The theo-eroticism of mythmaking about Aphrodite’s love for boys like Adonis

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Gregory Nagy

JANUARY 9, 2021 | By Gregory Nagy

2021.01.09 | By Gregory Nagy

§0. In a previous study, I used the term theo-eroticism as a way of describing a kind of sexuality that gets transformed into something sublime by way of blending eroticism with divinity. In line with terminology used by exegetes of the Bible in their interpretations of some intensely erotic situations pictured in the Song of Songs, I experimented with applying the terms of such biblical exegesis to ancient Greek myths. And, following the biblical model, my experimentation in that study concentrated on the sexuality of “divinity” as a male principle. But what about sexuality as a divinely female principle? In the present study, I will attempt to make up for neglecting, in my previous study, the most obvious exemplar of a sexually active female divinity, who is none other than the goddess Aphrodite herself. I will concentrate, however, on only one of the many surviving aspects of myth-making about Aphrodite’s sexuality, which is, the passionate love of this adult female immortal for a pre-adult male mortal, the boy Adonis. The mythical world of this divine love, as I hope to show, was quite real for real people in the real world of pre-modern times, ancient times. When I say “real people” here, I mean people who, back then, actually worshipped Aphrodite as the goddess of love and who would therefore actually think that the various dierent myths centering on such a divine love were relevant to the various dierent ritual practices that were intimately connected to their own life-experiences, especially when it comes to love, death, and, possibly, a coming back to life after death—since the ancient myths were telling them about a yearly resurrection of Adonis through the agency of Aphrodite’s love. For them, the boy Adonis could thus be gured as a vital part of an overall model for thinking about their own lives in terms of love, death, and a possible afterlife. In the spirit of such a frame of mind, I start my essay here by showing a modern painting that illustrates, in its own romanticizing way, the theo-erotic power of Aphrodite in bringing Adonis back to life and love. Such power, I must add most emphatically, was already verbalized in the songs of Sappho. And, as we will see, it was also visualized in vase paintings, some of which date back to the Classical era of Athens.

John William Waterhouse (1849–1917), The Awakening of Adonis. Andrew Lloyd Webber collection. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

§1. Following up on the modern picture I just showed, I now turn to a comparably erotic ancient visualization that rearms, I think, the idea that Aphrodite did indeed bring Adonis back to life—or, to say it more accurately in terms of ritual practices that re-enact myth—that the goddess must bring her boy-love back to life again and again, every recurrent year, since Adonis must die every year, again and again. I will focus on a reference to such a visualization in a Classical Athenian painting that was inspired, as I argued in a previous essay (Nagy 2020.10.30, linked here), by songs of Sappho about Aphrodite’s love for Adonis. It is a painting created in Athens by the so-called Meidias Painter, who lived in the fth century BCE. I have already shown, in the previous essay just cited (at §5 there), a line drawing of the central erotic scene that is pictured by the painter, and I now show it again here:

Red-figure hydria. Florence, Museo Archeologico 81948. Line-drawing by Noel Spencer, aided by Natasha Bershadsky. Featured in this close-up is Adonis at the center, attended by Aphrodite and by a winged Eros. Also attending is a lady who is teasing her pet sparrow. For the overall painting, I cite the Beazley Archive, here.

But now I also show, by way of two side-by-side line drawings, a closer look at some salient details featured in this erotic scene: Red-figure hydria by the Meidias Painter. Florence, Museo Archeologico 81948. Details: lady teasing bird; Aphrodite with Adonis, who gazes, dazed, at Eros and his magic wheel (now mostly lost). Line drawings by Jill Robbins.

In the left frame we see a female beauty teasing a small bird that is perched on her index nger, and I have already argued, in the previous essay I just cited, that the choreography of her gesture was inspired, as it were, by a poetic moment, now lost, in the songs of Sappho. And then, in the right frame, we see Adonis being caressed from behind by a female beauty who is Aphrodite herself, while a winged Eros is spinning a magic wheel to arouse the love of the languid boy for the goddess. We have seen it all before, in the previous essay. But I draw special attention, this time around, to the attempt of Eros at arousing Adonis with the magic wheel of love, called a iunx, which may be correlated with the kind of little bird that is perched on the other female beauty’s nger—a bird that art historians are tempted to identify with the wryneck, likewise called a iunx. Here too, we have seen it all before—in the essay preceding this one (§5 in Nagy 2020.12.31, linked here). For good measure, however, since the painting of the magic wheel of love is in this case fragmented, I now show a more visible attestation of such a iunx, and we see it being spun here again by a winged Eros: Photo and cast of gilded copper ring: Eros playing with a iunx/iynx (magical wheel on a string). From Egypt, probably of Greek manufacture, ca. 300 BCE. British Museum #1888,0601.1. Image via British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

§2. Having taken a closer look at these details featured in the erotic scene painted by the Meidias Painter, I have by now come to the conclusion that Adonis here is being brought back to life by way of concerted attempts to bring back his sexual desire for the goddess. To put it another way, Adonis is not about to die in this picture. He has already died, and I have in fact already analyzed in previous essays the mourning for Adonis by Aphrodite and by her cupids and by all the female beauties who attend the goddess (I refer especially to §§8–10 in Nagy 2020.11,13, linked here). This is not to say, however, that Adonis will not die again. He will, next year, only to be brought back to life again, next year, and I will have more to say later about the cyclical death and resurrection of this boy-love of Aphrodite. Also, the same can be said for the little bird that is perched on the index nger of the female beauty in this same painting by the Meidias Painter: it too, like Adonis, can die and be mourned and then get resurrected every recurring year. But my point for now is simply this: Adonis is not about to die in the present tense of this picture painted by the Meidias Painter. Rather, he is about to be coaxed back, sexually, into life after death. I see an analogy here with the modern painting that I showed at the start, where Adonis wakes up to life by way of a loving kiss from Aphrodite. §3. If I am right, then, about the painting by the Meidias Painter, his picture depicts the moment where the mortal Adonis is brought back to life from death. And now I come to a most important point of comparison: there is another picture by the Meidias Painter that depicts the moment where the mortal Phaon is brought back to youth from old age. Again, we have seen it all before: I had shown the picture of a rejuvenated Phaon in the same previous essay (Nagy 2020.10.30, linked here) where I had originally shown the picture of a resurrected Adonis. And now I show that picture of Phaon again here:

Red-figure hydria. Florence, Museo Archeologico 81947. Line drawing by Jill Robbins. §4. The erotic scene that I have just now shown again, where we see a rejuvenated Phaon enjoying the amorous company of a female beauty while Aphrodite, overhead, is driving her chariot pulled by cupids, is evidently inspired by the songs of Sappho—just like the other erotic scene where we see Adonis being caressed back to life by Aphrodite herself. Again, we have seen it all before, in a previous essay that I have already cited (Nagy 2020.10.30, linked here). But there are dierences, as we read in a most relevant formulation by the art historian Lucilla Burn (1987:41): “The cult of Adonis probably reached the Greek mainland through Cyprus, with islands such as Lesbos helping in the diusion of the cult.” This formulation highlights the intermediacy of Lesbos, homeland of Sappho, in diusing the “cult”—that is, the myths and rituals connected with the gure of Adonis as lover of Aphrodite. And the fact is, as Burn points out (p. 41), that the earliest attestations of the gure of Adonis himself are to be found in the songs of Sappho. But Adonis is not a native son of Sappho’s Lesbos. He is an import from the Near East by way of Cyprus, as Burn has noted in her formulation, and his identity can be traced back from there, all the way back to a most ancient Near Eastern gure, namely, the Mesopotamian (Sumerian / Akkadian) Dumuzi / Tammuz, a youthful male mortal who is every year brought back to life from death by his divine female lover, the goddess Inanna / Ishtar. And here we see a basic dierence between Adonis and Phaon, even though their identities are blended in the songs of Sappho. By contrast with the Near Eastern provenance of the myth about the love of Aphrodite for Adonis, there was a “home-grown” myth about the love of Aphrodite for Phaon, as I showed in an early study (Nagy 1973, cited by Burn 1987:42n88). And while the gure of Adonis was a Near Eastern import of great antiquity, the “home-grown” gure of Phaon, native son of Lesbos, was even older. Phaon can be traced even further back in time, back to a prehistoric Indo-European gure whose divine female lover may not even always have been Aphrodite, whose own Cypriote provenance brings her closer, in any case, to the Near Eastern provenance of Adonis. What is more important for now, however, is the simple fact that the provenance of Adonis was from the very start a “foreign” intrusion into the Greek-speaking world, even if it was mediated by way of a blending with what I have described as the “home-grown” provenance of Phaon, who was a mythological native son, as it were, of Sappho’s homeland, Lesbos.

§5. The mythological identity of Adonis as a “foreign” import from the Near East led to the perception of this gure as more “exotic” by comparison with “home-grown” boy-loves of Aphrodite such as Phaon. And the exoticism of Adonis could all too easily translate into a sense of luxuriance—the kind of ‘luxuriance’ that we see being signaled by the word (h)abrosunē in the celebrated wording of Sappho (Π2 25–26 = Fragment 58.25–26 ed. Voigt, as analyzed in my earlier work, at §§29–31 in Nagy 2019.03.08, linked here).

§6. These considerations lead me now to think about the actual use of the two vases considered so far, both of which are graced with the paintings of the Meidias Painter. As we have seen, the central erotic theme in one of these painted pictures was the resurrection of Adonis by way of sexual arousal through the agency of Aphrodite, and, in the other, it was more simply the rejuvenation of Phaon by Aphrodite. Both of these erotic themes, driven by the sexuality of Aphrodite, involved a sense of luxuriance, as I have argued—especially in the case of Adonis, whose exotic Near Eastern provenance made him seem all the more ‘luxuriant’. But this same kind of ‘luxuriance’, on a mundane level, would have been as expensive as it was chic. In this essay, I propose to connect the worldliness of the materialistic observation I just made by taking a good hard look at the expensiveness of acquiring such vases as painted by the Meidias Painter.

§7. And here I return to a basic fact about both of the vases I have considered so far. These expensive pieces of art were buried in the same tomb, together with the dead body of the person who presumably owned these precious objects. So, what is the connection between these expensive works of art, produced in Athens, and the presumably wealthy Etruscan in North Italy who owned them and was eventually buried with them?

§8. I can ask the same question about less prestigious precious objects, such as the vases produced locally in South Italy many years later, mostly in the fourth and the third centuries BCE—and we would expect that these vases too had been buried with their owners. I have shown an example in a previous essay (my description can be found at §14.1 in Nagy 2020.12.25, linked here): it is a vase graced with a painting that pictures a prole of Aphrodite paired with a magnied wryneck and with a miniaturized rose, that is, with a rosette, and I show the picture again now:: South Italy (Paestum), fourth century BCE. Attributed to Asteas. “Unprovenanced”: details from Turner 2005:75. Drawing by Jill Robbins.

§9. Keeping in mind this example of South Italian art, I now return to the so-called Pagenstecher Lekythoi of South Italy, as I referred to them in another previous essay (at §14.1 in Nagy 2020.12.31, linked here). In the context of that referemce, I quoted a relevant formulation from Michael Turner (2005:66, with extensive bibliography) about these lekythoi: “they were containers for rose oil” (p. 66, following Rolf Hurschmann 1997:7). And now I quote what Turner also says (again, p. 66) about such oil vessels: “they were […] made and decorated for the grave.” Yes, I agree. But I would add that these same lekythoi were originally made for the living. As you were living out your life in your own lifetime, you would surely take delight in the fragrance of the rose-scented oil whenever you poured some of it from those pretty lekythoi and rubbed it into the skin. I am thinking here of those happy times when you were, yes, still very much alive, before you ever went to the grave. If you were, say, an elegant lady, old or young, who loved luxury, you would be scenting yourself on festive occasions with rose perfume that you would pour on your skin from your very own Pagenstecher Lekythos. And you would want to take this beloved Lekythos of yours with you to the grave, when the time comes. After all, who knows? Maybe the rose-scented oil inside the Pagenstecher Lekythos that is buried with you in your tomb could somehow help you come back to life again someday? And there would be the model of Adonis himself. After all, he came back to life after death. Or, to say it another way, Adonis comes back to life every year.

§10. The reverie that I have fancifully reconstructed here depends on a well-known myth about the death and resurrection of Adonis as the boy-love of two rival goddesses, Persephone and Aphrodite. As we read in such sources as the Library of “Apollodorus” (3.14.4 ed. Frazer), Adonis dies every year and then, afterwards, he comes back to life every year, but he is allowed to rejoin in life his loving mistress, Aphrodite, only after spending an allotted span of time in death with his other loving mistress, Persephone, goddess of the dead.

§11. So, what does this well-known myth about the yearly death and resurrection of Adonis have to do with the Pagenstecher Lekythoi? For an answer, we must consider again the ower that gives its overpowering scent to the oil contained in these lekythoi. That ower is the rose. And the rose is the answer to our question, since it is so intimately connected with Adonis. As we read in the poem Lament for Adonis, by Bion of Smyrna (second / rst century BCE), the very rst rose that ever blossomed in this world had originated from the blood of Adonis—after a mighty boar that he was hunting gored him in the thigh with his tusk, so that the boy bled to death. We read about it at lines 64–66 of the Lament.

§12. But there is more to it. The blood of Adonis is connected to the love of Aphrodite. I focus here on a detail in the Lament of Bion, at lines 6–14. We read here that blood was pumping out of the gash in the thigh of Adonis before the moment of his death, but it stopped owing when that moment nally arrived, and now the blood was drained even from his rosy lips when, at the very moment of death, Aphrodite kissed those lips of his for the last time—or, as we are about to see, maybe not at all for the last time ever. Here are the lines from the Lament of Bion, 6–14, followed by my working translation:

αἰάζω τὸν Ἄδωνιν· ἐπαιάζουσιν Ἔρωτες. | κεῖται καλὸς Ἄδωνις ἐν ὤρεσι μηρὸν ὀδόντι, | λευκῷ λευκὸν ὀδόντι τυπείς, καὶ Κύπριν ἀνιῇ | λεπτὸν ἀποψύχων· τὸ δέ οἱ μέλαν εἴβεται αἷμα | {10} χιονέας κατὰ σαρκός, ὑπ’ ὀφρύσι δ’ ὄμματα ναρκῇ, | καὶ τὸ ῥόδον φεύγει τῶ χείλεος· ἀμφὶ δὲ τήνῳ |θνᾴσκει καὶ τὸ φίλημα, τὸ μήποτε Κύπρις ἀποίσει. | Κύπριδι μὲν τὸ φίλημα καὶ οὐ ζώοντος ἀρέσκει,| ἀλλ’ οὐκ οἶδεν Ἄδωνις ὅ νιν θνᾴσκοντ’ ἐφίλησεν. I cry aiai—I make this lamenting cry for Adonis. And lamenting in response are the Cupids [Erōtes]. | [He lies there, dead,] the beautiful Adonis is lying there. In the mountains—his thigh, the [boar’s] tusk—|the gleaming-white tusk had struck his gleaming-white thigh, and, for Aphrodite, he [now] makes-passionate-pain [aniân] for her [to feel], | as he oh-so-delicately [leptón] breathes-out-his-breath-of-life, and, with his dark blood running down |{10} his snowy esh, his eyes, as they look up from under his brow, are-glazing-over [narkân]. | Now the rose [rhodon] escapes from his lip, and on that lip |dies also the kiss that Aphrodite will maybe-never [mē-pote] carry-o-as-a-prize. | For Aphrodite the kiss—even though he is now not alive—gives delight, | but he does not know, Adonis does not, that she, as he dies, has just kissed him.

(At the last line, I prefer the manuscript reading θνᾴσκοντ’ ἐφίλησεν, not the emendation θνᾴσκοντα φίλησεν, since the augmented form conveys, in imitation of Homeric diction, I think, a perfective side-meaning for the aorist: ‘has judt kissed’ not simply ‘kissed’.)

§13. These lines from the Lament for Adonis by Bion are quoted by Michael Turner (2005:68, where he uses the edition and the accompanying translation of Bion by J. D. Reed 1997). According to Turner (p. 68n67, following Reed p. 201), the blood of Adonis at line 11 of the Lament by Bion is a rhodon ‘rose’ simply because the lips of Adonis once had a rosy color— before the blood was drained out of them by death. While I agree that the poetry of Bion has metaphorized here the mythological idea that the blood of Adonis was transformed into the very rst rose that ever blossomed in our world, I still prefer to interpret the rose at line 11 of Bion as mythologically the same “real” blood that was “really” circulating in the body of Adonis until it got drained out, even from his lips, through the open wound of the gash inicted by the boar’s tusk. My interpretation is supported, I think, by the existence of variant myths about the death of Adonis, where the blood that ows from the open wound of this boy-love of Aphrodite is transformed not into a rose, which is what we read at line 66 of the Lament by Bion, but into other owers, such as the anemone or ‘wind-ower’ in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 10.728–739 (extensive documentation of the primary sources by Reed 1997:233).

§14. And there also existed, I think, a variant myth where the blood of Adonis was transformed into the ower of a myrtle-tree. In this case, although we have no direct evidence, the indirect evidence is of great antiquity. I start with a report by Pausanias (6.24.6-7), analyzed in my previous essay (Nagy 2020.12:31, linked here), about the connections of Aphrodite and Adonis, as a pair, with myrtles as well as roses. As Pausanias says, the statues of the Kharites or ‘Graces’ that he sees in the agora of the people of Elis are linked with roses and myrtles, since one of the three ‘Graces’ is represented as holding a rose while another of the three is holding a spray of myrtle. In the case of the mursínē or ‘myrtle’, as Pausanias calls it, I nd it signicant that the word kháris itself, which applies generically in this context to one of the three ‘Graces’, can apply in other contexts specically to the ower of the myrtle-tree. I quote from the Scholia D (via Scholia A) for Iliad 17.51: Μακεδόνες δὲ καὶ Κύπριοι χάριτας λέγουσι τὰς συνεστραμμένας καὶ οὔλας μυρσίνας, ἃς φαμὲν στεφανίτιδας ‘Macedonians and Cypriotes use the word kharites [= plural of kharis] with reference to myrtle blossoms that are compacted and curled [around a garland]. We call them garland- blossoms [stephanitides]’ (from my MoM 4§§144–146; further comments in HPC II§424 pp. 295–296). Such a specic use of plural kharites in referring to myrtle blossoms is attested already in the Homeric Iliad (as I argued in HPC II§424 pp. 295–296). In the Iliad, 17.51–52, where the death of the hero Euphorbos is described, we see droplets of blood that grace the disheveled hair of the dead hero, lying in the dust, and these droplets are actually compared by way of simile to kharites, which in this context seem to be referring to red blossoms of myrtles: αἵματί οἱ δεύοντο κόμαι χαρίτεσσιν ὁμοῖαι | πλοχμοί θ’. Here is my translation: ‘with blood bedewed were his locks of hair, looking like kharites, | with the curls and all’ (commentary in HPC II§425 p. 296n80, where I analyze a modulation from red to white coloring in the complex simile of Iliad 17.51–59, where the graphic description extends from lines 51–52, focusing on the red color of myrtle blossoms, to lines 53–59, focusing on the white color of olive blossoms).

§15. Coming back to the death of Adonis as described by Bion in the Lament, lines 6–14, I must add now a further observation: the loss of blood from the lips of Adonis at the moment of his death comes not only from the open wound in his thigh. When the circulation of blood in the boy’s lips is stopped cold at the moment of his death, something else has just happened at that same moment: Adonis has just now been kissed on the lips by Aphrodite. In terms of the mythological realism in play here, is as if the kiss of the goddess could suck out the circulation of blood from the lips of the boy she has just kissed. But the realism has a happy as well as a sad side, since Adonis can have his life-blood restored when he is kissed again by Aphrodite, come springtime. Or, if you are reading Bion, you can experience such a restoration simply by reading his poetry, without even having to wait for springtime. §16. In the Lament by Bion, the story about the death and resurrection of Adonis is on hold at the point where the boy-love of Aphrodite dies, right after having been kissed on the lips by the goddess, but the myth lives on, since the ritualized yearly death of Adonis will be followed by a correspondingly ritualized yearly resurrection, which in turn will make the kiss of Aphrodite on the lips of Adonis come alive, just as Adonis himself will come alive. And those lips, kissed by Aphrodite at the moment of his death, will now exude not blood but the primal essence of roses—the kinds of roses that become the ingredients of the perfume to be rubbed into your skin after you pour over your body the precious scented oil that you store inside such delicately decorated little vases as the Pagenstecher Lekythoi.

Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), Venus, Adonis, and Cupid. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640 ), Venus and Adonis. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 37.162; gift of Harry Payne Bingham, 1937. Image via The Met’s Open Access program.

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Nagy, G. 1996. Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond. Cambridge. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- 3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Poetry_as_Performance.1996.

Nagy, G. 2002. Plato’s Rhapsody and Homer’s Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens. Cambridge, MA, and Athens. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- 3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Platos_Rhapsody_and_Homers_Music.2002.

Nagy, G. 2007. “Did Sappho and Alcaeus ever meet?” Literatur und Religion I. Wege zu einer mythisch–rituellen Poetik bei den Griechen (ed. A. Bierl, R. Lämmle, and K. Wesselmann; Basiliensia – MythosEikonPoiesis, vol. 1.1), 211–269. Berlin / New York. Second edition 2009 online at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- 3:hlnc.essay:Nagy.Did_Sappho_and_Alcaeus_Ever_Meet.2007.

Nagy, G. 2009|2008. Homer the Classic. Printed | Online version. Hellenic Studies 36. Cambridge, MA, and Washington, DC. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- 3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Homer_the_Classic.2008.

Nagy, G. 2010|2009. Homer the Preclassic. Printed | Online version. Berkeley and Los Angeles. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Homer_the_Preclassic.2009.

Nagy, G. 2013. The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours. Cambridge, MA. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- 3:hul.ebook:CHS_NagyG.The_Ancient_Greek_Hero_in_24_Hours.2013. Nagy, G. 2015.11.05. “Once again this time in Song 1 of Sappho.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/once-again-this-time-in-song-1-of-sappho/.

Nagy, G. 2016|2015. Masterpieces of Metonymy: From Ancient Greek Times to Now. Printed | Online version. Hellenic Studies 72. Cambridge, MA and Washington, DC. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- 3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Masterpieces_of_Metonymy.2015.

Nagy, G. 2018.12.06. “Previewing an essay on the shaping of the Lyric Canon in Athens.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/previewing-an-essay-on- the-shaping-of-the-lyric-canon-in-athens/.

Nagy, G. 2019. “On the shaping of the Lyric Canon in Athens.” In The Reception of Greek Lyric Poetry in the Ancient World: Transmission, Canonization and Paratext (ed. B. Currie and I. Rutherford), 95–111. Studies in Archaic and Classical Greek Song, Vol. 5. Leiden.

Nagy, G. 2019.03.08. “A scenario for exchanges of comments on a planned monograph about the ancient reception of Sappho.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical- inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/a-scenario-for-exchanges-of-comments-on-a-planned- monograph-about-the-ancient-reception-of-sappho/.

PR. See Nagy 2002, 2nd ed. 2020.

Nagy, G. 2020. 2nd ed. of Nagy 2002. Plato’s Rhapsody and Homer’s Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- 3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Platos_Rhapsody_and_Homers_Music.2020.

Nagy, G. 2020.10.30. “Looking for references to Sappho’s songs in Athenian vase paintings: preliminary comments.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical- inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/looking-for-references-to-sapphos-songs-in-athenian-vase- paintings-preliminary-comments/.

Nagy, G. 2020.11.06. “On the reception of Sappho as a personal experience to be expressed in pictures: examples from two vase paintings produced in classical Athens, fth century BCE.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/on-the-reception-of- sappho-as-a-personal-experience-to-be-expressed-in-pictures-examples-from-two- vase-paintings-produced-in-classical-athens-fifth-century-bce/.

Nagy, G. 2020.11.13. “Some narrowings and some widenings of perspectives for viewing the reception of Sappho in the ancient world.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical- inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/some-narrowings-and-some-widenings-of-perspectives-for- viewing-the-reception-of-sappho-in-the-ancient-world/.

Nagy, G. 2020.11.20. “Thinking of desiderata while tracing the reception of Sappho in the ancient world.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking-of- desiderata-while-tracing-the-reception-of-sappho-in-the-ancient-world/.

Nagy, G. 2020.11.27. “Thinking of further desiderata while tracing the reception of Sappho in the ancient world.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thinking- of-further-desiderata-while-tracing-the-reception-of-sappho-in-the-ancient-world/.

Nagy, G. 2020.12.04. “A sweet bird for the songs of Sappho.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/a-sweet-bird-for-the-songs-of-sappho/.

Nagy, G. 2020.12.18. “From the heavenly to the earthy and back, variations on a theme of love-on-wings in Song 1 of Sappho and elsewhere.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical- inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/from-the-heavenly-to-the-earthy-and-back-variations-on-a- theme-of-love-on-wings-in-song-1-of-sappho-and-elsewhere/.

Nagy, G. 2020.12.25. “Back and forth from general to special kinds of erotic love, further variations on a theme of love-on-wings in Song 1 of Sappho and elsewhere.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/from-the-specific-to-the-general- and-back-further-variations-on-a-theme-of-love-on-wings-in-song-1-of-sappho- and-elsewhere/.

Nelson, M. 2000. “A Note on the ὄλισβος.” Glotta 76:75–82.

PP. See Nagy 1996.

Pagenstecher, R. 1912. “Schwarzgurige Vasen des vierten und dritten Jahrhunderts.” Bulletin de la Société [royale] d’Archéologie d’Alexandrie 14:229–235. Petropoulos, J. B. 1993. “Sappho the Sorceress—Another Look at fr. 1 (LP).” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 97:43–56.

Reed, J. D. 1997, ed., with introduction and commentary. Bion of Smyrna: The Fragments and the Adonis. Cambridge.

Reitzammer, L. 2016. The Athenian Adonia in Context: The Adonis Festival as Cultural Practice. Madison.

Shelmerdine, C. W. 1985. The Perfume Industry of Mycenaean Pylos. Göteborg.

Sommerstein, A. H., ed. and trans. ed. 2. 1998. Reprint with addenda and updated bibliography 2007. The Comedies of Aristophanes, 7: Lysistrata. Liverpool.

Stocker, A. F., and Travis, H. T., eds. 1965. Servianorum in Vergilii carmina commentariorum editionis Harvardianae Volumen III. Oxford.

Thomas, R. F. 1993. “Sparrows, Hares, and Doves: A Catullan Metaphor and its Tradition.” Helios 20:131–142.

Turner, M. 2005. “Aphrodite and her birds: The iconology of the Pagenstecher Lekythoi.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 48:57–96.

Wray, D. 2001. Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood. Cambridge.

By Gregory Nagy

Adonis, Aphrodite, Meidias Painter, Phaon, Sappho