Every age creates its own Sappho.1 At the moment our own dominant
image of Sappho is a private, and often explicitly Romantic/romantic one.
Sappho is a locus where, oddly enough, the prejudices of the past and the
projections of the present become bedfellows. Add tothis an explicit or
implicit contrast with her island fellow, Alcaeus, and the result is our
standard view of Sappho: off by herself with a coterie of girls, divorced from
any involvement in public affairs. First, the view of a purely private Sappho
accords far too well with the traditional idea of what a woman poet and a
woman’s poetry should be (Lefkowitz 1973). Women write about love, not
politics.
As Susan Friedman notes (1975, 807): “The
short, passionate lyric has conventionally been thought appropriate for women
poets if they insist on writing, while the longer more philosophical epic
belongs to the real (male) poet.”3 This idea has contributed in part to Sappho
44 (“The Marriage of Hector and Andromache”) being labeled as “abnormal” (and
not for reasons of dialect alone) and to the attempts to force it to be an
epithalamium, whether it will or no.4 At the same time, since 44 is less girly
than some would like, there have been recurrent attempts to claim that it is
not by Sappho after all.5 To turn to the opposite end of the political
spectrum, a private Sappho also accords far too well with certain ideas of
écriture féminine of what a woman poet and a woman’s poetry should be The most
common image—that of Sappho running, if not a girls’ school on Lesbos, then at
least an all-girl coterie—also fits all too well into some our own private
concerns.7 A separate world—
apart from men, war, politics—is very
attractive. Sappho is often placed in a landscape, both literal and emotional,
that combines all the best features of Arcadia and Academe. There seems to be a
certain element of wish fulfillment in this picture.
Further, the private Sappho lends herself
so very easily to certain ideas much discussed
in feminist poetics and politics: a
woman-centered poetry, a femaleonly poetic tradition, and so on. Elsewhere, the
image of Sappho Schoolmistress has been invoked as a model for various kinds of lesbian separatism. The third factor in
creating an image of a purely private Sappho, the contrast with Alcaeus, is
natural. For example, one article contrasts “Romantic and Classical Strains in
Lesbian Lyric” (Race 1989). No points for guessing who is which. Further, the
contrast seems to have antique precedence.8 For example, the Cologne commentary
on Sappho (dating to the second century ce) begins with a `˘ m˘èn (but he) and
continues with = d& \f& =suxía[w] (while she in peace) apparently contrasting Sappho’s quiet life
with Alcaeus’ stormy life in politics.9 This has become standard in the
literature. So Lefkowitz (1981, 36): “Politics and conflict are missing
entirely from Sappho’s biography.” As we will see
in a moment this is not
the case. So too Campbell (1983, 107):
“The violent political life of Mytilene is hardly reflected at all in the
fragments of Alcaeus’ contemporary, Sappho.” The most recent survey (Tsomis
2001, 168) flatly states: “Alkaios was primarily a political poet,” a
conclusion that Horace for one did not agree with, and continues “All three poets
concerned themselves with invective as a literary form, but in contrast to
Alkaios, Sappho and Anakreon did not write invective based on political
grounds.”10 Page was more cautious (1955, 130–31): “First, it is noticeable that
whereas Alcaeus has much to tell of the political revolutions which Mytilene
underwent in his and Sappho’s lifetimes; and although it is attested that Sappho
herself suffered in those stormy days, yet there are very few allusions to
these great affairs in Sappho’s verse.
It is to these “few allusions” that I wish
to turn. To a large measure, however, I think, this picture is correct.
Sappho’s poetry does indeed, at least in the wretched fragments we possess,
seem to depict a separate world, a world apart from men and their concerns. My
title alludes to Eva Stehle’s outstanding 1981 article, “Sappho’s Private
World.”12 John Winkler’s article of the same year, “Gardens of Nymphs: Public
and Private in Sappho’s Lyrics,” in turn alludes to Demetrius’ famous summary
of “the whole of Sappho’s poetry” as “gardens of nymphs, wedding-songs,
love-affairs.”13 My only point is that these do not, in fact, comprise the whole
of Sappho’s poetry. What I want to do is sound a bit of warning that, when our
standard view of Sappho begins to replicate too closely certain old-fashioned
notions about the essential nature of women (private, passionate, sex-obsessed) and at the same
time takes on aspects of projection of our own ideas of a lost golden age of
poetry and power, it is time, perhaps, to examineour views carefully. We tend
to limit Sappho. She is discussed as “love poet,” a “woman poet,” a “lesbian
poet,” rather than as a poet. This is a failure even of the best-disposed of
critics. As Dolores Klaitch was forced to write in Woman + Woman (1974, 160):
“Sappho was a poet who loved women. She was not a lesbian who wrote poetry.” In
order to counter this tendency, I wish to raise the possibility of “reading
otherwise” (Felman 1982, Ender 1993). I want to look
for Sappho’s Public World.
First, we can note that there is
considerable clear evidence for Sappho’s involvement in and making songs about
public matters. Second, if we reexamine the corpus, actively presupposing that
Sappho, like any other Greek poet, might have written about politics (by which
I mean nothing more and nothing less than matters of importance to her polis),
we can view a number of neglected poems in a new and interesting light. We have
always approached Sappho looking for traces of her private life (in more senses
than one). I simply want to see what happens if we read with an eye open for traces
of her public life. A Sappho intimately involved in political affairs and
making public utterances emerges clearly from the texts. First, of course, the
Parian Marble tells us of her exile—exile (fugou]sa), not a “voyage to Sicily”
(Page 1955, 226): Sappho was not on a cruise.14 Exile is the fate of the losing
side in a civil war, as Alcaeus tells us. This event, almost certainly one of
her adulthood, is consistently played down and indeed belittled, as though
exile to Sappho meant nothing more than the inability to shop for the latest
hats.15 The background to Sappho’s life is the background to her poetry.