LESBIAN SAPPHO REVISITED
André Lardinois
More than twenty years ago, Jan Bremmer, the honorand of this volume, offered me the opportunity to write my very first scholarly article on Sappho in a volume he was editing on the history of sexuality, while I was still his student.1 Following his own analysis of Greek homosexuality as derived from an initiation ritual and Claude Calame’s detailed study of young women’s choruses, I concluded that Sappho probably did have sexual relationships with the girls she sang about in her poetry, similar to the pederastic relationships of adult men and young boys in archaic Greece.2 In the meantime, however, I have had second thoughts and I would like to take this opportunity to return to this subject in the light of recent scholarship. I have become convinced that Sappho in her poetry does not express her own emotions but speaks, either in her own voice or through a chorus, for the community, and that her sensual descriptions of young women,3 which are certainly expressed in homoerotic terms, were meant to praise the erotic appeal of these young women as experienced by men and women alike but intended to be consummated in heterosexual marriages. In my article I already cautioned against calling Sappho’srelation- ships with young women ‘lesbian’ or ‘homosexual’, because these rela- tionships would appear to have been first of all pederastic in nature (not
1 A. Lardinois, “Lesbian Sappho and Sappho of Lesbos”, in FromSapphotodeSade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (ed. J.N. Bremmer; London: Routledge, ), –. An earlier version of this book was published in Dutch in . 2 J.N. Bremmer, “An Enigmatic Indo-European Rite: Paederasty”, Arethusa (): –, especially –, and “Greek Pederasty and Modern Homosexuality”, in From Sappho to de Sade, –; C. Calame, Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece (second edition; translation D. Collins, J. Orion; Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield ; originally published in French in ). 3 I still believe that the women described in Sappho’s poetry are young and of mar- riageable age: see A. Lardinois, “Subject and Circumstance in Sappho’s Poetry”, Transac- tions of the American Philological Association (): –, contra H.N. Parker, “Sap- pho Schoolmistress”, Transactions of the American Philological Association (): –. andré lardinois between two adults, but between an older woman and a girl, probably between the age of twelve and eighteen), and they would not have been exclusive: Sappho was probably married and had a daughter, and the young women were also expected to get married after they left Sappho’s group.4 More importantly, Sappho lived in a time and society in which no strict opposition between homosexuality and heterosexuality was recog- nized but rather between marital love, the domain of Hera, and erotic passion, the domain of Aphrodite. The latter could include both homo- sexual and heterosexual affairs, as is clear from Sappho’s own poetry, in which she invokes Aphrodite both in a song in which she speaks about her passion for a woman (fragment ) and in her wedding poetry (frag- ment ).5 In Sappho fragment the first-person speaker compares her passion for the girl Anactoria with Helen’s love for Paris, an extramari- tal but not a homosexual affair. This example shows that heterosexual love can be used to illustrate homosexual feelings in Sappho’s poetry and vice versa. I therefore prefer to use the term ‘homoerotic’ for the passions described in Sappho’s poetry over ‘homosexual’ or ‘lesbian’,signalling the erotic nature of these described feelings rather than their sexual orienta- tion.6 In the following section I will first examine the Spartan evidence for sexual relationships between women, which are often adduced as a close parallel to Sappho’s situation, and, subsequently, the other Greek anthropological evidence. Finally, I will discuss Sappho’s own poetry and testimonia.7
4 There is some evidence that complex political alliances also played a role in estab- lishing relationships between Sappho and the young women of her group: see Lardinois, “Lesbian Sappho”, –. 5 One should not be surprised to find Aphrodite invoked in songs celebrating mar- riage, supposedly the domain of Hera. First of all, no marriage can do entirely without the passion of Aphrodite, as the telling conversation between Hera and Aphrodite in the Iliad (.–), where Hera asks the goddess of love to help her restore the marital bond between Oceanus and Tethys, illustrates; secondly, a young bride is a nymphê and especially during the period of her honeymoon still under the auspices of Aphrodite: see M. Detienne, “The Myth of ‘Honeyed Orpheus’”, in Myth, Religion and Society (ed. R.L. Gordon; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), – and –. 6 Cf. Calame, Choruses of Young Women, –. 7 All fragments and testimonia of Sappho, Alcman and the other lyric poets are cited from D.A. Campbell’s Loeb edition (Greek Lyric,vols.[Cambridge,MA:Harvard University Press, –]), unless noted otherwise.