Sappho in the Making: The Early Reception

Probing a scholarly schema that aims to reconstruct the original context of Sappho's song-making and her social role in archaic Lesbos, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis explores the cultural practices, ideologies, and socioaesthetic idioms that conditioned the politics of the reading and, eventually, the "writing" of the Sapphic persona in the early and most pivotal stages of its reception. By approaching ancient texts and visual representations as cultural informants, and by moving beyond the sanctioned paradigm of fictionalization in the research on Sappho and other archaic poets, "Sappho in the Making" articulates a new interdisciplinary Problematik on writing archaic Greek socioaesthetic cultures. Focusing on the ancient modalities and conceptual filters through which the figure and the songs of Sappho were perceived, this book offers the first anthropological and systematic investigation of the pluralities of what ancient discourses defined as the songs of Sappho.