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Abstract
The songs attributed to Sappho, dating from around 600 BCE, reveal a wide variety of roles played by the woman who is dramatized as the speaker in these songs—as also by those who are shown interacting with her. It is argued that the identity of this woman, as projected in acts of performance, cannot be reduced to some single historical person whose own life and times were supposedly being put on record by the first-person pronoun “I” of Sappho’s songs. Rather, the poetics of Sappho were fueled by her poetic personality—or, to say it more precisely, by her choral personality. In terms of this argument, the primary traditional medium for performing the songs of Sappho was the chorus, that is, an ensemble of singers/dancers. Such a chorus, as an instrument of mimesis, could reenact the personality of Sappho, which included personae that highlighted such roles as sister, lover, priestess. And these roles were reenacted and kept on being reenacted by way of choral singing and dancing performed on seasonally recurring festive occasions by the girls and the women of the island of Lesbos.
Abstract
The songs attributed to Sappho, dating from around 600 BCE, reveal a wide variety of roles played by the woman who is dramatized as the speaker in these songs—as also by those who are shown interacting with her. It is argued that the identity of this woman, as projected in acts of performance, cannot be reduced to some single historical person whose own life and times were supposedly being put on record by the first-person pronoun “I” of Sappho’s songs. Rather, the poetics of Sappho were fueled by her poetic personality—or, to say it more precisely, by her choral personality. In terms of this argument, the primary traditional medium for performing the songs of Sappho was the chorus, that is, an ensemble of singers/dancers. Such a chorus, as an instrument of mimesis, could reenact the personality of Sappho, which included personae that highlighted such roles as sister, lover, priestess. And these roles were reenacted and kept on being reenacted by way of choral singing and dancing performed on seasonally recurring festive occasions by the girls and the women of the island of Lesbos.