general invites a higher degree of speculation than modern literary texts generally do. Yet the texts of women authors in ancient Greece and Rome present especially difficult challenges. Most obvious, the fragmentary condition of much of extant women’s writing in Greco-
Roman antiquity makes it particularly susceptible to ambiguity. More important, women’s status in antiquity—the constraints on their legal and political rights, their limited educations, and the extreme restrictions placed on their involvement in the public sphere—renders knowledge about the conditions attendant on women’s production especially obscure.
In addition, much of what we “know” of ancient women has come down to us through the images created of them in male-authored texts. While women’s own writing might seem to make the possibilities of ancient female subjectivity accessible to us, we cannot be certain about the effects of male constraints on
female agency within the performative contexts of women’s poetry in the male-dominated societies of Greece and Rome.
Indeed, classical scholars over the years have often lamented the extreme paucity of extant women’s writing.1 On the other hand, we have to wonder how women in Greece and Rome wrote and performed their poems at all,they lived and wrote. While the women poets of Greece and Rome have at times fascinated modern scholars, much of the scholarship until recently has been either mildly dismissive or openly denigrating. Early twentieth century scholars often focused on women’s biographies, assuming that there was little poetic artistry to unearth and that women would naturally be concerned exclusively with the “trivialities” of
their private lives.2 Even scholars who wrote admiringly of Sappho’s poems, for example, emphasized aspects of her work they perceived
to be expressive of purely personal emotions.3 On the less positive end of this continuum we find scholars such as Devereux and Marcovich, who characterized the seemingly “confessional” quality in Sappho’s poems as hysterical and neurotic.4 Overall, the emphasis on women’s biographies and on the seemingly “personal” nature of their literary achievements has occluded the highly intricate and complex character of ancient women’s relationships not only to their largely patriarchal societies but also to literary traditions overwhelmingly
dominated by male voices.
While it is certainly true that for the most part Greek and Roman women occupied marginal positions in society, there is much evidenceto suggest that in certain periods women had at least some exposure to male literary culture. Even in archaic and early classical
Greece, where adult women were segregated from the larger public sphere except on ritual occasions, there are indications that women
might have produced their own discourses in isolation. The world Sappho inhabited, for example, as represented in her poems seems to be comprised of a community of women within a socially segregated society—a society that appears detached from male “public” arenas.5 Overall, in spite of the formal exclusion of women from the public domain in both Greek and Roman culture, women poets clearly had some familiarity with literary culture as well as with traditionally masculine forms of public and political expression.
The references in Greek and Roman (male) texts to women as practitioners of literature
strongly suggest that a tradition of female authorship flourished from the Archaic Age (ca. 700 bce) into the Hellenistic and Roman
periods. A canonical roster of women poets was first compiled by the learned scholars of Alexandria and was in circulation by the time
of Augustus in imperial Rome.