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The Eternal Feminine: Women and Lyric Old Age

Candidate Number: 937481 Course: Master of Studies in Greek and/or Latin Languages and Literature Option: CLAS0234 Lyric Poetry (Pre-submitted Essay 1) Word Count: 4,575

2 A great deal has been written, particularly in recent years, about aspects of gender in Greek lyric poetry. The perspectives of female poets writing for presumably female audiences, most notably Sappho, are contrasted with the attitudes and values evinced by male poets with presumably male audiences. Scholars have applied feminist theory to examine constructions of gender and sexuality within the poems, finding in them reflections, affirmations and subversions of traditional gender roles in their historical contexts.1 An especially significant amount of discussion has been devoted to gender as it relates to sexual desire, lovers and love objects within erotic lyric. Somewhat less attention, however, has been paid to gender in this genre as it relates to depictions of those past their erotic prime. In Homer and other examples in genres other than lyric, old men are revered as wise counselors and often, like Nestor, have a prominent role to play. Old women, since socially appropriate behavior involves keeping away from the public eye, only appear prominently when acting inappropriately.2 This may stem from the fact that most of the descriptions of aging in Greek literature show a very distinct perception of female and male aging.3 While male aging is often seen in terms of one's social and political standing, and elderly male figures like Nestor
1 See e.g. Stigers (1981), Winkler (1990), Skinner (1993), Wilson (1996). Fantham et al. (1994) present a useful reference for visual and verbal depictions of women in antiquity. 2 For discussions of old age as depicted in the classical world in general and ancient Greece in particular, especially as seen through its literature, see Finley (1981), De Luce and Falkner (1994), Falkner (1995). The latter also includes discussion of old age as it relates to women specifically. Gilleard (2007) offers a more cursory listing of some literary perspectives. 3 Falkner (1995) 72ff. discusses this at some length.

3 in the Iliad thus still have a place and voice in public life, female aging is defined purely in terms of the stages of their sexuality. Elderly women, being no longer desirable sexual beings, rarely appear in any positive light and have little real role to play in society. When females past their prime do appear in Greek literature, they are often pitiable at best, ridiculous at worst. Aristophanes illustrates both unsympathetic and sympathetic views of female aging, the first as seen in his Ecclesiazusae, in which old women take over the state and force young men to have intercourse with them.4 Ar.Ec.877ff. shows an old woman who has decked herself out in a ludicrous, inappropriately sexual fashion and is exhibiting herself from her window to passers-by, plastered with white lead makeup ( , 878) and dressed like a young girl in a futile effort to attract men. In a more sympathetic light, however, he has Lysistrata insist that women and men do not age in the same way as she sums up the plight of elderly women: {.} ; {.} ' ' . , , , ', , . (Ar.Lys. 593-597) Lysistrata contrasts the aging of women and men specifically in the societal terms of their marriage prospects; an old woman, no longer having her sexuality and fertility to offer, can only remain unmarried
4 See Falkner (1995) 73-4 for these Aristophanic examples.

4 and sit divining omens (597) while an old man takes a young woman ( , 595) to wife. But her emphatic insistence that men age , 'not in the same way' (594), is a particularly interesting one in the light of other examples such as that in Hesiod, who calls women a separate race ( , Th.590) and describes their aging in different terms from that of men.5 Lyric poetry offers fruitful ground for exploration of the Greeks' perspectives on aging. Almost more than any other genre, it is largely populated by descriptions of youthunderstandably so, since the choral lyrics we have seem intended for performance by young people, while erotic-sympotic lyric celebrates youthful beauty and sexual desirability. One consistently recurring concern, however, is the decline of the body into old age, going hand in hand with the inevitability of death. As such, lyric poetry contains more than a few depictions of or references to aging; these are particularly interesting because they often involve a kind of verbal self-portrait of the poem's speaker, detailing the telltale physical signs of age.6 Perhaps it is not very surprising, then, that old age as discussed in lyric poetry is overwhelmingly male old age. A male poet may lament white hair and wrinkles in a melancholy meditation on his own advancing years, or use the experienced perspective of his elderly persona as a basis from which to deliver observations, but the
5 See Falkner (1995) 80. 6 Intriguingly, the depictions of the depredations of age are overwhelmingly physical; lyric poets do not tend to speak of mental decline, but focus on the aspects of age related to sexual desire and attractiveness (see Falkner 1995).

5 succession of beautiful women (and boys) with whom he is infatuated appears forever young. Generic observations about age and descriptions of the stages of life like the famous example in Solon (fr. 24 West) focus exclusively on the masculine side. When females past their prime appear at all, it is briefly and farcically, the target of scathing remarks about sexual unattractiveness and inappropriate behavior as in Aristophanes; examples of such appearances include the invective of Archilochus, which has no parallel in abuse of older men.7 Archilochus fr. 196a W (the Cologne epode), for instance, includes an unflattering rejection of a woman past girlhood (probably not even elderly; her age is compared only to that of the young girl whom the speaker is seducing). He not only says that she is aged past desirability, 'overripe' (, 26), and has lost her ] (27) and prior grace ( , 28), but he goes on to disparage her fidelity and sexual continence ( [ , 38), as if this is related to her stage of life. This is not to say, however, that depictions of male aging are without a feminine presence. In conjunction with male old age, women appear as perennially young love-objects or goddesses whose age is static rather than dynamicserving as foils to elderly male figures, rejecting their advances or offering an erotic remedy for an old man's

7 See Falkner (1995) 83ff for a fuller treatment of invective against aging females' 'inappropriate' behavior, and its relation to the social and political mores of its historical context. Falkner also includes a useful discussion of aging and gender in Homer and Hesiod. See also Hor.C.1.25, 3.15, 4.13, for examples of invective portrayals of old women in Roman lyric.

6 cares. The major exception to this plethora of lyric perspectives on male aging, which both fits into and challenges their treatment of the subject, is the newest near-complete fragment of Sappho (the 'Tithonus poem'), which I will proceed to examine after discussing the lyric perspective on male old age and its relation to women. The elegies of Mimnermus, like Solon's 'ages of man,' present a generalized view of aging that is nonetheless limited entirely to the male, using forms of rather than : , (1.6; emphasis my own), and again (5.4). A feminine presence does indeed appear in Mimnermus 1, but in the form of the goddess Aphrodite, who symbolizes the erotic delights of the (1.4) and serves as a double antithesis to the aging of man: immortal herself, she also governs those things that properly belong to the 'flower' of mortal youth. The position of at the end of line 1 sets up another contrast in line 10, in which a male god () is blamed for creating old age ( ). Mimnermus thus genders the very concepts of youth and age by associating them with the quintessentially feminine deity and with a male deity, respectively. This effect is even more pronounced if, as seems likely, we have the complete poem, placing Aphrodite at the end of the first line and the at the end of the last. Mimnermus 1 further mentions women in the context of the loss of sexual desirability that accompanies male aging: while the pleasures of Aphrodite are described as / (1.5),

7 once a man grows old he is (1.9). Repeated in the same case and number, the remain a constant presence as the man ages, only altered in their lack of desire for him. Rather than growing old along with him, they remain in stasis. (The women's male counterparts in line 5, , are by contrast dynamic figures and in fact 'de-age' over the course of the poem, becoming (1.9), as if to emphasize their relative youth in comparison to the aging man.) As a man ages, then, he moves from the domain of Aphrodite and the feminine to the domain of the unnamed masculine ; but women, paired with the , remain firmly associated with youth to the end and as eternal as Aphrodite herself. The later lyric poet Anacreon also wrote on the theme of old age, most fully in fr. 395 PMG. This treatment is interesting in that, although one might assume the speaker to be male as the poet was, the whole is fairly gender-neutral. Anacreon includes an almost clinical list of the physical signs of aging: , ' ' , ' (Anacr.395) Grey temples, a white head, the loss of 'graceful youth' and aging teeth could all apply to the elderly of both sexes, and there are no grammatical indications of which gender is appropriate. The poem (or at least the part we have) concludes with a generic statement of the

8 inevitable permanence of death: (12). Although the participle is masculine, there is no here as in Mimnermus to emphasize the gender of those to whom it applies. We will return to this passage later in the essay. Interestingly, Anacreon also uses female figures as a contrast to the aging male. In his much-discussed fragment 358 PMG, the speaker pursues a (3) for the purpose of (4), a word whose erotic connotations are obvious, but which also has associations with 'child'associations strengthened by the initial image of the eternal child Eros throwing a ball at the speaker (, 1).8 His desire for mutual youthful sport is dashed by her rejection, ostensibly on the grounds that his hair is white with age (contrasted with the golden hair of ever-young Eros). Instead, she pants after 'another' ( , 8), most likely 'another girl.'9 The aging speaker is being excluded from the youthful play-world of his desired girl, who is rejecting this example of male old age in favor of another female, probably young, like herself. The 'fancy-sandaled girl' of the speaker's affections may also have an additional significance. Commentators from antiquity onward have discussed the link with Sappho created by the epithet and the later reference to Lesbos (6).10 But considering her in Sapphic terms, - may also call to mind the
8 See also Rosenmeyer (2004) for a discussion of the concept of play in this poem, its ambiguity and significance with regard to the girl's stage of sexual maturity. 9 See Pelliccia (1991) for information on the debate and an argument for this interpretation. 10 See note in Campbell (1982a), 320-321.

9 description of Aphrodite as ' (1) in Sappho 1. The feminine presence in this poem is thus linked, as in Mimnermus, with the goddess of Love, giving her associations not just with youth but with immortal youthSappho's next epithet for Aphrodite is ' (1). In this light, her rejection of the speaker further parallels the situation in Mimnermus 1: long as the speaker might to enjoy the delights of Aphrodite, age renders him unsuitable for her domain, and she turns away from him in favor of feminine youth and beauty that mirror her own. The choral lyric of Alcman, fr. 26, also juxtaposes feminine youth and the speaker's own old age:11 ' , , , ' ' , . (Alcm.26) The speaker cannot join the (1) in their dance, and wishes to be transformed into a bird to escape his age and feebleness. As in Anacreon, there are no specific pronouns or grammatical pointers in this fragment to mark the speaker's gender, although his desired transformation into a (2), the male of the halcyon bird, among the females of his species (, 3) identifies him as male. Meanwhile, as before, the maidens are youthful contrasts to the aging speakerthough not specifically the object of his
11 For more on the Alcman fragment and the image of the cerylus and halcyons, see e.g. Vestrheim (2004).

10 erotic pursuitand the use of the epithet 'holy-voiced' associates them with the divine.12 Up to this point, all the poets discussed and all the viewpoints on age presented have been male. It will now be interesting to examine the perspective presented in the poetry of Sappho, a woman who wrote about (and presumably primarily for) women.13 Although her poetry mainly deals with young girls and women in an erotic context, some of her poems feature a speaker who appears to be no longer young. Most notable among these is the recently emerged 'Tithonus' poem, seemingly complete, which affords a uniquely detailed, complex and in several respects puzzling treatment of a female perspective on old age.14 In Sappho's poem, the speaker describes her own elderly appearance in contrast to the youth of her addressees and goes on to speak in more general terms of the inevitability of age, using (and most likely ending her poem with) the mythological example of the eternally aging Tithonus.15 Rather than offering a humorous and unappealing description of female old age, the poem lends it wisdom and melancholy dignity. In fact, the whole bears a resemblance to similar
12 In this poem, however, the speaker's transformation renews him and makes him divinely young as well; (4) echoes the epithet in l. 1 and links him with the girls. 13 See e.g. Williamson (1995) for more on Sappho, her world and audience. Stehle (1997) deals specifically with performance and gender ideology. 14 Originally fr. 58 V; the editio princeps of the Cologne papyrus is Gronewald and Daniel (2004a), with addenda, ibid. (2004b). See also West (2005) and Rawles (2006). 15 See the aforementioned articles, as well as di Benedetto (2004) and Luppe (2004), for discussion regarding the 'abrupt' endpoint of the poem. Fain (2007) offers an additional argument with Horatian parallels.

11 meditations on male old age by male poets. Together with the reference to a male mythological exemplum, this in itself raises interesting questions of gender.16 After exhorting her addressees, whom she refers to as (1), to embrace the Muses' gifts and the lyre, Sappho contrasts them with a detailed physical description of the speaker's own old age.17 Age has '[seized] her skin' ( / [], 3-4) and her 'hair, from black, has become [white]' ( ] , 4); her is heavy and her knees do not hold her up ( [] , 5). The physicality of the description recalls her contemporary Alcaeus' mention of his ('grey-[haired] chest', fr. 50 l. 2)later Sappho uses the word to describe age itselfand the mention of knees no longer bearing the speaker also echoes Alcman fr. 26. It is also somewhat similar to the later poem of Anacreon already described (e.g. the mention of white hair, and the loss of dancing grace echoed in Anacreon's ). The most interesting facet of the latter similarities may be the lack of gendering.18 Not only are the addressees referred to by the gender-neutral term , but the speaker never directly refers to herself as female. The mention of her skin () may point to a feminine identification, as descriptions of skin are a common feature in

16 Falkner (1995) offers a valuable discussion of this poem, but was naturally working with a less complete text (and a different conjectural endpoint) than the one now available to us. 17 All quotations follow West (2005) unless otherwise noted. 18 Rawles (2006), 4, notes the 'remarkable absence of gendered words.' Janko (2005) takes it as emphasizing the parallel between the narrator and Tithonus.

12 poetic descriptions of women.19 But white hair is a sign of aging in both sexes, and both boys and girls perform choral dances. Sappho does introduce an unambiguously female presence from the beginning, but it is neither the speaker nor the addressees: rather it is the 'violetbosomed' Muses (1), immortal and abstractly beautiful women. As their musical gifts are offered to the addressed, and the speaker herself is no longer able to partake in the celebratory dances, the Muses seem to serve a somewhat similar function to the eternally youthful females in the poems already examined: they welcome the young, but shun the aged. The gender neutrality of the speaker's perspective continues into the second half of the poem, as Sappho moves into a more general meditation on old age: (8). She does not use , as Mimnermus does, but nor does she use or speak personally about herself as a woman: 'It is not possible that I could be ageless'. Instead she opts for , 'human', a term that differentiates by species rather than sex. Sappho finally introduces another female presence as she moves into a mythical exemplum that has sparked much discussion: the story of Eos and Tithonus, the quintessential tale of feminine immortality and masculine old age. Rather than using an aging mortal woman to serve as a parallel for herself, she uses an aging mortal mana comparison
19 See Falkner (1995) 86ff. for more on women's skin. If West's conjectured supplement (3) were correct, it might add further support, as 'tender' skin would be more a feminine than a masculine trait. Cf. Archil.188 W, an unflattering description of an old and undesirable woman: ' (1).

13 that does appear elsewhere in the context of male aging (compare e.g. Mimnermus 4: / , ). Instead, the feminine figure in this image is the lovely, immortal goddess of the dawn, reappearing in fresh glory as she heralds the beginning of each day, described in attractive epic terms as 'rose-armed' (, 9). Furthermore, through the version of the tale appearing in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (218ff.), which may have been known to Sappho, Eos in the Tithonus myth is a parallel to the goddess of Love herself.20 In this version, Eos eventually rejects her lover as he ages and shuts him away to wither in isolation. She is a figure like those in the works of the male poets examined, the eternally renewed eternal feminine, granting her favors only to the young and beautiful. What is Sappho achieving with this poem? Falkner interprets it as a 'radical response to male perspectives on the theme of aging', a rare depiction of female old age without the disgust and denigration attached to it by male poets.21 But taken simply as a text and disregarding assumptions about its speaker or audience, there is almost nothing at all to mark it as a depiction of the female aging process. Rather it is astonishingly neutral, and far from offering a radically different perspective on female aging, seems deliberately to be taking the aging experience past gender to the level of universal truth. Even this neutrality, however, is undercut by the final myth.
20 Rawles (2006), 2. 21 Falkner (2005), 106.

14 Aging is given a human face, and that face is specifically male. It could perhaps be argued that Tithonus ages past the point of humanity and thus in a way past gender, and that his reduction to voice alone makes him an apt parallel for a poet; certainly some versions of the myth, although likely not Sappho's, have him transformed into a cicada.22 But the Tithonus we first meet here is still a young, handsome and sexually active male, the object of Eos' attraction, and his aging is a sharp contrast with the eternal rejuvenation of his wife. There is, finally, no depiction of unambiguously female age in the entire poem; it could be envisioned as sung by a male with little incongruity. Perhaps Sappho is attempting to create not a distinctive, 'radical' model for female aging, but a universalized depiction of age, based on positive models of male aging, that transcends negative, gender-biased assumptions about elderly females. Erotic lyric is a particularly ideal setting for such a perspective: because it deals almost exclusively with sexuality and with the bodies and feelings of individuals, rather than with politics and one's role in society, discussions of male aging in this medium necessarily focus on the former aspectsaspects in which male and female old age are comparable. Sappho's poem exploits this common ground, first avoiding gendered assumptions by keeping the speaker's self-description within the realm of neutrality, then explicitly linking the speaker's aging with the aging of men through the parallel with Tithonus. The cross-gender comparison invites the awareness that

22 See King (1989), Rawles (2006) p. 5ff.

15 rather than following completely different life cycles, women and men both experience suffering connected with age in a very similar fashion. An aging woman's changes in body and mind,23 and her simultaneous pleasure and pain at being surrounded by lovely figures of the youth she has lost, are not dissimilar to the torment of an eternally aging man who must wake up each morning to the fresh beauty of his immortal wife;24 and there is dignity in the suffering of both. But the poem also contains more than a few features that could be seen as subverting the paradigm found in other lyric discussions of age. Given that Tithonus is the ostensible parallel for Sappho's message about age, it is striking how dominant a figure Eos is in the text. She is introduced prominently at the end of line 9, and her epithet is more striking, specific and vivid than the rather generic language used to describe Tithonus ( , 11). Tithonus himself is almost totally passive throughout; first he is carried off by Eos (10), then age seizes him (11). Finally, the poem (or at least the image) concludes not with a depiction of the aged and shriveled Tithonus, but with his (12). Meanwhile, Tithonus in age is no wise counselor like Nestor; inhabiting Eos' domain outside the society of
23 Given lyric poets' focus on the physical symptoms of age, it is interesting that Sappho refers to changes in her [] (5) as well as her body; for further discussion, see Bernsdorff (2004). 24 Sappho 121 V, an appeal to a younger lover to find another suitably young beloved rather than staying with the aging speaker, could almost be put into Tithonus' mouth addressing Eos: ' ' ... (Sapph. 121)

16 humans, he has no role to play other than that of aging husband. Furthermore, while Eos is shown rejecting Tithonus in the Homeric Hymns, in this poem there is no explicit mention of that rejection. In fact, in the one action attributed to Tithonus, he is finally shown [] (12), 'holding' or 'having' his immortal spouse; even as age seizes him, he is still permitted to possess her and to touch her. Unlike the eternally young women described in the other poems discussed, Eos neither passively receives the man's advances, nor spurns him as he succumbs to age. By keeping Eos so prominent, and by bookending the poem with references to immortal females, perhaps Sappho means both to retain the idea of the eternally youthful beloved so present in depictions of male aging and to keep the poem firmly within the realm of the female. In the other poems mentioned, it is the male playing the active role in pursuing female love-objects, who either do not respond to his desire or actively reject him. But here it is Eos who longs so deeply for Tithonus that she bears him away with her (with no mention of how willing he might be to accept her advances), and, in the fuller treatments of the myth, it is she who obtains for him the double-edged boon of immortality. The gender of the pursuer is reversed from the erotic norm, as is the outcome of the pursuit; an old man pursuing a young, beautiful woman or boy almost invariably does not achieve his conquest, but a young, beautiful woman pursuing a man, in this poem, succeeds and then retains her conquest even as age overtakes him.

17 In addition to encouraging the she addresses to take advantage of the gifts of the Muses in song and dance, Sappho may thus be obliquely encouraging them in this way to take an active role in seeking out the gifts of Aphrodite, the other pastime of the young. The sentiment might be compared to Horace's exhortation to the boy Thaliarchus to pursue both dancing and love while he can: nec dulcis amores sperne puer neque tu choreas, donec virenti canities abest morosa. (Hor.C.1.9.15-18) As Alcman's speaker uses the figure of the cerylus among halcyones to represent both himself and the girls around him, perhaps Sappho intends not only to draw parallels between the speaker and Tithonus, but indirectly to connect the young, beautiful girls with Eos as an expression of the speaker's own longing for their advances. The fact that Tithonus retains his to the very end of the poem could thus represent a desired relationship with a younger lover even as one partner is succumbing to age.25 Like Eos, the young girls cannot grant their partner eternal youth; but they can grant her the possession of their own. Sappho thus both makes use of the same tropes that appear in the male poets' workthe older man, the immortal beloved woman and modifies them for her own purposes. In tying the speaker's old age
25 As above, cf. Sapph.121 V.

18 to the traditional depiction of male aging rather than presenting a distinctively female model, she shows that despite the insistence elsewhere in Greek literature on distinct aging processes, at least from an erotic and physiological perspective (the perspective of lyric poetry), the experiences are no different. Even as she emphasizes this similarity, though, she also subtly inverts the gender dynamics of the relationship depicted in the poem, making the female figure the erotically active one. In this, she may be hinting at the same desires

that her male counterparts exhibit when lamenting their own old age: the desire to take a younger lover, and through them to retain the image of their own lost youth.

19 Bibliography Bernsdorff, H. (2004), 'Schwermut des Alters im neuen Klner SapphoPapyrus', ZPE 150: 27-35. Campbell, D.A. (1982a), Greek Lyric Poetry (London). (1982b, 1988, 1991, 1992), Greek Lyric, 4 vols. (Cambridge). Di Benedetto, V. (2004), Osservazioni sul nuovo papiro di Saffo, ZPE 149: 56. Fain, G.L. (2007), 'A Lesbian Ending in the Odes of Horace', CQ 57: 318321. Falkner, T.M. (1995), The Poetics of Old Age in Greek Epic, Lyric and Tragedy (Norman). Fantham, E. et al. (1994), Women in the Classical World: Image and Text (Oxford). Finley (1981), 'The Elderly in Classical Antiquity', Greece & Rome 28: 156-171. Gilleard, C. (2007), 'Old Age in Ancient Greece: Narratives of Desire, Narratives of Disgust', Journal of Aging Studies 21: 81-92. Janko, R. (2005), 'Sappho Revisited', TLS Dec. 23 and 30: 19-20. King, Helen (1989), 'Tithonos and the Tettix', in Old Age in Greek and Latin Literature, ed. T.M. Falkner and J. de Luce (Albany), 68-89. Luppe, W. (2004), 'berlegungen zur Gedicht-Anordnung im neuen Sappho-Papyrus, ZPE 149: 79. Page, D.L. (1962), Poetae Melici Graeci (Oxford). Pelliccia, H. (1991), Anacreon 13 (358 PMG), CP 86: 30-6. Rawles, R. (2006), 'Notes on the Interpretation of the 'New Sappho"', ZPE 157: 1-7. Rosenmeyer, P.A. (2004), 'Girls at Play in Early Greek Poetry', AJP 125: 163-178.

20 Rudd, N. (2004), Horace: Odes and Epodes (Cambridge). Skinner, M.B. (1993), 'Woman and Language in Archaic Greece, or, Why is Sappho a Woman?' in Feminist Theory and the Classics, ed. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin (New York), 125-144. Stehle, E. (1997), Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece (Princeton). Stigers, E.S. (1981), 'Sappho's Private World', in Reflections of Women in Antiquity, ed. H. Foley, 45-61. Vestrheim, G. (2004), 'Alcman fr. 26: A Wish for Fame', GRBS 44: 518. West, M.L. (2005), 'The New Sappho', ZPE 151: 1-9. Williamson, M. (1995), Sappho's Immortal Daughters (Cambridge). Wilson, L.H. (1996), Sappho's Sweetbitter Songs: Configurations of Female and Male in Ancient Greek Lyric (London). Winkler, J.J. (1990), 'Double Consciousness in Sappho's Lyrics,' in Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World, ed. L.K. McClure (2002, Oxford), 39-71. (1996), 'Gardens of Nymphs: Public and Private in Sappho's Lyrics', in Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches, ed. Ellen Greene (Berkeley), 89-109.