From: mls@cbnewsm.cb.att.com (mike.siemon)
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Subject: Re: Sappho (spin-off thread)
Summary: note about the continuance of Sappho
Date: 4 Sep 92 03:04:16 GMT
Organization: AT&T

In article <1992Sep2.202840.6658@lmt.mn.org>, ciaran@county.lmt.mn.org
(Ciaran Benson) writes:

>   After becoming discontent with several sources, most of
> them proportedly "Pagan" writers (but apparently with their
> own agendas), I've finally settled with the translations of
> Willis Barnstone as set forth in "Sappho and the Greek Lyric
> Poets", by Schocken Books, New York (ISBN 0-8052-0831-3).

This is indeed a recommendable offering of the extant verse;
it contains the Greek as well as acceptable translations.
However, there is a thrust to this discussion which needs some
correction:

> popular with and approved by Pagan and Christian alike.
> Sappho's works did not lack popularity, but as one who,
> in Ovid's words, "taught how to love girls" (/Lesbia quid
> docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas?/), her popularity did
> not always win approval.

This suggests, quite incorrectly, that Sappho was NOT popular
with (some) Christians.

>   "To the Church mind Sappho represented the culmination of
> moral laxity, and her work was treated with zealous
> disapproval.  About A.D. 380 Saint Gregory of Nazianzos,

Nazianzus was both something of a prude, and a deep devotee of
Classical culture who sometimes seems to have spoken from a very
tightly closed closet.  I won't apologize for his idiocies, any
more than the idiocies of "gay" homophobes.  However, Barnstone
is simply incorrect that "the Church" ever had any kind of opinion
about Sappho.

> She had already been violently
> attacked as early as A.D. 180 by the Assyrian ascetic Tatian:

Tatian was universally condemned (excpet in the Syrian Church,
which loved him :-)) as a heretic.

>   "Then in 391 a mob of Christian zealots partially destroyed
> Ptolemy Soter's Classical library in Alexandria.  The often

This is the usual peroration about Christian hatred of Sappho.
But Sappho was known AND QUOTED (some of our extant verses are
derived from these quotations) by Christians centuries AFTER
Alexandria and Egypt had fallen to the Muslims.

The *basic* problem is that later Byzantine taste was philosophic
rather than poetic, and the little poetry that was admired and
quoted from circa 1200 on was highly elaborate and contrived (it
is worth pointing out in this context that the intensely homo-
erotic *male* verse of Hellenistic poets WAS preserved by these
supposedly puritanical Christians.  The Palatine Anthology is THE
place to look for celebrations of gay sensuality/sexuality.  This
was transmitted to us by Byzantine Christians, at exactly the
same age in which Sappho was lost -- she was too "simple" and
the taste of the day was for something like a higher order Oscar
Wilde.

WE love Sappho, and can only tolerate small doses of Kallimachos
and other, less memorable, versifiers.  It must be noted that in
the first millenium of Christian life, OUR opinion has held at
various times -- and at other times has been rejected.  It is
rather unfortunate that the destruction of Constantinople by
Italians and their allies happened at a stage when Sappho was
NOT sufficiently in fashion to have survived, as far more trivial
homoerotic work *did* survive.
-- 
Michael L. Siemon			"I know of nothing -- I suspect
					not even death -- that is so fixed
mls@usl.com				in the present tense as love."
standard disclaimer					-- Jess Anderson
Newsgroups: alt.pagan