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While reading the extant fragments, one gets the sense that Sappho is giving Greek mythology a feminine slant.
Eros, son of Aphrodite, is the most prominent male divinity.
Epithalamia
it will be helpful to provide a general outline of Ancient Greek wedding rituals based on these poems and on comparative evidence.
In fifth-century Athens the engagement ceremony, called engeuēsis, involved a legally binding agreement between the bride’s kyrios (or legal guardian), who was usually her father, and the groom.
the dowry was agreed upon, and oaths were sworn in fr...
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In a famous monologue in which she argues that women are ‘the most abused creatures of all’, the mythic Medea complains of the bride’s powerlessness in this situation: ‘we bid a very high price in dowries only to buy a man to be master of our bodies… then comes the greatest risk: will we end up with a good man or a bad?’
Sappho provides us with a glorified portrayal of the wedding-procession in ‘Idaos, then, the panting emissary’:
True to her duties as public poet, Sappho presents only moments of joy in the festal epithalamia, though, inevitably, the process must often have been traumatic for the bride.
Style
Until very recently Sappho’s longest and best-preserved songs all had to do with erotic situations.
In fact, a minority of Sappho’s songs are erotic.
Sappho narrates epic events in a Homeric style as well as recounts what presents itself as intense personal experience in a distinctive voice.
Scholars often comment on Sappho’s ability to activate multiple perspectives within the same poem and to elide differences between subject and object.
Feminist scholars have pointed out that, in contrast to the power-dynamic common in masculine erotic encounters, the singer ‘does not attempt to impose her will upon the person she loves but instead, through engaging appeals, tries to elicit a corresponding response from her’.19
She exhibits double consciousness – a simultaneous awareness of the traditional male-authorized view and of her own distinctly feminine ‘take’.
The poems which interact with and reinterpret Homer best exhibit Sappho’s double consciousness.
Mary Lefkowitz observes that ‘it is as if Sappho were saying that what happens in a woman’s life also partakes of the significance of the man’s world of war’.
A refined taste for pretty things, both artificial and natural, characterizes Sappho’s songs, and such delights, as mentioned above, served to define the values of her aristocratic circle.
flowers in Sappho symbolize a ‘fragile combination of opposites’ consisting of ‘intimacy and distance, eroticism and innocence’.
roses and wild flowers in ‘Leave Crete and sweep to this blest temple’ contribute to an erotic landscape that is simultaneously an inviolable sacred space and a pleasure garden where Aphrodite will abound.
Sappho’s frequent use of eraton (lovely), an adjective which expresses both desire and loveliness, embodies this symbiosis. Her songs, then, begin with a love for the beautiful which, in turn, generates even more beauty.
Sappho’s style is deceptively simple. The sentence structure is most often paratactic, that is, sentences occur one after the other without subordinating clauses, like beads on a string.
for Sappho the “power” of love is a god, as power often is for the ancient Greeks,
Performance Context
The lyre is indeed an inextricable attribute of Sapphic iconography: she mentions and addresses them, she is credited with the invention of the pēctis (large many-stringed lyre) and the plectrum (pick for a lyre), and artists both in antiquity and modernity most often represent her with lyre in hand.
André Lardinois sums up the ‘personality’ debate thus: ‘can we be sure that any of the early Greek poems is “personal”…? What is “personality” in such a group-oriented society as archaic Greece?
in Archaic poetry] have been poems in which the poet clearly impersonates a character. Some of these we find, interestingly enough, among Sappho’s fragments as well.’27
we cannot be certain that even the most likely candidates – those in the first person – were performed solo.
In most instances it is impossible to say whether the speaker is a chorus or a soloist or even whether a given speaker is Sappho. In discussions of performance context, as with most things having to do with Sappho, we must content ourselves with probabilities.
Woman, Poet and Woman Poet
one runs the risk of relegating Sappho to a separate ‘female’ league for poetry and overlooking what she owes to her predecessors (Homer in particular),
If, by comparing Sappho’s poems with Anacreon’s, we show… that the art of poetry… is not different when practiced by men and by women but the same, will anyone be able to find just cause to reject our argument? (Virtues of Women 243b)
The art is the same – Sappho fits squarely into the development of poetry from Homeric epic to Greek lyric.
The mainstream of Western poetry flows through Sappho and on down through the centuries.
was Sappho a feminist? In Ancient Greek literature male poets tend not simply to portray women as lecherous but to attribute to them a species of lust different from that of males: a subhuman and automatic reflex, an animalistic urge.
Sappho is important because she gives a fully human voice to female desire for the first time in Western literature.
Goddesses
Apples, the most important fruit in Sappho, symbolize virginity in other songs.
Throughout Greek and Roman literature weaving is the activity of a female head-of-household in an ideal home.
Penelope weaves a death shroud for her father-in-law Laertes both as a delaying tactic and as confirmation of her loyalty to her husband Odysseus (Odyssey 2.96–102).
Aphrodite exhibits an exceptional familiarity with Sappho – the closest parallel is Athena’s banter with Odysseus in Odyssey 13.
The god Eros himself is described as the ‘Limb-Loosener’ in ‘That impossible predator’, and ‘limb-loosening love’ is central to several of Sappho’s erotic songs.
Maximus of Tyre (125–185 CE) claims that Sappho is delivering ‘Here is the reason: it is wrong’ to her daughter on her deathbed.
Desire and Death-Longing
Eros is the god of ardent desire.
In Hesiod’s Theogony Eros is ‘limb-loosening’, and in Homer a hero’s limbs are loosened in battle when he loses consciousness or dies.
That impossible predator, Eros the Limb-Loosener, Bitter-sweetly and afresh Savages my flesh.
Eros, with a stroke, Shattered my brain.
Archilochus of Paros (680–c. 645 BCE) also describes the love disease in Homeric terms:
