Sappho c. 620 B.C.-c. 550 B.C

1
Sappho c. 620 B.C.-c. 550 B.C
2
Biographical Info

• Little is known with certainty about the life of
  Sappho
• She was born probably about 620 B.C. to an
  aristocratic family on the island of Lesbos
  during a great cultural flowering in the area.
• Apparently her birthplace was either Eressos or
  Mytilene, the main city on the island, where she
  seems to have lived for some time.
• She seems to have married and had a daughter
  named Cleis.
• Sappho seems also to have exchanged verses with
  the poet Alcaeus.

3
(No Transcript)
4
Phaon and Sappho

• Phaon in Greek mythology was a boatman of
  Mitylene in Lesbos. He was old and ugly when
  Aphrodite came to his boat. She put on the guise
  of a crone. Phaon ferried her over to Asia Minor
  and accepted no payment for doing so. In return,
  she gave him a box of ointment. When he rubbed it
  on himself, he became young and beautiful. Many
  were captivated by his beauty.
• According to mythology, Sappho fell in love with
  him. He lay with her but soon grew to resent her
  and devalue her. Sappho was so distraught with
  his rejection that she threw herself into the sea
  to drown.
• Story is re-told in Ovids Metamorphoses

5

• Jacques-Louis David (1748 1825, influential
  French neo-classical painter), Sappho, Phaon,
  and Cupid (1809)

6
Reception and Reputation

• The history of Sapphos reception is itself part
  of Sappho's significance.
• Her attitudes toward love attracted a great deal
  of attention, both positive and negative.
• It is perhaps as an icon of the erotic that
  Sappho has been best known.
• In antiquity and in modern times there have been
  those who enthusiastically applauded her
  celebration of physical love, finding in her
  valorization of subjective experience an
  affirmation often absent in the European
  tradition.

7
Reception and Reputation

• In antiquity Sappho was regularly counted among
  the greatest of poets and was often referred to
  as "the Poetess," just as Homer was called "the
  Poet."
• Plato hailed her as "the tenth Muse," and she was
  honored on coins and with civic statuary.
• Nonetheless, an ancient, scurrilous tradition
  attacked and ridiculed her for her evident sexual
  preferences.
• Sappho was lampooned by the writers of New
  Comedy.
• New Comedians rendered the poet a popular
  burlesque comic figure on the stage.

8
Reception and Reputation

• Christian antiquity and middle ages censors
  condemned her in words such as those of Tatian,
  who called her "a whore who sang about her own
  licentiousness."
• Saint Gregory of Nazianzus and Pope Gregory VII
  ordered her works burned.

9
Reception and Reputation

• Great influence on the Romantic poets, such as
  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Alfred
  Tennyson, who all translated her poetry into
  English.
• influenced the Romantic idea of the poet as a
  creature of feeling, one whose solitary song is
  overheard, as opposed to the classical model of
  the poet as a socially defined craftsperson who
  speaks to a group (compare to the Bards in
  Homers Odyssey!).

10
Reception and Reputation

• Many readers particularly uncomfortable with
  expressions of Lesbian love.
• Many modern editors eliminated or changed words
  or lines in her poems that they believed would be
  misunderstood by readers.
• Nevertheless, her works speak to both
  heterosexual and homosexual readers, to men as
  well as to women.

11
Her poetry

• Only a handful of fragments of her poetry survive
• Nevertheless, her poems have been applauded by
  readers in all eras, and she has been regarded by
  many as one of the greatest poets of European
  history.
• One of the few female poets of the antiquity,
  whose work survived.
• greatest importance of Sappho in literary history
  has been her contribution toward the definition
  of the lyric genre.

12
Her poetry

• THE LYRIC (DEF.) A usually short, personal poem
  expressing the poets emotions and thoughts
  rather than telling a story. As a broadly
  inclusive genre, the lyric includes the elegy,
  ode, ballad, and sonnet. Its distinguishing
  characteristics are emotion, subjectivity,
  melodiousness, imagination, description, and
  (sometimes) meditation. In ancient Greece, a
  lyric was a poem to be sung with accompaniment of
  a lyre. The lyric usually includes any type of
  love poetry.

13
Sapphos contributions to the lyric

• Her emphasis on emotion, on subjective
  experience, and on the individual marks a stark
  contrast between her work and the epic,
  liturgical, or dramatic poetry (and usually
  public) of the period.
• But much of Sappho's work is intimate and
  putatively private, addressed to specific women
  or to her friends and her tone of colloquial
  familiarity anticipates medieval and modern
  practice.
• emphatic directness, using few figures of speech
  she celebrates love as the highest of human
  faculties while recognizing its complex nature,
  including elements of jealousy, rivalry, and
  aggression.
• In her poetry, subjective emotion expressed with
  intellectual dignity.
• power of Eros is self-justifying and literally,
  in its extremest dimensions, religious.

14
Relationship to social function of poetry

• much earlier literature had been sustained by the
  social consensus of collective vision expressed
  in myth and legend (e.g. The Iliad or The
  Odyssey)
• Sappho was free to be critical, to point out the
  gaps and problems in the received opinions of her
  society.
• challenges the heroic ethos that buttressed
  patriotism
• throughout her work she asserts the potentially
  subversive primacy of the individual
  consciousness and the validity of its opinions
  and impulses.
• A notion little known in archaic and traditional
  societies (there primacy of a collective
  consciousness)

15
Not entirely modern

• But her poetry was still meant to be performed
  orally
• she adhered, consciously or not, to the view that
  poetry was a form of magic and that, by
  manipulating language, one could also manipulate
  the reality that it described.
• Thus poetry as a type of religious rite.

16
Images and Representations (through the age)

• Fresco from Pompeii, National Archeological
  Museum, Naples

17

• Athenian depiction of Sappho and Alcaeus, about
  450 B.C.E.

18

• Musei Capitolini, Roma

19

• Charles Nicolas Rafael Lafond (17741835) Sappho
  sings for Homer, 1824

20

• Charles-August Mengin. 1877.
• (part of pre-Raphaelite movement in painting,
  founded by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.