Eros, Again: Sappho and Archaic Lyric

Legend has it that Solon, the wise politician that established, in the 6th century BCE, the bases for the development of Athenian democracy, and a poet himself, was once at a symposium (an aristocratic male party) when he heard his nephew sing a poem by Sappho. Dumbstruck by the intensity of the poem’s feelings and beauty, the old man asked the singer: Could you please teach me that song, so I can learn it, and then die? Sappho, the famous 7th c. BCE female poet from the island of Lesbos, is one of a relatively small group of archaic poets whose poems have survived, albeit in fragmentary form, to our days. In the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, when the Mediterranean, East and West, was emerging from the long social and environmental crisis of the Bronze Age and the peoples who would later come to call themselves “Hellenes” had recently organized themselves in poleis (city-states), and adopted and adapted the Phoenician Alphabet and metal coin, there was an intense poetic activity on the Hellenic coast of Anatolia (modern Turkey) and the islands off of it. We know about it because they, or others, put those poems in writing. The poems were meant to be publicly performed accompanied by musical instruments (the lyre, the cithara, or the aulos), and were thus called “songs”. The fact that they were written down allowed them to circulate vastly and survive the gradual transformation of an oral culture into a primarily writing culture. Unfortunately, what survives to our days are mostly tiny fragments of a handful of authors that already in antiquity had acquired canonical status. The rolls that originally contained the poems are lost, but the fragments survive because they were quoted by other authors in works that we do have, and because chance and knowledge have allowed us to identify some lines either in random pieces of papyri that the North African desert has preserved or inscribed in fractured pieces of ceramics (ostraka). Even in this frustratingly fragmentary form, and perhaps even intensified by it, the beauty of the poetry is astonishing.

In this course, we will allow ourselves to be emotionally affected by the beauty of poetry, but we will also approach the fragments critically. We will read a selection of the surviving fragments of archaic Greek poetry, focusing especially on those poems that revolve around Eros, the divinity of intense desire, its recurrent nature and the disturbing effects it has on its victims. We will consider the original performative context of the poems, what little we know about the historical circumstances of the authors and their cities, and the poetic traditions in which these poems came into existence (the Homeric tradition, but also musical traditions of the “East”), and we will grapple with matters of poetics, gender, and class: What is Eros and what language is used to express it? What is the relation between Eros and music? How does Eros affect the mind and body of the speaker? If Eros is, as it is almost always presented, so utterly destructive, why does it happen “again”? How does Eros trouble or produce the gender of the speaker? Are these poems earnest expressions of physical and emotional longing of the speaker or are they only a performance of erotic desire, a form of social presentation and identity marker? Who is affected by Eros and who is the object of another’s erotic passion? And how is that agency or lack thereof to be understood? As a primary text, we will use the volumes 1, 2, and 3 of the Loeb Library’s Greek Lyric, edited and translated by David Campbell, occasionally using in addition other translations (including my own, when it feels necessary).