The postcard on the cover of the book depicts a privileged view of a central street of Mytilene at the beginning of the twentieth century. One of the major Greek Orthodox monuments of the city, the elaborate church of St. Therapon, most prominent in Mytilene until today, dominates the left background of the picture, the right front of which is occupied by an eclectic mixture of random local passersby. Rather than a historical “document” of the life and sociocultural economies of Mytilene at a specific historical period, this image may be viewed as an aestheticized “monument”—a metonymic, anthropologically intriguing illustration of the discursive mechanisms involved in the rewriting and circulation of foreign societies among privileged consumers of cultural capitals. Characteristically, the French caption at the bottom of the picture (Une rue de Mételin) undertakes to rewrite the snapshot of the photographed indigenous life in the lingua franca of European cultural colonialism at the beginning of the twentieth century. This rendering entails a discursive transference of the multilayered—but here inevitably fragmented—local culture into a hegemonizing artistic crystallization intended for consumption by European admirers of (ancient, medieval, and contemporary) Greece’s perplexing, albeit often idealized, alterity. From this perspective, this postcard captures some of the discursive processes implicated in any attempt to convey, interpret, and naturalize the otherness of foreign, past or present, cultures.

“Rewriting” is inherent in cultural or literary historical accounts and hermeneutics, despite the fact that only rarely is its almost omnipresent function explicitly recognized in the study of Greek antiquity. It is this unwillingness to accept rewriting as an intrinsic constituent of any analytical process that often gives rise to lasting essentialized ideological or methodological approaches. In classical philology—defined as the study of texts in their original context, viewed always to a certain degree through the lenses of the textual work of Alexandrian Greek scholars—these approaches resist being superseded by newer paradigms, themselves methodological models not invulnerable to large-scale revision and modification. Practices of rewriting and monumentalizing Greek antiquity into sometimes unnecessarily confident reconstructions of archaic realities have been explored in different parts of this book. My analysis has attempted to shift the research focus from a “corrective” approach to ancient Greek evidence to the intricacy of the cultural practices that shaped the synchronic receptorial filters through which the song-making and figure of Sappho entered visual, literary, and wider sociocultural discursive domains of archaic, classical, and early Hellenistic antiquity. Moving beyond the polar hermeneutic schema of original authorial past vs. authoritative interpretive present, an anthropological approach to ancient cultural informants advocates the urgency of investigating Sappho in the making, especially in the early and pivotal stages of her reception. By focusing on the densely layered loci of these stages of the shaping of Sappho and other archaic and classical song-makers, my investigation has aspired to eschew the hermeneutic linearity of historicizing approaches that attempt to reconstruct in aggressive detail the original context or intentions of her poetry while leaving aside the synchronic discursivity of ancient informants who mediate between the past of her authorial voice and the present of their recontextualizing practices.

The theoretic methodology proposed in this book attempts to demonstrate several main arguments. If we return to the current sporadic outlines of the ancient reception of Sappho—viewed as a unified conglomeration of miscellaneous images from distant periods susceptible to modern narrativization—we run the risk of casting into schematic oblivion the richness, cultural vibrancy, and, more importantly, the interdiscursivity of existing sources—ancient Greek, Roman, and medieval. As one looks more closely at this material, which, despite contrary current assumption, has not yet been thoroughly collected, it appears persistently more extensive and more eloquent as an articulation of the pluralities of what ancient informants defined as “the songs of Sappho.” Reconstructing the original, late seventh- and early sixth-century contexts of the compositions of Sappho—the search for her companions—must continue being practiced as fervently as before. However, in current reconstructions of her original context, a marked tendency exists to look askance in the wrong places. Throughout this work, I argue that only through a plurality of investigations into the linguistic and cultural anthropology of sources and their broader sociopolitical discursive textures can scholarly advances be made with regard to how Sappho and her archaic world of social action might be viewed and written about in modern times. Once we shift our research focus to nexuses of synchronic ancient discursive idioms, mythopractical associations, and syntagmatic metonymies closely connected with the shaping and representation of her figure, the picture becomes more complex and our results concerning the original realities lurking behind the textual fragments of Sappho more historically grounded. Interesting questions surrounding late seventh-century Sappho remain: Was she perhaps a chorus leader in, or a poet for, archaic khoroi of young girls, a socioreligious initiator of some sort? Was her performative medium choral or monodic (a rather schematic understanding of performance in view of the arguments advanced in Chapter Four with regard to how we might want to conceptualize genre in archaic and classical Greece?) [1] And did she possibly represent a tamed version of male symposiastic poets like Alkaios or a coeval companion of women from Lesbos and the coast of Asia Minor? These questions must be based, I contend, on anthropologically oriented investigations into the socioaesthetic cultures that defined the agency of individual ancient discourses, which point both to Sappho’s original cultural context on Lesbos and to their need to rewrite it.

This brings us to a related argument. It has most often been assumed that no classical sources exist regarding the reception of Sappho. Our sources, the reasoning goes, are predominantly Hellenistic, with the exception of the allegedly numerous late classical comedies about the poet that exercised almost exclusive influence on later successive biographical readings of her poems. The prehistory of this Hellenistic flourishing of representations of Sappho has not been a scholarly concern whereas sporadic intuitive ideas about the late archaic and classical periods of her reception have remained influential, even regarding the question of homoeroticism in her compositions. However, if her songs and figure were scanned by early classical male audiences as indeed largely associated with a desire for sexual pleasure, we may perhaps not expect to find unambiguous references to female homoeroticism in Sappho’s poetry by classical authors, especially in Attic contexts. In extant classical literary sources there is no explicit mention. [2] And this is not confined to the songs of Sappho. Female same-sex relationships as such are distinctly unpopular in the literature of that period. [3] Kenneth Dover has ingeniously suggested that in the case of Attic comedy and art, this fact can be accounted for as a kind of cultural taboo imposed on the playwrights and craftsmen by the male anxiety of an androcentric society. [4] The only serious objection to this idea is the representation of scenes involving female homoeroticism or, as we might prefer to describe it as, female sexual fluidity in classical vase-paintings. [5] Even so, as I have argued with regard to early and late classical informants, Sappho’s songs were scanned by male audiences as analogous to songs that celebrated homoerotic male erôs between erastês and erômenos. [6] Therefore, one may need to formulate the whole question quite differently. The prehistory, visual or textual, of the Hellenistic representations of Sappho suggests hitherto unnoticed ways in which such issues can be approached.