The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones. Daniel Mendelsohn

Sappho’s central position in the history of female homosexuality, the two editors devoted an entire page to her. The page is blank.

      The controversies about Sappho’s sexuality have never been far from the centre of scholarship about her. Starting in the early nineteenth century, when classics itself was becoming a formal discipline, scholars who were embarrassed by what they found in the fragments worked hard to whitewash Sappho’s reputation. The title of one early work of German scholarship is ‘Sappho Liberated from a Prevalent Prejudice’: in it, the author acknowledged that what Sappho felt for her female friends was ‘love’ but hastened to insist that it was in no way ‘objectionable, vulgarly sensual, and illegal’, and that her poems of love were neither ‘monstrous nor abominable’.

The eagerness to come up with ‘innocent’ explanations for the poet’s attachment to young women persisted through the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The most tenacious theory held that Sappho was the head of a girls’ boarding school, a matron whose interest in her pupils was purely pedagogical. (One scholar claimed to have found evidence that classes were taught on how to apply makeup.) Another theory made her into an august priestess, leading ‘an association of young women who devoted themselves to the cult of the goddess’.

      Most classicists today have no problem with the idea of a gay Sappho. But some have been challenging the interpretation of her work that seems most natural to twenty-first-century readers: that the poems are deeply personal expressions of private homoerotic passion. Pointing to the relentlessly public and communitarian character of ancient Greek society, with its clan allegiances, its endless rounds of athletic games and artistic competitions, its jammed calendar of civic and religious festivals, they wonder whether ‘personal’ poetry, as we understand the term, even existed for someone like Sappho. As André Lardinois, the co-author of the new English edition, has written, ‘Can we be sure that these are really her own feelings? … What is “personality” in such a group-oriented society as archaic Greece?’

Indeed, the vision of Sappho as a solitary figure pouring out her heart in the women’s quarters of a nobleman’s mansion is a sentimental anachronism – a projection, like so much of our thinking about her, of our own habits and institutions onto the past. In Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s Sappho and Alcaeus, the Poetess and four diaphanously clad, flower-wreathed acolytes relax in a charming little performance space, enraptured as the male bard sings and plays, as if he were a Beat poet in a Telegraph Hill café. But Lardinois and others have argued that many, if not most, of Sappho’s poems were written to be performed by choruses on public occasions. In some lyrics, the speaker uses the first-person plural ‘we’; in others, the form of ‘you’ that she uses is the plural, suggesting that she’s addressing a group – presumably the chorus, who danced as she sang. (Even when Sappho uses the first-person singular, it doesn’t mean she was singing solo: in Greek tragedy, the chorus, which numbered fifteen singers, regularly uses ‘I’.)

      This communal voice, which to us seems jarring in lyrics of deep, even erotic feeling – imagine that Shakespeare’s sonnets had been written as choral hymns – is one that some translators today simply ignore, in keeping with the modern interest in individual psychology. But if the proper translation of the sexy little Fragment 38 is not ‘you scorch me’ but ‘you scorch us’, which is what the Greek actually says, how, exactly, should we interpret it?

      To answer that question, classicists lately have been imagining the purposes to which public performance of erotic poems might have been put. Ancient references to the poet’s ‘companions’ and ‘students’ have led one expert to argue that Sappho was the leader of a female collective, whose role was ‘instruction leading to marriage’. Rather than expressions of individual yearning for a young woman, the poems were, in Lardinois’s view, ‘public forms of praise of the general attractiveness of the girl’, celebrating her readiness for wedlock and integration into the larger society. The late Harvard classicist Charles Segal made even larger claims. As he saw it, the strongly rhythmic erotic lyrics were ‘incantatory’ in nature; he believed that public performance of poems like Fragment 31 would have served to socialize desire itself for the entire city – to lift sexual yearning ‘out of the realm of the formless and terrible, bring it into the light of form, make it visible to the individual poet and, by extension, to his or her society’.

Even purely literary issues – for instance, the tendency to think of Sappho as the inventor of ‘the lyric I’, a single, emotionally naked speaker who becomes a stand-in for the reader – are affected by these new theories. After all, if the ‘I’ who speaks in Sappho’s work is a persona (a ‘poetic construct rather than a real-life figure’, as Lardinois put it) how much does her biography actually matter?

      Between the paucity of actual poems and the woeful unreliability of the biographical tradition, these debates are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. Indeed, the study of Sappho is beset by a curious circularity. For the better part of a millennium – between the compilation of the Suda and the late nineteenth century – the same bits of poetry and the same biographical gossip were endlessly recycled, the poetic fragments providing the sources for biographies that were then used as the basis for new interpretations of those same fragments. This is why the ‘new Sappho’ has been so galvanizing for classicists: every now and then, the circle expands, letting in a little more light.

      Obbink’s revelation last year was, in fact, only the latest in a series of papyrological discoveries that have dramatically enhanced our understanding of Sappho and her work. Until the late nineteenth century, when the papyri started turning up, there were only the ancient quotations. Since then, the amount of Sappho that we have has more than doubled.

In 1897, two young Oxford archaeologists started excavating a site in Egypt that had been the municipal dump of a town called Oxyrhynchus – ‘the City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish’. In ancient times, the place had been home to a large Greek-speaking population. However lowly its original purpose, the dump soon yielded treasures. Papyrus manuscripts dating to the first few centuries AD, containing both Greek and Roman texts, began to surface. Some were fragments of works long known, such as the Iliad, but even these were of great value, since the Oxyrhynchus papyri were often far older than what had been, until that point, the oldest surviving copies. Others revealed works previously unknown. Among the latter were several exciting new fragments of Sappho, some substantial. From the tattered papyri, the voice came through as distinctive as ever:

      Some men say cavalry, some men say infantry,

      some men say the navy’s the loveliest thing

      on this black earth, but I say it’s what-

      ever you love

      Over the decades that followed, more of the papyri were deciphered and published. But by 1955, when the Cambridge classicist Denys Page published Sappho and Alcaeus, a definitive study of the two poets from Lesbos, it seemed that even this rich new vein had been exhausted. ‘There is not at present,’ Page declared, ‘any reason to expect that we shall ever possess much more of the poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus than we do today, and this seems a suitable time to begin the difficult and doubtful task of interpreting.’

      Sappho herself, it seems fair to say, would have raised an eyebrow at Page’s confidence in his judgment. Human fortune, she writes, is as variable as the weather at sea, where ‘fair winds swiftly follow harsh gales’. And, indeed, this verse was unknown to Page, since it comes from the papyrus fragment that Dirk Obbink brought to light last year: the ‘Brothers Poem’.

For specialists, the most exciting feature of the ‘Brothers Poem’ is that it seems to corroborate the closest thing we have to a contemporary reference to Sappho’s personal life: an oblique mention of her in Herodotus’ Histories, written about a century and a half after her death. During a long discussion of Egyptian society, Herodotus mentions one of Sappho’s brothers, a rather dashing character named Charaxus. A swashbuckling merchant sailor, he supposedly spent a fortune to buy the freedom of a favourite courtesan in Egypt – an act, Herodotus reports, for which Sappho ‘severely chided’ her sibling in verse. Ovid and other later classical authors also refer to some kind of tension between