Lesbos, the Greek island of women poets. Also beautiful, according to Homer, although some authors clarified that Sappho did not stand out precisely for her physique, the yardstick in the second half of the 7th century BC, when in Mytilene An annual beauty contest was held. It matters little that those writers had never seen her in person, nor that her oldest portrait was printed on a ceramic decades after her death. Perhaps we could appreciate that, at least, he has passed down to posterity for his work and not for his appearance.
“The ability to understand women and place them in their historical context is a quality absent even in the most renowned classical and contemporary historians,” makes clear the writer Daisy Dunn (London, 1987) in her book Pandora’s Revenge (Criticism), where she rewrites the biography of women in the ancient world or, if you prefer, the history of the ancient world through women. Their intention is clear: to strip them of the label of secondary characters and turn them into creators of the story, the same one that had portrayed them in a Manichaean way, as well as femmes fataleswell as chaste and honest.
Thus, the British classicist tries to reverse the “story of warriors, conquerors and bearded kings” and capture how they also built the classical world, so that Pandora’s Revenge can be read not so much as an ancient story about women, but as “written from women.” Thus, through its pages parade Artemisia of Halicarnassuscommanding an army during the Persian Wars; Agrippina the Lesser, powerful in Rome until her son, Emperor Nero, repudiated her; Fulvia, wife of Mark Antony, in whose name she waged a war while her husband cavorted with Cleopatra; or Cinisca of Sparta, the first woman to win in the Olympics.
“I hope I have contributed to some extent in bringing these female characters back to life,” writes Daisy Dunn, who praises the figure of Sappho of Lesbos“the great poet of nostalgia, longing and jealous desire.” His is the sapphic stanza, three hendecasyllabic verses with a final pentasyllable. Romanticism and wedding hymns, but also dirges, epic pieces and epigrams, lulled by the melody of a lyre. Without a doubt, those that address the love for other womensapphic poems like Hymn in honor of Aphroditewhere he invokes the goddess to obtain the favors of his beloved: “Does the restless heart burn again? […] “Do not distress me with regret and sex.”
In a sort of literary salon, she taught poetry and music to the girls of Mytilene, a prosperous city located on the southwest coast of Lesbos. He became intimate with some and was frustrated that they married men as soon as they finished their studies, at a very young age. Others, however, left her to go to school. Andromedaformer student and now rival, a betrayal that she reflected in her verses, where she also alludes to lovesickness or the corrosive effect of desire. A work in which, in the opinion of authors such as Maite López Las Heras, a poet who showed no interest in the sex of who she loved or who was loved is revealed, which makes her current or even places her as an advance in our time.
In fact, the opening of Lesvos gave her opportunities that allowed her to achieve fame, although she had “the desire to endure and obtain fame,” according to Daisy Dunn. An ambition that distinguished her from the women of her time, since very few “managed to achieve immortality through their work and through their own merits,” adds in her book the graduate in Classics from the University of Oxford and an expert in History of the World. Art. “Reluctant to be reduced to a piece of marble or a handful of verses composed by someone else, Sappho aspired to achieve the kleosthe imperishable glory.”
An eternal fame that she achieved thanks to intimate poems dedicated to other women, although it is difficult to establish a comparison with other contemporary poets, whose work has barely been preserved. In fact, part of his comes from quotes from third parties and the only complete poem is the Hymn in honor of Aphroditewhile some fragments appear in papyri that are difficult to read, such as those found in Egypt, where they talk about a woman possibly receiving dildos. “What is clear is that if Sappho ever used a dildo, she was not the only woman on Lesbos, the island of transgressive love, to do so.”
Daisy Dunn traces the poet’s biography and describes life on the island, as well as her sexual practices, from masturbation to fellatio. Situations and factors that contextualize the life of the so-called tenth muse, “because her verses seemed to have descended in a gentle flutter from the divine summit of Mount Helicon,” writes the classicist, who recalls that the first known poet in history was Enheduanna. In the 23rd century BC, she was also a pioneer in denouncing sexual harassment, specifically in The exaltation of Inannawhere he denounces a king of Ur (Mesopotamia).
“Those who read this text with modern eyes are in a comparatively advantageous position to appreciate that women changed the course of ancient history in very tangible ways,” concludes Daisy Dunn, who recovers female figures who, according to her, should be as known as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. The list is huge: Gorgo of SpartaAmitis, Telesila of Argos, Tomiris, File of Priene, Aspasia, Olympia of Epirus and a long etcetera in which, of course, the aforementioned Artemisia of Halicarnassus, Fulvia and Cinisca of Sparta deserve a prominent place.
“If you eliminate the Ptolemies and the Caesars, if you completely dispense with Pericles and Alexander, Xerxes and Juba, what remains is a barren wasteland,” writes the author of Pandora’s Revengewho clarifies that he does not seek to distort history, but rather to put them in the foreground. “Now, if you move them a little towards the edges of the scene, the women eclipsed by their shadow“. That some have left no trace, she warns, “is not a mere coincidence,” but rather the confirmation that historians and chroniclers excluded them from their narratives. “The truth,” laments Daisy Dunn, “is that many of them are shades”.
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