THE FORTUNES OF SAPPHO in later antiquity resolved themselves into two parallel but distinct strands, according to which she was either a poet of mythical powers or a sexual deviant. In this chapter and the next I take these two images in turn and consider each in the context of Sappho's own time. The main question inspiring this chapter arises from her representation as a Muse: goddesses aside, what were the circumstances in which a real woman could compose poetry in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE?

It is clear that there was already a strong tradition of poetic composition on the island of Lesbos. A line by Sappho herself boasts of how superior Lesbian singers were to those from other lands (106), and both history and myth seem to bear her out, Lesbos' unique association with poetry is represented in myth by the story of the poet Orpheus, whose severed head was thrown into a river by the women who had killed him; eventually, still singing, it floated over the sea to Lesbos and was buried there. The distinguished singers the island produced in historical times include Sappho's male contemporary Alcaeus, as well as two others thought to have lived earlier in the seventh century BCE. Terpander was credited with the invention of the drinking song, as well as with increasing the number of lyre strings from four to seven; later in the century came Arion, who was said to have been the first composer of the dithyramb, a type of song performed by a chorus. Arion was also famous for having been miraculously rescued from death, in a story recounted by Herodotus in the fifth century BCE (1.23). When the crew of a ship on which he was traveling to Corinth decided to steal his money and drown him, Arion asked to be allowed to sing one last song. "Delighted at the prospect of hearing a song from the world's most famous singer," the murderous sailors agreed, and Arion, arrayed in his singer's robes, stood on deck and sang, accompanying himself on the lyre. As soon as the song was over he jumped into the sea, but a dolphin carried him safely back to land on its back. The story illustrates not only the international celebrity status that poets might acquire, but also their semi magical powers: like prophets, they all had something of the divine about them.

But all these poets are men. Though tradition has preserved the names of a few female poets from early Greece, almost nothing is known of them or their work, and none apart from Sappho is connected with Lesbos. Helena, Manto, and Phantasia, said to have been precursors even of Homer, are shadowy figures whose names are linked with those of other figures from myth. In the later archaic period, Megalostrata of Sparta can at least be related to a known historical person, the poet Alcman, but only through a story of the familiar type concerning his love for her. None of this is of any help in understanding the real conditions of poetic composition by women.

There are a number of other reasons why this question cannot be approached directly. As these stories show, poetry in the archaic period was primarily a performance art, and figures like Sappho were more like the singer-songwriters of today than the poets. Since their work always required an audience, the situations for which they wrote were all to some extent public. The question of how Sappho came to be a poet, then, leads to wider questions about the social life and structures of her time, especially those involving women.

The trouble is that, for the time and place we are dealing with, such questions are extremely difficult to answer. The sources for any history of the Greek world in Sappho's lifetime are notoriously sparse: for her native island of Lesbos, her own poetry and that of Alcaeus are the most substantial we have. Even when we move on to the classical period and to the much better-documented city of Athens, there is still little of the kind of information on which modern social history is based: we have, for example, no statistical information and no private documents such as letters or diaries. And despite the fact that records for classical Athens are better than for anywhere else in the period, not a single female poet is recorded as having composed there.

Thus I have been forced to look well beyond Sappho's own time and place in the search for material with which to make sense of her role as woman and poet. Some of my discussion depends partly on written sources from many centuries after her lifetime, even from as late as the Byzantine period; the Suda entry from the tenth century helps to illustrate the biases and omissions that can arise. A redeeming factor here, though, is that historians have been able to consider these sources alongside other kinds of material, especially archeological findings.

We also find ourselves often faced with images rather than realities. Much of the source material dating from Sappho's time or thereabouts is either literary or artistic: the Homeric poems, say, or representations of women on vases. Neither can be looked to in any simple way for information about real life. Both are produced for particular kinds of occasion and audience, which largely dictate their content, and both deal in idealized images, within artistic traditions that do not pretend to be realistic. The Homeric poems create a world in which ships are swift, the sea wine-dark, and every dawn rosy-fingered. The fact that in this world women are often described as white-armed says little about real women's lives, and far more about what was expected of women (some at least) in the culture.

But culturally determined perceptions of this kind can still help to provide a context both for Sappho's role and for the poetic traditions of her time.Bearing these limitations in mind, I begin with a brief account of Lesbos in the archaic period.

Archaic Lesbos

By far the largest of the Aegean islands (with an area of some 630 square miles), Lesbos in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE was situated on the eastern fringes of the Greek-speaking world. About 100 miles away to the west and southwest was the coast of mainland Greece; immediately to the north and east lay Anatolia (Turkey), dominated by the non-Greek kingdom of Lydia; to the south were the Ionian Greek islands and coastal cities such as Ephesus and Miletus.

Some aspects of the life and culture of Lesbos at this time, the style of its wall-building for example, were unique to the island. But it was also part of a much wider network. Its closest neighbors, both geographically and culturally, were the small Greek settlements on the nearby Anatolian coast, many of them dependencies of Lesbian cities. There were also connections with mainland Greece. Tradition had it that Lesbos' original colonizers came from northern Greece, and the Aeolic dialect spoken in both places showed the affinity. During Sappho's lifetime there was also conflict with mainland Greece, when a Lesbian army fought Athenian settlers for possession of Sigeum, a key site on the shipping route to the Black Sea. And the island had cultural and political interests in common with the Ionian Greeks to the south, as well as links with non-Greek areas farther afield.

The period was one of great change, and Greek cities were being forced to expand their horizons. For reasons not fully understood, many Greek cities were sending out expeditions to colonize non-Greek areas and to establish Greek cities, some times as far away as modern Spain or France (Marseilles, then called Massilia, was one such colony). This activity was in full swing in Sappho's lifetime, and though not one of the foremost colonizers, Lesbos too was part of it, helping to found a new city to the north in Thrace and others closer to home.

At the same time, there was an expansion of trading activity, in which Lesbos once again played a part. By the end of the seventh century, trade with Egypt had grown sufficiently to warrant the establishment of a Greek trading post in the Nile delta, called Naucratis (which like Oxyrhynchus was a site of excavation in the nineteenth century, though the discoveries were of pottery and inscriptions, not papyrus). According to Herodotus, Sappho's own brother was among those who traveled to Egypt (2.135), and a later source, Strabo, adds the information that he was exporting wine to Naucratis (202). Another important center lay to the east: the aggressively expansionist kingdom of Lydia, as well as intermittently coming into conflict with Greek settlements, also traded with them. Linked to the spread of trade is the use of coinage, thought to have been invented in Lydia in or near Sappho's lifetime.

Internal changes were also taking place in Greek cities. The basic political unit of the time was the polis, an independent community based on a relatively small area of agricultural land and with an urban center: Athens, with its surrounding territory of Attica, later became the most famous example, though its size makes it untypical.On Lesbos the most powerful polis was Mytilene, one of the two cities later reputed to be Sappho's birthplace, which for generations had been ruled by the Penthilidai, a dynasty tracing its descent from the legendary Penthilus, son of Orestes. But in this climate of economic and social change, the supremacy of the established aristocracy was being challenged throughout the Greek world, and Mytilene was no exception.

Sappho's lifetime coincided with one of the city's most turbulent periods, whose details are reconstructed mainly through the poetry of Alcaeus. The overthrow of the Penthilidai was followed by a power struggle between several aristocratic families; and, as in other cities, there was a rapid succession of tyrants (meaning, here, non-legitimate rulers) drawn from these families. The involvement of Alcaeus' family began, as far as we know, when his two brothers joined with another aristocrat, Pittacus, to oust the tyrant Melanchrous. Alcaeus himself later conspired with Pittacus against another tyrant, Myrsilus. But Pittacus betrayed his oath and changed sides, and Alcaeus was forced into exile, railing bitterly against his former ally. Alcaeus remained on the losing side when, after Myrsilus' death, Pittacus himself came to power. It is a sign of the changing times that he did so not only with the support of a few aristocratic conspirators, but by the will of the wider populace, who are said to have elected him for a ten-year period.

Much of Alcaeus' poetry is concerned with this aristocratic plotting an counterplotting, and Sappho too must have been affected by it. It is certain that she came from an aristocratic family herself, and an inscription on marble from the island of Paros records that she fled from Mytilene to Sicily some time between 605 and 590 BCE; the reason is not stated, but was probably political. Yet political preoccupations do not take the same form in her poetry as in Alcaeus'. In order to see why, we need to look at the occasions for which poetry was composed.

Poetry and Performance

Poetry in early Greece was very different from what goes under that name today, most obviously because it was composed not to be read but to be heard. It was a branch not of literature but of music, or mousiki (the art of the Muses), which included instrumental playing, dance, and song. The occasions on which music might be called for embraced all aspects and stages of life.

Many such occasions are described in the earliest works of Greek literature known to us, the Homeric epics; perhaps not surprisingly, it is the performance of epic poetry itself that ap pears most often. Two separate stages of Odysseus' wanderings include accounts of the singing of bards. When he arrives in the land of the Phaeacians, their king Alcinous welcomes him with a feast. As part of the preparations, the bard Demodocus is summoned, and after the meal he sings to the assembled com pany: "the Muse ' roused the singer to sing the praises of men, a lay whose fame reached to the broad heaven, the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles" (Odyssey 8.73-5, tr. Barker). Demodocus' song could be an extract from the kind of poem within which he himself figures. Like the epic poet, he sings of the heroic deeds of those who fought at Troy, and he too is regarded as divinely inspired. Later in the Odyssey we meet another bard, Phemius, who is described in similar terms. The epic tradition probably goes back to these tales of heroic glory sung at feasts by professional singers.

Other kinds of music making appear in the epics, linked with particular occasions such as weddings and funerals. In book 18 of the Iliad the blacksmith god Hephaestus forges for Achilles a new shield on which are represented scenes from everyday life, described in loving detail by the poet. One shows wedding processions, with brides being escorted through the streets to their new husbands' homes. Song, instrumental music, and dance are all involved:

they were leading the brides from their houses through the town with blazing torches, and a loud wedding song rose up. Young men whirled in the dance, while among them auloi [pipes] and phorminges [lyres] gave forth their voice; and the women stood in the doorway admiring the sight. (Iliad 18.492-496, tr. Barker).

The Odyssey includes a brief glimpse of another stage of marriage, the wedding party. On his return home, Odysseus kills his wife's suitors and, in order to cover up the mayhem that follows, gives orders for a fake wedding party. This time the bard takes the lead, but his task here is not just to entertain a listening audience: it is to play his lyre and sing while leading the entire company in a dance, so that "the great house resounded to the feet of the merrily dancing men and the beautifully dressed women" (23.146-147).

Funerals also involve both specialist musicians and others. The last book of the Iliad describes the Trojans' mourning for Hector, led first by professional male singers and then by, in turn, Hector's wife, mother, and sister-in-law. Each sings an individual lament, which is answered by all the other women; and at the climax all the "countless people" moan in response (24.776).

Many other less formal occasions include song and dance. Addresses to the gods, whether planned or spontaneous, are sung: the Greeks sing paeans to Apollo both to ask for deliverance from plague and, later, in thanks for victory over Hector. The shield of Achilles shows other peacetime scenes involving music, such as a harvest scene in which youths and maidens carry baskets of grapes. As the work proceeds, a boy in their midst plays the lyre and sings a traditional lament for the mythical figure of Linus; others follow him, stamping time to the music and singing. The next scene has groups of young men and maidens performing a round dance and probably singing. This time it is not a singer who leads the dance but two acrobats, who whirled in the midst of them" (Iliad 18.606). These epic scenes, depicting ordinary people as well as professional musicians, show music interwoven with everyday life. They also illustrate the different forms it can take, from unison singing and dancing at one extreme to solo song with lyre accompaniment at the other, and sometimes a combination of both. With few exceptions, however, it is a communal activity. When Achilles withdraws from the fighting and sits alone with his lyre singing of "the famous deeds of men" (Iliad 9.189), his solitary celebration of the ideals he shares with other heroes serves only to accentuate his isolation at this point in the poem.

The picture painted in the epics, though idealized, is borne out by other sources from the centuries following their composition. Vase illustrations often show a dancing chorus led by a lyre player, just as these passages describe. We also have a body of poetry from this period, representing the words -- all that survives -- of the songs. Most of this is, like Sappho's, by famous named poets and has been preserved for that reason. Like her work too, it is mostly fragmentary, but enough survives to show affinities with the musicmaking described in epic. These shorter poems include hymns to gods, laments, and wedding songs; and they too make liberal use of myth, telling and retelling the stories of heroes of old.

But there are some differences. The most important is the appearance among the poems surviving from this period of a more personal-sounding kind of poetry, evidently intended for solo performance. The singer in many of these shorter poems tells not, like Achilles, of the men of old, but of the brevity of life's pleasures, of youth, beauty, wine, and love. It was these apparently more intimate poems that led eventually to the association of lyric with the private and the personal; and some of them do contain allusions to events and people who were part of the poets' lives and, presumably, known to their audiences. For a long time it was customary to interpret all these songs as containing autobiographical confessions about the poet's life. But the poems probably have both as much and as little association with the poets' lives as those of modern singers, drawing on their composer's experience and milieu but not always representing it directly. And as with our songs, the subject matter falls within a defined range dictated partly by the expectations of the audience.

The second important difference between the poetry described in epic and that of Sappho's time has, in fact, to do with its audience. The society depicted in the Homeric poems is dominated by a small group of heroes who stand out from other men because of their physical beauty and martial prowess. These qualities, emblematic of high social status, are emphasized by the epithet attached to each name: Menelaus of the loud war cry, swift-footed Achilles, godlike Diomedes. It is this small group of leaders, together with their households, followers, and guests, who form the audiences for bards like Demodocus and Phemius. Throughout the poems we come across them feasting together in gatherings composed mainly of men, though women are sometimes described as coming down from their quarters when the meal is over and the singing begins. Their sumptuous hospitality served a clearly defined purpose: to consolidate both the heroes' bonds with one another and their status as warriors within the community. The poet of the Iliad spells out the significance of feasts in book 12, when he has one hero, Sarpedon, explain to another that the luxury they enjoy at feasts is a sign of their favored status within their community, granted in recognition of their willingness to risk their lives in battle for their fellow Lycians (310-328).

But by the time of Sappho, although the practice of eating and drinking together persisted, its significance had changed. Success in warfare depended (as perhaps it always had) on disciplined groups of fighters rather than individuals, and political power was becoming more widely spread; as a result, the image of the heroic aristocratic warrior became more difficult to sustain. The successor to the warrior feast in the archaic period was the symposium, an exclusively male drinking party that now resembled an aristocratic club, concerned to defend both its exclusivity and its power against outsiders. It also provided an audience that, more than any other, shaped the lyric poetry of the time.

Poetry at the Symposium

There is an evocative description of the beginning of one of these drinking parties in a poem by Xenophanes, a poet who wrote somewhat later than Sappho:

Now the floor is swept, our hands are washed
and the cups clean. A servant garlands us;

another brings round perfume in a dish.
The mixing bowl stands full of merriment;

more wine is ready in jars, flower-scented,
gentle, promising not to fad us.

Frankincense wafts a holy fragrance in our midst;
the water is cool and sweet and pure (1)

Xenophanes goes on to describe the opening ceremonies, hymns and wine offerings to the gods, after which the drinking and the entertainment begin. A favorite entertainment was singing, but this time by the participants themselves, not by a professional bard. One or more of the feasters, accompanied by either wind instrument or lyre, would sing from an existing repertoire or impromptu; and here Xenophanes makes a recommendation that clearly reflects the broader purposes of these meetings. A singer should, he says, expound great deeds, to remind his audience of excellence and encourage them to strive for it: he should, that is, hold up to the aristocratic symposiasts a mirror to reflect and promote the qualities that justify their social preeminence.

Most of the work of Sappho's contemporary Alcaeus was composed for gatherings like these. Many of his poems (which, like Sappho's, survive only in fragments) concentrate on the delights of convivial drinking. In one, he urges his friend Melanippus to enjoy life's pleasures while he may, using an example from myth to argue that drinking days will be over all too soon:

Drink and be merry with me, Melanippus. You don't think
that, once over the great whirling river of

Death, you'll ever see the sun's clear light
again? That's too much to hope.

Look at Sisyphus, Aeolus' son, a king unmatched in
cunning: he thought he could outwit death,

but for all his wiles Fate made him cross that river

again, and Zeus son of Cronus planned

hard labour for him under the dark earth (38a).

Many of his other poems, though they do not allude to the symposium, were no doubt destined to be sung to his drinking companions. Later writers tell us that he dealt with the favorite sympotic theme of love, writing poems to beloved boys, though little of them survives. There are also short and apparently freestanding mythical narratives, telling a familiar story from a new angle, and hymns to deities. In a hymn calling on the twin gods Castor and Pollux, Alcaeus draws on an age-old formula when he reminds them of the powers from which he hopes to benefit:

you who roam the whole wide earth
and all the sea on swift horses,
easily rescuing men
from chilly death;

you leap to the tops of sturdy vessels,
and as you dart up the ropes, you shine out
and in the perilous dark bring light
to a black ship. (34.5-12)

This plea to the patron saints of seafarers would be of special interest to Alcaeus' island-dwelling companions, and their common life informs his work in other ways too. A poem about the hall in which they feasted evokes their comradeship in arms in a Homeric-sounding description of the weaponry stacked up in it: plumed helmets, greaves, corslets, shields, swords (140). Elsewhere Alcaeus apparently welcomed his brother back from war, celebrating a feat of single combat of which any Homeric warrior might be proud. The poem is paraphrased by a later author: "According to Alcaeus, his brother performed a great feat while fighting as an ally of the Babylonians, and rescued them from trouble by killing a warrior who was over eight feet tall" (350). Despite its apparently personal content, a poem like this one, harking back to the good old days of heroic achievement, represents an ideal shared by aristocratic poet and audience.

But it is Alcaeus' political poems that are most clearly marked by the setting in which they were sung. He tells us more about historical figures like Pittacus and Myrsilus than any other writer, and the reason is that his listeners are also fellow conspirators. His poems do not simply reflect political intrigue: they are one of the ways of engaging in it. When Myrsilus dies, Alcaeus enlists his friends and allies in the celebration:

Now is the time for every man
to drink and get drunk with all his might:
Myrsilus is dead! (332)

And when Pittacus reneges on the oaths they had sworn together, Alcaeus vilifies him in song, whipping up his friends' thirst for vengeance with a litany of insults. Among them are some that harp on Pittacus' lack of true blue blood: the fact that he had a Thracian mother enables Alcaeus and his friends to stigmatize him as "base-born," reflecting their sense of threat from new social groupings.

Although references to contemporary politics are not completely absent from Sappho's poetry, they are far fewer and less direct. Respectable women were generally excluded from male gatherings and from the world of war. Sappho's songs, and those of other unrecorded women poets, must have been performed in other social settings, many of which were for women only and reflected the social roles allotted to them. Of these, the single most important is that of bride.

Marriage in Archaic Greece

Both the Homeric epics and Alcaeus' poetry make it clear that the destiny of a male aristocrat was to become a warrior. A woman of noble birth was supposed to aspire to a quite different end: to marry. The sources focus particularly on women at the stage of their lives leading up to marriage, reflecting not so much their own life experience as the crucial importance of marriage to aristocratic society as a whole.

A short poem by Alcaeus, apparently complete, shows clearly what kind of woman was officially acceptable. It begins with an address to Helen, thelwoman whose "bad deeds" brought death and destruction to Priam of Troy and his sons. But the rest of the poem focuses on a contrasting figure:

Not so was the bride the son of Aeacus took:
he summoned the blessed gods to the wedding
and led from the halls of [her father] Nereus
the delicate maiden,

and took her to Cheiron's home. There
he loosened the pure maiden's girdle.
The love of Peleus and the best of Nereids flourished,
and within a year

she bore a son, finest of demigods,
blessed driver of golden stallions.
But through Helen, the Trojans perished
and all their city. (42)

The contrast between Helen and Thetis, bride of Peleus, works on several levels. Thetis is twice described with a word reserved for a young woman as yet unmarried, parthenos (plural parthenoi), or a maiden. This marks her off clearly from Helen, a sexually mature woman notorious for her adultery with Paris, which caused the Trojan war. Later in the poem, when Thetis becomes a mother, another contrast comes into play. Thetis' son is Achilles, "the finest of dermigods, blessed driver of golden stallions"; Helen's child is a daughter, absent from this poem and rarely mentioned elsewhere, who could never rival the achievement of Achilles. The fact that Achilles was also involved in destroying Troy is a contradiction that the poem glosses over.

The role of the virtuous woman is clear: to be a pure bride and then the mother of legitimate warrior sons, inheritors of the family name, wealth, and glory. And the focus is on transactions between men, with Thetis playing only a passive part. Both she and Peleus are identified with reference to their fathers, stressing their noble birth within a patrilineal society. The two men also take the initiative: Peleus summons the wedding guests, takes Thetis from her father's house to his own, and takes the sexual initiative ("he loosened the pure maiden's girdle"); Nereus will have given his daughter in marriage.

Many of these details are echoed elsewhere. As in the wedding scene from the Iliad, it was the bride, taken from her father's home to her husband's, for whom marriage involved the greatest upheaval (fig. 7). The Homeric poems also demonstrate the importance of marriage as a means of alliance between aristocratic families. The high value placed on women in these exchanges is represented in both Iliad and Odyssey by the giving of bridewealth, a gift from the groom's family to the bride's rather than, as with a dowry, the other way around. Although bridewealth was not current in Sappho's time, aristocratic marriage was still a cornerstone of social and political relations. Melas, tyrant of Ephesus, is among those known to have made use of it in this period, marrying a daughter of the king of Lydia; their son succeeded him as ruler, which suggests that the move was successful in consolidating the Ephesian dynasty's position both inside and outside ' the city. The same maneuver was practiced by Pittacus when he married into the Penthilidai, the original ruling family of Mytilene: Alcaeus mentions it in poem 70, with a bitterness that shows how effective the strategy was.

The fact that marriage was used to form alliances between aristocratic dynasties, and Alcaeus' corresponding portrayal of the ideal bride, does not necessarily tell us much about the participants' experience of it. Sappho's poetry suggests that love and marriage can be viewed in a very different way, and the condition of parthenos occupied only a small part of a woman's life, unlike the comparable status for a man, that of citizen and fighter, which lasted until he reached old age. But the social importance of marriage had a determining effect in two important areas: the way women are represented in literary and artistic sources, and the opportunities they themselves had to participate in mousike. It helps to explain why images of young women are so widespread, and why beauty and grace receive such emphasis in descriptions of them. Second, marriage and preparation for marriage are among the occasions that call for women themselves, and thus potentially women poets, to engage in song and dance.

Women and Music

The two descriptions of weddings from the Homeric poems both include women among the participants: as spectators of the procession and as dancers at the party. Two other accounts of weddings give them an even more prominent role. A scene in the Shield of Heracles (280), a poem written in imitation of the Homeric description of Achilles' shield, shows a bride being taken to her husband in a cart: maidservants carrying torches head the procession, which also includes a female chorus "dancing a lovely dance to the sound of lyres" (fig. 8). And in a fragment of narrative by Sappho written, unusually for her, in epic style and language, women have an even larger part to play.

The subject is the marriage of the Trojan prince Hector to Andromache, and the surviving section opens with a herald's announcement that Hector and his companions are bringing Andromache to Troy from her home in Thebe. As the news spreads through the city, women and girls are among those who set out to join in the celebrations, and the girls take a prominent role in the musicmaking that follows:

the sweet-sounding pipe and cithara [lyre] were mingled and the sound of castanets, and maidens [parthenoi] sang clearly a holy song, and a marvellous echo reached the sky (44L, 24-27)

At the close of the poem the older women raise a cry of joy, while the men sing a paean to Apollo, god of the lyre.

These scenes share an important feature with the others described earlier. Even when men and women are shown together, it is usual for them to be separated into groups according to both gender and status. Not only are the two sexes normally segregated: boys are distinguished from adult men, and girls from women. At Hector's funeral, it is specifically the married women who lament, whereas in the dancing scene represented on Achilles' shield the dancers, both male and female, are young. This picture echoes other sources in showing a society in which social roles, including gender roles, are very sharply differentiated, and different sexes and age groups spend much of their time apart.

The care with which these divisions are specified also helps to highlight the prominence of groups who share the status of Thetis in Alcaeus' poem, that of parthenos. Time and again in myth, literature, and the visual arts we encounter groups of girls on the verge of womanhood, and the surrounding narratives show that there is a strong link between membership in such a group and the stage of life just before marriage. In the Odyssey the Phaeacian princess Nausicaa, whose thoughts when we first meet her are turning to marriage, is playing a kind of dancing ballgame with her attendants when Odysseus comes upon her, and the situation itself is one of the ways in which the narrative hints at a romantic attachment. And in the dancing scene from the Iliad, the poet makes the maidens' status clear when he describes them as "bringing in oxen" (593), that is, liable to be wooed by suitors who will offer valuable bridegifts.

Two features recur regularly in these scenes. The girls' beauty and grace both reflect and idealize their marriageable state; and these qualities are characteristically expressed in choral singing and dancing. Myth too provides images of young women so engaged: the Muses and the Graces symbolize poetry and beauty respectively and are themselves represented as parthenoi. A Homeric hymn to Apollo, for example, shows his arrival on Mount Olympus, greeted by the singing of the Muses and the dancing of the Graces, and in the eighth century Hesiod begins his long poem about the genealogy of the gods with an invocation to the Muses, who

live on the great and holy mountain of Helicon, and dance with their tender feet around the violet-coloured spring and the altar of [Zeus]. When they have washed their soft bodies ... they begin to make their beautiful, lovely dances on the top of Helicon, stepping strongly with their feet. From there they fly up, covered in a thick mist, and go about in the night, singing with most beautiful voices, hymning Zeus the aegis-bearer. (Theogony 2-11, tr. Barker)

It is undoubtedly the social and symbolic importance of this stage of life that explains why it is so frequently represented. But there is reason to think that in some parts of the Greek world the social reality corresponded to the representation, and that for young women and young men alike, the approach to adulthood was negotiated through a period of quasi-initiation. Both would participate in rites of passage that took place through the worship, and under the protection, of an appropriate deity. And for both, but especially for girls, singing and dancing played an important part (fig. 9).

A clearer idea of some of the activities of these groups of adolescents can be gleaned from the work of Alcman, a poet who wrote, probably a little earlier than Sappho, in Sparta. Sparta's educational system, which later became famous throughout the Greek world, involved for both boys and girls a period of segregation from the rest of society in single-sex groups, and Alcman's surviving poems, all fragmentary, include some written to be sung and danced by such groups. Those for which he became best known, and of which most survives, are the songs written for choruses of girls and collected by the Alexandrian editors under the title partheneia, maiden songs.

A later commentator, whose work survives on papyrus, puts an important slant on Alcman's role in relation to these choruses, describing him as "trainer of [the Spartans'] daughters and young men in traditional choruses" (test. 9). Although this statement comes from a later period, it is confirmed by what we know of Alcman's time. The poetry already quoted here deals with idealized social roles and behavior, and even in Plato, over two centuries later, choral dancing was recognized as central to the educational process. It is natural that it should have been a way of transmitting traditional values to the young, and that Alcman's role as a poet should include educating the girls who performed his works.

It is unlikely that his contribution was limited to providing words and music. The musicmaking scenes just considered include several examples of bards who sing and play while also leading the dance, as well as choral songs led by individual singers; illustrations on vases often show dancers led by musicians. Several of the surviving fragments, it is true, make reference to a chorus leader chosen from among the dancers themselves: in the longest of the partheneia fragments, the chorus sing the praises of a girl whose name, Hagesichora, means "leader of the chorus" (1), and elsewhere a corresponding male figure, a beardless youth called Hagesidamos, "leader of the people," is mentioned (10a). In another fragment, though, an older male singer addresses to parthenoi a lament about the infirmity of age:

Oh honey-tongued, holy-voiced girls, my limbs
will no longer carry me. If only I were a kingfisher,
flying over the flower of the wave with the halcyon-birds
with fearless heart, a strong, sea-blue bird.
(26)

The third-century BCE writer who quotes these words adds an explanation: Alcman, he says, was unable because of his age to 'twirl about with the choirs and the girls' dancing." Before age overtook him, then, this is exactly what the poet would be expected to do, and even after that he probably taught by example, perhaps setting the music in motion with an invocation like this: "Come Muse, clear-voiced Muse of many songs, singer always, begin a new song for girls to sing" (14L), and then accompanying it on his lyre. It is possible that Sappho sometimes played a comparable role for the aristocratic maidens of Lesbos.

Sappho as Poet

The circumstances for which Sappho's poems were composed have long been a matter of controversy. There are no contemporary accounts, like Xenophanes' poem about symposia, to tell us about gatherings of women, and no other female poets from the period whose work might provide clues. Apart from later sources, then, we have little except Sappho's own poems to use in trying to answer this all-important question.

One theory sees Sappho as a kind of priestess, presiding over a religious group for which she composed devotional songs, and some support for this view can be found in her poetry. Many of her songs have a devotional aspect, and in some cases they can even be linked with known festivals or cults. One snatch of song seems to have been composed for the Adoma. A soloist and chorus, apparently singing in alternation, represent the goddess Aphrodite and her worshippers lamenting the death of her beloved Adonis:

"Gentle Adonis is dying, Cytherea: what shall we do?"
"Beat your breasts, maidens, and tear your clothes."
(140a)

And among Sappho's many hymns is one addressed to Hera, thought to be part of a trinity of gods worshipped at a cult center on Lesbos.

But the presence of a religious element in her work is not enough to make of her a priestess. Prayer and worship were a regular part of life for both sexes, and while there were few established priesthoods at this time, almost all poets of the period composed songs to gods. By no means were these all performed in cult situations. Xenophanes' poem shows that symposia routinely began with prayer, and Alcaeus' poems, sung to his drinking companions, include some calling on the gods for help against enemies. It is likely that, as well as composing for festivals and ceremonies, Sappho too addressed the gods in song on less formal occasions.

Another theory links Sappho's work with the kind of girls' choruses for which Alcman wrote. According to this view, Sappho too is to be thought of as leading groups of parthenoi in the manner described for Alcman, and several later sources back up the parallel by allotting her an explicitly educational role. The Suda entry, for example, mentions by name three female "pupils" from other parts of Anatolia, and a fragmentary commentary preserved on papyrus from the second century CE speaks of her as "educating nobly-born girls, not only from local families but also from families in Ionia" (214b). But these statements have one problematic aspect. Although young men might travel long distances from their home cities in order to be educated, there is no evidence from anywhere else in the Greek world that young women did too. Like the image of Sappho as priestess, this view probably reads back into her life the authority she later acquired, representing her poetic influence in the form of a direct relationship.

At the same time, though, there is quite a bit of evidence to support the idea of a link between Sappho's. poetry and parthenoi. Her usual audience is female: fragment 160 announces the singer's intention to "delight my companions" with songs, using the feminine form of the word "companion." And although Sappho's Greek often indicates no more than gender, several poems specify that the status of the female figures mentioned is that of parthenos. This is especially true of the poems composed for performance at weddings, which seem to have made up an entire book in the Alexandrian edition of her work. In the fragments we have, there are several references to the bride's virgin status, and one even has the bride herself singing in dialogue with her virginity:

"Maidenhood, maidenhood, where have you gone, deserting me?"
"Never again shall I come to you: never again."
(114)

The celebrants at weddings also, as in the narrative about Hector and Andromache, included groups of girls who would accompany the procession to the groom's house and even as far as the bridal chamber. The surviving fragments of songs composed for them by Sappho, written in a simple, folksong style, include not only complimentary addresses to the bride and groom but also playful mockery of the doorkeeper who stands guard to prevent the bride's friends from rescuing her:

The doorkeeper's feet are seven fathoms long
and his sandals are made from five ox-hides;
it took ten cobblers to make them.
(110a)

Outside the context of weddings, the term parthenos appears less often, but it is still found, and several other features of Sappho's poems suggest a focus on this stage of life. As in Alcman, there are calls for the presence of both Muses and Graces. Hera, addressed in fragment 17, presides over marriage and time of life Just before it, while Aphrodite, the goddess most frequently invoked in Sappho, symbolizes and bestows the attractiveness required in a bride. Many of the activities described in the poems are designed to enhance female accomplishment and charm: one fragment commends a parthenos for her skill, probably in music (56), while another refers disparagingly to someone ignorant of proper dress (57).

Another aspect of the poems suggesting a link with young women is the frequent reference to partings and absence. One of the longer fragments (96) refers to a former companion who is now gone. She is far away "among the women of Lydia"; even so, declares the poet, she still remembers and longs for her beloved Atthis. In a society that practiced patrilocal marriage, the most plausible reason for women to travel such distances was to be married, and the description of Atthis' friend contains a hint that this is indeed the reason for their separation: her companions in Lydia are no longer girls on the threshold of adult status, but women.

Finally, there are some similarities of language and imagery between Sappho and Alcman, and even fragments of her work (21, 58) which, like lines from Alcman, suggest an older singer performing in concert with young female dancers. The image of Sappho as the leader of young dancers or celebrants is taken up by several later writers, who picture her surrounded by groups of parthenoi (test. 21; Philostratus, Imagines 2.1; Himerius, Speeches 9).

Although most of this evidence is circumstantial, it does lend considerable weight to the idea that Sappho's work was connected with, and important for, groups of young women. To be a parthenos was to be at the prime of life, the moment when a woman was most highly valued by her culture. It is natural that a female poet, working within an idealizing poetic tradition, should celebrate it in song, just as mate poets sang of heroic warrior figures. It is beyond doubt too that some of her songs were composed for parthenoi, and performing them would have been important in training these young women in the roles expected of them.

In a play written in the late fifth century by Euripides, a group of women cast their thoughts nostalgically back to their youth. Singing in unison, they long for a return to earlier, happier times:

I wish ... that I could stand in the dance-choruses at noble weddings, as, when I was a girl, I whirled near my mother's feet in the joyful bands of my young friends, entering the contests of the Graces, the rivalry of our rich, soft hair, and shadowing my face with scarves, intricately adorned, and with my flowing locks. (Iphigenia among the Taurians 1143-52, tr. Barker)

There are many echoes here of situations evoked in Sappho's poetry. Groups of young girls dance together, sometimes at weddings, invoke the Graces as patrons, and take pride in elaborate adornment. Even the rivalry mentioned can be paralleled from Sappho's time: a poem by Alcaeus tells of a sacred place where the female inhabitants of Lesbos "go to and fro with trailing robes being judged for beauty, and around rings the marvellous sound of the sacred yearly shout of women" (130b). Even though Euripides is writing two centuries after Sappho, it may not be too fanciful to imagine that the shared life of parthenoi on Lesbos included similar activities.

Again, though, it is unlikely that Sappho's role was limited to that of mentor in the way later tradition suggests. For one thing, she may herself have composed at different stages of her life, and for different groups at different times. Many of her poems are certainly for girls, but others are said by the authors who quote them to be addressed to adult women, gynaikes (SS, 193). At least one fragment seems to be addressed by an older woman to a companion of her youth (24), while in another a girl sings to her mother (102). The fact that some of the fragments probably have fictional contexts serves only to complicate the picture.

Later in life as an established poet, Sappho may well have overseen the training of young choruses: Euripides' chorus remember dancing under a mother's eye, and there are several examples from other parts of the Greek world of older women supervising the initiatory activities of the young. Perhaps too, like Alcman, she sometimes led them herself in the way pictured by a later poet:

Come to the sacred precinct of bull-faced-Hera,
you dwellers on Lesbos, whirling your delicate footsteps,
and there set up a beautiful dance to the goddess; and
Sappho will lead you, her golden lyre in her hand.
Happy you dancers in the delightful dancing! Indeed
you will think you hear a sweet song from Calliope herself.
(Greek Anthology 9.189; test. 59)

But there were surely also times, such as the annual festival described by Alcaeus, when Sappho's companions in worship included other adult women. It is clear too that Sappho's is not the only voice we hear in her poetry. Even the solo songs for which she became best known often point to the presence of other virtuoso musicians among her listeners. Although Sappho herself and those connected with her, such as her brothers, are occasionally named within the poems, so too are a host of other female figures some of whom also sing and play the lyre. Fragment 21 invites an unnamed female singer to "sing to us of the violet-robed [Aphrodite]," probably accompanying herself on the lyre; in fragment 22 the subject of a similar song is the beauty of a third female figure. On these less formal-sounding occasions, her fellow singers may well have included girls and older women together, perhaps continuing to practice the arts they had learned as girls in all-female gatherings of a kind later depicted on classical Athenian vases.

Our knowledge of the circumstances in which Sappho sang will always be sketchy. But we shall probably do best to imagine her making music on many occasions, both formal and informal, in the shared life of girls and women. There is good reason to think that religious ritual and the initiation of maidens both figured prominently among the occasions that brought them together. But to see Sappho only as a priestess or only as an educator is to misrepresent the rich variety of her work. It is also to overlook another equally important dimension of her musicmaking.

Sappho's World

Although the world of Sappho's poems is mainly female, it is not a sequestered world. The story of her exile, if true, indicates that she was a figure of some social prominence, and her poetry provides evidence of involvement in the wider world of Lesbian and even international affairs. I have stressed the importance of marriage in aristocratic social relations, and there are other ways in which her poetry represents an aristocratic world view. There is, for example, no trace of the misogyny found in some other archaic poets. Apart from the obvious fact that she is herself a woman, this can be linked with her membership in a class for whom women are an asset. By contrast, peasant farmers such as those for whom Hesiod wrote his Works and Days, a compendium of agricultural and general advice, regard women as a necessary evil, who if they give birth to too many hungry mouths will wreck the family economy. Thus in Hesiod female beauty, as shown in the myth of Pandora, is a snare, not something to be celebrated.

Beauty in girls and women was also part of a specifically aristocratic ideal of accomplishment, as we can see from its negative portrayal in the seventh-century poet Semonides. Writing from a perspective similar to Hesiod's, he lists types of women created from animals. The results are hardly flattering. The sow-woman keeps a disorderly and dirty house and is herself unwashed, while the ass-woman works only under compulsion, never stops eating, and will accept any sexual partner. The woman "created from a dainty mare" is also criticized for her reluctance to work: instead she spends all day washing herself and putting on perfume and flowers. Her social class is clear not only from her parentage-horses were a luxury of the upper classes-but also from the poet's closing remarks: this woman, he says, is a bane to her husband unless he is a tyrant or king (7.57-70).

Sappho's poetry, by contrast, shows how the cultivation of beauty in women corresponds to martial prowess in men. A paraphrase of one of her wedding songs indicates that as well as comparing the bride to a sweet apple on the topmost bough, ready to be picked, her poem also "likened the bridegroom to Achilles, and put the young man on a par with the hero in his achievements" (105b). In common with the image of male hero ism, idealized female beauty underpins high social status. More over, the few nonaristocratic women who figure in her poetry are treated quite differently. The girl who does not know "how to pull her rags over her ankles" (57) is also described as "rustic." These phrases are said to come from a poem mocking Andromeda who is bewitched by the girl; and it may well be that the mockery arises from a connection inappropriate to An dromeda's rank. Similarly, when the addressee of fragment 55 is criticized for her lack of skill, her failing is no doubt social as much as personal:

. . . when you die you will lie there, and no-one will ever remember or long for you later. For you have no share of Pierian roses: so when gone from here, invisible even in Hades, you will flit to and fro with the shadowy dead.

Plutarch, who quotes these lines, tells us that they were addressed to a woman who was uncultured and ignorant but also wealthy. If poetic skill was a badge of social accomplishment for aristocratic women as it certainly was for men, then this poem may be as intimately bound up in the politics of Lesbos as any of Alcaeus' tirades, pitting aristocratic culture against mere wealth.

Issues about aristocratic honor and its relation to wealth are in fact explicitly addressed elsewhere in Sappho, as in many of the male poets of this period. Alcaeus quotes a sage's saying that no poor man is good or honourable" (360); Sappho says that the combination of wealth and excellence is the height of happiness (148). Elsewhere she expresses concern for family honor in a poem (5) about her brother Charaxus. Praying that he will redeem former mistakes, she sets out a model of behavior that any aristocrat from Homer on would recognize: he should be a joy to his friends and a bane to his enemies. That this is a public aspiration, and not one peculiar to Sappho, is suggested both by the mention of citizens later in the poem (though in a context too damaged for precise interpretation) and by the very fact that the poem was composed for performance.

Other references to people and places reach out to a world beyond Sappho's immediate surroundings, and even beyond her island. There are contacts with the nearby mainland: an address to Aphrodite mentions cloth sent as an offering by a woman from Phocaea, on the Anatolian coast south of Lesbos (101), and we are told that Sappho referred to the nearby promontory of Aega (170). But perhaps the most significant references are to Lydia and its capital city, Sardis. Lydia is both the source of fine clothing and an emblem of riches, used in two poems to express an individual's value to the speaker: "I would not [take] all Lydia in exchange for her" (132, 16). It is also the place where Arthis' former companion now "stands out among the women." This poem points to a role for Sappho and her "servants of the Muses" in relations between Lesbos and Lydia. Alcaeus tells of intervention by Lydia in Lesbian politics, and earlier I referred to the Lydian royal family's intermarriage with the ruling dynasty at Ephesus: the marriage of Atthis' friend was probably part of this process of forging international links between noble families.

The evidence for Sappho's involvement in the internal politics of Lesbos is even clearer. Commentaries on Alcman's poetry written in the first and second centuries CE indicate that the choruses for which he wrote were identified with particular localities and tribal groupings in Sparta. In Sappho's case there seem to have been links with the aristocratic families who are also encountered in the poetry of Alcaeus: the exile of Myrsilus' family, the Cleanactidai, is mentioned (98 b), as is Lesbos' former ruling dynasty, the Penthilidai (71). So it is likely that both she and her audience were, like Alcaeus, positioned within the power struggles of the time.

One possibility as to the form her involvement took is suggested by Maximus of Tyre, who writes in the second century CE that Sappho, like the Athenian Socrates, had two rivals. Of Socrates' relationship with other teachers, who also attracted a following among the young, he says: "what the rival practitioners Prodicus and Gorgias and Protagoras were to Socrates, Gorgo and Andromeda were to Sappho" (test. 20). These names, both female, are mentioned in Sappho's poetry in contexts that are consistent with Maximus' interpretation. In one fragment Arthis is said to be "flying off to Andromeda" (131); another seems to refer to people who "have had quite enough of Gorgo" (144). Maximus continues with a quotation implying that both are members of the Polyanactid ("much-ruling") family, an otherwise unknown family mentioned several times in Sappho (99a, 155, 213a).

This may be the key to their relationship with Sappho. Another fragment addresses a girl or woman called Mica and con tinues, "you chose the friendship of the female Penthilidai" (71). The evidence is so fragmentary that we cannot be certain, but it looks as if many of the attachments and rivalries in her poetry may have arisen from those of the families concerned. Even the ways in which both she and Alcaeus retell traditional stories may have political resonances. Penthilus, the ancestor of the Penthilidai, was the son of Orestes and the grandson of Agamemnon. This means that the Trojan war is part of'their family history, which can be told in ways either subtly complimentary to them or the reverse. Competing versions of what we would regard as myths could certainly have political consequences: in the conflict over Sigeum, both the Athenians and their Lesbian opponents used events in the Trojan war to back up their claims.

Even though we cannot reconstruct all the detail, it is clear that both the composition and the survival of Sappho's poetry depended on her social milieu. Her membership in the aristocracy is the single most important factor. As the rest of Semonides' poem shows in its preoccupation with work, only aristocratic women would have had the leisure for extensive musicimaking or the status to ensure that their work was valued and preserved. In a culture so imbued with mousiki, women from other social groups must have participated in it, but we have only one tantalizing glimpse of their activity. A song that the philosopher Thales, from Miletus, reported hearing sung by a woman on Lesbos indicates just as much involvement in politics as Sappho's poetry, but unlike hers it is accompanied by the manual labor that would have been the lot of most women:

Grind, mill, grind:
for even Pittacus grinds,
the ruler of great Mytilene.
(869)

It was also aristocratic values and social relations that placed Sappho's companions, and her poetry, under the patronage of those two sets of divine parthenoi, the Muses and the Graces. Yet there is another divinity central to Sappho's work who is by no means a maiden: Aphrodite. The role of the goddess of desire and the eroticism of so many songs lead us now to questions about Sappho and sexuality.

Chapter 4. Sexuality and Ritual

THE OTHER PREOCCUPATION in the legends of antiquity has never ceased to exercise Sappho's readers: her sexuality. Among classical scholars it continues to arouse controversy, and it remains crucial for many other readers of her poetry. In the case of scholars interpreting her poetry, there is good reason to question the emphasis it has been given. Why read the works of a female poet primarily as the key to her emotional and sexual life, when those of her male contemporaries are examined for more impersonal, literary qualities? Sappho is not the only woman to receive more than her fair share of this kind of attention, and it is legitimate to query such an approach to women writers in general.

But there are some reasons why this is a legitimate question to ask about Sappho. Her poetry is one of the few sources of information that exist about love between women in the ancient world, and she has become a figurehead for many lesbian women. So it seems important to begin by addressing directly the question of whether she was lesbian, and to anticipate the conclusion of this chapter by saying that, on the whole, the best answer is yes. Sappho's poetry speaks clearly, to my mind, of an eroticism directed toward other women, even though it also includes some poems less easy to reconcile with modern ideas of a lesbian identity.

Yet the very fascination of this question for generations of readers means that it is full of pitfalls. Direct discussions of Sappho's sexuality come from a period much later than her own, and are filtered through the attitudes and assumptions of a culture already very different from hers. This kind of problem does not arise only in antiquity. Nineteenth-century scholars had their own version of the "two Sapphos" theory, with one school seizing disapprovingly on assertions about her love of women and the other leaping chivalrously to her defense: it became difficult for anyone mentioning the subject to avoid alignment on one side or the other. Similar attitudes continued into this century. One of the most amusing is that of the American critic David Robinson, who in a book published in 1924 devotes several pages to impassioned declamation about Sappho's "moral purity." Among the evidence he cites are her poetic skill and love of flowers: it is, he asserts, "against the nature of things" that these qualities should be found in "a child of sodden vice" (Sappho and Her Influence, 43-45). Scholarly antipathy to the idea that Sappho could have been lesbian has abated some what in more recent studies, but problems remain. Considerable interest has, for example, focused on a scrap of papyrus (99) that may or may not be by Sappho, on which one badly damaged word can be construed to read "receivers of the dildo." The attention lavished on this single word, in a fragmentary text of uncertain authorship, could be said to arise from the same kind of attitude to lesbian sexuality as the mime of Herodas discussed in the first chapter.

These prejudices are one hurdle, but there are even more difficult cultural gaps facing us. One of the major problems arises from the way in which sexual behavior is now categorized. Some of Sappho's poetry seems to express passionate love for women, but it also includes some traditional celebrations of marriage. Should we then conclude that she was bisexual? Questions asked in the late twentieth century about Sappho's sexuality reflect a whole set of prior assumptions, many of which may turn out to be inappropriate for her time and situation. So I begin by looking more closely at those assumptions and testing them against what is known of ancient society. Only after doing this, and reviewing the extremely scanty evidence about lesbianism in archaic Greece, will it be possible to turn back to what 92remains the most significant source, her poetry.

Sexual Roles

To begin with definitions, including the terms I have already used: lesbian and bisexual. One definition of lesbianism is formulated by the author of a major study of ancient Greek homosexuality. In a brief discussion of lesbianism, K. J. Dover alludes to the question of whether Sappho and her companions "sought to induce orgasms in one another by bodily contact" (Greek Homosexuality, 182). But not everyone would agree that this is the most important question. The poet Adrienne Rich argues for a focus on emotional bonding between women in a patriarchal society, which may or may not include physical contact. Do questions about Sappho, then, presuppose this kind of strict and, some would say, reductive definition, or are we talking more generally about desire?

Then there are deeper questions about how people and behavior have been categorized along sexual and gender lines. If one looks at periods and cultures other than modern western societies, it soon becomes clear that to classify people and behavior as homosexual and heterosexual (with bisexual as an intermediate category) is not the only possibility. Sexual activity has often been characterized not according to the gender of the beloved but in terms of the role played by the lover. In ancient Greece and Rome and in many other societies too, including early modern Japan and Renaissance Europe, the most significant division is between active and passive roles in a homosexual relationship; and both partners would probably also relate to the opposite sex at some stage of their lives. This does not mean, though, that it would have made sense to their contemporaries to characterize them as bisexual: the division between the roles of lover and beloved was far more significant.

Another basis for drawing distinctions has been the extent of conformity with accepted gender roles. We have seen how gender is bound up with social and political structures: the main reason why tribadism was thought deviant was that it apparently involved someone from an inferior group taking on masculine power and privilege. Here too there are parallels for this phallocentric assumption that male sexual activity is the model for everyone, including lesbian women. Judith Brown, charting attitudes toward lesbianism in the medieval and early modern periods, suggests that the relative shortage of references to it can be attributed partly to an unquestioned assumption of male superiority. But this time the conclusion drawn was different from that of the Romans: lesbianism was viewed more indulgently than male homosexuality, on the grounds that the inferior sex was merely showing an understandable desire to emulate the superior one.

The importance of social roles in these accounts is a pointer to a basic difference between ancient ways of thinking about sexuality and those now current. The division of not only acts but also people into categories-homosexual, heterosexual, bi sexual, lesbian-on the basis of their choice of sexual partner goes with an assumption that sexuality expresses something fundamental about a person's identity, revealing some kind of inner truth about her or him. But a growing body of historical work, much of it inspired by Michel Foucault, shows that it was only in the fairly recent past that we began to live our sexuality in this way. For the Greek world, much of the available evidence suggests the opposite: that sexual behavior, for a man at least, was regarded not as an expression of his innermost self, but as an index to his role and capacities in public life.

One of the clearest indications of this gap between ancient and modern assumptions is the way in which the Greeks and Ro mans viewed dreams. Today we are all to some extent Freudians, finding particular significance in dreams and especially in their hidden sexual content. For ancient interpreters, however, Freud's priorities are often reversed. One of the richest sources of ancient dream analysis is the work of a Greek writer from the Roman period, Artemidorus, who in the second century practiced dream interpretation as a profession. Many of the dreams he studied had an explicit sexual content, but his interpretations do not lead him into the depths of the dreamer's psyche. Some times, according to Artemidorus, sexual dreams hardly need interpreting: they simply represent in sleep the interests and de sires of the dreamer when awake. But when he does offer to explain their significance, it is often to predict some future event in the dreamer's life or to indicate something about his standing or fortunes in the world. A man's dream about penetrating his brother, for example, is good because it indicates that "he will be above his brother and look down on him"; to have sex with one's grown son in a dream bodes well for a man who is away from home because it refers to their being together after his safe return (1.78). Men's dreams about penetrating their mothers, though quite widespread and varied in detail, are also interpreted symbolically. We are told, for example, that they are especially appropriate for leaders because "a mother signifies one's native country" (1.79), so that domination of her body indicates control of civic affairs. Nor is this way of thinking peculiar to a professional like Artemidorus. The history of Herodotus, writing seven centuries earlier, recounts how Hippias, the deposed tyrant of Athens, dreamed he was sleeping with his mother (6.107): he took it to mean that he would regain control of the city.

The connections drawn in these interpretations among sexual, social, and political roles are also found throughout the sources discussed by Foucault and by a growing number of classicists. There are now several studies based on classical Athens (the earliest period covered by Foucault, though still over a century later than Sappho). Focusing mainly on prose texts-rhetorical, medical, and philosophical-and concentrating as their sources do on male homosexuality, they show that the code governing a lover's conduct toward his beloved is closely linked to contemporary ideals about a good citizen's behavior. For the senior partner it is important to assume an active, dominant role in sexual relations just as he does in social life as a member of the elite body of male citizens. So closely are these two roles linked, in fact, that a grown man who adopts the alternative sexual role - a passive one is stigmatized as unfit to exercise the rights of a citizen. For the younger partner, too, submitting to this role by accepting his lover's advances is potentially problematic, since it comes dangerously close to acting like a woman or a slave, which would be unworthy of the full-fledged citizen he is shortly to become. So there is also a well-defined set of rules for him, laying down the conditions under which he may gratify an older lover's desire for him. One of the most important is that he must not himself enjoy the sex or feel desire, as a woman would. His motives for accepting a lover should instead have to do with forming useful social and political connections; other wise he will be derided as a prostitute.

For both lover and beloved, therefore, what is paramount is the adoption of an active, controlling role in relation both to others and to one's own desires. The same structure can be seen operating, according to these rules, at three different levels. In sexual relations the ideal citizen will be in a superior position both in relation to the boy he loves and in the control of his own desires. Self-control is even more crucial for the beloved boy, who will otherwise compromise his masculinity by welcoming the role of love object. Within the city all male citizens belong to a social group that will be dominant over others; and their city as a whole will have the upper hand over outsiders, especially non-Greeks (otherwise known as barbarians). What in forms the prescription of these roles is not a concern that a man should be able to express his individuality, but rather that he maintain in his sexual life the kind of control essential to his social position: if he fails in the first sphere, he is disqualified in the second.

The recent spate of studies drawing attention to these structures has in many ways revolutionized the understanding of sexuality in the ancient world. Most obviously, they highlight the extent to which sexual roles, and the concept of sexuality itself, are socially constructed rather than naturally given. Second, and equally important, they show that for the ancient world we need to discard the idea of sexuality as the identity or attribute of an individual, and think instead in terms of types of behavior or ways of relating. Greek society, for these purposes, must be broken down not into a collection of individuals so much as into sets of roles and relationships, several of which may be adopted by one individual, whether all together or at different stages of life. The mature male citizens we have just been considering almost certainly had sexual relations with women as well as boys; what mattered was their masculine role, not their choice of object. The boys, though, probably confined their sexual relationships for the time being to their own sex: homosexuality in this sense tends, in ancient Greece, to be linked with the period of transition from childhood to adulthood, after which many men would, at least in terms of sexual acts, become bisexual.

I shall return later to the question of puberty, homosexuality, and sexual initiation. For the moment, the point to note in connection with Sappho is that Greek women are no more likely than men to have related exclusively to their own sex. This does not mean that individual inclination was entirely irrelevant. Many of the texts in which sexual behavior is discussed do, it is true, give the impression that men's passionate energies were directed overwhelmingly toward members of their own sex, not toward women. But they are not unanimous on this matter, and there are also places in Greek culture where men's erotic interest in women is explored. A favorite subject for painting on vases was satyrs, half-human, half-animal creatures who represent a fantasy of male excess: their main interests are drink and sex, and they are often shown in hot pursuit of women. Homosexual relationships between men, on the other hand, probably receive disproportionate attention in prose texts precisely because of the problems they pose for the younger partner. In Sappho's poetry the overwhelming impression is of an eroticism directed toward women, which may have involved individual choice as well as social convention. It is fairly certain, though, that she and most of her companions also engaged sexually with men at some point in their.

But there are many difficulties in relating these analyses of male homosexuality to Sappho and lesbianism, and indeed to female sexuality in general. There is the familiar source problem: the material on which they are based comes mainly from Athens and from a later period than Sappho's. They are about men, not women, and in detecting links between sexual and political roles they also show that we cannot extrapolate directly from men's homosexual roles to those of women, whose relation to the structures of power is a different one. Even more seriously, most ancient discussions set out not to describe sexual behavior, but to prescribe it. This point cannot be overstated: what we learn from most prose texts about male homosexuality is only the publicly accepted ideals of sexual etiquette within a small group of privileged men. The rhetorical texts in particular, some of them used in actual legal cases, are a prime example of special pleading which says more about the sticks available for beating one's opponent (often a political opponent) than about how people actually behaved.

These problems apply to all discussions of sexuality in the ancient world, but there is another specific to women. It will by now come as no surprise that almost all the information we have about women's sexuality was produced by men, in the context of a patriarchal society. One consequence is that direct discussions of lesbianism are almost nonexistent in archaic and classical sources. For once even classical Athens has almost nothing to offer, the only exception being two references in Plato to women who prefer their own sex (Symposium 191e; Laws 636ab).

For the archaic period the only available evidence, consisting of such things as vase paintings and poetry, is almost all indirect and very difficult to interpret. One possible allusion to lesbian ism comes in a poem by the late sixth-century poet Anacreon about a girl the speaker desires: "but she - she comes from Lesbos with its fine cities - finds fault with my hair because it is white, and gapes after another" (358L). The fact that "another" is referred to by a feminine pronoun may indicate that the girl from Lesbos prefers women; but it has been argued that it could equally well refer to the poet's pubic hair and that she prefers fellatio, which according to Attic comedy was a speciality of women from Lesbos. Apart from this one controversial poem, by far the most substantial evidence is Sappho's poetry. Its importance is all the greater because, as well as being the clearest indication of sexual love between women, it is also one of the few moments in antiquity when we hear a woman's voice, un-mediated by male authorship, expressing sexual desire.

Still that desire must be approached in a broader context: the ways in which sexuality, and women's sexuality in particular, figures in Greek culture. Although Sappho does not merely reproduce the dominant paradigms of her culture, neither does she write in complete isolation from them. Later we shall see how she negotiates with, often departs from, and sometimes subverts some of the patterns of erotic relationship found in the love poetry of her male contemporaries. But before this complex relationship can be understood, it needs to be situated within the social and symbolic practices of her time. The studies of male homosexuality give notice that sexual meanings may be found at unexpected points in ancient Greek culture: in particular, we need to be alert to the ways in which female sexuality is represented within shared, public meanings and practices. The fact that these are produced within a patriarchal culture then gives rise to questions about women's own experience: how did they relate to the stereotypes about them?

Again, the time and place for which the source material is richest is classical Athens, and so I shall continue to draw on material from there. But here too, political structures can be seen to determine much about the position of women, and we must bear in mind that women's sexuality was not interpreted in exactly the same way in democratic Athens and in the aristo cratic milieu of Sappho's Lesbos.

Female Sexuality and Patriarchal Ideology

It would be impossible to give a full account of how female sexuality is represented in Greek culture and thought, since gendered categories appear in so many contexts, often unfamiliar ones. Take the different ideas of justice in fifth-century Athenian tragedies such as the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus or Sophocles' Antigone. In both works archaic, family-based notions of Justice are associated particularly with women, in contrast to a newer, more rationalized and more masculine kind of justice. The resulting battle of the sexes is significant thematically, not just for the individuals involved. In both, women stand for something beyond themselves, and what might in twentieth-century fiction be facets of personality are instead emblematic of social and symbolic forces at work in a whole society. Or take cosmology and religion. The beginnings of the universe were in early Greece cast in mythical terms, as the product of sexual encounters between gods, and human life too was felt to be determined by a host of deities, all of whom were definitely gendered beings. One of the most significant meanings of female sexuality for present purposes has already been encountered in Artemidorus' dream interpretations, and it is repeated in the Athenian betrothal formula: an Athenian father pledged his daughter in marriage to her future husband with the words "I hand this woman over to you for the plowing of legitimate children." This metaphorical connection between women's bodies and the fruitful earth was universal in the culture, and it is of crucial importance to the religious roles allotted to females, both human and divine.

To turn for a moment to the opposite end of the scale: where individual women were concerned, there was a fairly constant set of stereotypes in circulation about their sexual behavior. For many Greeks, including the Athenians, the single most obvious fact about women and sex was their immoderate enjoyment of it. According to myth, the prophet Teiresias owed his blindness to having given the game away. He had lived both as a woman and as a man, and was therefore well qualified to say which of the sexes got more pleasure from intercourse. When asked, he said that the woman got nine-tenths of the pleasure and the man only one-tenth, whereupon the goddess Hera, furious at this betrayal of women's secrets, blinded him. Women were accordingly seen as creatures whose insatiable sexual desire had to be controlled by men.

The plays of Aristophanes present in comic form some male fantasies about what may happen if this control is relaxed. No fewer than three of his plays show women breaking out of their normal restraints and seizing power, in a way that is tolerable only because of the temporary license of a dramatic festival. In the process they reveal their (supposedly) true natures: in Lysis trata the women's sex strike all but crumbles because they them selves cannot endure the deprivation they are trying to inflict on men; and in Women at the Thesmophoria a group of participants in a women-only festival exchange notes about their deceptions of men, including frequent adultery.

Women's sexual energy was not always portrayed in a benign way. Linking women's bodies metaphorically with the earth sug gests a positive valuation of their sexuality: human life depends on women's fruitfulness just as, in a largely agricultural econ omy, it depends on the earth's. But the fruitfulness is, especially in classical Greek thought, conditional on the proper cultivation of women through marriage. Women who are not yet married, or who have broken out of marital constraints, are linked through a darker set of images with the wild, uncivilized regions outside the polis, even with bestiality. It is normal to refer to an unmarried girl as admetos, which literally means untamed, and there is a plethora of uncomplimentary animal images for sexu ally active mature women, from the animal-wives in Semonides to the description of Clytaemnestra in Aeschylus' Agamemnon as a female monster, a Scylla or a snake. Suspicion of female sexuality is especially marked in democratic Athens and reflects a change in the function of marriage. As the formation of links between aristocratic dynasties became less important, the role of bride diminished, and a woman's role became limited to that of producing legitimate heirs. But since she came as an outsider to her husband's household, there would always be doubts about her loyalty, and hence about the legitimacy of her sons: so her sexuality had to be vigilantly watched.

The view of female sexuality as something in need of control also corresponds in interesting ways to the code for male sexuality. Whereas the ideal for Athenian males is that they should be able to moderate their sexual impulses, women are seen as sexually voracious and incapable of such control. The same relationship of negative to positive can also be seen by setting the assumed links between female nature and wildness alongside the idea of the city as a community of male citizens, a group of insiders who define themselves by contrast with noncitizen outsiders. Although women are in one sense, as those who produce citizens, central in the community, in another, with their wild and potentially uncivilized nature, they are outside it and their uncontrolled sexuality helps to define what it is to be a citizen male just as the idea of nature defines that of civilization. From this perspective it looks as if these ideas about women and their sexuality are also a way of establishing masculine identity by representing what is not, or should not be, masculine. Women, together with slaves, animals, and barbarians, occupy the position of the other, the not-male-citizen, in a symbolic system that is, in Luce Irigaray's term, hommosexual: that is to say, essentially about men.

It is worth stressing again that this is far from being an objective or unmotivated description of what actually happened, or even of what was experienced as happening. If the accounts of the sexual attitudes appropriate to a male citizen represent an ideal that was not necessarily attained in everyday life, these ideas of women's sexual nature embody the mirror opposite, ratifying the social control of women by painting a vivid picture of the forces ranged on the other side. Hence in the few direct sources we have on women's behavior, including sexual behavior, the emphasis is on their subordination to their husbands. Prose writers like Xenophon and Aristotle prescribe control; imaginative literature, in what is only an apparent contradiction, explores the consequences of slackening it.

But what about women's own experience of themselves as sexual beings? Inhabiting this patriarchal ideology would, one might think, present them with some problems. On one hand, women were supposed to occupy the position of the other, bearers of a potentially wild, unruly, uncivilized sexuality in opposition to which masculinity defined itself. Yet on the other, their fertility was a force that had to be both controlled and harnessed, in order to reproduce the community of male citizens. We may wish to ask how women lived this contradiction. Did they experience themselves as sexually voracious, or did they internalize the ethos of control prescribed for them? Or were there positions outside this opposition?

Like so many other areas of their lives, Greek women's sexual experience remains beyond our ken. But it is possible to go beyond seeing women's sexuality as a monolith and women as passive objects of description. In the first place, we can examine the sources in such a way as to reveal their biases and contradictions. Second, even from the limited and biased accounts of women available, it is possible to identify areas in which they participated actively in the symbolic practices of their culture, and to see that they could adopt a number of different attitudes toward official ideology. There is one area above all where women can be seen relating actively to the public meanings attached to their sexuality: religion.

Religious festivals were, especially in Athens, the most important occasions on which women played a role publicly recognized as vital to the whole community, and on which they could form, outside their homes, social links separate from those of men. These occasions give us a glimpse of groups of women acting independently, to some extent at least; and, most crucially, they can be seen as offering to the women who took part several different ways of engaging with the ideologies expressed in festivals, especially the more official ones. This is especially important because the rituals they performed were shot through with symbolism relating to human, agricultural, and divine fertility and sexuality.

Religious celebration normally involved the highly emotional experience of communal singing and dancing, recognized as having a socializing function. Rather than just reflecting the social roles prescribed for them, religious rituals will also have induced the desired behavior in the girls and women who enacted them. This means that the study of religion provides an angle on women's own experience of the constructions put upon their sexuality. It is also directly relevant to the study of Sappho, in whose poetry the worship of Aphrodite plays such an important part.

Sexuality and Women's Festivals

I begin with the annual festival on which Aristophanes' play is based: the Thesmophoria, widely celebrated in the Greek world and one of the better-documented women's festivals. In Athens (though not always elsewhere) it took place in October-November, at the end of one season and shortly before the next crop was planted. Its patron goddess was Demeter, the goddess of corn and agriculture, and like many women's festivals it was concerned with fertility. It seems to have been an occasion involving citizen-wives in large numbers, and it took place at the heart of the city, near the symbolic centers of male political power. One source indicates that during the festival the normal business of political life was either suspended or conducted elsewhere. Involving three days of camping out in makeshift shelters, it was one of the few occasions on which women spent time away from their homes. Another feature marking its abnormality was that they temporarily organized themselves in structures modeled on the city's permanent institutions.

Despite the fact that the rituals were secret (and Aristophanes' play makes it clear how little he knows about them), some of what went on can be pieced together from scattered sources. On the first day the women went up the hill leading to the festival site, no doubt in a procession that involved some dancing. The second was a day of somber mood, when they devoted themselves to fasting and sexual abstinence, symbolized by their sitting on pallets made of plants thought to be an aphrodisiac. On the third, the day of Beautiful Birth, the fasting gave way to joyful feasting and celebration.

Other details of the rituals confirm that fertility was central, though the sequence of events is not exactly known. There was a ritual involving pits in the ground, into which pigs-symbolic of female genitals-and dough cakes shaped like phalluses had been thrown. During the festival a special category of women who had remained chaste for three days went down into the pits, brought up the rotting remains, and placed them on altars: it was thought that these remains, mixed with sown seed, would ensure a good harvest. Although interpreters of this festival are not agreed on all points, some features emerge that recur in other rites involving women. There is the by now familiar link between women's fertility and that of the earth. The secret recesses of the earth clearly have sexual connotations, and placing sexual objects in a pit reproduces the symbolic link made in the marriage formula between plowing and human intercourse. At the same time, the pattern of rotting followed by renewed growth repeats the cycle of annual death and rebirth in nature.

The link between women's and the earth's fertility, crucial to the ritual, is on one level cosmic and universal. But as enacted in this festival, it is closely tailored to the political and social structures of its time. To begin with, the participants are segregated into distinct groups. In this case participation is confined to women, but even in festivals open to both sexes the roles are usually distinct. The division involves not only gender but also, crucially, social status: here the participants are both married women and citizens, that is, women whose duty is to reproduce the city as an exclusive community. The importance of the Thesmophoria in particular is shown by one of the rules relating to it: husbands had to pay all the expenses when their wives at tended the festival.

The social status of the women who participated, therefore, meant that they were identified with the interests of the male elite who made up the polis, and this identification can also be traced in the symbolic practices of the festival. There are some interesing parallels with the idea of women's rampant sexuality and men's control. On one hand, the celebrants of the festival took on, for a few days, a masculine role. It is not just that, as citizen-wives, they were more closely linked than other women with the centers of power; they actually occupied the symbolic c enter of the city, displacing its normal business, and assumed some of its political structures. For the duration of the festival they elected magistrates (archons, or in the feminine, Thesmophorian version, archousai) from among their number and made decisions by majority vote. On the other hand, the symbolism of pigs and caverns, and the link with Demeter, marked their part as a feminine one. Yet this focus on female sexuality and fertility was at the same time contained by its opposite, the insistence on chastity during the festival and, for some, before it as well. In political terms, then, the Thesmophorians were representing themselves both as central to the city (by taking it over) and as marginal (because the takeover was temporary), while in sexual terms they celebrated both fertility and chastity. Since their sexuality was essential to the city's stability but could also disrupt it, the contradictions at these two levels are clearly linked. The Thesmophorian women enacted not one but both sides of the gender divide as represented in the city's ideology: although they reproduced the divide in their rituals, they were not confined to one or the other side of it. It is already clear that individuals could relate to the ideology of gender in complex ways.

Some of these themes can be traced in other women's festivals. At the Scira, a one-day Athenian festival probably confined to women, the participants are said to have eaten garlic to discourage sexual attention from men. At the Haloa, another festival, linked with Demeter, they handled models of male and female genitals, some made of dough and placed on tables at the feast; they also spoke freely of sex in a way our Christian informant finds shameful, but which may just have involved fertility.

Though less is known about these festivals than about the Thesmophoria, these details, gleaned from various sources, suggest that they probably reproduced the Thesmophorian focus, carefully controlled, on female fertility. They also share another feature, in giving rise to male fears about what a group of women, temporarily alone and powerful, might get up to. In another of Aristophanes' plays about insubordinate women, Assemblywomen, it is at the Scira that they meet and hatch their revolutionary plans. Outside comic contexts, these fears appear in more violent and disturbing form. Herodotus in the fifth century links the founding of the cult with the fifty daughters of Danaus, who on their wedding night in Egypt murdered their husbands (2.171); another, later story has the celebrants of the festival castrating a man who has spied on their rituals (Aelian 44).

Although the Thesmophoria is not represented in Sappho's poetry, it is a useful starting point for considering the links between religion and sexuality. In an area about which information is so thin, its practices are relatively well documented, and it shows how female sexuality could be represented at the most public, civic end of the spectrum of social practices. It also forms a striking contrast with a festival that does figure in Sappho, in which a rather different atmosphere seems to have prevailed: the Adonia, a more informal occasion that was not part of the official state calendar of events. It is thought to have taken place in July, at the height of summer, and like the Thesmophoria it deals with the processes of vegetation. For this festival, seeds were planted on pieces of terracotta and taken up to the flat rooftops of private houses. For a time they were watered, and the seeds sprouted; but then they were allowed to parch and die, and were thrown into the sea or a spring. At the same time, an image of Adonis was consigned to the water. The climax seems to have been a night of loud and unrestrained lament over Adonis.

Everything known of the Adonia suggests a festival quite different in spirit from those just considered. For one thing, the rules for participation were much less strict. A comedy from the fourth century BCE by Menander has women neighbors celebrating it in an informal group, concubines and citizen-wives together. There are also some indications in comedy that, although men did not participate in this festival, they were less rigorously excluded from it than from others: more than one male comic character complains that the festivities on the rooftops are too loud and riotous to be ignored. The young man who describes the party in Menander says it kept him awake (The Girl from Samos, 43-44), and a character in Aristophanes' Lysistrata complains that assembly proceedings have been interrupted by a woman walling for Adonis from the rooftops (389-398).

The differences continue. The goddess of this festival is not Demeter but Aphrodite, whose sexual aspect, though linked with fertility, is not tied to it. And although the growth and withering of the "gardens of Adonis" probably alludes to fertility, this element is far less prominent. Descriptions of the festival suggest that the symbolism of human and agricultural fertility pervading the Demeter festivals was largely absent from the Adonia: instead, the most remarked-upon activity at this and other informally organized women's cults is noisy and enjoyable private merrymaking. At the other end of the spectrum from the Thesmophoria, then, we seem to glimpse a world in which the city's official writ did not run, in which women were released from the burden of being responsible for national fertility and simply got together, without a script, to have a good time.

Where does this leave Greek women in relation to the official view of their sexuality? It does look as if the festivals allowed for some complex relationships to the ideology that marked them so strongly as sexual beings. In some, female sexuality was linked with agricultural fertility, in others less so. Participants in the Thesmophoria acted out both sexual expression and its opposite; the Adonia apparently emphasized emotional release more than sexual symbolism. Even our limited knowledge is enough to show that different festivals provided women with different ways of enacting the construction of their own sexuality. The very fact that there was such variety between festivals, some open to limited groups of women, some to the same women at different times, some a matter of public duty and some of private enjoyment, suggests that there was a range of sexual stances for women, influenced but not entirely governed by their social status.

But one feature common to all these festivals emerges. They are viewed by the men who describe them with unease and sometimes fear, showing that the contradictions they embody are dynamic and must constantly be renegotiated. Women's sexuality is a powerful force, which festivals both harness and are always threatening to unleash on society. From a female perspective, however, this probably led to a sense of empowerment. Even if only for a short time, women were seen as a potentially powerful and independent group, and it is hard to imagine that they did not come away from such events with an enhanced sense of themselves and their sexual energies.

The most important point about women's festivals is that the meanings attached to female, as well as male, sexuality in ancient Greece can be found at the level of public as well as private life-and this can tell us something about women's own experience as well as about men's view of them. The powerful emotional and sexual expression at festivals may not always have taken place in a context as public as the Thesmophoria; but it was always communal and took women outside the confines of their domestic lives. Given that festival space and time were not just abnormal, but supranormal, it is at least possible that it was here, rather than in individual relationships, that many Greek women experienced themselves most powerfully as sexual beings. In the twentieth century we tend to place more emphasis on the private, individual experience of sexual intercourse as a high point of emotional and physical fulfillment. It need not have been so in Greek culture. The stereotype certainly was that women enjoyed physical sex enormously, and medical texts (by men) report that they experienced orgasm. But there is no reason to think that this pleasure carried the same charge as it does in contemporary culture. On the contrary, it seems that in order to find in ancient Greek culture a sense of the significance of sexuality for women, we have to look at shared symbolism and experience, especially in religion. Certainly in reading Sappho's love poetry it is important to be aware of its communal significance, of its suprapersonal dimension as well as the personal experience that seems at first to be its subject.

Sexuality and the Gods

Another way of appreciating the place of female sexuality in the public symbolism of Greek culture is by looking more closely at the gods. Greek religion was polytheistic: an enormous range of gods were worshipped at all levels of public and private life, from the patron deities of major cities such as Athena down to the deities of local cult and semidivine figures such as the Nereids. The group about which we know most is that represented in Homer as a kind of extended family, living on Olympus with Zeus at their head. Of the Olympians, four-Hera, Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite-are female. To these can be added a fifth, Demeter, patroness not only of the Thesmophoria but also of another important cult, the Eleusiman mysteries; she and Dionysus, though they barely figure in Homer, were increasingly recognized as equal in importance to the ten Homeric Olympians. The roles of these deities, and especially their sexual behavior, provide another angle on the significance attached to sexuality and gender. As with festivals, the gods represent many of the assumptions of the patriarchal society that imagined them. But again it will become clear that the ideology they embody is not monolithic: there is some room for maneuver, some space for choice between deities and different views of them.

Like most gods, the Greek deities were both like and unlike humans. They had in common with humans birth, but not death: they ate and drank, but ambrosia and nectar replaced the food and drink of humans. As gods they were capable of superhuman feats, but they did not observe superior standards of morality, even though to some extent they were guarantors of morality for humans. In fact, they appear somewhat amoral, especially in their sexual behavior. All the gods have a sexual aspect, which for male gods is expressed in relation not only to goddesses (usually lesser ones) but also to human females. Mythology is full of tales of the pursuit and rape of women by gods, an event that because of their divinity invariably leads to pregnancy. There is an obvious correlation between the role of divine pursuer and the role that contemporary culture assigned to upper class males. These divine pursuits are with very few exceptions heterosexual, the best-known exception being the seizing of the youth Ganymede by Zeus. Here too, though, the division of roles into active and passive is reproduced, with the senior partner playing an unproblematically masculine role.

With goddesses the situation is more complicated, no doubt partly because of the difficulty of combining the power appropriate for deities with the idea of female sexuality as a wild force in need of control. Hence two of the goddesses are, unlike any of their male counterparts, virgins. Athena is a notoriously male-identified goddess who often appears dressed as a warrior and does not even have a mother: she sprang fully armed from the head of Zeus, who had swallowed her pregnant mother Metis. Artemis is a slightly more paradoxical figure: she acquired somewhere in her history the function of presiding over childbirth, so that her separation from sexuality is not as complete as Athena's. Her most familiar aspect, however, is as a virgin associated with hunting and wild animals. This makes her not so much an asexual goddess as one associated with the threshold of sexual life. Although both Artemis and Athena sometimes, like human maidens, arouse desire in others, neither is shown initiating sexual contact as all the male gods do. So far, then, there is a fairly clear double standard on Olympus, as on earth.

The sexual aspect of the remaining major goddesses always has some connection with fertility, but it takes very different forms. The connection is most obvious in the case of Demeter, the goddess of corn and agriculture, whose daughter Persephone was playing with a group of other young girls when she was seized and carried off by the god of the underworld, Hades (Pluto for the Romans). Demeter's grief and anger at her daughter's loss caused the earth to cease being fruitful, a crisis eventually resolved by an agreement that Persephone should spend part of the year on earth with her mother and part below with her husband. Her bond to the underworld and her initiation into sexual experience are symbolized by the fact that while below the earth she received from Hades the gift of a pomegranate and ate some of its seeds. The fullest version of this story is found in a seventh-century BCE hymn to Demeter written in the language and style of Homer, and in many of its details it functions as a kind of charter for the Thesmophoria.

The most striking feature of this myth is the way it reinforces the idea of female sexuality as a cosmic force by associating it with two goddesses and portraying it as a world-shattering power. Agricultural fertility, and potentially human life, is temporarily destroyed by Demeter's mourning, and Persephone's annual disappearance from and return to the earth is also linked with the cycle of vegetation. But the myth is equally interesting for the way in which it articulates and distributes different female roles and statuses. Persephone represents the pubescent girl, as indicated by her other common name Kore, another term for maiden. Like many girls in Greek literature on the threshold of marriage, she is first shown in carefree play with her friends, picking flowers in a "soft meadow" (Homeric Hymn to Demeter 7).

Hades snatches her away from this idyllic scene to be his bride, and here too there are clear parallels with contemporary social practice. She herself plays a passive part: Hades seizes her with the complicity of her father Zeus, while her mother's wishes play no part in the initial agreement and are only partially accommodated after a period of crisis. Finally there is the position of mother, occupied by Demeter herself. Of the three roles of maiden, wife, and mother, Persephone occupies the first two by turns. Demeter, though, is associated only with the third: in the hymn she is portrayed as a mother only, though there is passing mention of her sexual liaisons in other sources. So although the hymn celebrates her as maternal and fertile, it does not show her as a sexual being in relation to her peers. Persephone, on the other hand, though shown as a bride, is the object of rape by a male deity rather than a sexual subject.

Some of the spheres of sexual activity divided between Demeter and her daughter are brought together in Hera and Aphrodite, but to different effect in each case. In Hera's case, the earth's fertility is directly associated with sexual intercourse through the story of her union with Zeus, who is both her brother and her husband. In book 14 of the Iliad, wishing to distract Zeus from what is going on in the fighting between Greeks and Trojans, Hera seduces him. As they are about to lie down together on Mount Ida

under them earth flowered delicate grass
and clover wet with dew; then crocuses
and solid beds of tender hyacinth
came crowding upwards from the ground
(Iliad 14.347-349, tr. Fitzgerald)

This archetypal scene of marital sex is repeated in visual renderings found in Hera's sanctuaries and accords with her principal role in cult, that of patroness of weddings; a secondary sphere of influence is maidenhood, the condition that immediately precedes marriage. The Iliad's portrait of Hera as a wife, though, is remarkably negative: she is quarrelsome, jealous of Zeus's many amours, and murderous toward them and their offspring. This negativity is not redeemed by any positive relationship to either motherhood or sexuality. As consort to Zeus, she is faithful but mutinous; though a mother, she is never shown cherishing her children, and indeed can express considerable hostility toward them, as in the case of Hephaestus, who was so misshapen at birth that she hurled him into the sea. Though Hera does, then, combine elements of all the roles articulated in the myth of Demeter and Persephone, it is a combination full of conflict. And though all these goddesses represent sexuality as a cosmic force, there is not one in whom it is as unproblematically active as it is for the male gods.

So far we have a group of goddesses in whom several stages of women's lives, all defined in relation to their sexuality, are kept separate: those of maiden (Artemis, Persephone), bride (Persephone), mature wife (Hera), and mother (Demeter). Athena is if anything a parthenos, but she is a special case because of her asexuality and masculine qualities. All these goddesses are in turn differentiated from gods by the fact that none of them engages in active erotic pursuit, whether of divinities or mortals. The only possible exception to this is Hera's seduction of Zeus, but unlike the gods' exploits this takes place within marriage.

Against this background Aphrodite, the goddess of sexuality itself and one of the most ancient and powerful of deities, emerges as a remarkable figure. She shares other goddesses' association with fertility: in Hesiod's Theogony, when she first steps on the island of Cyprus after her birth, vegetation springs up magically beneath her feet as it did for Zeus and Hera. But her generative power goes even further. Hesiod, writing in the seventh century BCE, dates her birth from the mythical separation of earth and sky, and the philosopher Empedocles in the fifth names her as the principle whereby the four elements combine to form the world. For both she represents a fundamental cosmic principle of combination.

Thus it is not surprising that in her person and powers she breaches many of the boundaries just noted. As goddess of sexual attraction, she is concerned with erotic relationships of all kinds, both within and outside marriage, heterosexual and homosexual. There are hints of bisexuality both in her birth (she was born from the severed genitals of Uranus, the sky) and in her cult: a seventh-century image seems to show her with a beard. In myth she is not confined to one sexual relationship: although married to Hephaestus, she has sexual liaisons with other males, including not only deities, such as Ares (with whom she is caught by her husband in the Iliad), but also mortals. She has a son, Aeneas, for whom she cares and whom she is shown rather ineffectually helping in the Iliad: so although her maternal aspect is not strongly marked, it still contributes to a combination of roles not found in any other major goddess. Finally, and most strikingly, she is the pursuer of her mortal lovers, taking a role that among the Olympians is otherwise reserved for male gods. In one of the Homeric hymns about her, she is shown falling in love with the mortal Anchises and approaching him as he tends his cattle; and we have already encountered some of the other young men she loved, Adonis and Phaon. A primeval, cosmic, female deity whose power no one, not even Zeus, can resist and who shows an alarming propensity to transgress boundaries, it is not surprising that, while Aphrodite is celebrated in literature, she is also often regarded with fear and suspicion. In Homer she can be fearsome as well as charming, and in fifth-century Athenian tragedy her power is often destructive, as in Euripides' Hippolytus, where in a terrible act of revenge she brings about the death of a young man who honored the virginal Artemis above her. This makes it all the more remarkable that she appears far more often in Sappho's poetry than a