This chapter offers a new and original analysis of what I call the Myth of the Goddess and the Herdsman: here the fundamental claim is that the mortal king engaged in a sexual relationship with a powerful female deity (Inana or Ištar in Mesopotamia, Aphrodite or Venus in the Greco-Roman world). As shown here, this relationship is merely the central episode of a longer story-pattern. The myth in full begins with the preparations of the union and the sexual union itself, and continues with the male lover’s transgression and his divine punishment. The punishment leads to lamentation, which in turn paves the way for a conciliatory ending, which is again achieved by divine intervention. Here the sources include Mesopotamian cuneiform texts from the late third millennium BC onwards, a variety of evidence from the wider ancient Near East, and Greek poems on the mythical early rulers of Cyprus and Troy. The last adaptation – the union of the Trojan prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite, which produced the future Trojan leader Aeneas – was of special importance in the Greco-Roman world, as it was eventually claimed to be the mythical basis of Augustus’ right to rule as the first Roman emperor.

We have referred elsewhere to Aristotle’s pronouncement in his Poetics on the role of the chorus in tragedy: ‘the chorus must be regarded as one of the actors; being part of the whole, it should take part in the action (sunagonízesthai), not as in Euripides, but as in Sophocles’. In the wake of this famous normative statement it is often said that the chorus of Euripides’ tragedies no longer played the central role it had played in those of Sophocles. According to Aristotle the tragic poet Agathon had been the first to turn the chorus’ interventions into mere musical intermezzos or embólima, and many have ascribed the same tendency to Euripides. If there is one play of Euripides that does not justify this belief it is his second Hippolytus. This play shows the master tragedian at the apex of his poetic career.

Chapter 3 looks at the way Sappho responds to material objects in Homer, and explores how plaiting becomes a metaphor for Sappho’s own poetic production. With readings of some of the lesser-known fragments (e.g., frr. 102V, 110V, and 22), as well as a re-examination of Aphrodite’s famed epithet (poikilothronos) in fr. 1, this chapter highlights Sappho’s generic range and poetic creativity, as well as her noncompetitive appropriation of the affects of fear, desire, and breathlessness that are associated with weaponry in the Iliad. In Sappho’s lyrics, similar emotions are produced by women’s garments, jewelry, and other forms of bodily adornment. The chapter ends with an interpretation of Alcaeus 140V, whose orientation towards Homeric weaponry, it is argued, is distinctly more aspirational than wily and playful.

This chapter focuses on Sappho fr. 1V and argues that as an attentive reader of the Iliad – and of the shame and humiliation experienced by its female characters, both divine and mortal – Sappho, rather than attempting to outdo Homer, or to contest his canonicity, amplifies and recasts “minor” episodes from Homeric epic. Her approach is neither overtly competitive with, nor subservient to, the older poet in that she does not aim to recreate the contours and feel of the original. Instead, in a manner designed to make visible what epic suppresses, she returns us to some of the Iliad’s marginal and dismissed characters, showing us the generative potential of painful experiences, such as Aphrodite’s defeat in Iliad 5 at the hands of Diomedes, and her feelings of shame as she is rebuked by the mortal warrior and demeaned by her father, Zeus. The consolation of her mother, Dione’s, reparative embrace anticipates the similar sort of “repair” Sappho herself, as named speaker of her “Ode to Aphrodite” finds in that poem’s evocation of Aphrodite.

This chapter explores coincidences and divergences between Hesiod’s conception of language and those found in Akkadian literature. First, it provides a synopsis of Hesiod’s ideas about language and the interrelation of these ideas with the poet’s broader poetics. Then it discusses how Hesiodic conceptions of language are deeply intertwined with the interpretation of divine names. The chapter also investigates how Hesiod’s particular ways of interpreting theonyms is used to endorse hermeneutic practices anchored in an oral tradition. It explores the differences between the Theogony and its cuneiform counterparts, especially by comparing how wordplay and etymology are deployed in the analysis of divine names.

This chapter considers the case of the Song of Emergence that has proved central to several contributions collected here, but approaches the comparison as an opportunity to appreciate the distinctive differences reflected in the various relevant sources. This chapter emphasises the role of female wife–mother figures as destabilising elements in Hesiod’s Theogony, in contrast to the more limited roles of female characters particularly in the Song of Emergence, and locates that gendering theme within the wider context of early Greek mythology. This comparison allows us to see the individual element working within its own context, to determine what is distinctive about each tradition and so, finally, to understand all of them better. Genealogy, at least in the way most Classicists would like to practise it, is neither possible nor profitable. But the comparison remains, and its analogy can tell us a lot.

From the invocation to Aphrodite in fr. 1, the gods are a constant force in the world evoked in Sappho’s poetry. Chapter 15 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho examines cultic and religious presences from a literary point of view.