, in Iliad 24. As Lawrence Schrenk (1994: 147) remarks, “Sappho seems to be suggesting (through guilt by association) that Andromache’s dowry becomes part of Hector’s ransom.” Indeed, there is an almost tangible connection between marriage and death in the verses quoted earlier. The fragrant textiles that accompany Andromache are purple in color: πορφύρ[α] καταΰτ[με]να (44.9V). Mentioned in the context of her wedding, they are singled out for the joy they bring: ἀθύρματα in the same line, and in apposition to πορφύρ[α] (ἔμματα/εἵματα), are playthings or delights.23 But when she hears the sounds of mourning in the Iliad, Andromache drops her shuttle.24 The garment whose weaving is interrupted at that fateful moment is also purple: a textile folded in two (δίπλακα πορφυρέην, Il. 22.441).25 As the very last lines of the Iliad reveal, “soft purple robes” play a part in the funeral of Hector. After his body has been burned, his bones will be wrapped in such robes before being placed in a golden casket (πορφυρέοις πέπλοισι . . . μαλακοῖσιν, 24.796). The city that in Sappho fr. 44V welcomes them with rejoicing and ululation (44.31V) will eventually be filled with the sounds of Andromache’s lament, her goos (Il. 22.476ff.) and by the mourning of the men and women of Troy (Il. 24.707–717). But it is the textiles and bodily accessories that tell the story from Andromache’s point of view. When, from the battlements of Troy, Andromache sees Hector being dragged and mutilated by Achilles, she tears off her elaborate headdress (Il. 22.466–472): τὴν δὲ κατ’ ὀφθαλμῶν ἐρεβεννὴ νὺξ ἐκάλυψεν, ἤριπε δ’ ἐξοπίσω, ἀπὸ δὲ ψυχὴν ἐκάπυσσε. 23

24 25

See Kidd 2019: 99–101 for what athurmata, usually translated “toys” or “playthings,” might mean in this context. The core sense of athurma is an object which gives pleasure, perhaps originally from its ability to “whirl” (from the verb athurō) but its semantic range extends to things one plays with or takes in ones hands, thus “objects of ‘delight’, like jewelry, ‘trinkets’, or ‘baubles’” (101). On these objects, see also Lather 2021: 135–136. On this gesture, see Chapter 3 and Canevaro 2018: 92. On diplax referring to a garment folded in two (rather than twice-folded), see Nagy 2010: 278.

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τῆλε δ’ ἀπὸ κρατὸς βάλε δέσματα σιγαλόεντα, ἄμπυκα κεκρύφαλόν τε ἰδὲ πλεκτὴν ἀναδέσμην κρήδεμνόν θ’, ὅ ῥά οἱ δῶκε χρυσέη Ἀφροδίτη ἤματι τῷ ὅτε μιν κορυθαίολος ἠγάγεθ’ Ἕκτωρ ἐκ δόμου Ἠετίωνος, ἐπεὶ πόρε μυρία ἕδνα. And dark night shrouded her eyes, and she fell backward, breathing out her soul. And far from her head she threw her shining hair-fastenings, the headband, cap and plaited binding, and the veil that golden Aphrodite gave to her on the day when Hector of the shining helm led her from the house of Eëtion, when he brought myriad gifts.

The verses read as if they were a sequel to Sappho fr. 44V.26 Here again are the bridal gifts, the “myriad” objects, with hedna annotating in an almost scholastic way the catalogue of items from Sappho fr. 44V (see, especially, line 8: πόλλα δ᾿[ἐλί]γματα χρύσια κἄμματα). Her “plaited” hair-binding (πλεκτὴν ἀναδέσμην, 469), mentioned in the Iliadic passage above, calls to mind the plaited objects and words with -plokos suffixes that we considered in Chapter 3. And “colorful delights” (ποί̣ κ̣ι̣ λ᾿ ἀθύρματα) from Sappho 44V finds an echo in the web that Homer’s Andromache is weaving as she learns of Hector’s death (22.447), in particular the “colorful flower pattern” she has added to the textile (ἐν δὲ θρόνα ποικίλ’ ἔπασσε, 441). That phrase, too – throna poikila – carries intimations of other textiles. The very first words of Sappho 1V are an address to the deathless goddess, naming her as ποικιλόθρον’ ἀθανάτ’ ᾿Αφρόδιτα (1.1V). Poikilothron’: a fitting epithet for the goddess who gave Andromache the veil that would witness both the beginning and the end of her marriage, its binding and its dissolution.27 In Chapter 1, I discussed the “bidirectionality” of the allusions between Homer and Sappho, noting how in certain scenes Homer appears to be alluding to Sappho. The juxtaposition here of Iliad 22 and Sappho fr. 44V engenders similar “bidirectional” effects. Andromache’s weaving in the Iliad gives us a view of her life in Troy, just as it is about to end. Sappho has, in this sense, created a kind of prequel to Iliad 22.28 But the scene from 26 27 28

Kakridis (1966: 26) identifies the veil of Aphrodite as an important intertext for Sappho fr. 44V; see also Schrenk 1994 and Xian 2019. On this epithet, see the section on “Plaiting and Poikilia” in Chapter 3. Performance traditions of Homer and Sappho very likely overlapped and intersected, with female performances of what we regard as “epic” material actually originating in native female genres, such as lament, and entering the epic tradition via performance at festivals; for this argument, see Levaniouk 2018, with the provocative proposal that “the echoes of Andromache’s wedding in Homer are there not simply because Andromache is Hektor’s wife but also because there were women’s songs about her wedding to Hektor, such as Sappho fr. 44” (183). See also Chapter 1.

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Iliad 22 is connected to the object life of Idaeus’ wedding catalogue by formal elements as well. As she falls backward and night clouds her vision, Andromache rips off her “shiny hair-fastenings” (δέσματα σιγαλόεντα, 468). These bright hair accessories allude to a radiant time that has now come to a violent end. As the bT 468–470 scholion puts it, Homer “reminds us of her former happiness, so that by stressing her change of fortune he may increase the effect of pity” (εἰς μνήμην ἄγει τῆς παλαιᾶς εὐδαιμονίας, ὅπως τῇ μεταβολῇ αὐξήσῃ τὸν οἶκτον).29 But given what we have seen of the almost archetypal quality of shining artifacts in Sappho’s verses, and their presence in particular in Andromache’s chariot, it is impossible not to retroject the view from Sappho fr. 44V onto these “shining fastenings” (desmata sigaloenta). They appear to be distinctly Sapphic objects embedded in the Homeric narrative. The desmata sigaloenta materialize (before the mind’s eye of the listener) two pivotal moments in Andromache’s life: her wedding day and the day she is widowed. When the Iliadic Andromache sees her husband dragged around the city walls by Achilles, she “falls back” in time to the moment of their union, as recounted in Sappho.30 On the brink of death, or so it seems, she rips off the veil, severing also the affective ties bound up in those very threads.31 Within the complex ensemble of her hair adornments, a couple of details stand out. First, there is an accessory that is described as “plaited”: πλεκτὴν ἀναδέσμην in line 469. Plektēn is of course cognate with the –plokos suffix of doloplokos, the epithet used of Aphrodite at Sappho 1.2V.32 Andromache’s hair accessories are mentioned just before the fascinating biography of Aphrodite’s veil, the krēdemnon (in line 470). Here, it would seem, we have the point of origin for Sappho fr. 44V, the poem that sketches the pre-Iliadic biography of that veil, by verbally rendering Andromache’s journey from her father’s house in Thebe all the way to Troy. Michael Nagler (1974: 60) has observed of the Iliadic Aphrodite and her krēdemnon (her veil) that “persona and object, the goddess and the garment could be used as symbols of virtually equivalent poetic signification.” In other contexts, krēdemna refer to the battlements of Troy (e.g., Il. 16.100).33 29 30 31 32

This is Richardson’s 1993: 157 translation. See also Segal 1971: 49: “Homer calls up these tangible reminders of past happiness in a context which assures its destruction.” As she faints, she falls backward: ἤριπε δ᾿ ἐξοπίσω, ἀπὸ δὲ ψυχὴν ἐκάπυσσε, 22.467. On falling to the ground in epic, see Purves 2006. On the eroticism of loosening the veil and other hair accessories, see Nagy 2010: 246 and Dué 2006: 4 and 78. See Chapter 3 on the poetics of plaiting. 33 See also Scully 1990: 33.

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When Andromache tears off her veil, a symbol of conjugal chastity, the narrative flashes not only backward but forward as well, to the eventual fall of Troy, to the devastation of the entire city and the rape and enslavement of its women, including Andromache herself. In having been “veiled” by Aphrodite on her wedding day, Andromache is made into a gift of sorts for Hector to carry away. Just as he has brought numerous precious objects with which to woo her and compensate her father, Hector leaves with the most valuable prize of all, Andromache herself. In her association with Aphrodite, who, through her veil, bequeaths her to Hector, Andromache becomes assimilated to the figure of the dangerously nubile bride and to the items with which she travels, the “golden bracelets” in particular. While she is ἐλικώπιδα (5),34 with “rolling” or “quick-glancing” (hence, “sparkling”) eyes, they are [ἐλί]γματα χρύσια (8), fashioned from “twisted gold.” The bride and her bracelets share a linguistic root: ἐλι-, which captures the quickening of the glance, the glinting edges of the gold that refract light back at the viewer. We are, inevitably, reminded of Helen, the bride-prize given by Aphrodite to Paris, whose “marriage” to the latter ignited the Trojan War. Both women are figured as divine gifts, and as portents of destruction: Helen because her theft leads the Greek army across the sea to reclaim her from Paris, and Andromache because, in being given to Hector to take back to Troy, she proleptically symbolizes the plundering of the Troad. Helen was carried to Troy by Paris, who brought her over land and sea. According to the Cypria, he also helped himself freely to the treasure chambers of Menelaos’ house.35 Thebe, Andromache’s native city, will eventually be sacked by Achilles, who also kills Eëtion, taking his horse and his lyre. It is on this lyre that Achilles can be found, at Il. 9.189, singing the glories of men (klea andrōn) “to the mournful tune of the sorrows of Andromache.”36 That Hector has Andromache as his own bride does not relieve her of her city’s fate. She, too, will become a captive woman, like Briseis and Diomede.37 The treasures (including Andromache herself) that escape 34 35

36 37

On this epithet, see note 6 with reference to Rissman 1983: 137. See Proclus’ Summary of the Cypria 2 and Apollodorus, Epitome 3.3. Both Proclus’ and Apollodorus’ accounts of Helen’s departure from Sparta with Paris emphasize that the two of them sailed away with much of Menelaos’ property on board, a notable point of overlap with Sappho fr. 44V. Hunter (2018: 74) remarks that it is “certainly tempting to see Aphrodite behind Menelaus’ (? sudden) departure to a funeral, an act which left Paris and Helen (? and Aphrodite) alone to their own devices.” Nagy 2010: 239–240. Nagy thus interprets this lyre as “a metonym for the transfer of these sorrows to Achilles.” On these captive women, see Dué 2002.

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before Thebe is destroyed and plundered are only temporarily given safe harbor in Troy. They will meet the same end as all the other precious, shining objects when Troy goes up in flames. It is a temporary reprieve from destruction. In its on-the-brinkness, fr. 44V engenders an atmosphere of dread, reminding us of the inevitable end that awaits all who have reached, or will soon return to, Troy.38 We sense this because of how the Iliad itself overlays the funerals of Patroklos and Hector with hints of Troy’s imminent fall. But Sappho, too, has woven her own affect and style into the episode of Andromache’s pivotal recognition, her anagnorisis, in Iliad 22. Upon rereading the Iliad, one has a strong sense of déjà vu, as if Homer were the natural sequel to Sappho fr. 44V, and the shining hairpieces torn from Andromache’s head were themselves conjuring up the gleaming artifacts in Andromache’s chariot.

Sappho’s kleos aphthiton: A “No Future” Poetics The wedding song presents itself as a life-affirming alternative to heroic kleos. By marrying, one commits oneself to a future presaged by the wedding song tradition; one sacrifices individual immortality for the longevity of the familial clan. In place of personalized kleos, there is the potential of life to come, the promise of the child. Focused as they are on future prosperity, wedding songs buy into the heteronormative social order, into a social and sexual ideology that has been critiqued by Lee Edelman as “reproductive futurism,” as discussed earlier in this chapter. For Edelman, the ideology of futurism (with its emblem of the child whose innocence and well-being are the pretext for relegating non-normative, nonprocreative sexuality to a place outside sociality) requires a phantasmatic threat to its survival. It invents and sustains this threat in the form of queerness. Edelman argues that the social order as we know it cannot simply expand to recognize and embrace a greater range of sexualities, because queerness, far from constituting “an authentic or substantive identity” instead underpins the logic of opposition – it is used as that against which heteronormativity defines itself. 39 38 39

I thank Meg Foster for bringing out Sappho fr. 44V’s “on-the-brinkness,” both here and elsewhere in the chapter. Edelman 2004: 102–107; his main antagonist here is the Judith Butler of Antigone’s Claim. Those who fall outside the remit of reproductive futurism, either because they themselves do not participate in it, or because they actively resist it, literary characters such as Scrooge or Silas Marner, are either rehabilitated and converted, or resigned to the status of sinthomosexuals. Sinthomosexuality is Edelman’s neologism, a portmanteau of the French “sinthome” and English “homosexuality.” Sinthome, as Lacan explains in Seminar 23, is taken from an “old way of writing what was written later as ‘symptom.’”

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The appearance of that most epic sounding of Homeric formulas, kleos aphthiton, near the beginning of fr. 44V, marks this wedding song as distinctly different from others of its type; it pits the heroic economy of kleos, the exchange of long years of life for supposedly immortal fame, against the investment in reproductive futurity that marriage itself would seem to entail. Occurring in line 4, kleos aphthiton is famously the phrase that describes the “imperishable glory” Achilles will achieve if he chooses to stay and fight at Troy, rather than returning home to Phthia (Il. 9.413).40 Sappho’s use of the formula is “pointedly un-Iliadic,”41 but what it actually refers to – the source of this undying glory – is far from clear.42 For Rissman and others, Sappho’s appropriation of epic language stems from an impulse to elevate her lyrics, to bestow on them the stature of epic: “Sappho can sing of Andromache’s κλέος ἄφθιτον because she means to identify her as a heroine of Achilles’ stature.”43 I concur that there is something inescapably tragic in the way that Andromache lays claim to her “epic” legacy. And her fate is closely intertwined with that of Achilles. Not only is she married to his greatest antagonist, but life as she knows it will be cut short for her when Hector succumbs to Achilles in Iliad 22. In Andromache’s case, however, the choice has not been her own. Achilles might have opted for a life of anonymity, free of both fighting and glory.44 He instead chooses kleos aphthiton, knowing full well what it will cost him. For Andromache, however, all paths lead toward enslavement. The Iliad itself previews who Andromache was and will be, before and after Troy. Nothing suggests that she could in any way have avoided the Trojan War’s traumatic assault on her family and personhood. If she had not married Hector, she would have been in Thebe when Achilles and his men raided that city. The Iliad even reminds us that Achilles was the one who killed Andromache’s father and brothers.45 For Andromache, not going to Troy would have resulted in enslavement of the sort that her “sisters in captivity,” Diomede, Chryseis, and Briseis endure. She delays 40 41 42 43 44

45

But see Finkelberg 1986 and 2007. For example, Budelmann 2018: 141. For the repurposing of this Iliadic phrase within an erotic context at Ibycus PMG 282.47, see Rissman 1983: 47–48 and 123–124. Barrett (2002: 67) assumes that the herald speaks of the κλέος ἄφθιτον of Hector; Xian 2019, discerning traces of the term γᾶν in the same line, argues that the kleos belongs to the “land” of Troy. Rissman 1983: 124. Although, according to the honor-driven logic of epic, this is not a real option. As Sarpedon’s words at Il. 12.322–328 make clear, the only escape from the kleos economy would be to live as an ageless immortal, like the gods. Mortal men must risk dying on the battlefield, giving boasting rights either to themselves or their enemies. See Il. 6.416–428, and note 47.

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the inevitable for a few years by marrying Hector, but the captivity she appears destined for finds her in the end. Achilles, however, is not the only point of epic contact for Sappho’s Andromache. The presence of the kleos aphthiton formula near the beginning of Sappho fr. 44V also invites comparison between the two Andromaches – Sappho’s and Homer’s. Sappho offers a snapshot of Andromache’s life “off screen,” as it were, thus giving us a context beyond Iliad 22 and Andromache’s unveiling there for interpreting the hymning of her marriage to Hector. Andromache’s son will be killed – an event already foreshadowed in the Iliad. His death, in line with the apocalyptic vision of the child in Edelman’s No Future, symbolizes the end of civilization, the complete and utter destruction of Troy. This wedding song thus embraces two seemingly incompatible visions: a queer, childless future and the heteronormative futurism predicated on marriage. I reckon, in fact, that the scholarly debate over whether Sappho fr. 44V is optimistic or pessimistic can be traced to these dual perspectives that are already “dueling it out” within the song itself. Sappho fr. 44V simultaneously promotes the optimism of futurity while undercutting that vision with the haunting knowledge that the married couple’s future child will be killed.46 Sappho fr. 44V in this way self-consciously encompasses the tragic perspective on Andromache already woven into the Iliad ’s narrative. “Reproductive futurism” is also already inscribed in the Iliadic representations of Andromache. She is introduced to us as the daughter of greathearted Eëtion, king of Thebe, when she first appears in the Iliad, at 6.394– 398. She is πολύδωρος (394), a wife who has been “acquired with many gifts.” Andromache herself will recall for Hector how Achilles sacked Thebe, how he killed her father though he did not despoil him, and how he slaughtered her seven brothers and enslaved her mother.47 And all the while that she is recounting these events to Hector, Astyanax, their infant son, is being held nearby in the arms of his nurse. Astyanax, the most powerful argument for why Hector should not return to battle – why he must choose family and future over the heroic ethos compelling him to fight. Here is what Andromache says (6.407–413): δαιμόνιε φθίσει σε τὸ σὸν μένος, οὐδ’ ἐλεαίρεις παῖδά τε νηπίαχον καὶ ἔμ’ ἄμμορον, ἣ τάχα χήρη σεῦ ἔσομαι· τάχα γάρ σε κατακτανέουσιν Ἀχαιοὶ 46 47

As Nagy (2010: 239) puts it, “the atmosphere of the song is festive on the surface but ominous underneath.” These lines from the Iliad (i.e., 6.416–428) had already been identified by Kakridis 1966: 23–24 as a central point of contact between Homer and Sappho fr. 44V. See also Saake 1971 and Meyerhoff 1984: 118–139.

Sappho’s kleos aphthiton πάντες ἐφορμηθέντες· ἐμοὶ δέ κε κέρδιον εἴη σεῦ ἀφαμαρτούσῃ χθόνα δύμεναι· οὐ γὰρ ἔτ’ ἄλλη ἔσται θαλπωρή, ἐπεὶ ἂν σύ γε πότμον ἐπίσπῃς, ἀλλ’ ἄχε’· οὐδέ μοι ἔστι πατὴρ καὶ πότνια μήτηρ.

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Crazed one, your manly strength will destroy you, and you will not pity the helpless child and me, ill-fated, who soon will be your widow. For soon the Achaeans will kill you, all of them charging against you. But for me it would be better, once I’m deprived of you, to sink into the earth. For there will be no other comfort once you are dead, only grief. For I no longer have my father and my lady mother.

Andromache identifies Hector as the source of the warmth and comfort that make life livable. If he were to die, she would follow; if not immediately, at least in spirit, for there is no other θαλπωρή, no other life’s nourishment, for her. She does not mention their son whose chances of survival are even more tenuous than her own. But she does recall, in the lines following those quoted, the family she has already lost to Achilles’ sacking of Thebe. Hector smiles when he first sees his son (ἤτοι ὁ μὲν μείδησεν ἰδὼν ἐς παῖδα σιωπῇ, 404), but Andromache’s words hold little sway with him. Of course, Hector has no real choice either. Were he to stay within the Skaian gates he and his family would all eventually fall to the Achaean forces. If he wants to save them, he must fight. But he knows, as Andromache also knows, that fighting means sure death. There is no future, except in fantasy. Andromache acknowledges as much in her opening gambit: “Your manly strength (menos) will destroy you,” she says (φθίσει σε τὸ σὸν μένος, 407).48 The verb Andromache uses is at the root of the adjective for “immortal,” as found in a-phthiton. The verb’s action is synonymous with that which fuels the biological cycle of growth and decay: in other words, with reproductive futurism. When Andromache blames Hector for his devotion to his own menos she implicitly criticizes him for choosing himself and his kleos over their son’s future. The outpouring of Hector’s “life force” (his menos) on the battlefield will mean his death at the expense of his family’s survival. It is a queer choice. And Andromache here frames it as a choice. She does not say that Achilles will kill Hector. Rather, his own menos will kill him, as if this were a death-driven act of autoeroticism. Hector’s response reinforces the “no future” dynamics of Andromache’s speech, laying bare the nihilistic affect that Sappho subtly weaves into fr. 44V. 48

The Greek word menos is often translated as “energy” or “vigor,” but a secondary meaning is “ejaculate.” On this sense of menos, see line 35 of Archilochus 196a and Giacomelli 1980.

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When he explains why he must fight, Hector stresses two key points: shame, that powerful emotion which drove Aphrodite off the battlefield and into her mother’s arms in Iliad 5 (see Chapter 4), and kleos, more specifically, his father’s kleos (6.441–446): And indeed, I care about all these things, my wife, but I feel terrible shame before the Trojan men and the long-robed women of Troy, if, like a coward, I avoid war. Nor does my spirit bid me do this, since I have learned to be a brave man and always to fight among the first ranks of Trojans, securing the great fame of my father, as well as my own (ἀρνύμενος πατρός τε μέγα κλέος ἠδ’ ἐμὸν αὐτοῦ).

What matters here, Hector suggests, is not how one lives but how one dies. Hector must die in such a way that his father’s kleos will not die with him. He must make that kleos “undying” (aphthiton). One might think that kleos would be exempt from the vicissitudes of human life, safe from the fluctuations of fortune. Not so, until its “unperishing” status is secured. Hector will trade in his own mortal life for this posthumous prize. To secure the imperishable glory of his family he must act on the shame he feels, allowing it to drive him toward heroic death. He will meet Achilles face-to-face in battle despite his certainty that Troy will fall. The gain here is something intangible – certainly not the future symbolized by Astyanax. Though Andromache pleads with him to consider his son and his wife, Hector cleaves to the heroic ethos, that all-male closed (and closeted) economy where reputations are won and lost. Menos is what will destroy him, they both know. If Sappho is indeed gesturing to the Iliadic kleos economy, she does so in a way that forces us to feel both Hector’s reckoning and the suffering it entails for Andromache. Sappho’s Andromache is being wedded, sung, and celebrated under the banner of kleos aphthiton. What this means is something the Iliadic Andromache already portends: first, in the form of a prohibition, which she delivers to her still-living husband: “Do not make your child an orphan and your wife a widow” (μὴ παῖδ᾿ ὀρφανικὸν θήῃς χήρην τε γυναῖκα, 6.432). Later, in mourning his death, she confirms that his kleos will be sustained by female hands, the very same hands that have woven his clothes. These textiles will be burned and their conflagration turned into Hector’s “glory.”49 As part of the same speech where she makes this promise, however, she reports that Astyanax “suffers much, feeling the absence of his dear father” (22.505). The fire on Hector’s pyre burns bright, 49

See Il. 22.512–514.

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attesting to the intensity of his kleos, but its blaze is sterile, its life’s force fed by death: the death of the father and the son, and the symbolic death of mother and wife. The queer glimmerings of this conflagration can be detected also, I propose, in Sappho fr. 44V. Not as direct intertextual echoes with Iliad 22, but as part of the tragic pathos of Sappho’s poem, which is heralded by the two words, kleos aphthiton, whose meaning and affect we have been limning here. We usually understand aphthiton as a term with positive resonances; the adjective signals immortality (generally considered a good thing). But, as I anticipated earlier, there is a more pessimistic way of reading the alphaprivative, where the “withering” that is being negated is that of the life cycle – of vegetal, human, and animal organisms. Each generation can be expected to replace the one before it, thus sustaining the species. This sort of reproductive continuity is what is cut short by the kleos economy. In a sense, then, Hector’s refusal of biological futurism in the form of his son’s life is a kind of queering, understood (in Edelman’s sense) as the abnegation of the “natural” life cycle. The child is sacrificed so that his father’s fame may continue to burn bright. In a blaze signaling the death of the future, the whole city will go up in flames, and, with it, the promise of an unheroic (or happy) ending.

An Absent Presence Let us imagine for a moment that Sappho’s Andromache had been described as wearing the veil gifted to her by Aphrodite. Imported by Sappho directly from Iliad 22, Aphrodite’s veil would become a distinctive marker of the Homeric scene, linking Sappho’s song to its source text. As it is, her song instead fills in the backstory of this veil without naming it, allowing a Sapphic affect to permeate the Homeric scene, and to guide our reading of the object already in Homer. Although postdating Homer chronologically, Sappho fr. 44V appears to have engendered the entire scene of Andromache’s unveiling. The veil is a lyric object that has been retrojected into the Iliad from Sappho’s world. As we interiorize Andromache’s slow-motion collapse, we find our attention being co-opted by “Sapphic” effects. The aestheticizing quality of these Homeric “fastenings” (the desmata sigaloenta) encourages the listener to pause and briefly inhabit the Sapphic world that has been delicately interwoven into this Iliadic scene. For a few brief moments, our attention is not on the tremendous loss Andromache has suffered but on the scene’s striking visuality, which suspends both time and thought. Our ears are filled with the brilliant elaboration of these things and the

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sonic qualities of the words standing in for them – which evoke similar sounds from Sappho. In return, the Homeric episode lends narrative structure to the somewhat disconnected “images” that constitute Sappho fr. 44V. Franco Ferrari (2010: 132), for example, notes that in contrast to the choral lyrics of Stesichorus and Bacchylides, which present “stories that have the breadth and development of a narrative tale,” what we find instead in Sappho fr. 44V is “a series of framed images that are as essential and persuasive as they are inadequate to build up a self-contained story.” The narrative backbone of the story is, however, provided by the listener’s familiarity with the Iliadic ending to the nuptials of Andromache – and with the scene in Book 22 we have just explored. The atmosphere of Sappho fr. 44V is powerfully pessimistic. So, too, are my readings of the individual objects and the stories they tell, both about Andromache and Hector and, more generally, about epic marriage and the heroic kleos economy. I began this chapter by considering the description of the journey and, in particular, the attention given to the vehicles of transport and what they contain. I then looked more closely at how this song inserts itself into Andromache’s “flashback” in Iliad 22, where she briefly loses consciousness as she rips off her veil. The veil drew our attention to its own evocations of the dowry items from Sappho fr. 44V and, finally, to the tantalizingly decontextualized phrase kleos aphthiton, which occurs in what is now the fourth line of Sappho’s poem. Some scholars prefer to treat fr. 44V as an epicizing song which has intertextual echoes, not just with the Iliad, but with the Trojan Cycle more generally.50 But the question remains, what are we to make of the framing of this song as a wedding celebration? If we do not link it to an actual ritual event, how should we thematize the marriage of Hector and Andromache? The procession, the dowry objects, the sensory elements – all vividly evoked – conjure for us this couple’s epic future and their future in epic. “[T]his is an ironic poem which gathers its force from the juxtaposition of the increasing naïve joy of the participants with the building horror of the enlightened reader.”51 We, the readers and listeners, know the future, while the song’s fictional participants do not. It is an irony impossible to ignore. And what, then, of the brightly glittering artifacts carried over sea and shore? And the sounds and scents of joy that are conjured in the song’s final 50

51

See especially Spelman 2017 and Budelmann 2018: 137–138, characterizing Sappho fr. 44V as a mythological wedding song, on a par with the description of the wedding on the shield in Iliad 18 or with the Shield of Heracles, Theocritus 18, or Catullus 61, 62, and 64. Schrenk 1994: 149–150n16.

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verses? All of these signs of happiness – the “naïve joy” experienced by the participants – become forebodings of calamity. Sappho fr. 44V is a wedding song being queered at the very moment of its performance. It is not just not a real wedding song, and therefore a fictional wedding song – which is where those who have rejected the epithalamium hypothesis have tended to leave it. Rather, Sappho fr. 44V is a “wedding song” inverted, turned inside out. It would be a distortion of the poem’s uniquely dissonant self-presentation to treat it as simply another epic – or epicizing – narrative. By fully attending, however, to its affect and atmosphere, we temporarily inhabit that in-between place – between Sappho and Homer, between her Andromache and Homer’s Andromache. Sappho’s most unusual composition, with its subtle unveiling of the “no future” poetics of undying fame, is what makes this possible.

chapter 7

Sappho’s Third Alternative Helen and the Queering of Epic Desire

Fragment 16V is perhaps best known for the “priamel” rhetorical device with which it opens.1 We first hear what others (a series of others) have claimed is “most beautiful” or “finest” (kalliston) before the singer tells us what she considers to be kalliston (1–4): ο]ἰ μὲν ἰππήων στρότον, οἰ δὲ πέσδων, οἰ δὲ νάων φαῖσ’ ἐπ[ὶ] γᾶν μέλαι[ν]αν ἔ]μμεναι κάλλιστον, ἔγω δὲ κῆν’ ὄττω τις ἔραται· Some say an army of horsemen, others an army of foot soldiers, and yet others say a fleet of ships is the finest thing on the black earth. But I say whatever one loves – that is what is most beautiful.

These opening verses have been read as the most explicit repudiation in Sappho of heroic values. The singer begins by acknowledging the desirability of “an army of horsemen” to one group, “foot soldiers” to another, and “ships” to a third, only to claim that “whatever one loves” (ὄτ-/τω τις ἔραται, 3–4) is finest, or “most beautiful” (κάλλιστον, 3).2 As an illustration of this general truth we are given the example of Helen who went off to Troy, leaving behind the “best of all husbands” because she was led astray.3 For Helen, apparently, the irresistible attraction of Paris undermined the cultural injunctions that were meant to bind her to her husband, children, and parents. 1 2 3

See, for example, Rissman 1983: 30–54 and Snyder 1997: 65–67. As duBois (1978: 91) notes, this is not simply a love poem; it is a “sketch on the abstract notion of desire,” as effectively conveyed by the neuter form. Textual corruption prevents us from identifying with certainty the subject of the verb παράγ̣α̣γ̣᾿ in line 12 or 13, and thus the direct cause of her aberration, but most likely this would have been eros, or Aphrodite (Kypris). Schubart (1948: 314) suggests Κύπρις as the first word of line 13 (the beginning of the fourth stanza) and hence the subject of this verb. See the discussion by Lidov 2016: 90–91. Many scholars now think that this poem ended at line 20 (see Budelmann 2018: 127–128 and Neri 2021: 119– 121 and 577–586).

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The mythical exemplum of Helen’s active pursuit of what she finds “most beautiful” then serves as a segue to the singer’s own infatuation with the “lovely step” of Anactoria, a glance at whose face would be preferable to all the Lydians’ chariots and infantry (16.17–20V). “The immediate effect of rejecting these symbols of male glory,” observes Ruby Blondell (2013: 116), “is not only to avoid coupling Helen’s deed with the war but to repudiate heroic warfare as an object of desire.” For the target audience of the Iliad, war chariots and soldiers would be considered most beautiful – kalliston, in both its aesthetic and moral senses. But for Sappho, and for the mythical heroine she summons to mind, there is neither beauty nor eros on the battlefield. And yet, in her actions, Sappho’s Helen chooses for herself a role that belongs properly (according to epic tradition) to the male warrior. She sails to Troy and leaves behind a house untended. Her choice – to pursue what she desires – is only reprehensible because she is a woman acting on a man’s prerogative, because she leaves behind (in the active voice) rather than passively being left behind.4 In light of its opening priamel, the rhetorical strategy of fr. 16V has been characterized as competitive.5 Mark Griffith, for example, remarks that “the rules, as it were, are changed in mid-contest, and the rivals’ poetry thereby rendered irrelevant or tasteless.”6 Sappho may be changing the rules. But must we assume that she denigrates those who continue to play by them? Is her definition of “the finest thing” (kalliston) to be understood as a takedown of her rivals? Should those who answer “foot soldiers” or “fleet of ships” even be construed as “rivals” in the first place? Her framing of her answer from the perspective of an “I” whose definition is relative rather than universal could indeed be a very clever way of trouncing the competition. I would like to propose, however, that we consider it instead (or also) as a carving out of habitable space within the competitive landscape of archaic Greek song culture. I will offer as a model for this the way Sedgwick similarly sidesteps the minefields of various contests (academic,

4

5

6

On Sappho’s transformation of Helen from object into subject of erotic pursuit, see also duBois 1978: 96 (also 1995: 121–124) and Winkler 1981: 70–74; Williamson (1995: 60–89), however, cautions against constructing an overly subversive Helen/Sappho; Rosenmeyer (1997: 144) emphasizes that Sappho 16V is “remarkable for its lack of judgment, for its emphasis on the difficulty and near impossibility of Helen’s situation, thanks to the power of eros.” Pfeiffer (2000: 2) suggests that the statement about love contains an element of surprise, a foil that “is a means of generating attentiveness” and is skillfully combined with suspense, since Sappho does not reveal what it is that she loves until line 15. Griffith 1990: 194. On recusatio and priamel in archaic poetry, see Race 1982.

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literary, erotic), by finding a “third alternative” (more on this in the next section).7 Sappho proposes a standard for beauty (to kallos) with no equivalent in the agonistic contexts in which such debates were usually conducted. The indefinite, abstract form of her proposition (whatever one loves) leaves room for others to define beauty howsoever they choose.8 The relativism of Sappho’s definition is what allows it to be stated as a general truth. If “whatever one loves” is the finest thing on earth, then the very search for a one-size-fits-all answer, one that will withstand all attempts at refutation, is misguided.9 Instead, as Sappho fr. 16V exhorts, let us each decide for ourselves – or, better yet, have it decided for us by the whims of eros – what is finest. Fr. 16V has also been described as “a love poem with an implicit profession of love for Anactoria.”10 And yet, Anactoria, who is not even named until the middle of the fourth stanza, disconcertingly ends up as something of a footnote to Helen. Sappho summons the exemplary force of Helen to make the case that “what people find superlatively beautiful are those things to which they are passionately attached.”11 Helen has her individual aesthetic preferences: she is drawn to Paris. We may rightly wonder why, if this is a poem addressed to Anactoria, she is placed last.12 Why has this become Helen’s poem, if Helen is merely a step along the way to what Sappho claims is “finest”? One possibility is that Helen “makes understandable” (σύνετον πόησαι, 16.5V) the premise with which Sappho caps her priamel. Helen also, I suggest, enables the poem to pivot between the world of the Iliad, with its normative values and aesthetics (as are well captured by the three 7

See, too, Gilligan 1982 for a critique of tests designed to measure ethical aptitude on which girls and women routinely scored lower on average than their male counterparts. Sappho’s response may signal that she views the question itself – and the way it is phrased to solicit a univocal answer – as flawed. 8 See also Howie 1976: 228–229 and Purves 2014. 9 I emphasize here the abstractness of Sappho’s definition, but for women in archaic Greece, beauty was more than a philosophical precept. A scholion to Il. 9.129, for example, explains that beauty contests (Kallisteia) were held on Lesbos under Hera’s patronage (παρὰ Λεσβίοις ἀγὼν ἄγεται κάλλους γυναικῶν ἐν τῷ τῆς Ἥρας τεμένει λεγόμενος καλλιστεῖα) and Alcaeus 130b alludes to what sound like similar contests. On the ritual of the Kallisteia, see Calame 2001: 122–123 and Nagy 2016. 10 Zellner 2007: 270. 11 Zellner 2007: 268. On what Helen is meant to exemplify, see Koniaris 1967, Howie 1976, Most 1981, Williamson 1995: 54–55, duBois 1995: 121–126, Pfeiffer 2000, Fredricksmeyer 2001, Bierl 2003, Blondell 2013: 111–116, and Whitmarsh 2018. 12 Howie (1976) argues that encomiastic poetry “often approaches the personal object of its praise (the laudandus) by stages before it finally identifies that person as the principal theme of the poem” (209), an approach to Sappho that he traces back to E. L. Bundy’s Studia Pindarica. See also Pfeiffer 2000.

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“armies” listed in the opening stanza), and the queering of desire– that world of dancing, music, and radiant beauty to which Anactoria belongs. Rachel Lesser (2023: 86) suggests that the Helen of the Iliad is already transgressive, even “queer,” thanks to her “violations of the epic’s norms of female passivity and fidelity.” Certainly no female figure in Greek myth has a greater claim to upending societal expectations (and getting away with it). But in my view, Sappho’s Helen does not defy norms and expectations so much as she points to a “third alternative” – a path that cuts across that dyad. By being pulled to the side (παράγ̣α̣γ̣᾿, in line 11) while also actively pursuing what she desires, Sappho’s Helen exemplifies what Sedgwick has described as the “middle ranges of agency.” This expression, as we saw in Chapter 3, refers to that gray zone between active and passive; it seeks to capture the sense the artist has, particularly while working in a tactile medium, that the materials themselves are guiding her movements. Scholars have somewhat unreflectively placed Sappho herself in a competitive relationship with Homer because of Helen’s choice to pursue what she considers kalliston. I want to suggest here that Sappho fr. 16V is neither a celebration of Helen’s refusal to comply with patriarchal norms, nor an attempt to dismiss epic’s normative ideals by replacing them with something else. Rather, Helen is represented as following desire’s imperative, and in this way bypassing the stringent binary system in which such decisions have often been made. Sappho, I argue in this chapter, gives us a Helen whose very being calls into question the oppositional thinking (active vs. passive, subject vs. object, good vs. bad) according to whose tenets she is usually judged.

Dialogue(s) on Love In A Dialogue on Love, Sedgwick’s genre-bending memoir on love, friendship, and therapy in the wake of cancer, we read from the transcribed notes of her therapist, Shannon Van Ley: Somewhere in here we also touch on E’s consummate tendency – having learned/realized/felt that she would lose if she competed on someone else’s turf (giving up the Oedipal struggle in hopelessness) she learns to find a third alternative to competing or giving up – to create her own turf, a ground that is just hers, but then she can make proffer of it to others.13

13

Sedgwick 1999: 125, my emphasis.

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In the original text, the passage quoted above is written in capital letters, the orthographic mechanism through which Sedgwick differentiates Van Ley’s notes on their therapy sessions from her own diary entries and haibun reflections.14 In this way, Sedgwick creates a dialogic structure, incorporating the voices of others (and one other in particular) within her memoir. Like Sappho, she is attuned to the judgment of others. And like Sedgwick, Sappho asserts that the situatedness of the question is vital to how one hears it. We may also want to link up Sedgwick’s musings on creating her own turf with her efforts elsewhere to avoid dualisms. In Tendencies, Sedgwick (1993: 8) famously defines “queer” not simply as “nonheteronormative,” but more vividly as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”15 The metaphorical language she uses here – “mesh” in particular – resonates with Sedgwick’s later writings, especially with what she describes as the “middle ranges of agency” that, as a fabric artist, she encounters in her tactile engagement with her materials.16 Active versus passive: that duality simply does not account for the experience of having one’s decision-making power (or rational agency) temporarily “suspended” by the sort of bodily knowledge that is activated when fingers come into contact with fabric. For Sedgwick (2011: 83), such bodily knowledge is pleasurable: “It feels wonderful to exist and to be active in that space of suspended agency.” Indeed, in an echo of the “third alternative” from her memoir, Sedgwick describes the “three-way conversation” that comes about as she maneuvers amidst and between the various agencies involved in crafting: “There are second-by-second negotiations with the material properties of whatever I’m working on and the questions ‘What will it let me do?’ and ‘What does it want me to do?’ are in constant three-way conversation with ‘What is it 14

15 16

Sedgwick (1999: 194) reveals that haibun, a seventeenth-century Japanese genre that mixes prose and haiku writing, is “classically used for narratives of travel.” In another essay, that is, at Sedgwick 2006 (“Teaching, Depression” published by The Scholar and Feminist Online, Issue 4.2), Sedgwick comments on the formal choices she made to intersperse prose and poetry in A Dialogue on Love as well as the “permeable” first person that occurs in the small cap type: “Also the interspersing of my accounts with passages in small capital type from Shannon’s notes-which record sometimes his thoughts but mostly my thoughts and dreams, in a permeable first person that refers sometimes to him and at other times to me. There are times when even I can’t tell whose first person it is.” See also the Introduction. “The Middle Ranges of Agency” was also the title of a talk that Sedgwick had been scheduled to deliver at Boston University in April 2009, as Murphy and Vincent (2010: 162) inform us. On this term, see Chapter 2 and Edwards 2019.

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that I want to do?’”17 Something similar seems to be occurring in Sappho fr. 16V. In electing to follow Paris, Helen is not simply exercising her firstperson agency. The lyrics give us a clear sense that this was rather an action imposed on her, from within and without. In English, it is almost impossible to express this sort of “middle-range agency” with the verbs we use for decision making. I had originally written that Sappho “opts” for a third alternative. But “opting” suggests a rational, deliberate action, whereas Sappho’s Helen effectively has her decision made for her by whatever it was that “led her astray” (παράγ̣α̣γ̣᾿, 16.11V). What Sappho experiences becomes that much more pressing in the fourth and fifth stanzas of fr. 16V, where attention shifts from Helen to Anactoria, and where Helen’s lack of remembering blends almost seamlessly into Sappho’s being put in mind of her own beloved, who is also absent. Here is where we get the personal “reveal,” that moment the lyric sequence has been building up to – a moment we could in no way have foreseen.18 From Helen’s pursuit of Paris, which has occasioned her abandonment of both her natal and conjugal families, we arrive at the speaker’s own desire.19 In following Sappho’s gaze, we imagine the “lovely step” of Anactoria and her bright face (16.17–20V): τᾶ]ς ⟨κ⟩ε βολλοίμαν ἔρατόν τε βᾶμα κἀμάρυχμα λάμπρον ἴδην προσώπω ἢ τὰ Λύδων ἄρματα κἀν ὄπλοισι πεσδομ]άχεντας. I would rather look upon her lovely step and the bright sparkle of her face than the Lydian chariots and foot soldiers in arms.

On the surface, what drives this comparison between Anactoria and the military personnel/armor of the Lydians is that both refract light.20 Made of metal, armor is also “bright” (lampron) and its material gleams in the sunlight, creating a “sparkling” effect that is captured by the ἀμάρυχμα (“sparkle,” “twinkle,” “flashing,”) at the beginning of line 18.21 J. G. Howie

17 18

19 20 21

E. Sedgwick 2011: 83. Although this does not prevent it being paradigmatic of what Whitmarsh (2018: 144) calls the “lyric paradox,” the way in which lyric “is designed both to be performed in multiple contexts and to suggest the immediacy of an individual emotional expression, concretized in a particular hic et nunc.” Rissman (1983: 42) suggests that Anactoria “as the object of her love, takes on, in a sense, the role of Paris as well.” See Howie 1976: 116, Snyder 1997: 70–71, Pfeiffer 2000: 5, and on brightness as a motif that Sappho borrows from Homer, LeMeur-Weissman 2006. Rissman (1983: 45) observes that in Homer “λαμπρός is applied only to armor and heavenly bodies.”

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(1976: 226), in fact, suggests that it is “likely that Sappho still had the imagery of brightness in mind when she reintroduced from the opening priamel the chariots and foot soldiers (19 f.).” These are the impressions that first catch the eye. But both realms of glinting surfaces also have symbolic associations, representing in particular (and to very different effect) the spheres of Ares and eros. Sappho’s preference for the ephemeral, transient sparkle of a girl’s face and her lovely step (evoking the realm of choral dancing and music), signals her affiliation with Aphrodite and her “desire-inducing” works.22 Within the Iliad, a poem that privileges the power of Ares and the acts of violence in which armor and chariots are imbricated, that choice is a queer choice. We might think here of how Aphrodite, in Iliad 3, attempts to entice Helen back to the bedroom by describing Paris, who awaits her there, not as a man having come from battle but as one “glistening in his clothes and beauty,” (κάλλεΐ τε στίλβων καὶ εἵμασιν, 3.392): he looks like a man who has either recently stopped dancing or is on his way to join the chorus (3.393–394).23 The contrast, then, between a body that is draped in beautiful garments and that same body girding itself in armor with the sheen of metal emitting rays of light is one that has already been drawn by the Iliad. Sappho aligns herself with both an eros-driven Helen and, implicitly, the Paris from whom she turns away.24 For Sappho, the delight felt in the presence of her beloved’s beautiful movements and glances far surpasses any beauty one might discern in the weapons of war. How different Sappho’s Helen is from both Homer’s and Alcaeus’. The latter is a lyricist who follows Homer in reinforcing heteronormative values (as they are explicitly framed by Sappho). We can gauge this from Alcaeus frr. 42 and 283V: in both, Helen’s pursuit of Paris entails blame. But before taking a closer look at those poems by Alcaeus, let us first return briefly to the Homeric Helen. For as Ruby Blondell (2013: 115) aptly observes, “the voice Sappho borrows from Homer is Helen’s own, that is, the Homeric voice most strongly associated with blame.” This is a different way of framing the poetic dialogue between Sappho and Homer, and one that I also pursue in the readings ahead. Sappho, as we shall see, is attentive to 22 23 24

As Stehle (1996b: 223) suggests, “by referring to Anaktoria’s way of walking and the sparkle of her face, she creates rather an image of light and movement.” One is reminded of the flashes of light and brightness through which Hegesichora is conjured at Alcman 1.51–59: see in particular, Peponi 2004: 301–303, Weiss 2018: 27–29, 34, and Olsen 2019: 287. This perspective on Paris is further developed in the Roman lyric tradition; Thorsen (2019: 172) argues of Horace Carm. 1.15 that “Nereus claims that Paris will choose to perform music in his chamber instead of acting bravely on the battlefield (Hor. Carm. 1.15.13–19), but that his adulterer’s good looks will nonetheless be smeared with the dust of the Trojan plains.”

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the vocalizations and the rhetorical style of individual characters (not just epic, writ large). By borrowing Helen’s voice, Sappho brings out some of the latent potential, for female agency as well as queer aesthetics, that remains unexplored within the Iliad itself.

Aphrodite, Helen, and Paris (in the Iliad ) Helen’s rejection of Paris in the Iliad offers a clear view of the tensions that have entered into their relationship since their arrival in Troy. Sappho fr. 16V can thus be framed as the prequel to Iliad 3 (much as Sappho fr. 44V serves as a prequel to Iliad 22).25 But while Helen herself resists Paris and what he represents, Sappho, I want to suggest, borrows from the Iliadic portrayal of Paris in sketching the luminous quality of Anactoria, her own love interest.26 First, there is the unusual description of Paris as he appears in the front ranks of the Trojans, preparing to meet Menelaos in battle.27 He is not dressed like the other Homeric heroes. He wears a leopard (or panther) skin around his shoulders (3.17), and in his hands he carries his bow and arrows, a sword, and two throwing spears. M. M. Willcock (1998 ad loc.) describes Paris’ equipment as “abnormal,” remarking also that “later in the book (330–8) he puts on the full armour of the Homeric hero.”28 Martha Krieter-Spiro (2015: 20) regards the leopard skin as a marker of Paris’ “marginality,” adding that it underscores “Paris’ striking appearance, his soft, almost feminine beauty.” She mentions also the lines from the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite where “swift panthers” (71) are among the retinue of animals following Aphrodite as she makes her way from her birth island of Cyprus to Troy. The leopard-based association is crucial as it allows us to make a more explicit connection between the behaviors that epic deems shameful and Sappho fr. 16V’s blurring of the binary thinking that underpins this depiction of Paris as cowardly and effeminate.29 If Paris is dressed in a feminine manner that is pleasing to the goddess of love, he cannot be a “real” man at all. Within epic, Paris’ appearance is “godlike,” but his behavior and his character are cowardly.30

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27 28 29 30

See Chapter 6. Pfeiffer (2000: 6) argues instead that Anactoria is to be compared to Helen, the “woman who far surpassed all mortals in beauty,” which would leave Sappho, unconvincingly I believe, in the role of Menelaos. See also Fredricksmeyer 2001: 83. This and the following two paragraphs are adapted from Mueller 2023b. What follows, at Il. 3.330–338, is a typical arming scene. Mueller (2023b) explores the genre-based resonances of non-normative masculinities in the Iliad. The adjective θεοειδής (οr variants thereof) is used of Paris multiple times in this scene, for example, at 3.16, 27, 30, and 37.

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Menalaos rushes at him, like a hungry lion who has come upon a deer or wild goat, and prepares to feast on his prey even as the dogs and hunters try to brush him off. As soon as he sees Menelaos, who has jumped down to the ground from his chariot, Paris is paralyzed with fear. Hector scolds his brother, harshly upbraiding him (3.43–45): “I suppose the long-haired Achaeans are rejoicing, saying that you are (our) leading fighter because of your handsome appearance, but that there is no fighting force nor any defensive strength in your heart” (ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἔστι βίη φρεσὶν οὐδέ τις ἀλκή, 45).” He continues, further denouncing Paris as a delight to his enemies but a source of shame to himself (δυσμενέσιν μὲν χάρμα, κατηφείην δὲ σοὶ αὐτῷ, 51). These are bruising words. But Hector’s shaming of his brother a few lines later in the same speech suggests, even more explicitly, that Paris’ unmanliness in battle is a consequence of his special relationship with Aphrodite. As Nancy Worman (2002: 51) remarks, “the centrality of the lover’s role to Paris’ type insures that even his encounters on the battlefield will have a tincture of the bedroom.”31 Nor is battle a situation in which Aphrodite can be of any help to Paris (54–55): “Neither the kithara nor the gifts of Aphrodite will come to your aid – nor will your hair and beauty – when you are mingled with the dust.” Hector’s disparagement is aimed as much at the goddess as at her protégé. And the fact that Paris admits the truth of his brother’s words makes it seem likely that Homer’s audience would also have accepted them as correct. I want to return briefly to a feature of Aphrodite’s sexual power that we saw highlighted particularly well in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, namely its elision of boundaries. Desire causes gods both male and female to fall in love with mortal men (Zeus with Ganymede, Aphrodite with Anchises); it also sparks attachments between nonhuman animals and divinities.32 We have a hint, in Paris’ leopard-skin poncho in Iliad 3, of Aphrodite’s animalworshippers, but the scene in the Homeric Hymn, where Aphrodite makes love to Anchises on a bed of animal skins (158–160), further develops this transgressive aspect of her sexual agency. Not only does a goddess take on the likeness of a virginal woman in order to satisfy her lust for a mortal man, but she does so in the virtual company of the animals who, equally entranced by her, followed her from her native island of Cyprus to Mount Ida. In this sense, Aphrodite is the embodiment of wild, untamed eros. Her power 31

32

Worman (2002) comments specifically on the language of sexual conquest, for example, in Hector’s speech at 3.55 (μιγείης). On Paris’ non-normative masculinity, see also Arthur 1981, Suter 1991, Ransom 2011, and Warwick 2019a: 7–8. See my discussions of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite in Chapters 4 and 5.

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genuflects to no known social norms, and can be felt by all manner of creatures, human and otherwise. The transformative potential of sexuality is something that Sappho also explores, perhaps most unusually in the Tithonos Poem, where the sexual union between a goddess (Dawn) and a human man (Tithonos) eventually ends in the latter taking on the form of an insect, as we saw in Chapter 5. As the very embodiment of sexuality, Aphrodite has a distinctly unsettling effect, which is why the language of “choice,” as I argued earlier, may not be ideal for discussing what it is one finds most beautiful (kalliston). But whereas the Iliad rigorously upholds the difference between the masculine and the feminine, Sappho questions the assumption that these two realms (the battlefield and the bedroom) are mutually exclusive. In fact, she attempts actively to reconcile them. In the Iliad, the male soldier who prefers the dance floor and the gifts of Aphrodite to battle-won glory is no man at all. But as Sappho fr. 16V reveals, both battlefield and dance floor are destinations to which one is led by desire, their apparent and incontrovertible value an effect of the one who pursues them being already in the clutches of eros. Where the Iliad sees little value in Aphrodite’s realm and those who dwell there, especially if they are men, Sappho fr. 16V dismantles the essentializing relationship between manliness and battle, femininity and Aphrodite. The poem suggests that both women and men may be driven to cross these gendered lines, in pursuit of what to them is kalliston (most beautiful and desirable).33 As already mentioned, Sappho’s Helen takes on the traditionally male role of the Homeric hero who travels across the sea to Troy. She leaves behind her husband, children, and parents, in a way that is surely unforgivable, if not unimaginable, within the Iliad.34 Sappho herself (as the singer of fr. 16V) does not actively pursue Anactoria, but she treasures her memory of her, much like Penelope in the Odyssey keeps her marriage alive by remembering Odysseus in his absence. Sappho fr. 16V thus presents us with women (Helen, Sappho, Anactoria) who align themselves with both male and female epic paradigms. Although the Helen of the Odyssey had already described her husband as “by no means lacking in either wits or beauty” (Od. 4.264), Sappho is even more eulogistic. Helen is represented as having left behind a truly excellent husband. But the extent to which Menelaos is blame-free underlines the 33 34

See Konstan 2015 on the semantics of kalliston. Lesser (2023: 90) suggests that in her interaction with Aphrodite, Helen is marked out as “a queer actor” since in her behavior and resistance to divine command she is “gendered masculine according to the epic’s established norms of behavior.”

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strength of Helen’s desire for Paris. That she “forgets” her conjugal commitments is not a matter of choice on Helen’s part, although she still bears responsibility for her actions.35 Sappho fr. 16V makes clear that these matters of the heart place the desiring subject at the disposal of Aphrodite and her powers of seduction. I want to turn now to a closer examination of the phenomena of memory and forgetting as these impinge upon the entanglements of Sappho fr. 16V with Homer’s Helen. The Odyssey presents Penelope’s faithful remembering of her husband as key to his successful homecoming – and therefore also to her reputation. Because of its centrality to the Homeric discourse of the good wife, it will be important for us to look closely at the language of memory in fr. 16V and to consider, in particular, the significance of Helen’s forgetting.

Helen and the (Queer) Art of Forgetting Already in the Odyssey, Helen practices the art of forgetting, an art that she perhaps hopes will induce forgetfulness of her own less than honorable Iliadic past.36 The Odyssean Helen mixes into the drinks of Telemachos and Peisistratos a drug that takes away painful sorrow, although it threatens the individual with memory loss in the process. Anyone who swallows this drug is invulnerable for a day to suffering of any kind, even if he should see his closest relatives die (4.222–226). The drug makes one forget – it is epilēthon, 220 – in the same way as the lotus plant and Circe’s drugs; and by inducing forgetfulness of her past, the drug “remembers” that Helen spent time in Egypt, a variant version of the myth.37 The effects of Helen’s drug are short-lived, however, and do not interfere with the homecoming (nostos) of her guests. Drug-induced forgetting is instead comparable to the effects of poetry, which replaces the listener’s focus on present woes with immersion in the deeds of the past.38 One “forgets” one’s own sorrows by “remembering” those of others (as detailed in song). In itself, the mildness of her drug is a tribute to the power of the 35

36 37

38

Helen’s actions are depicted as overtly reprehensible by Homer and Alcaeus, and more subtly so by Sappho. Blondell (2013: 115) remarks that “abandoning one’s husband, home, and family is intrinsically blameworthy, a fact underlined both by the Homeric reminiscences and by the parallels with the accusing Alcaeus.” On the Odyssean Helen’s finessing of her reputation, see Worman 2002: 56–65; for an intertextual reading of the heroines of the Iliad and the Odyssey, see Lesser 2019. For Helen’s drugs and their Egyptian provenance, see, for example, Bergren 2008: 111–130, Austin 1994: 76–80, Gumpert 2001: 40–42, Blondell 2013: 80–82. On Egypt in the non-Homeric Helen traditions, see Austin 1994, chapters 4 and 5. For example, Hes. Th. 94–103, on the forgetting of cares induced by poetry.

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Odyssey to contain Helen. Shown in her domestic setting, with her husband Menelaos, Helen plays the ideal host who tantalizes her guests with stories of war, enabling them briefly to forget their sorrows.39 She is neither a Calypso, who delays Odysseus for seven years, nor a Circe, whose pharmaka make men forget their homeland (10.236). The Odyssey celebrates Penelope’s conjugal brand of remembering; Helen steps into the spotlight only briefly, as it were, to remind us of that other world for which husbands left their homes, their wives, and their children. Forgetting can be pleasurable, Helen seems to suggest but, if taken in too large a dose, also extremely dangerous. In Sappho fr. 16V, we find a Helen who is figured as Penelope’s antithesis: she is the wife who has not remembered (7–12): κ̣άλ̣λο̣ς̣ [ἀνθ]ρ̣ώπων Ἐλένα [τὸ]ν ἄνδρα τ̣ὸν̣ [ . . .άρ]ι̣ στον κ̣αλλ[ίποι]σ̣᾿ ἔβα ᾿ς Τροΐαν πλέοι̣ [σα κωὐδ[ὲ πα]ῖδος οὐδὲ φίλων το[κ]ήων π̣ά[μπαν] ἐμνάσθ⟨η⟩, ἀλλὰ παράγ̣α̣γ̣᾿ α̣ὔταν ` ] σαν

10

(Far surpassing) humans in beauty, Helen left behind the best of husbands and sailed to Troy. And she remembered neither her child, nor her dear parents, but . . . (Kypris?) led her astray.

Taken out of context, the verb “remember” might appear somewhat odd here. Certainly, Helen is not struck with amnesia as soon as she leaves home. But in light of the connections drawn by the early Greek imaginary between the physical space of the house and the wife’s memory, I suggest that not remembering is the cognitive correlate of Helen’s departure from her husband’s house. Her failure to remember characterizes Helen as the wife who violates the first principle of marital fidelity (to protect the hearth), and confirms the cultural dictum (as expressed most cogently by Athena) that a woman’s mind goes wherever her body is: once she remarries, a woman remembers neither the children from her previous marriage nor her former husband (Od. 15.21–23).40 Helen’s desire for Paris is what causes her failure to remember.41 39

40 41

Telemachos’ inability to take pleasure in the stories is a sign of his being too close to them. For him, the Trojan War (and the nostoi of its heroes) is not distant poetry but a very personal story without an ending. On the relevance of these lines to Sappho fr. 16V, see Segal 1998: 66–67 and Mueller 2007. On desire and memory in Sappho, see especially Snyder 1997: 45–61.

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The next chapter will take up the theme of remembering in Sappho’s lyrics more broadly. For now, I simply want to point out the ways in which the female desiring subjects in Sappho fr. 16V transgress the traditional classifications of gender and sexuality. In actively leaving behind her spouse, parents, and child, Sappho’s Helen behaves much like the male warrior of Homeric epic. The poet herself, moreover, takes on the role of the remembering wife, becoming a Penelope to Anactoria’s “Odysseus.”42 This queering and bending of traditional sexual identities along gendered lines makes for a clear distinction between Sappho’s and Alcaeus’ “Helen” poems. In two separate poems (frr. 42 and 283V), Alcaeus highlights the devastating effects of Helen’s desire for and pursuit of Paris. The first two extant stanzas of Alcaeus 283V describe Helen’s impassioned state as she follows Paris across the sea in a ship (in verses notably similar to Sappho 16.9–12V). It is in the last two stanzas that the male poet catalogues the cost of this love affair, linking the deaths of Priam’s sons and the conquest of dark-eyed warriors and chariots directly to Helen, their deaths having taken place “for that woman’s sake” (ἔν]νεκα κήνας, 14). In Alcaeus fr. 42, the speaker traces Troy’s downfall back to Helen and her transgressions, although the part of the papyrus fragment where Helen’s name may have appeared is badly damaged (1–4):43 ὠς λόγος, κάκων ἄ[χος ἔννεκ᾿ ἔργων Περράμῳ καὶ παῖσ[ί ποτ᾿, Ὦλεν᾿, ἦλθεν ἐκ σέθεν πίκρον, π[ύρι δ’ ὤλεσε Ζεῦς Ἴλιον ἴραν. As the story goes, bitter grief, because of evil deeds, came to Priam and his children once upon a time from you, Helen. And Zeus destroyed sacred Ilion with fire.

Unlike his Lesbian compatriot, however, Alcaeus does not frame Helen’s transgression as a mnemonic lapse. The poem likely began and ended with Helen, but it leaves it to the listener’s imagination to fill in how it is she has caused such devastation. By contrast, Sappho’s homing in on Helen’s “not remembering” suggests a reworking of the Homeric discourse

42 43

For an exploration of Penelopean intertexts in Sappho, see Larson 2010 and Chapter 8. I follow Campbell’s text of Alcaeus fr. 42, which contains Page’s supplements for lines 1–3 and 10, including an apostrophe to Helen in line 2. Although other addressees have been proposed, Budelmann (2018: 90–91) points out that τεαύταν in line 5 “is difficult if Helen has not been mentioned shortly before.”

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of female memory. As we might have expected, Helen does not fit easily into the known Homeric paradigms. Her not remembering can be read as a rejection of the Penelopean model of constant mindfulness within a domestic setting, but it also evokes the “active” performative memory more often applied to warriors’ valiant deeds in Homer. Indeed, Sappho’s description of Helen’s failure to remember closely mirrors lines of the Iliad which speak to the importance of the soldier’s memory on the battlefield.44 Nestor, at one point, urges the Achaeans to “be men” and “remember” (mnēsasthe, 15.662) their children, wives, property, and parents.45 This is not an injunction to extract long unused concepts from mental storage bins but rather, as Egbert Bakker puts it, an “activation of consciousness.”46 That the “activation of consciousness” is crucial to performing heroic deeds gains further support from a passage in Iliad 21, where Agenor explains the Trojans’ invincibility to Achilles (586–589): ἐν γάρ οἱ πολέες τε καὶ ἄλκιμοι ἀνέρες εἰμέν, οἳ καὶ πρόσθε φίλων τοκέων ἀλόχων τε καὶ υἱῶν Ἴλιον εἰρυόμεσθα· σὺ δ’ ἐνθάδε πότμον ἐφέψεις, ὧδ’ ἔκπαγλος ἐὼν καὶ θαρσαλέος πολεμιστής. For we [in Troy] are many and strong men, who also, in front of our own parents and wives and sons, defend Troy by fighting. But you will encounter death here, although you are such a terrifyingly bold warrior.

As Agenor implies, boldness does not compensate for being in a foreign land, far from friends and relatives (notice here the similarity of language in Agenor’s reference to φίλων τοκέων and Sappho’s, at 16.10V). By fighting before the gaze of kin, the Trojans have a tremendous advantage over the Achaeans, who must conjure by means of memory their wives, parents, and sons, whether living or dead. In summoning the imaginary – but experientially real – presence of their kin, the Achaeans work that much harder at “being men” on the battlefield. Similarly in Alcaeus, the imperative to remember, in both fragments 6 and 140V, is embedded in a broader appeal to “be a man” (6.11–12): μνάσθητ̣ε τὼ πάροιθε μ̣[όχθω· / νῦν τις ἄνηρ δόκιμος γε̣ [νέσθω. “Remember the previous (hardship),” commands the

44 45 46

Compare Il. 15.662 and 21.587, loci similes noted by Voigt 1971 ad loc. See Nestor’s speech at Il. 15.661–664. Bakker 2002: 69: “Memory in Homer is not a retrieval of stored facts but a dynamic cognitive operation in the present, a matter of consciousness, or more precisely, of the activation of consciousness.”

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speaker. For now is the time when every man must “show himself trustworthy/steadfast.”47 Memory takes on a particularly performative dimension in the preceding examples. Warriors must bring into being, through acts of memory, their own kin. This particular kind of performance is of short but intense duration; it lasts only so long as the men themselves are fighting. Whereas men “remember” in the aorist and their memory acts as a catalyst to deeds of manly strength (e.g., alkē) and virtue, female memory occurs in the perfect tense, which suggests that it is not simply an activation but a durable state of being, a monument rather than a single act. In the Odyssey, Penelope “remembers” always with a perfect-stem form of the verb, μιμνήσκεσθαι.48 She wins kleos, according to Agamemnon, because she “has remembered Odysseus well” (ὡς εὖ μέμνητ᾿ Ὀδυσῆος, 24.195); Penelope says in Odyssey 1 that she is weary because of “always remembering” her husband (μεμνημένη αἰεί, 1.343). When she announces the contest of the bow she says, in a perfect-stem future infinitive, that she thinks she “will remember” Odysseus’ house (μεμνήσεσθαι ὀΐομαι, 19.581 and 21.79). And she is exhorted by Odysseus to “be mindful of” (perfect infinitive) his mother and father in his – Odysseus’ – absence (μεμνῆσθαι πατρὸς καὶ μητέρος, 18.267). These verbal forms are no accident. On the contrary, they attest to the omnitemporal quality of the remembering expected of Penelope, and of women more generally. Sappho’s Helen, on the other hand, confounds these neat distinctions between domestic and heroic remembering by violating the norms of each gender. She makes a parody out of Iliadic forms of remembering kin – the kind of memory valorized by both Nestor and Agenor – because as a woman she has no business sailing to Troy and not minding her child and parents. Sappho uses an aorist tense verb for Helen’s failure to remember. The similarity of Sappho’s phrasing to the Iliadic imperatives only reinforces how the male model of remembering during battle is being perverted, for a woman’s (Sappho’s and Helen’s) poetic purposes. In 47

48

This is Campbell’s text of fr. 6. Compare Jarratt 2002: 24–28, on the martial contexts of remembering and forgetting in Alcaeus’ poetry, a masculine tradition that derives from Homer. On this fragment, see also Uhlig 2018: 88, with an emphasis on the marine sphere “in which the sailors must now prove their worth.” Of remembering with a perfect stem in the Iliad Bakker (2002: 70n14) writes: “The only cases where Homeric Greek comes close to a modern ‘scientific’ notion of remembering involve the perfect stem of the verb, denoting a permanent state in the present, e.g. Il. 6.222–23: Τυδέα δ’ οὐ μέμνημαι, ἐπεί μ’ ἔτι τυτθὸν ἐόντα / κάλλιφ’, ὅτ’ ἐν Θήβῃσιν ἀπώλετο λαὸς Ἀχαιῶν. ‘I don’t remember Tudeus , because he left me when I was still little.’” On Penelope’s “perfective” remembering, see Mueller 2007, from which this and the following paragraph have been adapted.

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a different way, Helen also violates the Penelopean model of remembering by escaping from husband and home, removing herself both physically and mnemonically from her role as the wife of Menelaos. Helen’s not remembering aligns with neither the masculine nor the feminine paradigm. But in the process of transgressing both of these, she illuminates some of the complex interconnections between memory, songmaking, and sexuality. Because she is a woman pursuing what rightly belongs to a man (i.e., the right to leave his family and city for Troy), she reminds us of the power of eros to reconfigure the normative patterns of desire. By playing the “bad” wife in Sappho fr. 16V, Helen embodies the queer effects of eros. Acting on a man’s prerogative, she yields to her desire for a man who is not her husband – and this man, Paris, is placed in the passive position of being pursued.49 Helen also shows us how the soldier’s love of his shimmering armor and war chariots is no different, really, from Sappho’s own infatuation with Anactoria’s bright face and lovely step. Both are epiphenomena of the “whatever it is one feels desire for is fairest” principle. Helen herself, in pursuing Paris, becomes not only an adulterous but also a queer wife. As such, she mirrors Sappho’s own desire for Anactoria (although, as others have noted, Sappho does not pursue her beloved).50 In a section of The Queer Art of Failure devoted to the phenomenon of forgetting, Jack Halberstam argues that forgetfulness can signal a radical break from the past. He takes as his case in point Dory, a fish-character in the computer-animated 2003 film Finding Nemo who suffers from shortterm memory loss. While by some standards Dory “might be read as stupid or unknowing, foolish or silly,” Halberstam (2011: 80) argues that she “ends up ‘knowing’ all kinds of things that go against received wisdom” but that turn out to be essential to Marlin’s quest to find his son. Dory’s condition compels her to draw on hidden cognitive reserves (she “reads human texts, speaks whale, charms sharks”) and to invest the energy and affection in friends that most funnel into their families (she “understands the primacy of friends over family”). Helen does not suffer from short-term memory loss. But her forgetting, like Dory’s, still represents a queer form of failure. Rather than tethering herself permanently to her biological kin and her husband, 49

50

As Blondell (2013: 115) observes: “Sappho’s choice of the grammatical neuter for the love object in line 4 (‘whatever’ one desires, not ‘whomever’) contributes to the implied objectification of Paris, who, as the object of Helen’s desire, sets her in motion without any indication of agency on his part.” Paris is given a passive role, and “thus exercises the passive power that beautiful women wield so often, with or without their consent – the kind of power the Trojan elders attribute to Helen in the Iliad ”). On Helen’s queer subjectivity, see Lesser 2023: 79–90.

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Helen makes a break with the past and its traditions. In both Sappho and Homer, Helen models knowledge practices (e.g., instilling forgetfulness in her guests), desires, and forms of kinship that are generally excluded from the heterosexual nuclear family and its procreative ideology.51 In the final section of this chapter, I consider what it means that Sappho has positioned both herself and Helen beyond heteronormativity.

Sappho’s Third Alternative Sappho fr. 16V appears to anticipate the agonistic tradition that pits poet against poet, a tradition that is parodied in the opening gambit of the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, a late work (possibly modeled on Alcidamas’ earlier fourth-century bce version) that imagines these two celebrities of hexametric verse facing off against one another in Calchis.52 The contest proper begins with a set of questions: “What is the best (phertaton) thing for mortals? What is the finest thing (kalliston)?” Each poet takes his turn at outwitting the other. Various riddles or problems are posed, and the best or most skillful answer wins the prize. There is no shortage of examples in archaic Greece of poets correcting, contradicting, or improving upon the work of their predecessors.53 Early Greek scientists, philosophers, medical writers, and historians were no less keen to assert the innovation and originality of their own work.54 Many contemporary scholars are also used to ascribing agonistic motives to the archaic Greek poets about whom they write. Since these critics know that the texts they study are already immersed in an eristic culture of their own making, and since that culture itself seems to promote competition – and individual excellence – at the expense of collaboration, it becomes tempting to read every sign of difference, every point of disagreement, as entailing a contest with winners and losers.55 What, then, does it mean that Sappho has chosen a “third alternative”? I refer to it as such, rather than opting for the “or” part of the either/or binary within Homeric epic, because the realm of Aphrodite is not, as we 51 53 54

55

Compare Halberstam 2011: 81. 52 See Ford 2002: 275–277. See Griffith 1990: 193–194; on agonistics and verbal conflict more generally, Fitzgerald 1987: 1–18, Barker 2009: 1–28; and, on competition within Homeric epic, Kelly 2008. As Griffith (1990: 192) observes, “proto-scholarship and literary criticism often follow this competitive model too, as rival explanations and interpretations are advanced for real or pretended ‘problems’ in the texts of the classics, especially Homer.” See also D’Angour 2011. To cite only one recent example, Thorsen 2019: 168, who reads Sappho fr. 16V as an intertext for Horace’s Ode 4.9 (and 1.15), suggests that the primacy given to Aphrodite’s agency by Sappho “might also have an important metapoetic aspect, since it appears to give the lyric genre of Sappho the upper hand compared to the epic genre of Homeric war.”

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have seen, actually a viable alternative for Iliadic heroes. Paris, who is as close as we get to a queer epic hero, represents that third space that is not fully sketched out within the Iliad, one where, rather than standing one’s ground and fighting to the death, it is possible to be miraculously rescued from death by Aphrodite, and gracefully restored to the soft bedding and beautiful clothes in which the goddess herself delights. This is not a real option for men in the Iliad, and it is the source of Paris’ humiliation and the insults that he, like Aphrodite, must field from the more normatively gendered masculine heroes of that epic.56 For Sappho, however, there is no need to embrace the Iliad’s values. In choosing the “third alternative” she does not seek to destroy the epic armature that constitutes and sustains the distinction between heroes and losers, nor to dispute the worthiness of those who, like Hector, Achilles, and so many others, have chosen to die for glory. She simply sidesteps that binary: between brave and cowardly, victor and defeated. To each her own. Just as Sappho’s love interests (as these are represented in her lyrics) are female, she appears also to measure her professional standing as a poet against that of other female poets.57 Nowhere in antiquity is Sappho represented as having competed directly with Homer. Patricia Rosenmeyer (1997: 135), in fact, argues that female poets were ranked and evaluated separately from their male counterparts and that “when commentators do place Sappho in a directly agonistic relationship with other poets, they usually rank her against other women.”58 Gender plays a role here, certainly. Maximus of Tyre, for example, an orator and philosopher from the second century ce, compares Sappho’s use of irony with Socrates’ dismissal of “rival craftsmen” (ἀντίτεχνοι): “What Alcibiades and Charmides and Phaedrus were to him, Gyrinna and Atthis and Anactoria were to her (literally: the Lesbian); what the rival craftsmen Prodicus and Gorgias and Thrasymachus and Protagoras were to Socrates, Gorgo and Andromeda were to Sappho. Sometimes she censures them, at other times she cross-examines them, and she uses irony just like Socrates.”59 56

57 58

59

Warwick (2019a: 7) argues that Paris is “the negative masculine archetype that other warriors seek to avoid”; Lesser 2023: 77 describes Paris as “antisocial” in the sense that although he knows the Iliad ’s social codes he chooses “instead to embrace a different way of being.” On Sappho’s relationship to contemporary female singers, see Chapter 8. Rosenmeyer (1997: 135) cites Strabo who writes that “in all recorded history I know of no woman who even came close to rivalling her as a poet (13, 2, 3 = Loeb T 7).” For the desexualized representations of Sappho in Hellenistic epigram, see Barbantini 1993: 30 and Gosetti-Murrayjohn 2006. Max. Tyr. Or. 18.9, which is included as test. 20 in Campbell 1982 (the English translation is Campbell’s). See Schlesier 2011: 1–4 on this testimonium and, more broadly, on Sappho as “a forerunner of Socrates.”

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For Maximus, both Socrates and Sappho exemplify the “Socratic art of love” (ἡ Σωκράτους τέχνη ἐρωιτκή). In his unusual pairing of female lyricist and male philosopher, both are erotically linked with the group of followers listed first, while ironically conversing with and “crossexamining” a second set, who are potential professional rivals (ἀντίτεχνοι). Relevant for our purposes is that both Sappho’s lovers and her supposed rivals are female (as Socrates’ are male).60 Sappho, moreover, served as a muse and model for other female poets, some of whom promoted their affinity with Sappho by claiming to be beloved by the Muses.61 It is, therefore, worth reflecting further on how the heteronormative world of epic supports and interacts with the female-centered perspective of Sappho’s lyrics. I mentioned at the start of this chapter that the scholarship on Sappho fr. 16V often tends to privilege Sappho’s focus on Helen, as opposed to the homoerotic nature of the singer’s feelings for Anactoria.62 But even to put it this way may be a symptom of the binary thinking that Sappho’s lyrics resist. Charles Segal, for example, has acknowledged how the heterosexual paradigm of Helen’s desire for Paris gets transformed into the same-sex desire the singer herself feels for Anactoria.63 And more recently, Tim Whitmarsh (2018: 149) has described Helen as “the cyborg figure of the epic tradition, who occupies an ever-shifting position within the matrix of defining polarities.” Sappho fr. 16V leaves it to the listener of the poem to pivot, with Helen, between epic and lyric. There is no mythical precept for a woman loving another woman with the intensity of desire that Sappho feels for Anactoria. The poem presents Helen as the woman chasing her love interest (who happens to be a man) and conjures Anactoria as a radiance in Sappho’s memory, an object of desire longed for perhaps even more because of her non-presence. In this regard, 60 61

62 63

Sappho fr. 55 is a prime example of this sort of rivalry and is frequently mentioned as an example of “iambic” Sappho; see especially Rosenmeyer 2006, Dale 2011, and Martin 2016, and Chapter 8. See, for example, Skinner 1991: 95 on Nossis (a “Hellenistic imitator”) and Sappho as both having an “alternative, woman-identified concept of artistic creativity.” Nossis uses floral imagery from Sappho’s own poetry to evoke her connection with her predecessor and boasts that she is also beloved to the Muses. On Nossis, see Hauser 2016: 151–157 and on the tradition of women’s poetry in ancient Greece more generally, Bowman 2004. See, however, duBois 1978: 96: “Sappho acts, as did Helen, in loving Anaktoria, in following her in her poem, in attempting to think beyond the terms of the epic vocabulary.” Segal (1998: 67–68) suggests that “the echoes of the Homeric Helen also allow Sappho to hint at the conflict between sexual desire and social norms without having either to blame or exonerate,” and also that “by using Helen for a statement of erotic feelings between women . . . Sappho may be implicitly acknowledging and answering the possibility of censure or disapproval.” On Sappho’s queering of Homer’s Helen, see also Lesser 2021: 139–142.

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Segal (1998: 77) is right that “Helen allows Sappho to express the power of women’s erotic feelings and even to acknowledge delicately that these feelings are outside of social norms (cf. παράγαγε, led astray, 11).” That the social norms violated are outside the realm of heterosexuality was perhaps less a problem for Sappho’s contemporaries than for modern scholars who have attempted to erase the poet’s lesbianism by reframing her love for women as driven by a pedagogical agenda. What a reparative reading makes possible, instead, is a chance to move beyond the binary frameworks created by epic. In doing so, we follow Sappho as she represents sexual desire itself as bypassing the boundaries of heteronormativity. There are trace elements of this sort of desire in the Iliad, particularly in the scene in Book 3 where Aphrodite first coaxes and then forces Helen back to her bedroom to make love to Paris.64 In persuading the mortal woman, who is at this particular moment resistant to the charms of both Aphrodite and Paris, having recently developed nostalgic longing for Menelaos, Aphrodite utters the following words (3.390–394): δεῦρ’ ἴθ’· Ἀλέξανδρός σε καλεῖ οἶκόνδε νέεσθαι. κεῖνος ὅ γ’ ἐν θαλάμῳ καὶ δινωτοῖσι λέχεσσι κάλλεΐ τε στίλβων καὶ εἵμασιν· οὐδέ κε φαίης ἀνδρὶ μαχεσσάμενον τόν γ’ ἐλθεῖν, ἀλλὰ χορόνδε ἔρχεσθ’, ἠὲ χοροῖο νέον λήγοντα καθίζειν. Come hither. For Alexander calls you to the house, he who is in the bedroom, on the finely fashioned bed, shining in both his beauty and his clothes. Nor would you say that he had come from fighting a man in battle, but rather that he was on his way to the dance floor, or that he was sitting down, having recently stopped dancing.

I have noted already that both Anactoria and Paris have a radiant quality about them. Paris’ radiance is linked explicitly to a choral context (χορόνδε, χοροῖο, 393–394). But Anactoria’s movements have choral resonances as well.65 In his concluding reflections on fr. 16V, Segal (1998: 73) surmises that “Sappho’s description of Anactoria . . . may be evoking the choral performances in which she knew, admired, and perhaps loved Anactoria while she was still in her entourage.” Segal is careful, however, to acknowledge that the feelings called to mind by the memory of Anactoria do not

64 65

Hall (2010: 160) suggests that “the antithesis of the warrior and the dancer/lover is crystallized and consolidated in the uneasy sex scene that follows immediately afterwards.” For Sappho’s subtle evocation of Anactoria as a dancer, see Olsen 2019: 291, with reference to earlier literature.

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necessarily emerge from the poet’s lived experience; these are emotions with which anyone in her circle – anyone among her readers – might identify. In so far as the description of Anactoria’s beauty is evocative of the Iliadic Paris at the moment when Aphrodite leads Helen back to him, Sappho fr. 16V offers a reparative lyric response to the Iliad’s layering over of Paris’ beauty with rebukes from both Hector and Helen. We considered Hector’s shaming of his brother earlier. It remains for us to hear Helen’s dismissal of Paris as she compares her two husbands, past and present. (Il. 3.428–436): “Earlier you were boasting that you were going to get the best of war-loving Menelaos with your force of hands and spear… so, go ahead and call him out to fight once again. But do not, I tell you, lest you are swiftly defeated by his spear.” Rather than defend himself, Paris expresses the intensity of his desire for Helen, which is stronger even, he claims, than when he first led her away from lovely Lacedaemon: “So much now do I love you and does sweet desire take hold of me” (ὥς σεο νῦν ἔραμαι καί με γλυκὺς ἵμερος αἱρεῖ, 3.446), an appropriately Sapphic ending to this book of the Iliad in which sexual desire and desirability are shown to be completely incompatible with martial valor. Other chapters of this book have focused on forms of eros that could be construed as either queer or conforming: the singer’s unrequited love in Sappho 1V, Dawn’s fateful attraction to Tithonos, and the marriage of Hector and Andromache (Sappho fr. 44V). In each instance, the path along which desire travels is anything but straightforward. Even heterosexual eros confronts a queer future. As we saw in Chapter 6, there is no imaginable way around the nonreproductive ends toward which Hector’s lust, his menos, has driven him. In this chapter, we have traced some of the patterns that link Helen to Troy, in both epic and lyric, and seen how these intersect with the desire the singer of Sappho fr. 16V feels for her absent lover, Anactoria. We have dwelled, in particular, on how subtly attuned Sappho is to feelings that are mostly suppressed within Homeric epic. We have seen how Sappho chooses for herself the “third alternative” that the Iliad refuses, modeling her Anactoria on an almost-queer male hero from that poem, and how, at the same time, she celebrates Helen’s subversive orientation toward the poetics of female memory in the Odyssey. In the next and final chapter, I delve further into how Penelopean remembering becomes a source of kleos (enduring fame) for Sappho’s lyrics.

chapter 8

Sapphic Remembering, Lyric Kleos

Sappho’s lyrics, as we know, center women’s affective and erotic experiences with other women. Less widely acknowledged is the fact that Sappho repurposes the trope of female remembering, a central component of the Odyssey’s marriage plot, to describe the enduring ties between women whose lives are not otherwise intertwined. In this final chapter, I return to the theme of avuncularity as first described in Chapter 1, but with somewhat different objectives. Avuncularity is a style of reparative reading that, with its nonconfrontational, nonhierarchical manner of placing poets and their texts side by side, offers a welcome alternative to the more familiar Oedipal dynamics of intertextuality. In a chapter of Tendencies called “Tales of the Avunculate,” Sedgwick looks at how Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest decenters the marriage plot by foregrounding avuncular characters – particularly aunts. Sedgwick is keen to point out that such avuncular figures (whether or not they themselves are queer) offer children models of both familial and erotic attachments that are obliquely positioned relative to those of the nuclear family, with its procreative orientation.1 Whereas grandparents are the parents of parents – and, therefore, part of the same generational continuum that connects the past to the future – aunts and uncles remind us that parents may also be siblings. As Sedgwick (1993: 63) formulates it, aunts and uncles position parents “as elements in a varied, contingent, recalcitrant but re-forming seriality, as people who demonstrably could have turned out very differently.”

1

Sedgwick 1993: 63: “Because aunts and uncles (in either narrow or extended meanings) are adults whose intimate access to children needn’t depend on their own pairing or procreation, it’s very common, of course, for some of them to have the office of representing nonconforming or nonreproductive sexualities to children.” See Ensor 2012 for a subtle exploration of how the “spinster” aunt figure enables us to imagine a future that is neither normatively reproductive nor the refusal of “reproductive futurism.”

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With its emphasis on nonprocreative relationships as well as what might have been, Sedgwick’s account of avuncularity gestures to horizontal affiliations, presenting parents as brothers and sisters – as individuals who somehow became, but were never destined to become, parents. I want to argue here that Sappho’s lyrics similarly position women at an oblique angle to marriage. Those who would be identified as wives or concubines in most other contexts (and certainly in Homeric epic) are represented by Sappho as women who loved, and continue to love, other women. The physical intimacy between these women may be relegated to the past, but their own memories actively shape how they are remembered – and memorialized – in the Sappho fragments we will consider. Sappho represents women as singers and authors of their own narratives, rather than as supporting characters in their husbands’ adventures. Women are almost without exception the subject and object of two key action verbs in Sappho’s lyrics: “singing” (ἀείδω) and “remembering” (μιμνήσκομαι). In fragment 22, for example, the first-person voice exhorts Abanthis to “sing (of) Gongyla” (κ]έλομαι σ᾿ ἀ̣ [είδην / Γο]γγύλαν̣, 9–10). In fragment 96, a woman is described as “going back and forth, remembering delicate Atthis” (πόλλα δὲ ζαφοίταισ᾿, ἀγάνας ἐπι-/μνάσθεισ᾿ Ἄτθιδος, 96.15–16).2 What does it mean to “sing Gongyla” or to “remember Atthis”? When μιμνήσκομαι occurs in poetic texts, it seems to involve an action that more closely approximates what is meant by “performance” than what is meant by “memory.”3 To remember, in modern English usage, is to call something to mind; it is a cerebral activity. By contrast, to “remember” something in the context of a song culture is to perform it as song. William Moran (1975), in fact, has shown that μιμνήσκεσθαι is used in Homer as a semi-technical term for “sing.” This verb, by activating listeners’ awareness, makes its object present. The first line of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, for example, instantiates the remembering, the making present, of Apollo, who is the genitive object of this verb: μνήσομαι οὐδὲ λάθωμαι Ἀπόλλωνος ἑκάτοιο (“I will remember and let me not forget far-shooting Apollo”). To the extent that μνήσομαι (“I will remember”) self-reflexively refers to the event of singing the hymn, it is a performative utterance. The pledge to remember is being fulfilled as the singer sings these very words. A similar performative dimension to remembering and singing emerges from 2 3

Atthis is mentioned several other times in Sappho’s lyrics; see Ferrari 2010: 45–52, on Atthis as the graceless young girl in fr. 49V and as the addressee (the “you”) of fr. 96. On memory in Sappho, see Wilson 1996: 129–141, Snyder 1997: 45–61, Jarratt 2002, and Lardinois 2008.

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Sappho’s lyrics. In commanding Abanthis to “sing Gongyla” (fr. 22), the singer evokes both of these women through their names, but she also hints at the multiple variations that might be performed on the basic architectural sequence as it is offered (9–14):4 .] . ε . [. . . .] . [. . .κ]έλομαι σ᾿ ἀ̣ [είδην Γο]γγύλαν̣ [Ἄβ]α̣νθι λάβοισαν ἀ . [ πᾶ]κτιν, ἆς̣ σε δηὖτε πόθος τ̣ . [ ἀμφιπόταται

10

τὰν κάλαν· ἀ γὰρ κατάγωγις αὔτ̣α[ς σ᾿ ἐπτόαισ᾿ ἴδοισαν, ἐγὼ δὲ χαίρω. I exhort you, Abanthis, to sing (of) Gongyla, taking up the lyre, while desire once again flies around you, the beautiful one; for her dress (katagōgis) terrified you, taking your breath away when you saw it; and I rejoice.

As Eva Stehle (1997: 304) remarks, “the phrase ‘desire . . . flies around you’ (ἀμφιπόταται) must refer to the longing that Abanthis feels, but in its vivid unspecificity it suggests the longing that Abanthis causes as well.” Reciprocity has been scripted, subtly, into this description of longing. The outline of a group of women, taking turns desiring and being desired, singing and being sung, emerges in the shadow of these names, suggesting that the group itself is enacted through such imperatives. Being sung inscribes one into the group’s circle, the virtual traces of which are preserved in these lyrics.5 “I exhort you, A, to sing B” contains an ordering of names that might have been reversed, and perhaps will be on a future occasion. To the extent, also, that desire is present where remembering is enjoined, we begin to sense the subtle imbrication of cognitive and affective features of reperformance. Gongyla’s dress, as we saw in Chapter 3, acts as a gathering point for song and desire.6 The dress rendered the woman who looked at it breathless, and the woman singing these lines delights in that effect (ἐγὼ δὲ χαίρω, 22.14), while urging the other woman (Abanthis) to pick up the thread of the song where she has left off. The longing projected onto Abanthis appears to emanate from the very material of Gongyla’s dress, which even in the viewer’s memory transmits a visually powerful affect. When she is asked to “sing Gongyla,” Abanthis is not actually looking at the dress. Rather, she is 4 5 6

I use Campbell’s text of fr. 22, and I discuss this fragment at greater length in Chapter 3. On the dynamics of Sappho’s group, see Wilson 1996: 123–124, Stehle 1997: 282–287, Calame 2001: 212–214 and 231–233, Skinner 2002: 63–66, and Robbins 2013: 124–128. See Chapter 3, pp. 75–77.

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being asked to remember what this dress looked like and how she felt when Gongyla wore it; that act of remembering fills her with desire, for both Gongyla and Gongyla’s lyrics. The present chapter will focus on poignant moments such as this one, where memory, song, and the materiality of desire coalesce. The examples I consider will allow us to reflect on how acts of remembering enable (or disable) the persistence of a lyric repertoire beyond the singer’s own lifetime, deepening our understanding of the language of memory that we began considering in Chapter 7. There, I was primarily interested in how the Odyssean discourse of women’s remembering is subtly reshaped in Sappho fr. 16V, in connection with Helen’s failure to remember. This chapter makes both a bolder and more general claim about the rhetoric of remembering in Sappho’s lyrics. In the fragments I survey below, “remembering” offers a means of creating and sustaining the repertoires of female singers and songwriters (both Sappho’s own and those of her antitechnoi, or poetic rivals).7 Framed in relation to epic, the sort of remembering that is celebrated within Sappho’s lyrics also has a reparative component: acts of remembering in Sappho reverse the usual patterns of sun and moon, male and female, thereby creating a repertoire of poetic song that revolves around objects and erga of a notably nonHomeric variety. But Sapphic remembering also repurposes the syntax of conjugal remembering from the Odyssey. Rather than a wife keeping alive her husband’s reputation (his kleos) through her steadfast memory of him, as Penelope does for Odysseus, the women who “remember” in Sappho’s lyrics are generally sustaining the kleos of other women. In this way, Sappho pointedly queers the pattern of conjugal remembering that takes center stage in the later books of the Odyssey. She invites us to view these women within the framework of their nonprocreative, avuncular attachments to other women. Helen’s queer forgetting (as discussed in Chapter 7) pairs well with this sort of nonconjugal remembering. Both represent departures from the demands typically made of the Homeric wife, whose cognitive resources are meant to secure and sustain her husband’s estate. Whether through a single act of disruptive forgetting or through a longerterm commitment to remembering their absent female lovers, the women of Sappho’s lyrics embody the “possibility embedded in the break from heterosexual life narratives.”8 As part of this “possibility,” we might include the poetic ambitions of these women, both named and anonymous. 7

On poetic rivalry, see Chapters 1 and 7.

8

Halberstam 2011: 70.

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In the next section, I take a closer look at the intersections between memory and reperformance. For a song to survive beyond the present, there must be a periodically renewed desire to hear it performed. Without this longing on the part of listeners, the song itself will cease to exist. And with its disappearance, the name of its composer will also be lost. Fr. 55, which I consider in the following section, presents the poignant case of one of Sappho’s contemporaries, a woman whose poetic compositions, at least according to Sappho, have failed to secure their place in the literary canon. The particular emphasis on memory in these verses gestures to the metapoetic resonances of remembering elsewhere in Sappho’s corpus.

Remembering and Poetic Immortality The addressee of Sappho fr. 55, a fragment that the anthologist Stobaeus tells us is meant for “an uneducated woman” (πρὸς ἀπαίδευτον γυναῖκα), is not named. In addressing this woman simply as “you,” the singer performs an erasure, enacting the very anonymity for this individual that her poem forecasts:9 κατθάνοισα δὲ κείσῃ οὐδέ ποτα μναμοσύνα σέθεν ἔσσετ᾿ οὐδὲ πόθα εἰς ὔστερον· οὐ γὰρ πεδέχῃς βρόδων τὼν ἐκ Πιερίας, ἀλλ᾿ ἀφάνης κἀν Ἀίδα δόμῳ φοιτάσῃς πεδ᾿ ἀμαύρων νεκύων ἐκπεποταμένα. You will lie there when you die, and there will be no memory of you ever, nor longing for you in the future: for you do not have a share of the roses of Pieria. Instead, invisible also in the house of Hades, you will flit about amidst the shadowy corpses, having flown away.

In the first several verses, Sappho asserts that neither memory (μναμοσύνα) nor longing (πόθα) will follow in the wake of this unnamed woman’s death. A first reading suggests that the woman’s personal friends and family will forget her. But the predicted absence of “longing” (πόθα) invites us to interpret the entire poem as a reflection on poetic (im)mortality. The reference to the Pierian roses in the following gar clause 9

I print Campbell’s text of fr. 55, which includes Bucherer’s emendation of mss. οὐδέποκ᾿ ὔ in line 2. Voigt prints †ποκ᾿† ὔστερον but Bucherer’s (1904) πόθα εἰς ὐστερον is preferable. There are parallels for the synizesis at Sappho frr. 1.11, 16.11, 55.1, 91, 94.9, and 135; moreover, without the emendation there is no noun to parallel μναμοσύνα (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1913: 88n2). See the discussions of fr. 55 at Burnett 1983: 215–16, Clay 1993, Carson 1997, duBois 1995: 178, Wilson 1996: 162, and Yatromanolakis 2006.

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strengthens this reading. At issue is not so much the woman’s network of personal friendships as her failure to cultivate, or to be cultivated by, a poetic Muse: οὺ γὰρ πεδέχῃς βρόδων / τὼν ἐκ Πιερίας (“You do not have a share of the roses of Pieria”).10 She crafts uninspired verse, easily forgotten songs. Currently unnamed, she will remain anonymous after her death, going down to Hades “invisible” (ἀφάνης), where she will flit about among the shades. There will be no μναμοσύνα (“remembering”) of the unnamed woman in so far as her songs will not be sung again, for there is little “longing” (πόθα) to hear them. The not-naming is, in this sense, a performative (or perhaps a periperformative) utterance, one that fulfills its promise by rendering the addressee as unseen to the singer’s audience as she will be among the other shades of Hades.11 The καί (as part of κἀν) in the third line drives home this point, by underlining that the woman will be invisible also in Hades. In other words, she is already invisible. Somewhat paradoxically, she is rendered absent and anonymous, even while being sung. More pointedly, she will remain so, “moving around unseen” – movements that, as André Lardinois (2008: 87) observes, “may be contrasted with the radiant and memorable dancing of Anaktoria or Atthis, evoked in fragments 16V and 96V.” The participle ἐκπεποταμένα also merits comment, as the same verb is used in fragment 130V (=L-P 131) of Atthis’ “flight” to Andromeda: Ἄτθι, σοὶ δ’ ἔμεθεν μὲν ἀπήχθετο φροντίσδην, ἐπὶ δ’ Ἀνδρομέδαν πότη⟨ι⟩ Atthis, to think of me has grown hateful to you, and you fly away to Andromeda . . .

Alex Hardie (2005: 19–20) and André Lardinois (2008: 87) read Atthis’ departure as a personal betrayal of Sappho.12 And Hardie, at least, detects a similarly “vindictive tone” in fr. 55. I would argue, however, that in both contexts, the absence of thought/memory speaks to the fate of not only 10 11

12

See Matlock 2020: 37–38 on the restrictive valence of πεδά as both a prefix and adverb in this fragment. Carson (1997: 223) treats fr. 55 itself as a kind of disappearing act and the crasis in line 3 as a performative, suggesting that Sappho “has used the syncopating action of crasis to speed up the meaninglessness and to introduce a lurch of hindsight into the reasoning process of her poem” (224). Approaching the same topos with an aural sensibility, Clay (1993) notes the sound play of “going, going, gone” in the repetition of -pot- in three words: pota, potha, ekpepotamena. On the periperformative, see Chapter 5. See Caciagli 2011: 212–216 for the suggestion that family politics, rather than individual eros, may be the motivational force behind betrayals and changing alliances in Sappho’s group.

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these women but also their poetry. In the case of the anonymous addressee of fr. 55, potha (longing) is the missing catalyst to reperformance. “The roses of Pieria” reinforce what is at stake in this sort of remembering.13 As the birthplace of the Muses, Pieria is a place redolent with the roses of song, the products of poetic craft. When a poet is “remembered,” she is made palpably present through the singing of her songs. And these songs in turn create the longer-term reputation of their author.14 As we have seen with fr. 55, Sappho claims that the unnamed addressee will be forgotten, since (γάρ) her songs do not inspire longing. The Andromeda, moreover, to whom Atthis flies in fr. 130V may be the same Andromeda Sappho mocks in another fragment. According to Athenaeus (21bc=Sappho fr. 57V), it is her infatuation with a very unstylish “country girl” (ἀγροΐτις) that causes the speaker of fr. 57V to suggest that Andromeda has lost her mind: τίς δ᾿ ἀγροΐωτις θέλγει νόον . . . ἀγροΐωτιν ἐπεμμένα στόλαν . . . οὐκ ἐπισταμένα τὰ βράκε᾿ ἔλκην ἐπὶ τὼν σφύρων; Who is this country girl who charms (your?) mind . . . dressed in a farm-girl dress . . . not knowing how to pull down her rags over her ankles?15

The invective is clearly inspired by the singer’s hurt feelings. The aspersions cast on the appearance of the other woman are an indirect attack on the questionable tastes of Andromeda (Sappho’s rival). We have no way of knowing whether the mockery targets Andromeda’s sexual proclivities, her appearance, her poetic style, or all three.16 Their names (Andromeda, Atthis) have been preserved, but these women are not cast in a very flattering light. It is Sappho’s “memory” of them that has survived, her version of their betrayal that reaches us, in the absence of the songs composed by Atthis and Andromeda. But lest I give the impression that Sappho merely brandished poetic “memory” like a weapon, calling out insults and improprieties and settling various scores, let us consider the 13

14 16

Calame (1996: 119n25) assumes that this phrase must refer to “Sappho’s school,” which the uncultured addressee of fr. 55 has failed to attend. Hardie (2005: 18) suggests that the roses are meant to evoke a stephanos, such as might have been worn “as a mark of the bearer’s consecration and selfdedication” to various goddesses. For Lardinois 2008: 86, these roses “stand for all of Sappho’s poetic activities,” a reading I find compelling. 15 See also Jarratt 2002: 23–26. On the significance of this gesture, Ferrari 2010: 40–41. Ferrari (2010: 23–26 and 39–44) suggests a political angle to Sappho’s hostility toward Andromeda, who was a member of the rival Penthilid clan.

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highly fragmentary fr. 65V, where the concatenation of words and images suggests a very different sort of poetic enterprise (5-10): Ψάπφοι, σεφίλ[ Κύπρωι̣ β̣[α]σίλ[ κ̣αίτοι μέγα δ . [ ὄ]σσοις φαέθων̣ [ πάνται κλέος [ καί σ’ ἐνν Ἀχέρ[οντ

5

10

Although the text is lacunose, it records in close contiguity the suggestive words “Sappho . . . shining . . . everywhere kleos . . . even in Acheron” – precisely the ingredients for a posthumous poetic life that are missing from Sappho fr. 55. But in contrast to that poem, Acheron in fr. 65V appears to be more nurturing of “reputation.” Acheron is not necessarily the antithesis to Pieria (as it was in fr. 55). And when we juxtapose the other “Acheron” poem, Sappho fr. 95V, with this one, we have an even clearer sense of Sappho’s efforts to rehabilitate the underworld. I quote only the second half of fr. 95V (lines 11–13), although it should be noted that the first lines contain the name “Gongyla,” likely referring to the same Gongyla we met earlier (in fr. 22): κατθάνην δ᾿ ἴμερός τις [ἔχει με καὶ λωτίνοις δροσόεντας [ὄχ̣[θ]οις ἴδην Ἀχερ[ A certain longing seizes me to die, and to see the dewy lotus plants along the banks of Acheron. . .

Is it possible to connect the wish for death expressed in this fragment with the brightness that is mentioned in proximity with Acheron in Sappho fr. 65V? Do the lotus plants growing along the banks of this underworld river somehow link up with the bright rays of kleos penetrating even the depths of Hades (65.9V)? Exploring Sappho’s unusual appropriations of Homeric epic in fr. 95V, Deborah Boedeker (1979) argues that the poet upends her audience’s expectations about Acheron by creating a Hades that is both fertile and erotic.17 Sappho’s description of Hades includes the lotus flower, a plant that appears, for example, in the hieros gamos of Zeus and Hera in Iliad 14. The lotus also appears in the Odyssey, as part of the tale that Odysseus recounts 17

Boedeker (1979: 49) suggests that “Acheron becomes . . . a place of life and nurture, with erotic connotations as well.”

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to the Phaeacians; those of his companions who ate the fruit of the lotus lost their desire to sail home (Od. 9.94–97). Sappho radically recontextualizes a plant whose Homeric associations are with life and fertility, but also with the pleasures of forgetting.18 “Such use of epic material with ‘nonepic’ consequences” becomes a crucial part, argues Boedeker (1979: 52), of Sappho’s construction of an “anti-heroic” persona.19 Boedeker’s analysis points up Sappho’s self-conscious repurposing of features of the epic landscape in shaping her own literary aesthetic. By having the lotus draping the banks of this normally sterile and eerie river, Sappho represents death not just as an escape from suffering, or as a precondition for kleos, but as a destination with erotic potential. Acheron in both fragments is a familiar epic locale. But it is also a place where the reputations of forgotten (or never celebrated) women can be resurrected – where longing to hear their lyrics takes root. The Odyssean resonance of the lotus plant speaks in particular to that latter possibility: Homer’s lotus erases memory of the past, but its Sapphic avatar instills a longing for forgotten verse. Sappho’s Acheron is layered over with these images of lush vegetation and nourishing light; this in itself suggests that for the poet and her readers, sources of kleos may likewise be found in unexpected places.

Just Like the Rosy-Fingered Moon: Sappho fr. 96 The boundaries between song and singer, performance and reperformance are once again playfully elided in Sappho fr. 96.20 In this fragment, the place from which the speaker’s voice emerges is anchored through the adverb τυίδε, an indexical deictic that acquires its spatial coordinates from the place of performance, which is notionally Lesbos (96.1–5): ]Σαρδ . [ . . ] πόλ]λακι τυίδε̣ [ν]ῶν ἔχοισα ὠσπ . [ . . . ] . ώομεν, . [ . . . ] . . χ[ . . ] 18

19

20

For epic references to the lotus plant, which connotes fertility and “fruit effortlessly gathered” (Boedeker 1979, 48), see Od. 9.97, 9.102, and Il. 14.348–351. In Sappho fr. 96, dew and honey-lotus (or melilot) appear together. On Sappho’s poiēsis, see also Chapter 3. Rather than reading the lines as a straightforward expression of Sappho’s despair or “death wish,” Boedeker (1979: 44) aims instead to discover “the poet’s relationship to her material at a more formal level.” I quote from Campbell’s text of fr. 96, which has Blass’ reading [ν]ῶν in line 2 and Lobel’s θέαι σ’ ἰκέλαν ἀρι-γνώται in lines 4–5. As Voigt notes in her app. crit. Blass’ supplement of [ν]ων in the second verse has been accepted by most editors (see Voigt’s own objections in Hamm 1957). Voigt leaves the words undivided in 4–5, printing the MS text as is: †θεαςικελαν ἀρι-/γνωτα†. I have also adapted Campbell’s translation of these lines.

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Assuming for the moment that the “I” voice is speaking from Lesbos, and that we can imagine this voice as the “I” persona familiar from other songs, the first two stanzas establish a relationship between Sappho and the absent woman about whom she sings (who is perhaps in Sardis but who remains noetically connected to Sappho by “directing her mind here”). This “I”–“she” dynamic is, however, triangulated by the absent woman’s delight in the song and dance of a “you” figure, the “you” who is publicly recognized for being as beautiful as a goddess. It is this woman, this “you,” to whom the song is addressed. She may still be part of Sappho’s coterie on Lesbos. In that case, she would be sharing the speaker’s embodiment of the “here” (τυίδε) to which the Sardis-based woman directs her thoughts. Or she may be, like the absent one, far away herself. At one time, however, all three women were together, which is how the absent woman came to be particularly enamored of the song of the addressee: there was a time when she “took most delight in your song” (σᾶι δὲ μάλιστ᾿ ἔχαιρε μόλπαι, 5). The following three stanzas fill in, with slightly more detail, the identities of the three women and, in particular, the situation of the absent one (fr. 96.6–14): νῦν δὲ Λύδαισιν ἐμπρέπεται γυναίκεσσιν ὤς ποτ’ ἀελίω δύντος ἀ βροδοδάκτυλος σελάννα πάντα περρέχοισ’ ἄστρα· φάος δ’ ἐπίσχει θάλασσαν ἐπ’ ἀλμύραν. ἴσως καὶ πολυανθέμοις ἀρούραις·

10

ἀ δ’ ἐέρσα κάλα κέχυται, τεθάλαισι δὲ βρόδα κἄπαλ’ ἄνθρυσκα καὶ μελίλωτος ἀνθεμώδης· But now, she stands out among the Lydian women, just like the rosyfingered moon – when the sun has set – surpasses all the stars, and her light embraces the briny sea and the much-blooming fields in equal measure. And beautiful drops of dew melt, and roses, tender chervil, and flowering clover melilot.

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The previously unnamed woman is now given a secure location. She lives among the Lydians, where she stands out like the moon from the other stars at night. The moon is represented in such a way as to recall the sun, all the more so, as has been pointed out, “in that the moon takes on the Homeric epithet for dawn, ῥοδοδάκτυλος” – or “rosy-fingered.”21 The moon paradoxically assumes the sun’s photosynthetic qualities. Under the nurturing aspect of its light, a landscape of roses, chervil, and clover flourishes. At the start of the next stanza, the moonlike friend’s restless remembering is conveyed through her movements (15–17):22 πόλλα δὲ ζαφοίταισ’, ἀγάνας ἐπιμνάσθεισ’ Ἄτθιδος ἰμέρῳ λέπταν ποι φρένα κ[ᾶ]ρ̣[ι σᾶι] βόρηται· And often going back and forth, she remembers delicate Atthis, her tender heart being consumed with longing, because of your fate.

Now for the first time the addressee is given a name: Atthis. It was Atthis’ song-accompanied-by-movement (her molpē) that occasioned the reminiscence by the absent, moonlike friend. Νow we learn that Atthis’ “fate” is apparently a cause for concern. As we saw earlier, μιμνήσκεσθαι, when it is used in the aorist, implies a doing, or an embodying, of the object governed by the verb. Memory’s work here is the “activation” of Atthis, which can be achieved either by singing about her or by evoking her presence through the song(s) Atthis herself sang. If the “you” of line 5 is indeed Atthis, the latter interpretation gains in appeal. For in that case, the departed woman would be imagined as continuing to delight in Atthis’ music, even while living among the Lydians. And Sappho would, in this way, be flattering her addressee by conjuring for Atthis a scenario in which her songs continued to enjoy a broad circulation despite their author’s departure for another city, another circle (if that is what is meant by her “fate”). Atthis, as we saw above, is represented as having taken flight from Sappho to the rival circle of Andromeda (fr. 130.3–4V: Ἄτθι, σοὶ δ’ ἔμεθεν μὲν ἀπήχθετο / φροντίσδην, ἐπὶ δ’ Ἀνδρομέδαν πότη⟨ι⟩). There are no words in fr. 130V for memory or remembering, but the syntactic construction σοὶ δ᾿ ἔμεθεν recalls the syntax of remembering. In so far as the genitive (“of me”) is 21

22

Macleod (1974: 218–219) contrasts the moonlike girl with the moon’s own fertile light: “the moon stands in contrast to the girl. She is surpassingly beautiful like the moon; but she wastes away whereas it gives life, she feels an absence whereas its light is omnipresent.” The suggested reading in line 17 of κ[ᾶ]ρ̣[ι σᾶ⟨ι⟩ is Page’s (see Page 1955: 92).

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also the grammatical case on which remembering relies (i.e., when the memory of “so and so” is being activated), we can construe the verb “to think” (φροντίσδην) as fulfilling a similar role. I do not want to elide the distinctions between these two verbs, especially since I have been emphasizing the implicit sense of μιμνήσκεσθαι as the performance, or reperformance, of poetic song. In the case of φροντίσδην, it is perhaps safest to assume that the activity involves a summoning to mind of the person herself, and not her poetic repertoire. If so, the fragment would convey the sort of vindictive tone that Hardie attributes to the speaker of Sappho fr. 55; it would suggest a personal rivalry between Sappho and Atthis based on what Sappho represents as Atthis’ betrayal of her.

Penelope and Her Sisters: fr. 94V, fr. 96 The addition of πόλλα (“much,” “many,” “often”) in line 15 of fr. 96 indicates that Atthis was brought to mind repeatedly. Repeated acts of remembering may in turn lead to a longer-term commitment, such as the speaker of fr. 94V urges upon a lover who is departing.23 The entire episode is reported by Sappho, who frames it as the final words exchanged between herself and this woman during a tearful leave-taking (94.1–8V): τεθνάκην δ᾿ ἀδόλως θέλω· ἄ με ψισδομένα κατελίμπανεν πόλλα καὶ τόδ᾿ ἔειπέ̣ [μοι· ὤιμ’ ὠς δεῖνα πεπ[όνθ]αμεν, Ψάπφ’, ἦ μάν σ’ ἀέκοισ’ ἀπυλιμπάνω. τὰν δ’ ἔγω τάδ’ ἀμειβόμαν· χαιροισ᾿ ἔρχεο κἄμεθεν μέμναισ᾿, οἶσθα γὰρ ὤς ⟨σ⟩ε πεδήπομεν· “ . . . truly I wish I were dead.” Shedding many tears, she was taking her leave when she said this to me: “Oh, what terrible things we have suffered, Sappho – I leave you against my will.” And to her I said in reply: “Go, faring well, and remember me, for you know how we cared for you . . . ”

23

See also my discussion of fr. 94V in Chapter 3.

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In line 8 the perfect imperative (μέμναισ᾿) carries with it the suggestion of remembering with a continuous, temporally unbounded aspect.24 At stake is not just a single act of remembrance, such as would be achieved by singing a song, but a more durative kind of remembering – the possession of a certain mindset, or consciousness. What follows is a “reminder” that takes the form of a catalogue of objects (94.9–23V): αἰ δὲ μή, ἀλλά σ᾿ ἔγω θέλω ὄμναισαι [ . . . ( . )] . [ . . ( . ) . ε̣ αι ὀ̣ σ̣[ –10– ]καὶ κάλ᾿ ἐπάσχομεν·

10

πό̣ [λλοις γὰρ στεφάν]οις ἴων καὶ βρ[όδων . . . ]κίων τ᾿ ὔμοι κα . . [ –7– ] πὰρ ἔμοι π⟨ε⟩ρεθήκα⟨ο⟩ καὶ πό̣ λλαις ὐπαθύμιδας πλέκταις ἀμφ᾿ ἀπάλαι δέραι ἀνθέων ἐ̣ [ –6– ] πεποημέναις.

15

καὶ π . . . . . [ ] . μύρωι βρενθείωι̣ . [ ]ρ̣υ[ . . ]ν ἐξαλ⟨ε⟩ίψαο κα̣[ὶ βασ]ι̣ ληίωι

20

καὶ στρώμν[αν ἐ]πὶ μολθάκαν ἀπάλαν παρ̣[ ]ο̣ν̣ων ἐξίης πόθο̣[ν ] . νίδων But if not (i.e., if you do not remember), I wish to remind you . . . and the beautiful things we experienced. Many wreathes of violets and roses and . . . you put on by my side . . . and you put many plaited garlands around your delicate neck, made from flowers . . . and with myrrh you anointed yourself . . . and in a queenly way, on the soft sheets . . . you would satisfy your desire . . . for tender . . .

The objects recalled here are pieces of nature temporarily stabilized through human intervention – flowers plaited into garlands – but not with anything like the permanence of statues, weapons, or other monumentalized epic things. There is not even a woven “commemoration” (or mnēma) such as Helen hands to Telemachos as a parting gift in Odyssey 15.25 Sappho’s wreath-to-be-remembered straddles the ephemeral and the eternal, being part unmodified nature and part crafted object. Its in-between quality captures also the status of memory in Sappho’s poetry. Remembering occupies a middle ground between the flux of lived experience and its 24

On perfect-tense remembering, see Chapter 7.

25

See Mueller 2010 on this object.

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reformulation as song.26 Memory and objects both serve as prompts to the performance of a song in which the absent beloved is recalled. Also notable is the repetition of πόλλα (“many”): it first appears in line 3, referring to “many” tears, but then gets picked up again by the many objects remembered (πόλλοις in line 12, πόλλαις in line 15). The fluid tears morph into somewhat more durable objects, but both are objects of memory and in their plurality, they attest to the repeated, temporally unbounded quality of the remembering urged upon the addressee by the speaker of these verses.27 The only precedent for this type of remembering on the part of a woman is the epic remembering of Penelope. The Odyssey, as we saw in Chapter 7, endows Penelope with kleos in recognition of her unflagging memory of her husband: “since she has well remembered Odysseus” (ὡς εὖ μέμνητ᾿ Ὀδυσῆος, 24.195–196), is how Agamemnon puts it in the underworld. In the perfect tense, as we have seen, the verb (μέμνημαι) implies the kind of remembering that keeps pace with the ever-shifting present. This perfect-tense remembering is vital for the longer-term survival of a poet’s corpus and the constitution of her poetic reputation – her kleos. Sappho’s poetry by contrast creates a non-domestic, though still female-gendered environment, within which women’s memories of one another can be cultivated and sustained.28 As Susan Jarratt (2002: 16) observes, “a substantial number of the poems thematize presence and absence – women’s coming and going – within spaces of women’s habitual congregating” and in this regard they call forth “a gendered operation of memory.” In the Odyssey, by keeping herself enclosed within her husband’s home, the wife practices a spatial confinement from which cognitive fidelity was thought to follow.29 Sappho’s poetry redirects women’s remembering toward different objects, as we have seen. But there may still be something particularly Penelopean in the sort of remembering enjoined on the addressee of fr. 94V. Stephanie Larson (2010) has suggested that the beginning of fr. 94V recalls the scene in Book 20 of the Odyssey where Penelope awakens, weeps, and prays to Artemis to kill her. Finding it impossible to imagine any other escape from the necessity of remarrying, Penelope wishes that the goddess would either kill her with an arrow or cause her to be swept up in storm winds, like the daughters of Pandareus.30 She would rather die than betray Odysseus, even 26 27 29 30

Ferrari (2010: 139) remarks that “[t]he whole sequence of lines 12–23 is configured as one homogenous distillation of memories.” 28 I am grateful to Naomi Weiss for this observation. See pp. 176–178. See Mueller 2007. Lesser (2017) offers a subtle reading of Penelope’s comparison of herself to the Pandareids at Od. 20.61–82.

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though she presumes he is already dead. It is this death wish that provides an intertext for the opening line of fr. 94V, where the girl who leaves Sappho’s circle, perhaps to marry, says, “Honestly, I wish to die . . . ” (τεθνάκην δ᾿ ἀδόλως θέλω). Larson (2010: 186) argues that the language here recalls both Penelope’s death wish as well as the epic heroine’s earlier use of deception and cunning.31 Sappho’s lover, unlike Penelope, has no recourse to a ruse with which to delay her marriage; the adverb (ἀδόλως) thus indicates that she is resigned to having to leave Sappho.32 In the last chapter, we saw that within the Odyssey’s own discourse of conjugal remembering, Penelope is the paradigm of the faithful wife; for her steadfast memory of Odysseus, she herself is remembered. However, within the Sapphic contexts of leave-taking that we have just considered, Penelope’s remembering is reconfigured as a paradigm for the mnemonic fidelity between women. I title this section “Penelope and Her Sisters” not because I want to invoke the biological bond of sisterhood but because I find it helpful – picking up, once again, on the avuncular thread of our discussion – to think of Sappho’s lyrics as reframing epic’s remembering wife as a woman with lateral affiliations. This repurposing of Penelope’s conjugal remembering helps us understand how lyric kleos comes to be constituted within Sappho’s poetry. The remembering women in Sappho’s lyrics do not model themselves on Homer’s Penelope per se, but on her (imagined) sisters. This does not mean that they were not, or could not have been, wives themselves. But as far as Sappho’s erotic lyrics are concerned, they are primarily lovers of women. That is the context in which they exhort one another to remember and be remembered. “I wish to remind you of . . . and the beautiful things we experienced,” says the speaker of fr. 94V. The violets, roses, plaited garlands, and myrrh, the soft sheets and other delicate things are precisely what we associate with both the queerness and the poikilic aesthetic of Sappho’s poetry.33 These things also enable, through their encounter with human bodies, release from sexual desire. And although they are not apostrophized directly, I find it appealing to recall Jonathan Culler’s insight into lyric’s capacity “to posit a world in which a wider range of entities can be imagined to exercise 31

32 33

The speaker of the first line of fr.94V is not named or otherwise indicated. See Neri 2021: 726 for why it makes sense to understand the “I” speaker here as “Sappho,” although, like Larson (and others), I attribute this line to the departing lover. Whereas duBois (1995: 137–138) hears an allusion to Odysseus in this adverb, Larson argues for Penelope as an epic point of reference because women, in fr. 94V, are in the subject position. This and the next paragraph are adapted from my discussion of “Queer Sappho” at Mueller 2021. On the floral imagery here, see Larson 2010: 190, citing Snyder 1997: 60 and Stehle 1996b: 220–221.

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agency.”34 The queerness of fr. 94V is not just an effect of the displacement of the male object of remembering; it is a product of the fragment’s decentering of the human subject more generally. Things both natural and crafted, living and remembered, impinge on the senses, and the poem’s very language morphs from a human-centered discourse into objectoriented sensations.35 The human subjects, the original loci for these feelings of sadness and desiring despair, give way to a more dispersed kind of animacy, one in which (partly due to the fragmentary state of the parchment) it is no longer possible to say who, or what, is satisfying whom. We hear only that “in a queenly way, and on the soft sheets . . . you would satisfy your desire (ἐξίης πόθο[ν).” The addressee is the subject of the verb to “exhaust” or “satisfy,” and desire (pothon) is its object.36 But what she has desire for is irrecoverable, and in this sense, the nonhuman objects, the things themselves that are being recalled, share the stage with the human actors. All are objects of memory and entangled in the feelings and sensations to which remembering gives rise. We simply have no idea what the noun is, in the genitive case, that “tender” (ἀπάλαν) modifies. Nor, for that matter, do we even know whether there is an external object (perhaps the object is the subject herself). I suggested in Chapter 2 that, following Sedgwick’s directive, we might want to abandon the binary-relational definition of sexual identity, with its focus on the external object toward which desire is directed. In fr. 94V, we may have an instance of a woman satisfying her own desire, while the singer lies beside her.37 However we choose to imagine the sexual acts that are being recalled, the mnemonic filter also demands our attention. Ultimately, the object to which the speaker directs her departing friend’s memory is poetry; these artifacts, captured in song, will sustain the longerterm remembering that Sappho has also urged upon her lover, when she says κἄμεθεν μέμναισ᾿ (“remember me also”), using a perfect imperative. By 34 35

36 37

Culler 2015: 242. For the animating effect of apostrophe see Culler 2015: 211–242 and Johnson 1986; on Sappho and lyric, see Purves 2021. Compare McEvilley 1971: 9 on the fourth stanza of fr. 94: “Images of beautiful objects and acts abound in what has been up to now an imageless poem.” On affect and materiality, see the Introduction to Telò and Mueller 2018. Of the expression ἐξίης πόθον, McEvilley (1971: 3) writes that it “seems to provide a clear reference to homosexual acts – the only reference in our fragments.” Larson (2010: 196) suggests that “Penelope, the faithful and seemingly heterosexual wife who exhibits longing only for men, has become a model for the female-female desire and yearning expressed in fragment 94.” Larson further claims that “the biological sex of the object of desire and remembrance is not Sappho’s concern.”

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inscribing herself (ἐμέθεν) as the genitive object of that remembering, Sappho has appropriated the grammatical case that would have belonged to this woman’s husband, had this been the Odyssey. But she has also substituted her own verbal creations for the variegated fabrics of the loom, verbal artifacts which are themselves plaited from the object matter of epic’s weaving wives.38 In the Odyssey, women are primarily vehicles of memory; they are wives and mothers. In Sappho they are both vehicles and objects of memory: linked together through their experiences of shared pleasure, their acts of remembering sustain these horizontal (nonreproductive) relationships. The fragments that we have considered open a window to a world where loyal friends and lovers are rewarded with remembrance and reperformance, while enemies are threatened with virtual banishment. A world where, indeed, the very distinction – friend versus enemy – hinges on remembering. As an aoristic performative, “remember” correlates, as we have seen, with reperformance, but at stake in these short-term events is nothing short of poetic immortality. The discourse of memory provides a powerful mechanism for drawing the boundaries of the circle, separating out friends from enemies as well as enlisting future “friends” and new audiences. In this context, it is appropriate to cite Sappho fr. 147V: “someone, I assert, will remember us” (μνάσεσθαί τινά φα⟨ῖ⟩μι †καὶ ἕτερον† ἀμμέων), a prediction that comes true every time these words are uttered. One final thought on how Sappho configures the materiality and embodied nature of this sort of remembering. In Sappho fr. 96, we saw that the woman who remembers Atthis does so as she is going “back and forth” repeatedly: πόλλα δὲ ζαφοίταισ᾿, ἀγάνας ἐπι- / μνάσθεισ᾿ Ἄτθιδος, 15–16. How are we to envision this movement? Is she simply pacing or strolling back and forth while she sings? Is she dancing as part of a chorus? Could her movements be modeled on those of the weaver? When Calypso and Circe are weaving in the Odyssey, they are said to “go back and forth” before the loom (ἱστὸν ἐποιχομένη, 5.62 and 10.222). No loom is present in Sappho fr. 96, but the singer’s movements mirror those of the weaver, nevertheless. The same occurs in Sappho fr. 102V, where, as we saw in Chapter 3, by striking her plectrum to the lyre, the singer performs the gesture she would have made at her loom.39 You will recall that in this twoline fragment, a female voice, addressing her “sweet mother,” claims to 38 39

On plaiting as a metaphor for Sappho’s creative process, see Chapter 3. See Chapter 3 for an extended reading of this fragment.

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have been so overcome by desire that she can no longer weave (γλύκηα μᾶτερ, οὔ τοι δύναμαι κρέκην τὸν ἴστον / πόθωι δάμεισα παῖδος βραδίναν δι᾿ Ἀφροδίταν). Singing is construed as compatible with desire. Weaving is not. This contrast offers a final opportunity to invoke the reparative nature of Sappho’s poiēsis, by considering some of the Homeric “ellipses” that Sappho’s lyrics help us fill in. Without disowning or denying the value of conjugal remembering as it appears in the Odyssey, Sappho’s lyrics shift the focus from the male head of household to his wife. But rather than invoking Penelope qua wife, the fragments we have examined reveal the “sisterly” dynamics that exist alongside that conjugal relationship – dynamics that the Odyssey itself does not explore. We are introduced to the girls and women that these wives once were before they were married, and to the women they still are, even as they remain married. The bonds that remembering sustains in Sappho’s world exist alongside the vertically inflected (conjugal, maternal) relationships that more visibly defined a woman’s life. Perhaps this is why the props that adorn these scenes of recollection are themselves so ephemeral: lightly woven wreathes, fabrics, flowers, fragrant oils. There is nothing of the enduringness of Odysseus’ palace, nothing to suggest an accumulation of wealth, or a male heir who will carry on the paternal legacy. These women – “sisters,” all of them, to Homer’s Penelope – are bound to their faraway lovers through their acts of remembering alone.

Epilogue Homer’s Night, Sappho’s Day

This book has considered many of the ways in which Sappho’s reception brings greater visibility to some of the unnoticed and undervalued features of the Homeric poems – from the only partially sketched world of its female characters to its natural landscape. Reading Homer and Sappho in tandem has shown us just how attuned she was to the agency and aesthetics of Aphrodite’s sphere in particular. Rather than offering a summary of what has been observed in each of the foregoing chapters, I would like to devote this Epilogue to Sappho’s nocturnal poetics and the way certain fragments transform the night into a temporal zone well suited to the characters and concerns of her lyrics. Whether it is sparrows taking the place of horses in the Hymn to Aphrodite or the “moon” substituting for “dawn” in Sappho fr. 96, Homer’s night becomes Sappho’s day (and vice versa). In Sappho’s world, the moon is a metaphor for the girl who outshines her peers. It is also the background setting for nocturnal festivals. In fr. 154V, quoted by Hephaestion, we read that “the full moon was just becoming visible, and when the women were gathered around the altar . . . ” (the narrative breaks off): πλήρης μὲν ἐφαίνετ᾿ ἀ σελάν⟨ν⟩α, / αἰ δ᾿ ὠς περὶ βῶμον ἐστάθησαν. In fr. 34V the stars are outshone by the moon and “hide their bright form” whenever the moon fills the earth with her light. The moon’s setting is also a marker of the “middle of the night” in fr. 168B Voigt, a poem we considered in the Introduction: δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα καὶ Πληΐαδες· μέσαι δὲ νύκτες, παρὰ δ᾿ ἔρχετ᾿ ὤρα, ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω. The moon has sunk as well as the Pleiades. And it is the middle of the night. The season passes by. And I sleep alone.

Here the dynamism and plurality of the night sky and the visible passage of time sharply contrast with the stillness of the solitary woman (who may also see in the movement of the ὤρα the passage of her own “season”). The 193

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moon signifies what is exceptional but also what is invisible to the eyes of men. The epic bard trains his eye on Dawn’s path, as she rises upward in the sky, until the day’s light is enveloped by night. Sappho’s lyrics take their point of departure from the setting of the sun while also tracking the deeper nighttime of the moon, revealing a world otherwise cloaked in sleep. For example, in fr. 30V (the final poem in Book 1 of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho), there are “virgins . . . singing all night long” (πάρθενοι . . . παννυχίσδοι̣ [σ]α̣ι̣ [) about “your love for the violet-robed bride.” Most likely addressed to a bridegroom, the song encourages him to go find other young men his own age, “so that we may all see less sleep than the clear-voiced [bird].” And in fr. 43V, the singer urges her female friends to come, for day is near: ἀλλ᾿ ἄγιτ᾿, ὦ φίλαι, / ], ἄγχι γὰρ ἀμέρα.1 If the sunken moon is an apt image for the girl or woman who sleeps alone, the full moon overshadowing the stars is like the woman in Sappho fr. 96 who outshines her choral peers (6–11): But now she stands out among the Lydian women just like the rosy-fingered moon (βροδοδάκτυλος σελάννα) surpasses all the stars, after the sun has set; and her light embraces the salty sea and the flowery fields alike.

Commentators have found puzzling Sappho’s inversion of night and day. “At first sight, ‘rosy-fingered’ is as inappropriate as an epithet for the moon as it is poetically telling in Homer’s evocation of the dawn,” writes Clifford Hindley (2002: 374). Hindley proposes an emendation to the text. Instead of “rosy-fingered” we ought to read “silver-fingered” – ἀργυροδάκτυλος, an unattested word. Critics have sought to normalize Sappho’s diction, to bring her language into closer alignment with epic patterns of naming and describing. We know that Sappho knew her Homer. Her verses are filled with epic formulae, metrical patterns, sounds, and themes. Yet these are not necessarily to be treated as faithful quotations or allusions. Noting that the sun and stars are used to describe men in the Iliad, and that both “sun” and “star” in Greek have the masculine gender, Eva Stehle (1996a: 148) observes that “Sappho uses neither image, but twice compares a woman with the moon eclipsing the surrounding stars (F34, 96 L.-P.). The moon is female in gender and a goddess in mythology.” Sappho, suggests Stehle, “consciously wished to connect women with the mysterious rhythms of the moon as separate from the sharp, bright male world of sun and stars.”2 1 2

On these two fragments, see Snyder 1997: 108. The other passage to which Stehle 1996a refers is Sappho fr. 34V, quoted by Eustathius with reference to Il. 8.555.

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Epic Dawn, with her rosy fingers, is symptomatic of the epic day and epic deeds (erga). In Sappho, Dawn becomes a tragic figure, ceding her iconic epithet rhododaktulos (rosy-fingered) to the moon. Present in her fully personified being (as the lover of Tithonos), not just as a marker of time, Sappho’s Dawn reminds us, paradoxically, of old age.3 The gradual, yet unstoppable, diminution of the self, a sapping away of vitality and life, until all that remains is the voice: this is the fate that awaits those who have not been freed first by premature death, the kind of death on which epic glory (kleos) depends.4 The moon, adorned with Dawn’s epithet, becomes a metonym in Sappho for a tradition of women’s poetry. Taking its temporal cues from night rather than day, the moon provides background lighting for women’s festivals,5 for the woman who sleeps alone, and for reminiscences. As Homer’s rosy-fingered Dawn spreads her light, a new day begins. Epic pursues a narrative pacing that is predicated on the reliable rhythms of daily life: the inevitable succession of day from night, light from darkness, speech from silence. The sun rises, then sets. Dawn rising “rosy-fingered” from the bed she continues to share with Tithonos reassures us that the stage is set for the next day’s actions. In the Iliad, only exceptional actions take place by the light of the moon; one thinks, for example, of the Doloneia of Iliad 10 (whose authenticity has been doubted), along with the fall of Troy through the machinations of the great wooden horse.6 Both episodes lie at the margins of the Iliad (the capture is recounted in the Iliou Persis, an episode within the epic cycle, and not the Iliad proper), and both are characterized by deception (dolos). In epic, night is the time of ambush and guile. The capture of Troy, in fact, was said to have occurred “in the middle of the night, as the bright moon was rising” (νὺξ μὲν ἔην μέσση, λαμπρὰ δ᾿ ἐπέτελλε σελήνη).7 Given the marginality and deviancy of the nocturnal in the Iliad, it is hardly surprising that Sappho reclaims in her own lyrics some of epic’s temporal “blackouts.” 3

4 5 6 7

But as Wilson (1996: 111) remarks, Dawn appears also in Sappho frr. 103.10, 123, 157 and 104a, and, at 104a, she is “juxtaposed with Hesperus – the evening star – to portray a double-sided, perpetual natural process”; she is “golden-sandaled” at fr. 103.10V and 123V. See my discussion of the Tithonos Poem in Chapter 5. There are potential references to nocturnal women’s gatherings in frr. 30V, 43V, and 154, discussed earlier. See Dué and Ebbott 2010: 3–29 for an overview of the longstanding debate surrounding Book 10’s authenticity. This is a line that a scholiast on Euripides’ Hecuba 910 attributes to the author of the Little Iliad (see Little Iliad 14 West).

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I am not suggesting that her goal here, any more than in her other interactions with epic, was to divest the more established, canonical genre of its poetic cachet. Sappho, as I have argued throughout this book, was not playing a zero-sum game.8 Rather, she turns to epic for inspiration as well as for sustenance. Discovering in the alienated nocturnal rhythms and domestic scenes the material with which she fashions her songs, Sappho amplifies the queer potential of Homeric narrative. She reparatively reassembles epic elements into new patterns, finding nurturance, and a source of light – literal and metaphorical – in the blackness of night and the banks of Acheron. While epic heroes live and die by the diurnal rhythms of Dawn’s coming and going, Sappho’s female singers remember one another and craft their lyrics within the folds of epic’s barren landscapes. 8

As discussed in Chapters 1 and 7.

appendix

On the Absence of the Newest Sappho Fragments from this Book

At an earlier stage of its development, this book included a chapter I had written on the Brothers Poem and part of a chapter devoted to the Kypris Poem (both from P.Sapph.Obbink), along with references to fragments from the Green Collection Sappho (P.GC. inv. 105). After considerable reflection, I decided to exclude that material from the present book. However, I cannot ignore the ways in which the “newest” Sappho (particularly the Brothers Poem) has shaped how I read Sappho’s lyrics more generally. In fact, it was an invitation to participate in a colloquium on the newest Sappho at Bard College in 2014 that gave me the confidence to pursue this book project.1 I mentioned in the Introduction that I had previously read Sappho’s poetry as an amateur – off the grid, as it were. But when given the chance to speak about the Brothers Poem and to reflect on its intertextuality with the Odyssey, I began to see Sappho in terms of the “avuncular poetics” I describe in Chapter 1 (and which influence the rest of this book). That presentation and its corresponding publication as a 2016 article in Arethusa were the start of what became a largerscale exploration of the reparative style of Sappho’s reception of Homer. It would take another seven years for me to realize that, given what I have since learned about its illegal acquisition history, I should not publish any further on the Brothers Poem. My personal attachment to the poem, and the related sense I had that that chapter on the Brothers Poem (originally Chapter 9) was a central component of this book, made it difficult for me to remove it. If, at an earlier stage of writing, I had been able to reimagine this book without its culminating chapter, I might have listened sooner, and more readily, to the scholarly voices that were urging caution and reconsideration. But I was not alone in my resistance. The benefit of time has allowed me to read up 1

I remain grateful to Lauren Curtis for organizing the “Sappho: New Voices” colloquium along with Robert Cioffi, and for including me on the program; details of the event may be found here: www .bard.edu/inside/calendar/event/?eid=126656&date=1413640800 (accessed September 13, 2022).

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more widely on the ethics of publishing papyri. I am aware that many scholars (and even some papyrologists) subscribe to the view that the content of a poem has greater value than the material upon which it is inscribed. In the case of the newest Sappho, like many others, I was more concerned with whether these fragments were genuinely composed by Sappho than I was with questions regarding their transmission history. As C. Michael Sampson and Anna Uhlig (2019) put it, “it seems that, for many, once the ‘authenticity’ of the papyrus’ texts as genuine works of Sappho had been satisfactorily established, the history of the physical object ceased to matter – even if we no longer know where to find it!” When the newest Sappho fragments, including the previously unknown Brothers Poem, were first published in 2014, few literary Hellenists seemed troubled by the lack of transparency regarding their provenance. Papyrologists and archaeologists, however, were on high alert.2 Dirk Obbink, formerly a lecturer in papyrology and Greek literature at the University of Oxford, originally stated that the newest papyrus fragments (P.Sapph.Obbink and P.GC inv. 105) derived from mummy cartonnage (burial encasings used in ancient Egypt, similar to papier-mâché); he also claimed that he had been asked to examine the papyri by their London owner, who wished to remain anonymous. Obbink’s story was contested at the time because “the practice of recycling papyri in the manufacture of cartonnage ceased long before the papyrus was copied.”3 Within a year, Obbink had revised his provenance narrative, suggesting in a paper presented at the Society for Classical Studies annual meeting on January 9, 2015, that, rather than mummy cartonnage, the papyrus had been recovered from book cartonnage that was purchased in 2011, at a Christie’s auction.4 As would later become known, a brochure had been circulated to Christie’s clientele, advertising the London Sappho papyrus for sale shortly after Obbink’s 2015 presentation.5 The brochure contained images relating to the recovery of the papyrus and a summary of its supposed provenance. 2 3 4

5

See, for example, Mazza 2014. Sampson and Uhlig (2019) offer a succinct overview and analysis of the rollout of the newest Sappho. The quote is from Mazza 2019. The paper has since been tagged with a comment by the Society for Classical Studies, alerting readers to the dubious nature of its claims (https://classicalstudies.org/annual-meeting/146/commentabstract-dirk-obbink), but it may still be read online: www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/Fragments/SCS .Sappho.2015.Obbink.paper.pdf (accessed August 22, 2022). Sampson (2021) summarizes the results of his analysis of the brochure and concludes that “the anonymous owner of the papyrus had access to Obbink’s unpublished research, and undertook to propose the papyrus for private sale almost immediately after Obbink presented the revised story at the scholarly conference Jan. 9, 2015.”

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Once he had been made aware of the brochure’s existence, papyrologist C. Michael Sampson undertook his own study of the metadata of various PDF documents embedded within it. By establishing a timeline for their creation and revision, Sampson concluded that the documents had been fabricated to support the changing stories about provenance presented by Obbink between 2014 and 2015.6 In March 2021, Anton Bierl and André Lardinois (2016), editors of The Newest Sappho: P. Sapph. Obbink and P. GC inv. 105, Frs. 1–4, issued a retraction of chapter 2 of their volume. This is the chapter in which Obbink provides a longer account of his 2015 provenance narrative for P.Sapph.Obbink and P.GC. inv. 105.7 Bierl and Lardinois also confirm in their retraction that the former owners of the Green Collection fragments, the Museum of the Bible, released a statement acknowledging that P.GC inv. 105 was acquired from a Turkish dealer on January 7, 2012, “without any documentation proving their legal provenance.” Those papyrus fragments have, in the meantime, reportedly been restituted to Egypt along with an additional circa 5,000 papyri. Given that P.Sapph.Obbink belonged to the same bookroll as P.GC inv. 105, the likelihood is very high that it was acquired at the same time, from the same dealer. One consequence of the resulting fallout is that scholars who wish to publish on these Sappho fragments are now faced with the question: does doing so offer legitimacy to papyri whose provenance cannot be vouched for? Simply put, how do we proceed from here? Should researchers be expected to state from the outset their views on the ethical issues raised by the acquisition history of P.Sapph.Obbink and P.GC. inv. 105? Or do we instead flag the problems of provenance, and then proceed as though the material and legal status of these fragments are settled? By “material” status, I refer to the fact that the whereabouts of P.Sapph.Obbink (which contains both the Brothers and Kypris Poems) is currently unknown.8 At this point, there is no clear roadmap for scholars who wish to publish literary 6

7 8

Sampson (2020) offers a detailed account of his findings, determining that the photos depicted were “staged” and do not represent an authenticatable recovery scenario for this papyrus. For more on Obbink’s travails, see Ariel Sabar’s piece in the June 2020 issue of the Atlantic: www.theatlantic.com /magazine/archive/2020/06/museum-of-the-bible-obbink-gospel-of-mark/610576/ (accessed August 28, 2020) The retraction of Obbink 2016 is accessible on the publisher’s website: https://brill.com/view/book/ 9789004314832/B9789004314832_026.xml (accessed July 29, 2022). The location and accessibility of P.GC inv. 105 are also in question. Nongbri (2022: note 5) reports that “ownership of the Green Collection Sappho fragments has been transferred to Egypt” but that he has been “informed by Brian Hyland of the Museum of the Bible that as of February 2022, the fragments themselves remain in the United Kingdom for logistical reasons arising from the Covid pandemic.”

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interpretations of these Sappho fragments. Nor is there any consensus on how to balance the competing interests – for new knowledge, on the one hand, and due diligence, on the other. The passage of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property considerably changed the landscape for publishing on artifacts whose post-excavation legal status cannot be securely documented, or whose provenance is suspect.9 Protocols have been established by the various professional institutions overseeing the research and publication practices of archaeologists, papyrologists, and classicists. As of 2016, the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) has stipulated that its members must “refuse to participate in the trade in undocumented antiquities and refrain from activities that give sanction, directly or indirectly, to that trade, and to the valuation of such artifacts through authentication, acquisition, publication, or exhibition.” It further specifies that “undocumented antiquities are those that are not documented as belonging to a public or private collection before December 30, 1970, when the AIA Council endorsed the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.” The American Society of Papyrologists also condemns the purchase of post-1970s papyri and prohibits members from publishing on such material “unless the author, speaker, or curator includes a frank and thorough discussion of the provenance of every item.”10 The Society for Classical Studies’ Statement on Professional Ethics, last revised on September 20, 2019, likewise urges that “members should always be aware of the impact that their professional practice will have on the creation and preservation of information about ancient objects and should exercise due diligence by thoroughly studying the history of the object(s) under study.”11 There is a great deal at stake in the interpretation of the phrase “due diligence.” But at a minimum, members of the Society for Classical Studies are clearly expected to “avoid activity that increases the commercial value of illegally exported objects or which can, even indirectly, lead to further looting.” There are growing efforts, moreover, to demonstrate the links between 9 10 11

On the UNESCO Convention, see https://en.unesco.org/fighttrafficking/1970 (accessed August 27, 2022). This comes from the ASP–AIP joint resolution on the papyrus trade, approved on January 15, 2021 and accessible here: www.papyrology.org/resolutions.html (accessed September 22, 2022). The SCS Professional Ethics statement: https://classicalstudies.org/about/scs-statementprofessional-ethics (accessed September 13, 2022).

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illegally exporting and selling antiquities (and subsequently publishing on them) and the looting that destroys archaeological contexts.12 As Roberta Mazza (2021: 389) and others have argued, trafficking in unprovenanced antiquities is supported by rings of dealers based in different countries who are aided by academics. In the meantime, many scholars have chosen to remain unaware of the illegal provenance of the papyri on which they publish. The cumulative cost of this willful ignorance is impossible to measure. But that does not absolve those of us who are not directly involved in publishing or editing first editions of papyri, nor does it stop us from taking a stand. The various stakeholders in these Sappho fragments (literary scholars, papyrologists, the general reading public, etc.) will likely reach different conclusions regarding the best course of action. I am not suggesting that we censor these fragments or retract them tout court; they are now in the public domain, and it would be logistically impossible – and perhaps ethically unjustifiable – to implement such a ban. The choice to continue publishing on these fragments is one that each of us must make for ourselves. But we would all benefit from more collective reflection. If nothing else, this moment invites a reckoning on the part of literary Hellenists regarding our complicity in the current state of affairs. The newest Sappho fragments have reached the public domain without our due diligence. Sampson and Uhlig 2019 identify key components of our collective failure: With the benefit of hindsight, it is relatively easy to identify missed opportunities. The editors of the ZPE, for example, should have insisted on a frank and thorough accounting of the papyrus’ origins before accepting the edition for publication. Likewise, scholars publishing on the new poems should have considered the recent history of their discovery before turning their attention to the ancient world. If we are shocked by the current allegations, we should also acknowledge they are, at least in part, the product of our discipline’s longstanding collective indifference to the provenance of “literary” artefacts.

Papyrology sits at the crossroads of two different academic fields: the study of material artifacts (archaeology) and the recovery and editing of texts (philology). These two fields have different methods of conceiving and articulating ethical norms for research and publication. Yet, even among papyrologists, the textual component of the discipline has enjoyed a higher standing than the archaeological and has, therefore, been subjected to different norms. Roberta Mazza (2021: 378) demonstrates how the 12

See, for example, Brodie 2009 and 2016.

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description of papyri as texts rather than objects “has contributed to their unethical and illegal collection.” The current consensus among literary Hellenists still seems to be that the Brothers Poem and Kypris Poem are authentic (i.e., genuine compositions by Sappho).13 But is this – or, rather, should this be – the primary consideration as we weigh the pros and cons of whether we should continue to publish on them? In a recent talk, Anna Uhlig reported that when she showed a slide of P.Sapph.Obbink as part of a presentation at the University of Oregon some years ago, an archaeologist in the audience asked about the propriety of using such an image. Thinking further about the implications of having shown that slide, Uhlig concludes that her error did not lie in her handling of images but rather in her presentation of a “clean” text: My real transgression had not been in showing images of the papyri, but rather in the handout which I had distributed, which contained a “clean” text of the so-called Brothers poem (the most noteworthy discovery from those papyri) together with a translation. In treating the “Brothers poem” as a “text,” separable from the artifact on which it had been preserved and “rediscovered,” I was – however unwittingly – contributing to the laundering of that artifact.14

Uhlig’s reflections are timely and important. I include them here in the hopes that they may guide those of us who have presented and published on this artifact, without specifically addressing the implications or consequences of our actions, toward a similar reckoning. We need not all reach the same conclusion. But the onus, I venture, is now on the scholars who continue to present “clean” versions of the Brothers and Kypris Poems without offering a rationale for why it is ethically defensible to do so. My own inability to produce such a rationale explains the absence of the newest Sappho fragments from this book. 13

14

See, for example, the position of Finglass and Kelly 2021: 6–7. But as Nongbri (2021) pointedly asks: “How many scholars have actually examined these papyri in person? That’s an honest question. I don’t know that the larger ‘London’ fragment has ever been closely physically examined by anyone besides Prof. Obbink” (accessed August 22, 2022). From the unpublished transcript of “Uncertain Footing: Authorship and Papyri,” a talk presented on February 17, 2021 as part of the Ethical Reading seminar organized at Oxford University by Constanze Güthenke and Hindy Najman.

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Index Locorum

5.115–117: 103 5.312: 97 5.312–313: 98 5.314–317: 97 5.315: 98 5.337–338: 98 5.347–352: 99 5.348–349: 98 5.350–351: 98 5.352: 99 5.361: 104 5.366: 67 5.367: 67, 105 5.370–371: 104 5.373–374: 104 5.382: 90 5.383–384: 91 5.416–417: 101 5.420–425: 101 5.426–430: 101–102 5.859–863: 102 5.906: 102 6.294: 80 6.393: 141 6.394–398: 148 6.404: 149 6.407: 149 6.407–413: 148–149 6.432: 150 6.441–446: 150 7.245–6: 70 9.122: 26 9.129: 156n7 9.189: 145 9.413: 147 10.30: 161 14.166–168: 78 14.174: 78 14.176: 78 14.179: 74, 78 14.180: 78

Alcaeus fr. 140V 3–7: 85 8–10: 85 12: 86 fr. 283V, 14: 166 fr. 6, 11–12: 167–168 fr. 42: 166 Athenaeus 21bc= Sappho fr. 57V: 181 xiv 627ab: 86 Catullus 2: 66 Diogenes Laertius 1.81 (Alc. T 429): 70 Homer Iliad (Il.) 2.95: 122 2.784: 122 3.17: 161 3.43–45: 162 3.51: 162 3.54–55: 162 3.139–140: 93n23 3.337: 85 3.371–372: 93 3.390–394: 173 3.392: 160 3.393–394: 160 3.396: 93 3.397: 93 3.405: 94 3.407: 94 3.414–417: 94–95 3.428–436: 174 3.446: 174 4.134–138: 73 4.137: 73

227

228 Homer (cont.) 14.183: 78 14.185: 78 14.195–196: 78 14.214–215: 79 14.215: 80 14.220: 80 15.662: 167 16.134: 80 19.10–11 76 19.10–13: 76 19.14–20: 76 19.16: 76 19.19: 76 19.304: 128 19.307: 128 19.374–378: 79 19.379–380: 79 19.381: 79 21.586–589: 167 22.88: 141 22.300–305: 100 22.437–441: 82 22.441: 80, 81, 142, 143 22.448: 61 22.466–472: 12, 142–143 22.468: 144 22.468–472: 133 22.469: 143, 144 22.470f.: 144 22.471–2: 140 22.476ff.: 142 22.505: 150 23.172: 128 23.225: 128 24.544: 25 24.707–717: 142 24.796: 142 scholion bT 468–470: 144 Odyssey (Od.) 1.132: 80 1.343: 168 3.132–133: 27 3.169: 27 4.220: 164 4.222–226: 164 4.264: 163 8.266–369: 69 9.94–97: 182–183 10.236: 165 10.454: 122 15.21–23: 165 15.107: 80 18.267: 168 19.228: 80

Index Locorum 19.581: 168 21.79: 168 22.298: 77 24.195: 168 24.195–196: 188 Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (HHAphr.) 3–4: 92n14 56–57: 92 71: 161 87–89: 101 158–160: 162 188–189: 118 196–197: 97 214: 118–119 221: 119 222: 120, 124 223–224: 120 224: 124 227: 120 228–230: 120 231–232: 120 234: 119 237–238: 120 Homeric Hymn to Apollo (HHAp.) 1: 176 Little Iliad PEG F 21: 29 Maximus of Tyre Or. 18.9: 172n59 Sappho 1V (Hymn to Aphrodite) 1: 82, 143 2: 82, 94, 144 3–4: 92 9–13: 66 13: 105 18–19: 103 19–20: 103, 104 21–24: 103 24: 104 27–28: 102 fr. 2V 2: 141 7: 141 fr. 16V 1-4: 154 3: 154 3–4: 154 5: 156 7–12: 165 10: 167 11: 157, 159

Index Locorum 17–20: 155, 159 18: 141 fr. 17V 2: 141 7: 27 12: 27 fr. 20V 2: 141 fr. 22: 75, 177 9–10: 176 13–14: 77 14: 75, 177 fr. 30V: 194 fr. 34 2: 141 fr. 39V 2: 141 fr. 43V: 194 fr. 44V: 135 4: 136, 147 5: 145 5–10: 136, 140 8: 140, 141, 143, 145 9: 141, 142 10: 141 11: 136 11–20: 137 12: 136 13: 137 14–15: 137 25–27: 138 31: 142 fr. 55: 179 fr. 57V: 181 fr. 58 (Tithonos Poem) 1–12: 111–112 4: 112, 119 5: 112, 119 7: 113, 118 7–8: 126

8: 127 9: 115 9–12: 117 10: 112 11: 112 fr. 65V, 5–11: 182 fr. 94V 1: 189 1–8: 186 3: 188 8: 187 9–17: 187 9–23: 63 12: 188 15: 188 16: 63 17: 63 23: 63 fr. 95V 11–13: 182 fr. 96 1–5: 183–184 5: 184, 185 6–11: 194 6–14: 184, 185 15: 186 15–16: 191 15–17: 176 fr. 98b L-P: 72 6–7: 79 fr. 102V: 62, 192 fr. 105V: 41 fr. 106V: 23–24 fr. 110V: 68 fr. 111V: 68 fr. 130.3–4V (=L-P 131): 180, 185–186 fr. 147V: 191 fr. 150V: 7 fr. 154V: 193 fr. 168B Voigt: 5, 193

229

Subject Index

Abanthis, 176, 177–178 Acheron, 182–183 Achilles armor, 75–79 kleos, 147–148 lament for Patroklos, 128–130 raids on Lesbos, 25–26 sack of Thebe, 145 achos (grief), 128 Aeneas, 97–98 affect, 9, 10, 14, 35, 38–40, 44, 48, 59, 61, 71, 77, 89, 93, 96, 105, 108, 126, 133, 135, 146, 151, 153, 177 see also atmosphere; emotions; queer theory; reparative reading; shame agency, 74–75 of knowledge, 55 middle ranges of agency, 53, 60, 71, 157, 158 see also choice Agenor, 167 aging see Sappho, fr. 58 (Tithonos Poem) aidōs, 95–96 AIDS, 6, 15, 110 Ajax, 69–71 Alcaeus, 70, 156n7 140V, 84–88 cicada, 122n45–123n46 Helen, 160, 166 remembering, 167–168 Alcman headband, 72n47 Hegesichora, 160n23 allusion, 28–33 American Society of Papyrologists, 200 Anactoria, 141, 155, 156–157, 159, 161, 163, 169, 172–174 Anchises, 92–93, 118–119, 123–124, 127 Andromache, 12, 61, 82, 142 see also Sappho, fr. 44V Andromeda, 180–181

animals horses, 66–68 sparrows, 65–68 Aphrodite flight to Olympus, 67 and Helen and Paris, 161–164, 173 and Hera, 78–79 as Muse, 8 poikil- epithets, 81, 82 and shame, 41–42, 51, 90–108 and sparrows, 66–67 and weaving, 65, 83 aphthiton see kleos, aphthiton Apollodorus, 145n35 Archaeological Institute of America, 200 ardent reading, 37 Ares, 107, 160 compared to bridegrooms, 69 horses of, 65, 66–67, 104 wounding of, 102 Arion, 28 Aristarchus, 93 armor, 74–79 and Alcaeus 140V, 84–88 mitra/mitrana, 72–74 see also shields Arsenius, Archbishop of Monemvasia, 5n16 Astyanax, 29, 51, 148, 149, 150–151 Athena, 74–75, 97, 101–103 Athenaeus, 86 atmosphere, and Sappho fr. 44V, 133, 146, 152 Atthis, 171, 176, 180–181, 185–186 Austin, J. L., 113, 130 How to Do Things with Words, 124 avuncularity, 24, 34, 83, 175–176 see also reparative reading Bakhtin, Mikhail, 31 Bakker, Egbert, 167 Barber, Stephen, 54 bardo, 112, 113–118

230

Subject Index beauty, impersonal, 4–5 Berlant, Lauren, 52n70–53n71, 87 bidirectionality, 21–22, 23–24, 143–144 see also intertextuality Bierl, Anton, 199 Blondell, Ruby, 155, 160, 164n35, 169n49 Bloom, Harold, 19–20 body, 14, 35 rhetoric of the, 108 see also cancer; metamorphosis; middle age; Sappho, fr. 58 Boedeker, Deborah, 182, 183 bridegrooms, 68–69, 70 Brockliss, William, 79n68, 101n45 bronze weapons/armor, 84–86, 87, 88 Brothers Poem, 46n48, 197–202 Buddhism, 113–114 Burgess, Jonathan, 29 Burkert, Walter, 25 Burnett, Anne Pippin, 134 Butler, Judith, 10 Calame, Claude, 181n14 Callimachus, 119 cancer, Sedgwick’s, 6, 15, 45, 48 Canevaro, Lilah Grace, 61 Carson, Anne, 104, 121 Catullus, 65 and Lesbia, 66 Chalkis, 87 chariots, 84, 141 and Aphrodite, 67–68, 104, 105 journey of Hector and Andromache, 136–137 children, 41 as the future in Edelman, 51, 135, 146, 148 Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, 123n51–124n52 Klein on, 8–9 and the Tithonos Poem, 123 choice Aphrodite’s, 163 Hector and Andromache’s, 149 Helen’s, 155, 157, 160 see also middle ranges of agency choruses, Sappho fr. 44V, 138 cicadas, 27, 42, 119, 120–122, 130 Circe, 61, 165, 191 Clark, David L., 54 clothes, 101 see also dressing scenes; robes; sandals; veils cobblers, in fr. 110V, 68, 69–70 conjugal remembering, 178–179, 189, 192 Contest of Homer and Hesiod, 170 crafting, 4, 46–50, 59–61, 71, 158–159 see also materiality Culler, Jonathan, 189–190

231

Cvetkovich, Ann, 47–48 Depression: A Public Feeling, 48–49 Cypria (Proclus), 145 daidalos, 74–75, 78 Dale, Alexander, 132n4–133n5 dappling, 80 Dawn, 117–118, 194, 195 failed prayer, 124–127 and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, 42, 118–124, 126 and Tithonos, 27–28 day and night, 193–196 Demetrius, On Style, 71 depressive style of reading, 9 desire Abanthis and Gongyla, 177–178 fr. 16V, 74 and Hera, 78 queering, 42–46 see also longing/lust/pothos desmata sigaloenta see shining fastenings Di Benedetto, Vincenzo, 105 Dialogue on Love, A (Sedgwick), 43, 115, 157–158 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 37 How Soon Is Now?, 36 Diogenes Laertius, 70 Diomedes, 107 wounding of Aphrodite, 97–101 wounding of Ares, 102 Dione, and Aphrodite, 90–91, 101–105 Doloneia, 195 doorkeeper’s sandals, 68–71 double consciousness, 105–108 dowry, Andromache’s, 140–146 dressing scenes, 77–79 see also clothes drugs, for forgetting, 164–165 Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk, 106n57 duBois, Page, 2n5–4, 122n45–123n46 Edelman, Lee, 50–51, 90 No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, 148 “The Future Is Kid Stuff,” 134–135 Edmunds, Lowell, 116 Edwards, Jason, 48 Eëtion, 140, 143, 145, 148 Eliot, George, Daniel Deronda, 126 emotions, 13, 40, 54, 73–74 and professional readers, 36 weapons, 73–74, 76–78 see also desire; grief; longing; shame enslavement, 133, 145, 147–148

232

Subject Index

ephanto, 115–116 epithalamia, 132, 133–134, 138–139, 153 see also Sappho, fr. 44V; Sappho, fr. 110V; Sappho, fr. 111V epithets, 29, 71–72 poikil-, 80, 81, 82, 84 rosy-fingered moon, 184–185, 194, 195 erasure, 179 erotic crisis, 117–118 eyes, 92–97 failure, 42, 89–90 and Dawn’s prayer, 124–127 queer, 99–101, 107 Fat Art, Thin Art (collection of poems) (Sedgwick), 7 Faulkner, Andrew, 28n33 Fawaz, Ramzi, 3n7, 15 Felski, Rita, 52–53 Ferrari, Franco, 72, 152 fiber art, 46–50 Finding Nemo (film), 169 Fisher, Gary, Gary in Your Pocket, 15 forgetting see remembering forty-six, 4 fragments, poems as, 3–4 Frank, Adam, 40–41, 48 future queer futures, 50–52, 174 see also Sappho, fr. 44V future reflexive reading see bidirectionality Ganymede, 118–119, 123–124 gaze see eyes gender, 23, 44 and armor, 74 and double consciousness, 105–107 and Helen, 166, 168–170 and rivalries with other poets, 171–172 in the Tithonos Poem, 44 gifts, wedding, 140–146 Gongyla, 75, 77, 79, 177–178 Goodkin, Richard, Around Proust, 20–21, 28 Graziosi, Barbara, 60 Green Collection Sappho, 197, 199–200n9 grief (achos), 128 Griffith, Mark, 155, 170n54 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung, 133 Hades, 179–180, 182 haibun, 158 Halberstam, Jack, 90, 126 The Queer Art of Failure, 169 Hardie, Alex, 180

headbands, 72–74, 79 Hector, 100, 136–140, 142–143, 147–151, 162 Hegesichora, 160n23 Helen, 145, 161–164 in Alcaeus, 160, 166 and Aphrodite, 93–96 on Menelaos, 163 remembering, 164–165, 166–167, 168–169 in Sappho fr. 16V, 5, 154–157, 159, 163–164, 165–167, 168–169, 172–173 weaving, 61–62 Hellanicus of Lesbos, on Tithonos, 27 helmets, 79, 85–86 Hephaestion, 62, 193 Enchiridion, 5n16 Hera, seduction of Zeus, 74–75, 77–79, 80 Herring, Scott, 37, 49 Hesiod, 8 Catalogue of Women, 28, 29n37–30n38 Theogony, 90n7–91n8 heteronormativity Sappho’s third alternative, 156, 157–159, 170–174 see also queer/queerness Hindley, Clifford, 194 Hinds, Stephen, 32 Allusion and Intertext, 32–33 Homer, 23, 24–31 Iliad Achilles’ armor, 75–79 actions at night, 195 Ajax’s shield, 69–71 Andromache and Hector, 12, 139, 140, 142–146, 147–151 weaving, 61, 81–82 Aphrodite, 161–164, 173 failure/shame, 90–91, 97–105 Ares’ horses, 67 Astyanax, death, 29 Helen, 61–62, 160–164, 173 Hera and Zeus, 74, 77–79, 80, 182 Menelaos wounding, armor, 73 Muses, 83 Paris, 85, 161–164, 171, 173 use of stenachisdō, 122, 128 Odyssey allusions, 29–30 Ares, 69 Athena’s aegis, 77 family relations, 20 Helen’s gift to Telemachos, 187 lotus plant, 182–183 Penelope, remembering, 163, 164, 168, 188–189, 192 use of stenachisdō, 122, 128

Subject Index weaving, 61 poikil- epithets, 80 Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, 27–28, 30, 96 animal skins, 162–163 clothes and jewelry, 101 Dawn and Tithonos, 42, 110–111, 126, 127, 131 and Sappho fr. 58, 118–124 sexual agency, 162–163 Homeric Hymn to Apollo, 90n7–91n8, 176 Horace, Carmen saeculare, 160n24–161n25 horses, 66–68 Houser, Emily, 24 Howie, J. G., 159–160 Hunt, Arthur, 132 Hunter, Richard, 33, 145n35 hurling-from-a-height motif, 29 Hymn to Aphrodite (Sappho 1V) see under Sappho, poems “I dare you,” 130n70–132n1 Idaeus (herald), 136, 144 Iliad (Homer) see Homer, Iliad Iliou Persis, 195 immortality kleos aphthiton (undying fame), 50–51, 135–136 poetic, 179–183 see also Sappho, fr. 58 (Tithonos Poem) insults, Diomedes and Aphrodite, 99–101 intertextuality avuncular, 24, 34, 83, 175–176 Homeric epic on Lesbos, 24–31 and literary scholarship, 31–34 Sappho and Homer, 19–20 James, Henry, 39–40, 118n29 The Golden Bowl, 126 “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” (Sedgwick), 43–44 Janko, Richard, 27–28, 44, 120–121 Jarratt, Susan, 188 jewelry, 101 kalliston, 154–157, 163, 170 Karanika, Andromache, 62 Kelly, Adrian, 30–31 Kenny, Dylan, 87 kimonos, 48, 71 King, Helen, 120n35 Klein, Melanie, 8–11, 54 Kleis, 72, 79–80 kleos, 83–84, 100–101, 168, 188, 195 aphthiton (undying fame), 50–51, 135–136, 146–151, 152 knowledge, and agency, 55 Krieter-Spiro, Martha, 161

233

Kristeva, Julia, 31 Kruse, Meredith, 37n10 Kurke, Leslie, 128 Kypris Poem, 197–202 Lardinois, André, 180, 199 Larson, Stephanie, 188–189, 190n38 Lavery, Daniel, Dirtbag Sappho, 59, 77 leopard skin, 161, 162–163 Lesbia (in Catullus), 66 Lesbos, 45–46 in Homeric epic, 25–28 in Sappho fr. 96, 183–184 Lesser, Rachel, 157 Levaniouk, Olga, 132n4–133n5 longing/lust/pothos Sappho fr. 22, 177–178 Sappho fr. 55, 179–181 Sappho fr. 94V, 62–63 Sappho fr. 95V, 182 Sappho fr. 102V, 64–65 loom-striking, 64 Lopez, Erika, Flaming Iguanas, 116 lotus plants, 164, 182–183 Love, Heather, 11, 89, 126 love poetry, 66, 104 lust see longing/lust/pothos Lynch, Michael, 42, 45 making see crafting “Making Things, Practicing Emptiness” (Sedgwick), 4, 47–48 manly strength see menos Martin, Richard, 28, 29 Martindale, Charles, 3 materiality, 46–50, 59–61, 191–192 doorkeeper’s sandals, 68–71 dress and armor, 71–79 plaiting and poikilia, 79–84 and weaving, 61–65 Maximus of Tyre, 7, 171, 172 Mazza, Roberta, 201 memory see remembering Menelaos, 93, 162, 173, 174 menos (manly strength), 149–150 metamorphosis, Tithonos, 27, 42, 119, 120–122 meter, antispastic tetrameter catalectic, 62 middle age, 4–6 in fr. 168B Voigt, 5, 6 middle ranges of agency, 53, 60, 71, 157, 158 Miller, D. A., The Novel and the Police, 33 Miller, Nancy K., 114–115 Mimnermus, 117n26 mitra/mitrana, 72–74 Monsieur O., 45 moon, 76, 184–185, 193–196

234

Subject Index

mothers, 90–91, 97–98, 101–105 moisopoloi, 7–8 Muñoz, José Esteban, Cruising Utopia, 51–52 Munt, Sally, 96–97 Muses, 83 Aphrodite as, 8 on Lesbos, 26 Myrmidons, 76–77 Myrsilus of Methymna, 26n23 Nagler, Michael, 144 Nelson, Maggie, 115 Nicholson, Nigel, 30 night and day, 193–196 Nossis, 65, 172n61 nostoi, 26–27 Nyong’o, Tavia, 10 O., Monsieur, 45 Obbink, Dirk, 198–199 Odysseus, 29–30, 80 Odyssey (Homer) see Homer, Odyssey Ormand, Kirk, 28–29 Orpheus, 28 Oswald, Alice, “Tithonos: 46 Minutes in the Life of Dawn” (poem), 109, 121 P.GC. inv. 105, 197–202 P.Sapph.Obbink, 197–202 Page, Denys, 87 Pandareus, daughters of (Pandareids), 188 panther/leopard skin, 161, 162–163 papyrology, 201 paranoid style of reading, 9–11, 33–34, 52–55 Paris and Helen, 160–164, 165–166 and his helmet, 85, 93 as queer hero, 171–174 Payne, Mark, 20 “Pedagogy of Buddhism” (Sedgwick), 115 pempeboeia, 69–70 Penelope remembering, 163, 164, 168, 188–189, 192 weaving, 61 Peponi, Anastasia-Erasmia, 133 performance, 23–24, 49–50, 143n28–144n29, 176–177, 180–181 Sappho fr. 96, 183–184, 185–186 performatives, 112–113 periperfomative speech acts, 124–127, 130–131 Pfeiffer, Ilja, 155n5 Pierian roses, 179–180, 181 Pittacus, 70, 72n46 plaiting, 61, 80–81, 191

fr. 1V, Aphrodite, 80–84 fr. 94V, 63–64, 187 Iliad, 78, 143, 144 “Trace at 46” (poem) (Sedgwick), 8 see also weaving Plato, Phaedrus, 122n45–123n46 poiēsis (making), 50, 60, 83, 192 poikilia (ornamentation), 60, 79–84, 98 Power, Timothy, 26 Priam, 26n25 priamels, 154–156 Probyn, Elspeth, 96 Proclus Chrestomathia, 25n22–26n23 summary of the Cypria, 145 professional readers, 36 see also paranoid style of reading Proust, Marcel, 47 Combray, 21 and Homer’s Odyssey, 21 À la recherche du temps perdu, 20 Purves, Alex, 95 “Queer and Now” (Sedgwick), 38 “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel” (Sedgwick), 39 queer theory, 37–46, 50–51, 55 queer/queerness failure, 99–101, 107, 169 and Paris, 171–174 queer futures, 50–52, 174 and reparative reading, 37–46 and reproductive futurism, 50–51, 90, 135 Sappho fr. 94V, 189–190 and Sedgwick, 2–3, 38–39, 158 time, 123 Rawles, Richard, 25, 119 readers, professional/amateur, 36 remembering, 175–179 and Helen, 159, 164–170 Penelope, 163, 164, 168, 188–189, 192 and poetic immortality, 179–183 Sappho fr. 94V, 186–191 Sappho fr. 96, 183–186 soldier’s, 167–168 reparative style of reading, 8–11, 35–39 and materiality, 46–50 and paranoid style, 52–55 and queer futures, 50–52 queering desire, 42–46 and Sedgwick, 6, 39–42 reproductive futurism, 50–51, 90, 135, 146, 148–149 Rissman, Leah, 12n44–15n47, 82, 91, 133–134, 147 Love as War, 19

Subject Index rivalries, with other poets, 171–172 robes Aphrodite’s, 97–98 Athena gives to Hera, 74–75 Rome, poets, 33–34 Rosenmeyer, Patricia, 107, 129, 171 rosy-fingered moon, 184–185, 194, 195 Sampson, C. Michael, 198, 199n6, 201 sandals, 72n47 doorkeeper’s, 68–71 Sappho general discussion, 7–8, 42–46 and night and day, 193–196 sexual orientation of, 43, 44–46 style of reading Homer, 9–10 and women in her poetry, 176 poems 1V (Hymn to Aphrodite), 8, 42, 66–68, 81, 103–105, 143 erotic crisis, 117 poikil- epithets, 81, 82, 84 shame, 89–92 Dione and Aphrodite, 101–105 and double consciousness, 105–108 eyes/gaze, 92–97 wounding of Aphrodite, 97–101 sparrows, 66–68 fr. 2V, 103n50 fr. 5V, 46n48 fr. 15V, and Aphrodite, 93 fr. 16V, 154–157 chariots, 84 desire, 74 Helen, 5, 53 and the Iliad’s Aphrodite/Helen/Paris, 161–164 fr. 22, 75, 77, 79, 176, 177 fr. 30V, 194 fr. 31, 117n26 fr. 34V, 193 fr. 43V, 194 fr. 44V (wedding song), 12, 13n46–15n47, 51, 132–136, 151–153 gifts and dowry, 140–146 journey of Hector and Andromache, 136–140 and kleos aphthiton, 146–151 fr. 55, 172n60, 179–181, 182, 186 fr. 58 (Tithonos Poem), 3–4, 30, 42, 109–113, 195 Dawn’s failed prayer, 124–127 and gender, 44 and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, 118–124

235

lament, 127–131 and Sedgwick, 113–118 fr. 65V, 182 fr. 94V, 60, 117, 186–190 leave-taking, 189 lyres, 60, 61, 63, 64, 75, 81, 111, 145, 177, 191 fr. 95V, 182 fr. 96, 117, 176, 183–186, 191 fr. 96V, 180 fr. 98b L-P, 72, 79–80 fr. 102V, 62–63, 64–65, 81, 191–192 fr. 106V, 23–24 fr. 110V, 68, 69 fr. 130V, 185–186 fr. 147V, 191 fr. 150V, 7 fr. 154V, 193 fr. 168B Voigt, 5–6, 193 see also P.GC. inv. 105; P.Sapph.Obbink Schrenk, Lawrence, 142 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 1–3, 6–8 on AIDS, 110 avuncularity, 175–176 bardo of dying, 112, 113–118 and futurity, 51–52 and illness, 15, 45 and middle ranges of agency, 53, 60, 71, 157 middle years, 4–6 periperformative speech acts, 124–127, 130–131 on “queer,” 2 on queer time, 123 and the reparative style of reading, 6, 8–11, 22, 36–39, 53, 54–55 on sexual orientation, 43–44, 45–46 on shame, 38, 39–42, 89, 94 textile work/crafting, 4–5, 46–50, 71, 158–159 on the third alternative, 156, 157–159 Sedgwick, Hal, 7 Segal, Charles, 172, 173–174 Sellberg, Karin, 3n6, 22 shame, 10 Aphrodite, 90–91, 97–105 and Sappho, 41–42, 89–108 Sedgwick on, 38, 39–42, 89, 94 Shame and Its Sisters (Tomkins Reader) (Sedgwick and Frank eds.), 40–41 “Shame and Performativity” (Sedgwick), 39–40 shields, Ajax, 69–71 shining fastenings (desmata sigaloenta), 12, 144, 151 ships in Sappho fr. 16V, 154, 155, 166 in Sappho fr. 44V, 140 Sider, David, 5n17–6n18 sinthomosexuality, 146n39–147n40 Skinner, Marilyn, 65

236

Subject Index

smiles, Aphrodite, 91 Snediker, Michael D., 4n15–5n16, 6n21–7n22 Snyder, Jane McIntosh, 64, 77n57, 106 Society for Classical Studies, 200–201 Socrates, 171–172 soldiers, Sappho fr. 16V, 154 Solomon, Melissa, 116–117 sparrows, 65–68, 105 speech acts, 113, 124–127 Spelman, Henry, 86, 87 Stehle, Eva, 112–113, 160n22, 177, 194 stenachisdō (groaning), 112–113, 117, 118, 120, 127–131 in Homer, 122 Stesichorus, 30 Stobaeus, 179 “Teaching, Depression” (Sedgwick), 158n14 Telemachos, 164 Tendencies (Sedgwick), 6, 158 on “queer,” 2 reparative style of reading, 36–39 “Tales of the Avunculate,” 175–176 Terpander, 24, 26, 72n47 textiles and Andromache, 142–146, 150 and Sedgwick, 4–5, 46–50, 114 Thebe, 145–146 Thetis, 75–76 third alternative, 156, 157–159, 170–174 Thomas, Richard, 32 Thomas, Rosalind, 28n34 Thorsen, Thea, 33 thumos (heavy), 119 time, queer, 123 Tithonos, 27–28 see also Sappho, Fr. 58 Tithonos Poem (Sappho fr. 58) see under Sappho, poems Tomkins, Silvan, 40, 94, 96 Touching Feeling (Sedgwick), 35, 52, 54, 89, 110 “Pedagogy of Buddhism,” 115

“Trace at 46” (poem) (Sedgwick), 4n13, 8, 59 Troy, in Sappho fr. 44V, 139 Tychios, 71 Uhlig, Anna, 198, 201, 202 undying fame see kleos aphthiton UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing . . ., 200 Van Ley, Shannon, 157–158 veils, 139n17–140n18 Andromache’s, 133, 143–145, 151 Aphrodite’s, 136, 144 Helen’s, 95–96 Hera’s, 78 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 73, 76 Walker, Jeffrey, 75 weapons and Alcaeus 140V, 84–88 shield of Ajax, 69–71 see also armor Weather in Proust, The (Sedgwick), 59–60 weaving, 60, 61–65, 80–83, 136, 142 wedding songs see Sappho, fr. 44V; Sappho, fr. 110V; Sappho, fr. 111V weddings, 132n4–133n5 Hector and Andromache, 134 West, Martin L., 24n16–26n23 “White Glasses” (Sedgwick), 45 Whitmarsh, Tim, 159n18, 172 Willcock, M. M., 79n68, 161 Willis, Ika, 13n45 Wilson, Lyn Hatherly, 139n17–140n18 Winkler, John J., 105–107, 109–110 women, in Sappho, 14, 42, 46, 62, 65, 73, 77, 138, 163, 176–178, 181, 183, 184, 189, 192, 194 Worman, Nancy, 162