Nossis was a female poet of the Greek Hellenistic period (approximately 2 centuries after Sappho), 11 of whose poems have survived. This article discusses how her work reflects a self-conscious identity specifically as a female poet and as one who sees herself as following in the tradition of Sappho.
Sappho
6th century BCE Greek poet whose work implies erotic relations with women and whose name and home island of Lesbos have become standard references to love between women.
LHMP entry
Rather than investigating the original context of Sappho’s life and work, this article reviews the chronology of popular understandings and theories about that topic. The chronology jumps around a little in the article so bear with me. [Note: Also, I think the chronology misses some elements.]
Lardinois (who several years earlier wrote an excellent article digging into the actual known facts about Sappho’s life, and their likely interpretation – Lardinois 1989) examines the evidence for the context in which Sappho’s poetry was performed and the likely composition of her audience.
I probably should have been clued in to the angle of Devereux’s article by the word “inversion” in the title. This article is a modern psychoanalysis of Sappho fragment 31 (“He is like a god to me”), interpreting the emotional and physical reactions described in the poem as indicating, not romantic desire or even jealousy, but an anxiety attack triggered by Sappho’s recognition of her “abnormal” and “deviant” homosexual desires and her consequent shame at experiencing them.
I’m now going to walk back my claim that Downing 1989 had no relevant content, because Downing 1994 is a slight re-working of several chapters in that book, mostly restricting itself to laying out the mythological and historic material that she analyzed in the earlier publication. In this article, she omits the psychoanalysis and focuses on the texts, interpreting them in the context of a broadly-defined “woman-centered-woman” definition of “lesbian.”
The poem by Sappho identified as “fragment 1,” which isn’t a fragment but the only surviving complete poem, is also the one where Sappho as a woman-desiring-woman is most overt. This is not only because she names herself within the poem, but also because it is specifically about asking divine help to attract the love of another woman.
This article is not particularly relevant, as it presents an overview of the structure of sexual relations from an elite male point of view. There is discussion of the social construction of sexual systems, with some odd anecdotal parallels from more modern cultures. There is a brief discussion of how to understand Sappho’s biography and work within this context (including a perhaps unwarranted assumption that social structures in Lesbos were identical to those in Athens).
Bremmer presents some anecdotal, cross-cultural evidence for classical Greek pederasty having structural similarities to some generational-initiation ceremonies or systems in “primitive” cultures, positing that it is, perhaps, a relic of a more widespread Indo-European practice. The body of the article is focused exclusively on male relations, however a very brief appendix reviews three brief references to a possible female parallel in Sparta that could expand understanding of the context of Sappho’s love poetry. The references are:
A great deal of this article isn’t directly of interest, so much will be glossed over. The “proverbs” in question are various Greek adages in reference to people from Lesbos that mostly are not in reference to female same-sex relations. [Note: I’ve seen some arguments that some of the interpretations are more ambiguous that indicated here, but I’ll stick to summarizing what’s in this article.]
The central topic of this article is “femme invisibility” when researching queer women’s lives in archival material. The difficulty in identifying and researching historic persons who “read straight” due to conforming to gender expectations is paralleled by the author’s experiences as a femme (i.e., straight-passing) queer woman who repeatedly found herself calculating the risks of coming out to archival personnel who could potentially gate-keep access to material based on attitudes toward the type of research being done.
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