Eros, Again: Sappho and Archaic Lyric

Legend has it that Solon — the wise statesman who established, in the sixth century BCE, the foundations of Athenian democracy, and a poet himself — was once at a symposium (an aristocratic male drinking party) when he heard his nephew sing a poem by Sappho. Dumbstruck by the intensity of the poem’s feeling 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 celebrated seventh-century BCE poet from the island of Lesbos, is one of a small group of archaic poets whose work has survived to our day. In the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, as the Mediterranean world was emerging from the long social and environmental crisis of the Bronze Age, the peoples who would come to call themselves “Hellenes” were organizing themselves into poleis (city-states) and adopting and adapting the Phoenician alphabet and metal coinage. During this period, there was an intense flowering of poetic activity on the Hellenic coast of Anatolia (modern Turkey) and the islands off its shore. Composed to be publicly performed with musical accompaniment — the lyre, the cithara, or the aulos — they were in their own time simply called “songs.” Being written down allowed them to circulate widely and survive the gradual transformation of an oral culture into a predominantly literate one.

Unfortunately, what survives are mostly tiny fragments of a handful of poets who had already achieved canonical status in antiquity. The rolls that originally contained these poems are lost, but the fragments remain because they were quoted by later authors in works we do possess — and because chance and scholarship have allowed us to recover additional lines from scraps of papyrus preserved by the North African desert, or from verses inscribed on broken pieces of pottery (ostraka). Even in this frustratingly fragmentary form — perhaps even intensified by it — the beauty of the poetry is astonishing.

In this course, we will allow ourselves to be emotionally affected by that beauty, while also approaching the fragments critically. We will read a selection of the surviving archaic Greek poems, focusing especially on those 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 these poems, what little we know about the historical circumstances of their authors and cities, and the poetic traditions out of which they emerged (the Homeric tradition, but also the musical traditions of the East). Along the way, we will grapple with questions 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 strike “again”? How does Eros trouble or produce the gender of the speaker? Are these poems earnest expressions of physical and emotional longing, or are they performances of erotic desire — a form of social presentation and identity? Who is seized by Eros, and who becomes the object of another’s passion? And how is that distribution of agency to be understood?