sappho

• Dover - says in Loeb 1 Sappho is talking about herself in the use of 'I'
• Higgins - Sappho not only takes on Homer but subverts him
• Higgins - “Intensely sensuous, pictorial, sometimes synaesthesic nature of her descriptions”
• Reynolds - Says Sappho 31 ('He is as blessed as a god') could be read as an elaborate compliment to the bridegroom who has just acquired a desirable bride.
• Winkler - “Because men define and exhibit their language and manners as THE culture and segregate women’s language and manners as a subculture, [...] women are in the position of knowing two cultures where men only know one.”

  “Sappho’s consciousness therefore is necessarily a double consciousness.”
• Karanika - “Sappho deeply communicates the female anxiety towards marriage, marriage that did not operate on any romantic terms that we see today.”
• Kubic - goes against Karanika, says that Sappho's discussion of marriage is "optimistic in tone"
• Ilkay - The young girls who leave Lesbos all echo Helen’s act of abandonment
• Hall - Sappho’s homoerotic stance, in the ancient setting was unremarkable
• Gubar - Sappho epitomises all the lost genius in literary history, especially all the lesbian artists, whose work has been destroyed, sanitised or heterosexualized.
• Longinus - saw Sappho 31 as the perfect example of how to write about desire
• Ormand/Greene/Stehle - Women’s desire is less hierarchical than men’s, it is about the shared experience of desire, not power - “mutual pleasure and desire”
• Ormand - Sappho’s poetry is about past pleasures and present suffering.
• Aziz - “Sappho makes it clear that love is truly based on feelings and emotions"
• Wilson - Her work is universal not because she invites us in but because she relates the experience of exclusion
• Tatian - Sappho was a nymphomaniac
• Lidov - on Sappho 15, doubts that the story that Sappho’s brother Charaxos is in this relationship with Doricha (an Egyptian sex worker), argues it is simply an Athenian interpretation
• Plato - Described Sappho as the 10th Muse
• Now - “Every generation invents its own Sappho”
• Calame - Sappho set up a thiasos for women preparing for marriage, having both an erotic and teacher-student relationship
• Ormand - Sappho as school mistress, her inclination for sex with young women as part of an initiation rite/her duty (like Calame)
• Ormand - Sappho almost never discussing pleasure in the present
• Hallett - models an appropriate response to female beauty -> how men should feel when seeing young virgins. Consumerist approach - working on commission, no depth of feeling
• Dover - Sappho's poems address women in the language used by the male erastai to the eronmenoi
• Snyder - argues against Hallett's consumerist approach - poetry is female centric and treats homoeroticism as normal, natural and valued
• Page - There is no evidence she ever acted on her homosexual inclinations
• Parker - challenges Sappho as school mistress, more closely resembling hetaria of symposia