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Sappho speaks
Mary Beard
The Woman and the Lyre: Women Writers in Classical Greece and Rome by Jane McIntosh
Snyder
Bristol Classical Press, 199 pp, 25.00, May 1989, ISBN 1 85399 062 0
The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece by J.J.
Winkler
Routledge, 240 pp, 30.00, February 1990, ISBN 0 415 90122 7
Greek Virginity by Giulia Sissa, translated by Arthur Goldhammer
Harvard, 240 pp, $29.95, March 1990, ISBN 0 674 36320 5

It is against the nature of things that a woman who has given herself up to unnatural and
inordinate practices ... should be able to write in perfect obedience to the laws of vocal
harmony, imaginative portrayal, and arrangement of the details of thought. For David
Robinson, writing in the Twenties and reprinted in the Sixties, the perfection of Sapphos
verse was clear enough proof of her unblemished character. He was perhaps unusual in his
unshakable confidence that (at least in the case of female writers) fine poetry could be found
only in association with fine morals: but in other respects he was merely part of that great
scholarly tradition that has attempted to rescue Sappho from the implications of her own
writing from the implication, in particular, that she enjoyed the physical love of other
women. So, for example, even some recent critics have sought to portray her as a primarily
religious figure, the leader of a cult of young girls devoted to the goddess Aphrodite. Others,
with a yet more extreme capacity for fantasy, have seen her as some kind of female professor
or headmistress, instructing her young charges in poetry, in music, even perhaps in the
techniques of sensual pleasure that they would need in their future life as wives.
It is easy to ridicule these attempts to deny the central place of (lesbian) sexuality in Sapphos
poetry. Jane Snyder, in The Woman and the Lyre, runs through the main strands of
traditional Sappho criticism, pointing out the anachronistic absurdity that underlies most of
these reconstructions of her social background and literary context. The tough, warring world
of sixth-century BC Lesbos was no place for some prototype of a liberal arts college for young
ladies and, as Snyder rightly sees, it is sheer bowdlerising whimsy to suggest that it was. But,
in distancing herself from such vain attempts to imbue Sappho with respectability, in
asserting instead a simple wish to read the poems for what they actually say, Snyder loses
sight of some of the important issues involved in those traditional responses to Sappho and
her writing. What was at stake was not just the anxiety of conservative Classical scholars at

Sapphos apparent sexual preference for young women though that was, no doubt, an
aggravating factor in the most strident reactions. More important, as Jack Winkler suggests
in his essay on Sappho reprinted in The Constraints of Desire, was the plain fact that the
writer, the speaking subject of these poems, was a woman a woman claiming the right to
talk about her own sexuality. What was at stake was not so much lesbianism as the womans
voice, and how that could be heard and understood.
Any discussion of women writers in Greece and Rome of Sappho and her less well-known
followers must focus on the nature of that womans voice. The dominant ideology of most
of the ancient world offered women no place in public discourse. The exclusion of women
from politics and power was simply one side of that much greater disability their lack of any
right to be heard. As Homers Telemachus put it to his mother Penelope (when she dared
publicly to interrupt a bards recitation), talking must be the concern of men. How, then,
within this insistent ideology of female silence, could women writers find any space for their
own creativity? How did they interact with the overwhelmingly male literary and cultural
heritage? Did they succeed in appropriating and subverting male language for a distinctively
female form of writing?
Snyder barely touches on these central questions. Starting from Sappho and ending with
Hypatia and Egeria writing a thousand years later, she pieces together an account of the
major women writers of Antiquity and provides translations of the surviving fragments of
their work. There are some odd omissions. Surprisingly, she makes no mention of St
Perpetua, whose autobiographical account of her imprisonment and trial during the Christian
persecutions is one of the most extraordinary documents to have been preserved from
Antiquity. Nor does poor Melinno (author of a surviving Hymn to Rome) find a place. But,
even so, for those used to the familiar (male) roll-call of Classical authors, the list of women
writers that Snyder has assembled is itself impressive Myrtis, Korinna, Praxilla, Anyte,
Nossis, Erinna, Leontion, Sulpicia, Proba and many more.
Not so impressive, unfortunately, are the paltry surviving fragments of their work and
Snyders generally banal attempts at literary and historical analysis. Among the bestpreserved is the poetry of Korinna: three excerpts from what were probably much longer
poems and a few isolated couplets, amounting to about a hundred lines in all. Snyders main
concern is to assign Korinna to her appropriate niche in the history of Greek literature: she
reviews the modern controversy about her date (fifth century BC or third century?) and she
searches vainly for the literal truth, rather than the much more important symbolic truth, in
the conflicting stories of Korinnas victories in poetic contests over her male rival, Pindar. She
does, in the end, admit the impossibility of reaching any firm conclusions on these areas of
Korinnas life-history. But her underlying preoccupation with the poets biography tends all
the time to deflect her attention from serious analysis of the poetry itself. This she discusses
in only the most general terms: she compliments its swiftly-paced narrative, its simple,
direct language, its refreshing treatment of parallels between the mythological world and
everyday human behaviour, while suggesting at the same time that it was essentially

conservative, interested only in transmitting received tradition, not challenging it, and
largely lacking in philosophical profundity. These judgments may be all very well as far as
they go; there is certainly no need to see Korinna as a creative genius. But they fail to engage
directly with the central problem of womens writing within a male tradition. Was Korinna, as
Snyder appears to suggest, simply submerged by that tradition? Or do her conservative
mythological narratives (including, interestingly, in one of the longer fragments, the story of
the rape of the nine daughters of the river god Asopus) hint at a more pointed parallel
between the mythological world and human behaviour than Snyder allows?
In many cases the very fragmentary state of what is preserved makes discussion of the literary
issues associated with womens writing in Antiquity next to impossible. Even with
extraordinary scholarly ingenuity, there is not much that can usefully be said about the fewer
than twenty surviving words of Telesilla of Argos! But Sappho, with several substantial
extracts, and at least one complete poem preserved, comes into a very different category. It is
here, where some close analysis of a womans writing is for the first time possible, that
Snyders evasion of the important issue is most glaring.
In discussing Sapphos output, Snyder does seek to identify female language in her poetry.
She appeals, for example, to the poets sense of description, her apparent fondness for the
natural world and her tendency to introspection. What she misses, however, by concentrating
on these stereotypical female characteristics is Sapphos radical subversion of the male
literary (epic) tradition that Winkler discusses so acutely. This is seen most clearly in the
poem known as the Hymn to Aphrodite, in which Sappho calls on the goddess to come once
more to her aid in pursuit of the girl she loves. Snyder recognises that this poem was written
in imitation of the standard form of a Greek prayer, adapted by Sappho to suit her own
purposes. But she does not appear to recognise that Sappho is echoing, much more
specifically, the prayer of the hero Diomedes in the midst of battle in the fifth book of
Homers Iliad. As Winkler demonstrates, that echo provides the key to our understanding of
Sapphos voice (or voices) in this poem. It focuses our attention on the distance between the
male world of epic heroism and the private domain of female concerns; it shows the poet
reading and reinterpreting Homeric epic to give it a new meaning in distinctively female
terms; it effectively subverts the whole heroic order, by (as Winkler says) transferring the
language for the experience of soldiers to the experience of women in love. Sapphos writing
here amounts to a tactical inversion of the dominant male language.
The ideology of female silence was, of course, challenged in other ways. Women found a
voice not just in writing, but also most obviously in religious ritual, prophecy and oracular
utterance. Giulia Sissas Greek Virginity, a translation of her (more aptly titled) Le Corps
Virginal, takes as its starting-point the virgin priestess of Apollo at Delphi, the Pythia. What
was the connection, she asks, between her oracular function and her virginity? How far can
the Pythias right to speak (or at least to act as a human mouthpiece for the god) be related
to Greek ideas on the structure of the female body? How are we to understand her form of
language that was at once divine and feminine?

Sissa argues that the openness of the Greek virgin was central to the Pythias role. There is a
striking contrast here with modern (and some Roman) ideas of the closure of the virginal
body. For us, the seal of the hymen acts as a physical token of a girls intactness until that
moment of violent, wounding rupture at first penetration. For the Greeks, virginity did not
entail a physical barrier: their idea of a human body had no place for a hymen. The body of
the virgin was open and ready for penetration. Its moment of closure came only when it
sealed around the growing foetus during pregnancy the one sure sign that virginity had
been lost. In the case of Pythia, her virginity ensured her openness to Apollo, and (like a
perfect bride) to him alone. Christian writers poured scorn on the way she sat (as they
claimed) astride a tripod, legs apart, taking up the vapours of his prophetic spirit into her
vagina. But, as Sissa shows, that was precisely the point: the body of the Pythia was open to
the word of the god. There is more at issue here than strange notions of female physiology.
The role of the Pythia highlights an inextricable connection between the womans voice and
sexuality, between the mouth that speaks and eats and the mouth of the vagina. Sissas
book is a subtle exploration of the womans body as a vehicle not just of divine prophecy but
also of human speech.
Vol. 12 No. 19 11 October 1990 Mary Beard Sappho speaks
pages 16-17 | 1782 words
ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright LRB Limited 2014

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