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Sappho ( final version) received a peer review by Wikipedia editors, which on 19 September 2023 was archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this article. |
Given that identification of ancient images of Sappho is a perennial subject of sturm und drang on this talkpage, I've put together some notes on what I can find out about all of the supposed ancient depictions available on Commons (plus a couple of well-known ones that we don't have illustrated!) here. In general, it's nothing we haven't discussed before: all identifications of ancient sculpture as depicting Sappho are tenuous at best.
Hopefully this is a useful resource. If anyone has any further sources on the identification of any of these works (in particular some of the sculptures) do add them – all contributions greatly appreciated. Caeciliusinhorto-public ( talk) 16:53, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
"Whilst her importance as a poet is confirmed from the earliest times, all interpretations of her work have been coloured and influenced by discussions of her sexuality."
This seems extremely subjective and of the opinion of the author of the content and not the reality. Sappho has long been know for her poetry. Not everything is about sexuality. Spiel ( talk) 03:03, 2 June 2022 (UTC)
Hmm, this was introduced by someone who has not otherwise edited this article with the summary "small changes for clarity". As this is a very strong claim that isn't supported by the body of the article, I have removed it from the lead. (Though I note that it does not at all contradict the claim that Sappho is known for her poetry!) Caeciliusinhorto ( talk) 04:30, 2 June 2022 (UTC)
No reliable portrait of Sappho has survived; all extant representations, ancient and modern, are artists' conceptions. In the Tithonus poem she describes her hair as now white but formerly black. A literary papyrus of the second century AD describes her as very small. Alcaeus possibly describes Sappho as "violet-haired", which was a common Greek poetic way of describing dark hair. Some scholars dismiss this tradition as unreliable.
I am increasingly uncomfortable with this. The first sentence is true, though it's not exactly what the cited source is saying; Richter says that no ancient sculpture has been reliably identified as depicting Sappho, not that none of the ancient sculptures of Sappho are reliable likenesses. The second is true but I am incredibly uncomfortable with our article inferring details of Sappho's personal appearance from her poetry: aside from the fact that the speaker does not name herself as Sappho in fr.58, there's no reason to think that the poet would necessarily faithfully record her hair colour rather than e.g. use the contrast of black and white for poetic effect. Unless we can find reliable sources making this connection I think we should steer well clear. As for the literary papyrus, there are several sources rather better than Smyth's comments from 1900 which discuss in rather more depth why we shouldn't take that as a useful description: e.g. Marguerite Johnson, Sappho (2007); Mary Lefkowitz, The Lives of Greek Poets (2012); Jane McIntosh Snyder, "Sappho in Attic Vase-Painting" (1997).
Finally, the Alcaeus fragment is an enormous can of worms. Whether it mentions Sappho at all is disputed: it doesn't in Voigt's edition, nor in Liberman, Alcée (1999); Neri (2021) discusses the controversy in some depth and concludes that "μελλιχόμειδε Σάπφοι" is wrong. Even if it is right, citing the LSJ dictionary entry to support "a common poetic way" seems to be stretching the source way beyond the limits of what it actually says, and e.g. Snyder 1997 argues that it should be interpreted as meaning "O weaver of violets" rather than "violet-haired Sappho". And I can't lay my hands on a source at the moment, but I've definitely also seen it translated as "Sappho with violets in her hair". (Meanwhile, Yatromanolakis, Sappho in the Making (2008), goes so far as to say that the ascription of the fragment to Alcaeus is uncertain and it may have been authored by Sappho!)
I've tried to rewrite this in a way that I'm happy with, but I haven't been able to come up with anything which doesn't end up as footnotes upon footnotes of hedging and clarifying. Ultimately, I think the reason is that this doesn't really belong in the section of Sappho's life; the stories about her appearance are only relevant insofar as it tells us something about her reception. So I've cut it out; I'm going to try to fit some discussion of how Sappho's appearance is described in the sources (the Oxyrhynchus biography is not the only relevant source here!) into the section on reception. Caeciliusinhorto ( talk) 20:07, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
This article could use a bit more information about the music associated with Sappho—at the moment the only substantial information on it is hidden away in a note! ("Other musical inventions...", note n) For example, in her Grove article, the two leading scholars on Greek music doubt that she invented the Mixolydian mode (among other things), which is to be fair, a bit nonsensical anyways. Certainly there isn't a lot known about the music associated with her, but there is certainly more known than what is in the article. Would be happy to add some myself, if there is agreement from others that I should do so? (asking since this is a GA). Best – Aza24 (talk) 23:12, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
I think the new infobox recently added by Laharmo1 was a good addition to the article, and an improvement on the previous infobox which was removed by Caeciliusinhorto about a month ago.
So 3 editors want an infobox, and 1 is against. I'm posting this here to try and get a consensus.
𝕱𝖎𝖈𝖆𝖎𝖆 (
talk) 17:38, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
Sappho | |
---|---|
Born |
c. 630 BC Lesbos |
Died | c. 570 BC |
Known for | Poetry |
Notable work | Ode to Aphrodite, Sappho 31 |
Children | Cleïs (possibly) |
Notes
Caeciliusinhorto, as discussed above, I've now added a music section, which I hope is satisfiable. I have some thoughts regarding this new section:
Also, the now two-picture (and even when it had three) gallery in the Ancient sources section strikes me as very strange and out of place. Do we really need these at all? Aza24 (talk) 21:13, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
I favor the picture of the bust over the much smaller picture on a vessel as the first photo@, even if the latter is older. What do others think ? Wuerzele ( talk) 19:09, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
In my attempts to bring this article up to featured, I've spent much of today trying to get my head around our image licensing rules; I still have a few outstanding queries so I'm summarising everything here in the hopes of getting to the bottom of things.
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There are really two images that I'm concerned about: the one of Grenfell & Hunt in Egypt and the one of Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene. Both are claimed as public domain in the US due to pre-1928 publication, but I can't find any evidence for either.
The Solomon painting can be swapped out if necessary for an image of Amanda Brewster Sewell's "Sappho" ( exhibited Chicago 1893). There's nothing great on Commons for Grenfell and Hunt (there's a studio portrait of Grenfell which is much less relevant to the topic, and the only photo of AS Hunt itself needs its US public domain status establishing), or for the Oxyrhynchus excavations. There is a nice image in the Illustrated London News from 23 May 1914 showing the excavations at Oxyrhynchus; its photographer isn't listed but if it's by Grenfell or Hunt it's PD-old, and if we can't establish a photographer it's PD-UK-unknown. Caeciliusinhorto ( talk) 18:10, 30 June 2023 (UTC)
An IP editor removed "The legend may have resulted in part from a desire to assert her as heterosexual. [1]". I was going to restore it routinely as sourced content (and indeed UndercoverClassicist did restore it) but reviewing the source, I found that the statement might look plausible but isn't clearly supported by the source.
Hallett describes how the legend was used to assert Sappho as heterosexual but doesn't suggest that was its origin, even in part. She does write "Various works from the fourth century onward also represent Sappho as a mythic heroine, driven by her love for a younger man, Phaon, to a dramatic suicide"; "in the fifteenth of Ovid's Heroides, a fictive epistle from Sappho to Phaon, she is portrayed as discomfited by allegations that she enjoyed erotic attachments with other women; at line 201 she complains that her love for the women of her native Lesbos has made her infamous" (p448) and "Three of these sources ... insist that Sappho's primary erotic allegiances were heterosexual, citing as evidence that she was infatuated with Phaon, was married, and had a daughter" (pp448–449).)
Should we remove the statement as WP:SYNTH or do we have a source that does directly support it? NebY ( talk) 14:35, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
The history of Sapphic speculation provides countless examples of the tendency to literalize references in Sappho's poetry in order to make them into elements from which a biography can be constructed ... The first male author who made the actual Sappho ... commit suicide for love of a man named Phaon ... reassured his male audience: the desiring woman rejects her love for women.
The ancient use of the story by multiple writers is significant, after all, and more so than speculation about why it was created. NebY ( talk) 15:45, 23 April 2024 (UTC)The story of Sappho's leap is regarded as ahistorical by modern scholars, perhaps invented by the comic poets or originating from a misreading of a first-person reference in a non-biographical poem, [2] but was used in antiquity as evidence that Sappho was heterosexual. [3]
The story of Sappho's leap is regarded as ahistorical by modern scholars, perhaps invented by the comic poets or originating from a misreading of a first-person reference in a non-biographical poem. [2] It may have served to reassure ancient audiences of Sappho's heterosexuality, and became particularly important in the nineteenth century to writers who saw homosexuality as immoral and wished to construct Sappho as heterosexual. [4]
Source for Walen: Walen, Denise A. (1999). "Sappho in the Closet". In Davis, Tracy C.; Donkin, Ellen (eds.). Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 233–256. ISBN 9780521659826.
I think we need a bit more than just "it was used as evidence that Sappho was heterosexual", as our sources are fairly clear that this was a major reason why it was popular, even if they stop short of saying that this is why it was invented. UndercoverClassicist T· C 16:26, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Sappho article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 |
Sappho has been listed as one of the Language and literature good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This
level-4 vital article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to multiple WikiProjects. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Sappho ( final version) received a peer review by Wikipedia editors, which on 19 September 2023 was archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this article. |
Given that identification of ancient images of Sappho is a perennial subject of sturm und drang on this talkpage, I've put together some notes on what I can find out about all of the supposed ancient depictions available on Commons (plus a couple of well-known ones that we don't have illustrated!) here. In general, it's nothing we haven't discussed before: all identifications of ancient sculpture as depicting Sappho are tenuous at best.
Hopefully this is a useful resource. If anyone has any further sources on the identification of any of these works (in particular some of the sculptures) do add them – all contributions greatly appreciated. Caeciliusinhorto-public ( talk) 16:53, 5 November 2021 (UTC)
"Whilst her importance as a poet is confirmed from the earliest times, all interpretations of her work have been coloured and influenced by discussions of her sexuality."
This seems extremely subjective and of the opinion of the author of the content and not the reality. Sappho has long been know for her poetry. Not everything is about sexuality. Spiel ( talk) 03:03, 2 June 2022 (UTC)
Hmm, this was introduced by someone who has not otherwise edited this article with the summary "small changes for clarity". As this is a very strong claim that isn't supported by the body of the article, I have removed it from the lead. (Though I note that it does not at all contradict the claim that Sappho is known for her poetry!) Caeciliusinhorto ( talk) 04:30, 2 June 2022 (UTC)
No reliable portrait of Sappho has survived; all extant representations, ancient and modern, are artists' conceptions. In the Tithonus poem she describes her hair as now white but formerly black. A literary papyrus of the second century AD describes her as very small. Alcaeus possibly describes Sappho as "violet-haired", which was a common Greek poetic way of describing dark hair. Some scholars dismiss this tradition as unreliable.
I am increasingly uncomfortable with this. The first sentence is true, though it's not exactly what the cited source is saying; Richter says that no ancient sculpture has been reliably identified as depicting Sappho, not that none of the ancient sculptures of Sappho are reliable likenesses. The second is true but I am incredibly uncomfortable with our article inferring details of Sappho's personal appearance from her poetry: aside from the fact that the speaker does not name herself as Sappho in fr.58, there's no reason to think that the poet would necessarily faithfully record her hair colour rather than e.g. use the contrast of black and white for poetic effect. Unless we can find reliable sources making this connection I think we should steer well clear. As for the literary papyrus, there are several sources rather better than Smyth's comments from 1900 which discuss in rather more depth why we shouldn't take that as a useful description: e.g. Marguerite Johnson, Sappho (2007); Mary Lefkowitz, The Lives of Greek Poets (2012); Jane McIntosh Snyder, "Sappho in Attic Vase-Painting" (1997).
Finally, the Alcaeus fragment is an enormous can of worms. Whether it mentions Sappho at all is disputed: it doesn't in Voigt's edition, nor in Liberman, Alcée (1999); Neri (2021) discusses the controversy in some depth and concludes that "μελλιχόμειδε Σάπφοι" is wrong. Even if it is right, citing the LSJ dictionary entry to support "a common poetic way" seems to be stretching the source way beyond the limits of what it actually says, and e.g. Snyder 1997 argues that it should be interpreted as meaning "O weaver of violets" rather than "violet-haired Sappho". And I can't lay my hands on a source at the moment, but I've definitely also seen it translated as "Sappho with violets in her hair". (Meanwhile, Yatromanolakis, Sappho in the Making (2008), goes so far as to say that the ascription of the fragment to Alcaeus is uncertain and it may have been authored by Sappho!)
I've tried to rewrite this in a way that I'm happy with, but I haven't been able to come up with anything which doesn't end up as footnotes upon footnotes of hedging and clarifying. Ultimately, I think the reason is that this doesn't really belong in the section of Sappho's life; the stories about her appearance are only relevant insofar as it tells us something about her reception. So I've cut it out; I'm going to try to fit some discussion of how Sappho's appearance is described in the sources (the Oxyrhynchus biography is not the only relevant source here!) into the section on reception. Caeciliusinhorto ( talk) 20:07, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
This article could use a bit more information about the music associated with Sappho—at the moment the only substantial information on it is hidden away in a note! ("Other musical inventions...", note n) For example, in her Grove article, the two leading scholars on Greek music doubt that she invented the Mixolydian mode (among other things), which is to be fair, a bit nonsensical anyways. Certainly there isn't a lot known about the music associated with her, but there is certainly more known than what is in the article. Would be happy to add some myself, if there is agreement from others that I should do so? (asking since this is a GA). Best – Aza24 (talk) 23:12, 25 July 2022 (UTC)
I think the new infobox recently added by Laharmo1 was a good addition to the article, and an improvement on the previous infobox which was removed by Caeciliusinhorto about a month ago.
So 3 editors want an infobox, and 1 is against. I'm posting this here to try and get a consensus.
𝕱𝖎𝖈𝖆𝖎𝖆 (
talk) 17:38, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
Sappho | |
---|---|
Born |
c. 630 BC Lesbos |
Died | c. 570 BC |
Known for | Poetry |
Notable work | Ode to Aphrodite, Sappho 31 |
Children | Cleïs (possibly) |
Notes
Caeciliusinhorto, as discussed above, I've now added a music section, which I hope is satisfiable. I have some thoughts regarding this new section:
Also, the now two-picture (and even when it had three) gallery in the Ancient sources section strikes me as very strange and out of place. Do we really need these at all? Aza24 (talk) 21:13, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
I favor the picture of the bust over the much smaller picture on a vessel as the first photo@, even if the latter is older. What do others think ? Wuerzele ( talk) 19:09, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
In my attempts to bring this article up to featured, I've spent much of today trying to get my head around our image licensing rules; I still have a few outstanding queries so I'm summarising everything here in the hopes of getting to the bottom of things.
Extended content
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There are really two images that I'm concerned about: the one of Grenfell & Hunt in Egypt and the one of Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene. Both are claimed as public domain in the US due to pre-1928 publication, but I can't find any evidence for either.
The Solomon painting can be swapped out if necessary for an image of Amanda Brewster Sewell's "Sappho" ( exhibited Chicago 1893). There's nothing great on Commons for Grenfell and Hunt (there's a studio portrait of Grenfell which is much less relevant to the topic, and the only photo of AS Hunt itself needs its US public domain status establishing), or for the Oxyrhynchus excavations. There is a nice image in the Illustrated London News from 23 May 1914 showing the excavations at Oxyrhynchus; its photographer isn't listed but if it's by Grenfell or Hunt it's PD-old, and if we can't establish a photographer it's PD-UK-unknown. Caeciliusinhorto ( talk) 18:10, 30 June 2023 (UTC)
An IP editor removed "The legend may have resulted in part from a desire to assert her as heterosexual. [1]". I was going to restore it routinely as sourced content (and indeed UndercoverClassicist did restore it) but reviewing the source, I found that the statement might look plausible but isn't clearly supported by the source.
Hallett describes how the legend was used to assert Sappho as heterosexual but doesn't suggest that was its origin, even in part. She does write "Various works from the fourth century onward also represent Sappho as a mythic heroine, driven by her love for a younger man, Phaon, to a dramatic suicide"; "in the fifteenth of Ovid's Heroides, a fictive epistle from Sappho to Phaon, she is portrayed as discomfited by allegations that she enjoyed erotic attachments with other women; at line 201 she complains that her love for the women of her native Lesbos has made her infamous" (p448) and "Three of these sources ... insist that Sappho's primary erotic allegiances were heterosexual, citing as evidence that she was infatuated with Phaon, was married, and had a daughter" (pp448–449).)
Should we remove the statement as WP:SYNTH or do we have a source that does directly support it? NebY ( talk) 14:35, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
The history of Sapphic speculation provides countless examples of the tendency to literalize references in Sappho's poetry in order to make them into elements from which a biography can be constructed ... The first male author who made the actual Sappho ... commit suicide for love of a man named Phaon ... reassured his male audience: the desiring woman rejects her love for women.
The ancient use of the story by multiple writers is significant, after all, and more so than speculation about why it was created. NebY ( talk) 15:45, 23 April 2024 (UTC)The story of Sappho's leap is regarded as ahistorical by modern scholars, perhaps invented by the comic poets or originating from a misreading of a first-person reference in a non-biographical poem, [2] but was used in antiquity as evidence that Sappho was heterosexual. [3]
The story of Sappho's leap is regarded as ahistorical by modern scholars, perhaps invented by the comic poets or originating from a misreading of a first-person reference in a non-biographical poem. [2] It may have served to reassure ancient audiences of Sappho's heterosexuality, and became particularly important in the nineteenth century to writers who saw homosexuality as immoral and wished to construct Sappho as heterosexual. [4]
Source for Walen: Walen, Denise A. (1999). "Sappho in the Closet". In Davis, Tracy C.; Donkin, Ellen (eds.). Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 233–256. ISBN 9780521659826.
I think we need a bit more than just "it was used as evidence that Sappho was heterosexual", as our sources are fairly clear that this was a major reason why it was popular, even if they stop short of saying that this is why it was invented. UndercoverClassicist T· C 16:26, 23 April 2024 (UTC)