Sappho's Roses: Audience and Memory

William Tortorelli (Northwestern University)

The question of the addressee of Sappho 55 is more than a mere curiosity.  In these four lines the poet warns a female addressee that she will be forgotten for all time, a shadowy, unknown wanderer of Hades.  The reason for this warning is unclear, but this is not entirely due to the fragmentary state of the poem.  Plutarch's reading of Sappho 55 is taken as evidence against the correct understanding of the poem.  I shall offer new parallels for reading the fragment as a threat of poetic immortality withheld, presumably from a non-complying lover.  I shall then discuss the implications of this reading for our understanding of archaic appeals to memory and to the various audiences participating in the reception of archaic poetry.

Plutarch twice quotes the first two and a half lines, claiming once that they were addressed to a wealthy woman, pros tina plousian, and once that they were addressed to an uneducated woman, pros tina tōn amousōn kai amathōn gunaikōn.  This depiction of a catty barb aimed at a poetic rival is the most commonly accepted interpretation of the lines.  Two scholars mention in passing the possibility of an erotic message [Gow 1965 and Young 1968].  I shall demonstrate the likelihood of the erotic message, a threat of withholding the eternal fame awarded to compliant lovers, adducing parallels in fragments of Ibycus and Euripides and in poems of Pindar, Theocritus, and Propertius.

This reading has wide implications for scholarship on archaic Greek lyric. Few topics in ancient literature are debated as hotly as that of Sappho's audience and her relationship to its members.  She is variously described as a homosexual (gunaikerastria), a cult leader, a choregos, and/or a schoolmistress.  Ancient testimonia are flawed in several obvious ways, the most significant of which are their taking as historical fact stories culled from Attic comedy and their credulous assumption of biographical details from Sappho's fractured corpus.  These depictions of Sappho are disputed with political furor and often with little recourse to evidence or its lack.  Two provocative studies [Parker 1993 and Lardinois 1994] dismiss the more egregious of the theories and attempt to place Sappho in her performative context.  This has brought the specific debate about Sappho into the more general debate about the performance of archaic poetry.  The archaic poets are usually relegated to limited performance in symposia comprising their social equals.  This context is incompatible with the archaic poets' own statements about their audiences.

The key to this debate is in the theme of memory.  Sappho gives us a clue when she writes of a future in which she will be remembered.  Theognis envisions the same kind of fame, not just in the future, but throughout the contemporary Panhellenic community.  The extended audience these poets have in mind becomes part of the audience for which they compose, whatever the constitution of their audiences within their poleis.  I shall suggest how the field of Theater Studies can provides a good theoretical perspective on the plurality of audiences involved in the production of archaic poetry [cf. Jahn 2003].