Atthis, Gyrinno, and Other Hetairai: Female Personal Names in Sappho’s Poetry

Abstract

In her extant poetry, Sappho uses fourteen female personal names, four of which are not attested elsewhere. The essay is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive analysis of all of them. The results challenge the opinion, still prevailing in scholarship today, that Sappho’s companions were adolescent girls forming an educational or initiatory group, led by the poetess, that prepared them for respectable marriages. As a matter of fact, the female proper names in Sappho belong to four categories: ethnics, abstract nouns, nicknames and mythological names. According to the onomastic conventions of ancient Greece, names of all these categories typically denote females as slaves and courtesans, at least until the Hellenistic period. Thus it is argued that Sappho’s nomenclature creates a ‘reality effect’, implying furthermore that her use of the term hetairai (‘companions’) - and likewise of kalai and philai - could also point to the status of courtesans in the technical sense. This best fits the emphasis put on female beauty, seductiveness and musical skills, but also on invective and rivalry. Under the auspices of Aphrodite and from a female perspective, Sappho’s poems feature erotic experiences with lovers of both sexes as well as the reflection of those loves’ vicissitudes. The world imagined and displayed in her songs would therefore be mainly related to the symposion as the dominating realm of archaic poetry. This is how Sappho’s work was actually received in antiquity.

Subjetividad, memoria y verdad: Safo en una «historia política de las veridicciones»

“…Actualmente es pensado según la idea general de «grupo» o hetería femenina (aunque no con las mismas características que la masculina), o bien como «grupo» de jóvenes muchachas al cuidado e instrucción de Safo; véase Lardinois (1994); Calame (1997: 210-14;249-52); Burnett (1998: 209-28). Sin embargo, esta representación ha sido consistentemente criticada por Parker (1993); Stehle (1997: 262-318); Schlesier (2013).…”

The Look of Lyric: Greek Song and the Visual

“…McIntosh Snyder (1991) 56: 'Presumably the person addressed is a young woman of innocent demeanor who is in fact not so innocent as she looks, but whether she is supposed to be a bride-to-be or a hetaira cannot be determined.' 44 Though this status quo is now being challenged in relation to Sappho, and the view is resurfacing that she was a courtesan of sorts and her poetry essentially sympotic: see especially Schlesier (2013). …”