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.”11 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 examine our 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.