Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • Chapter 8 - Sapphic Remembering, Lyric Kleos

  • from Part II - Sappho and Homer
  • Melissa Mueller, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
  • Book:
    Sappho and Homer
    Published online:
    07 December 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023, pp 175-192

  • Summary

    Taking Penelope’s exemplary remembering of Odysseus as its point of departure, this final chapter argues that Sappho’s lyrics shift the focus of women’s remembering from male to female objects, in this way creating an “avuncular” variation on the Odyssey’s conjugal paradigm. The fragments examined display the “sisterly” dynamics that exist alongside marriage – something the Odyssey itself does not explore. Sappho’s fragments feature the girls and women that wives once were before they were married. The bonds that remembering sustains in Sappho’s world exist alongside the vertically inflected (conjugal, maternal) relationships that more visibly defined a woman’s life. The scenes of recollection are appropriately adorned with lightly woven wreathes, fabrics, flowers, fragrant oils, suggesting the precariousness and fragility of these bonds, in comparision with the supposed enduringness of marriage and patrilineal lineage, with its accumulated household wealth passed on from one generation to the next.