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- [00:00]
Anita Anand
To some, he is the revolutionary hero who restored China to its rightful place on the global stage.
- [00:06]
Mary Beard
To others, he's a brutal despot accused of presiding over more civilian deaths than
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Anita Anand
either Stalin or Hitler. Mao Zedong has one of the most recognizable faces in the world. Yet he started life in a muddy provincial village.
- [00:20]
Mary Beard
A rebel son who hated his father survived a 6,000 mile walk across China and rose to become a figure of titanic proportions.
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Anita Anand
From Empire the Goal Hanger World History Show. I'm Anita Anand. And I'm William Duranpo. In this six part series, we're joined by world renowned expert Rana Mitter to explore the life of the father of Communist China, Mao Zedong. We'll track his rise from a bookstore
- [00:47]
Mary Beard
owner to a guerrilla commander.
- [00:50]
Anita Anand
And we'll witness his ruthless elimination to secure total power.
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Mary Beard
And we'll descend into the dark experiment of the Cultural Revolution, a time when ancient temples were burnt, children denounced their parents, and a nation worshipped a mango
- [01:04]
Anita Anand
as a sacred relic. Subscribe to Empire wherever you get your podcasts to listen. Now,
- [01:12]
Mary Beard
let's face it, when we think about ancient Greece and Rome, we tend to think about men.
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Anita Anand
It's men who left their public mark on the ancient world. Its story is mostly told by men. And 2,000 years later, honestly, the image of antiquity still has its fair share of muscles, leather straps and oil.
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Mary Beard
Oh, my goodness me. But you don't have to look very far to find the women, actually, do you?
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Anita Anand
In this episode, we're going right back to the 7th century BCE to the Mediterranean island of Lesbos, which is close to the coastline of modern Turkey.
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Mary Beard
Lesbos was home to a poet called Sappho. About 600 or so lines of her poet survives enough that we know that they describe powerful desire for women as well as for men. And because of this, Sappho and her island inspired the modern term lesbian and Sapphic. But for me, she's probably the greatest poet of erotic desire and love. And also her poems contain wonderful evocations of nature. And they talk a bit about her family. And there's even one that's about her really bad aging needs.
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Anita Anand
We all know what lesbian means, but few us really have a sense of the woman, or more particularly, the extraordinary poetry which gave us that term.
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Mary Beard
In this episode, we're going to do our best to bring that poetry to life and we're going to ask how nine complete books of her work, which survived for centuries after her death, were eventually lost.
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Anita Anand
Okay, Charlotte, let's start by having you read us a bit. Come on. One of your favourites okay, I'm going
- [03:04]
Mary Beard
to try it in Greek. I'm going in. Wish me luck. Poikalothron arthanataphrodita pae dios dolo plocadiliso maisa mei massaisi made on the aesi damnna potnia fumon. So that means. And I'm going to use Stanley Lombardo's translation to give you a sense of this poem. It begins, shimmering, iridescent, deathless, Aphrodite, child of Zeus, weaver of wiles, I beg you, do not crush my spirit with anguish, lady. And this poem goes on to invoke the goddess Aphrodite and ask her, you know, it's sort of Sappho in the first person, asking Aphrodite to help her in her. In her kind of love life. And I guess some of it, some of the reason I really love this poem is that it sets up an incredibly intimate relationship between Sappho, the voice, the narrative voice of this poem, and the goddess who she's praying to, invoking. She asks Aphrodite, you know, come to me now if ever before you heard my voice in the distance. And leaving your father's golden house drove your chariot pulled by sparrows swift and beautiful over the black earth, Their wings a blur as they streaked down from the heavens across the bright sky. And then you were with me, a smile playing about your immortal lips. And you asked, what is it this time? Why are you calling again? And asked what my heart and its lovesick raving most wanted to happen. Whom now should I persuade to love you? Who is wronging you? Sappho. She may run now, but she'll be chasing soon. She may spurn gifts, but soon she'll be giving. She may not love now, but soon she will, willing or not, come to me now. Release me from my agony, Fulfill all that my heart desires and fight for me, Fight at my side, Goddess. And I love this intimacy reading that as a teenager and this idea that there was a female voice in antiquity who was a poet and who was writing unlike all these blokes, and who was asking the goddess Aphrodite to fly down from heaven on a chariot pulled by sparrows and fight with her by her side for her lover to get her lover. I just adored it.
- [05:53]
Anita Anand
What I think is really interesting about that is that quite often when you read early Greek poetry, the gods and goddesses sort of get in the way that you're being asked to take on board a range of superhuman divine characters which don't sort of mean anything in Some ways what I think is amazing about that poem, that hymn to Aphrodite as it's sometimes called, is that Aphrodite doesn't get in the way because you know exactly what Sappho is talking about. She's talking about desire and how difficult it is and how it pulls you apart and how you need help. And it's one of the most intimate and utterly comprehensible bits of Greek religious poetry.
- [06:46]
Mary Beard
In a way, I love it. And I remember really quite clearly that when I was a teenager we didn't study this at school, but I had a book called the Penguin Book of Greek Poetry and it's rather peculiar, but I don't know if it even exists anymore. But it was Greek. Excerpts of Greek poetry with Greek, the original Greek, and an English translation went right through from Hesiod and Homer all the way through to contemporary or 20th century Greek poets like Cavafy. And it had these fragments of Sappho in it. And I sort of was able to work my way through this sort of tricky Greek with the help of this side by side English translation. And it just, you know, it was reading, reading a female voice. Honestly, I think it's one of the things that made me want to carry on and study classics.
- [07:39]
Anita Anand
You see, I came across it in a quite different way. I was also a teenager and I was at an all girls school and I was studying Latin and Greek and I think that we were encouraged, mate, to read a few poems of Sappho because we were an all girls school. And I think that the rather fusty teachers as they seemed then, I suspect they were much less fusty than I imagined, thought that it would be a good idea that we should read something written in Latin and Greek that was by a woman. I think that I can now sense their kind of awkwardness, though this is back in the late 60s in Shrewsbury, so don't imagine it wasn't in California. And they had a kind of problem, I think, with what Sappho was going on about, and particularly a woman's passion for women. And so they did try to conjure up for us this rather strange world in which Sappho was a kind of schoolteacher, lady schoolteacher, and the objects of her desire were completely chaste. Objects of desire were her pupils. She was a devoted teacher. In retrospect was even more kinky than the actual. It seems a hell of a lot worse than just saying, look girl, she was gay or whatever. So we had this very strange version of the kind of passion that she might be talking about. And I think that it took me forever until I managed not just to kind of get my head around that because people have been taking the sex out of Sappho for hundreds of years. Quite used to it. But I needed to get my head around the sort of place she came from, the world she lived in, the society she lived in. And I think we never.
- [09:43]
Mary Beard
It's a historian, a new Mary.
- [09:44]
Anita Anand
We never. Yeah, it is. Okay. We never mentioned that. No, I didn't. I suppose I knew that Lesbos was an island, but it's a tiny island. I now read Sappho's poetry and actually to be honest, an awful lot of our information about Sappho's world comes from Sappho's poetry. But it's. You suddenly go back to again a much less familiar bit of Greece because she's living on this small island close to Turkey. Her world is very eastern facing. It's a quite cosmopolitan world. Even though it's 7th century BC this is not a small inward looking community.
- [10:24]
Mary Beard
Right. It's trading, seafaring. Very connect.
- [10:29]
Anita Anand
She talks about her sandals at one point. Where do her sandals come from? Well they come from Lydia, which is now in modern Turkey. That you can also see that it's somehow Greece or a Greek community which existed while all those things that I later came to think of as Greek, the city, the polis, the democracy or the oligarchy, all the ways I used to or I came to talk about Greece, all those things were in the process of taking shape. Greece in the 7th century was still becoming Greece in our turn and full actually of no doubt very nasty aristocratic infighting of which Sappho's family.
- [11:14]
Mary Beard
Right. This is very much definitely not a democracy and it's. And we are earlier in time than classical Athens and the Parthenon several hundred years.
- [11:23]
Anita Anand
And what's also the case though is that it looks like it's a freer world for women. Absolutely. Than you go to classical Athens and elite women are pretty enclosed, cloistered away.
- [11:38]
Mary Beard
It's at home not to be spoken of.
- [11:41]
Anita Anand
It looks like the world of Lesbos, at least for a woman of the elite like Sappho was is more quotes liberated. And it looks as if she's, you know, she's probably performing her poems which would all have been sung. She's performing them at least semi public occasions. So I think that I missed out on Sappho because I was, I was fed her, I was amazed by her. But I didn't no where on earth to put Her.
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Mary Beard
Put her. Yeah.
- [12:20]
Anita Anand
And, you know, that goes to. For who she was.
- [12:25]
Mary Beard
Yeah. And we. And that's a really hard question to answer because a lot of the information about who she was is either to be gleaned from the fragmentary lines of poetry that we have, because she does talk in the first person and she does talk about what we can only assume are real things. And also a kind of whole bunch of stuff written about her later, which, some of which absolutely seems to veer quite strongly into the world of hearsay and myth. But what we get from her poems is that. Well, we get the sense, as you say, that she's quite well off. She's part of an aristocratic network. She has a couple of brothers who are named in the poems Caraxos and Larichus. We hear elsewhere that she has a daughter and so she's married. Also, she has a daughter called Clays. You know, we hear that she gets older because there's this incredible poem where she says she can't dance anymore as much as she'd like to because her knees are bad, which I just absolutely love because it's such a human detail. And then into this sort of world of semi or actual myth, there's a story told in antiquity that she fell desperately in love with a boatman, a
- [13:48]
Anita Anand
ferryman called Hunky Ferryman. Yes.
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Mary Beard
I'll leave you to your fantasies of the honky ferryman, Mary. Anyway, so fabulously amazing and unrequited was this love that she supposedly threw herself off some cliffs into the ocean and thus died, which sounds kind of slightly implausible. I mean, it also disrupts the whole. You know, we do have to acknowledge that although she is the lesbian poet and she is Sapphic, because she's Sappho, she writes about desire for women and she also. There is also mention of desire for men, and she is married and so on and so forth. But I don't think she flung herself off a cliff out of unrequited love for Fion, do you?
- [14:36]
Anita Anand
But bizarrely, that story, which is clearly barking. Matt. Right. Became hugely popular in the much later tradition, 18th, 19th century Britain and Europe, partly because it was a way of getting round Sappho's homosexuality. So the lead story was not whatever she thought about her girls or women. It was the unrequited love for fun. And, you know, even in 20th century novels, that is hugely to the fore. I mean, I don't know how many people read Erica Yong as much as I did. Yeah, good old late 20th century feminist. She's got a novel called Sappho's Leap.
- [15:29]
Mary Beard
Right.
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Anita Anand
Yeah. And what is it about? So does Peter Green, excellent classicist who also wrote novels, who's got a novel focused on Sappho where he rather engagingly turns her passion for whaon into a sort of midlife crisis for this very kind of upright but also gay woman. And so, you know, right centre, you just can't get rid of this absolutely extravagantly untrue story. Yeah.
- [16:07]
Mary Beard
That has all the kind of traces of myth about it and really feels like it's not true. But never mind. I think one thing that we can say about her, I mean, if not her herself, but that she was an absolutely huge name in Greece and Rome, that she was revered, her reputation was absolutely enormous. She gets to be called the Tenth Muse. And she's massively influential on Roman lyric poets. And that's partly. So she writes in a particular verse meter which are called. Which naturally we call the Sapphic meter. And that's kind of used quite. That's her special meter. And it's used a lot by later poets and Roman poets. And there's one really special thing, which is that Catullus, who's a Roman poet of the first century bce, translated one of her poems that we also happen to have more or less complete. So we've got this more or less complete Sappho poem and a Roman Latin translation by Catullus. And I'll just read you a bit of Anne Carson's translation of this fragment that catullus translated, fragment 31. I think, actually, by the way, that it is an absolutely knockout, incredible poem. What it's about is about the experience of watching the person that you desire and that you fancy and that you are obsessed by talking intently to somebody else. And the incredible jealousy, the physical feelings that you experience when that happens. And I just. It's absolutely wonderful. And Catullus obviously thought so too. But anyway, the Sappho poem starts like this. In Anne Carson's translation, he seems to me equal to the gods. That man, whoever he is, who opposite you sits and listens Close to your sweet speaking and lovely laughing. Oh, it puts the heart in my chest on wings for when I look at you even a moment no speaking is left in me no tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under my skin and in my eyes no sight and drumming fills ears and cold sweat holds me and shaking grips me. And so it goes on. So when Catullus translated that, we know he was a huge fan of Sappho, not only because he translated the poem, but because the woman who he addresses all his love poetry to, he uses the pseudonym Lesbia for this lover of his. And it's an obvious. It's a big, big, big tribute to Sappho, the poet of Lesbos. Yeah.
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Anita Anand
And in many ways that is what writes Sappho in totally prominently to Latin literature. And I think a lot of people read Catullus, he's still very popular, without quite seeing what lies behind the choice of that. That nickname for his des. It lesbian. That takes you right back to Sappho. And that if you're reading Catullus and enjoying it, and many people do, it's a real shame not to go back and look at Sappho, because that is what Catullus had been reading in order to think about what he wanted to say.
- [19:44]
Mary Beard
Yeah. And all these other famous Roman poets like Horace, like Ovid, like Propertius, they were all reading Catullus and they were reading Sappho. So Sappho gets into this bloodline of love poetry that flows through Roman poetry and then ends up with John Donne, with Shakespeare. I mean, maybe not as conscious influences for all these Renaissance and later poets, but I think Sappho, via very circuitous and thin line, goes all the way through love poetry, poetry of desire, and ends up in pop lyrics. I mean, I really think she's in the desire love spritz dream, although we
- [20:22]
Anita Anand
have very little surviving by Sappho herself. And that. That of course, hits you in the face as soon as you think that. Look, a collection of her complete poetry was made a few centuries later after her death, and that was in nine books.
- [20:45]
Mary Beard
And by books, we mean scrolls on papyrus.
- [20:49]
Anita Anand
We today call them books, but they're not book. It means it took nine papyrus scrolls to write out all the poetry of Sappho.
- [20:59]
Mary Beard
And these are sort of big things that you unroll and read. Not like a codex, like a book, but literally unscrolling it and reading the verse on that.
- [21:11]
Anita Anand
And they're not, as the papyrus roll isn't as long as a modern book, which is why when classicists talk about, oh, there's so many books of Livy, or there's so many books of Sappho, it's rather less than you'd think from what a modern book looks like. But still, we've got 600 plus lines of Sappho surviving, that would be less than. Considerably less than one book in these terms. So a huge amount has got what, again, classicists euphemistically call lost, which always makes it feel like some terrible mistake down the back of the sofa. Sappho went down the back of the sofa and we never found her again. But it is at first sight puzzling because she was hugely popular. It's not that Sappho was a kind of minority option in most of the classical world. She was absolutely central to how you thought about poetry. The ancient Greeks and Romans put her right at the top of the tree. But as always, I think with how classical literature, ancient literature gets between the ancient world itself and us, you have to insert medieval monks into the picture, sadly.
- [22:37]
Mary Beard
Medieval monks, you're saying, they didn't really like stories about lesbian erotic desire?
- [22:42]
Anita Anand
Well, I think many of them might have loved it, actually. But I think more to the point of, perhaps, is that it didn't fit into any kind of educational curriculum. A lot of the. What survives because it survives because it's been copied by medieval monks generation after generation. A lot of it is quite educational, quite morally educational. It's not what they're reading to, you know, have fun with in bed themselves. I mean, in bed, I mean, chastely. And Sappho doesn't fit into what's essentially boys education. Yeah. I mean, she. What is really.
- [23:25]
Mary Beard
She has to pass through this Byzantine Christian filter, essentially.
- [23:29]
Anita Anand
That's right.
- [23:30]
Mary Beard
And there are stories that the Christ. There were public burnings in early Christianity of Sappho stuff. I mean, it wasn't. It did not pass any kind of Christian moral test, though she was a
- [23:41]
Anita Anand
bit unlucky because we have a bit of a papyrus from the 7th century CE which has got a poem of Sappho on it. So clearly she was still being read actively by somebody in Egypt in the 7th century. She only needed a few more centuries and she would have been home and dry. But actually the monastic tradition inserts itself.
- [24:04]
Mary Beard
Right. And when you say home and dry, you mean that enough had to be copied in the sort of early medieval period for them to appear in codex form, that is, in book form, and those manuscript, handwritten books to be in medieval libraries until the Renaissance, by the time the Renaissance comes along, so that people who are really interested, became really interested in this sort of dusty Latin and Greek literature could pluck them out, decide they were fabulous and print them on the new technology of the printing platform. That's a very crude version of how these things evolve.
- [24:41]
Anita Anand
They're wonderful Renaissance experience explorers, in a way, who went round monasteries trying to see if they could find ancient texts that the monks had by then forgotten about.
- [24:49]
Mary Beard
And the shame is because actually she would have gone down so well in the Renaissance.
- [24:54]
Anita Anand
It's a real pity.
- [24:55]
Mary Beard
But so the poem I read at the beginning, that's almost complete, survives because it's quoted in another author who did make it through this Byzantine filter. And that's true of, you know, a, some fragments, some quotations, and also it's true of the poem about desire, which survives because it's quoted in a work called on the Sublime, written by a writer called Longinus. And so they get through because they're
- [25:29]
Anita Anand
quoted and she is so famous that chunks, real big chunks, almost complete poems of hers do get quoted by later Greek authors and then who made it
- [25:44]
Mary Beard
through and sometimes for really funny reasons. Right. Like to illustrate incredibly minor points of grammatical correctness or really, you know, not things that we would now pick out about Sappho, which would be about the quality of her, of her language and her imagery or whatever. But often it's these kind of amusingly dry things about the use of certain words.
- [26:08]
Anita Anand
Yeah, it's an interesting grammatical use here, as you can see in Sappho. Yeah. I think though, she got lucky in a different way because since really the kind of 19th century, there's been a huge amount of exploration in among the papyri of Egypt, classical papyri preserved, because unlike other places in the Greco Roman world, it was really hot and really dry. And so it just meant things didn't
- [26:48]
Mary Beard
rot away and they survived incredibly intact.
- [26:52]
Anita Anand
Yeah. So the waste paper baskets of Egypt have given us huge amounts of Greek literature, Latin literature, that has otherwise got lost. And Sappho has been one of the major beneficiaries of this that often not in very large chunks, but fragments and sometimes bigger pieces have been coming up since the end of the 19th century in Egypt. One evening was discovered having been scratched on a bit of old pottery and. And that has created a whole new Sapphic industry, which is. Because it's very technical stuff, you know, we're talking about reading papyri and reading what's written on papyri as if it's super easy.
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Mary Beard
No, I mean, guys, it's super difficult. It's like doing a three dimensional crossword or something. You're reading stuff that's really. The handwriting's incredibly hard, there are millions of gaps. It's like, you know, imagine going through your waste paper basket, but everything's stained and you ripped it all up. I mean, it's super difficult.
- [28:03]
Anita Anand
That's how a lot of Sappho has come down to us. And it is actually still coming down to us that Chunks of Sappho are still being discovered on Egyptian papyri.
- [28:20]
Mary Beard
Yeah, and occasionally that's sensational and very exciting. So about 10 years ago, an almost complete poem was found. It was about Sappho's brothers. Very exciting moment. The Telegraph said it was more exciting than finding a new David Bowie album. I was very excited. I wrote about it in the Guardian. It then doubts crept in very quickly because people who are really enthusiastic about literature, like me, forgot to ask serious questions about the actual physical papyrus on which this was written. I mean, you know, Egyptian papyrus, that is archaeological artifact. And there are serious laws and ethical frameworks surrounding how to deal with these artifacts. And, you know, it turned out actually that there were serious questions about the provenance of that particular poem, which are still unresolved and have been under police investigation.
- [29:24]
Anita Anand
Questions were raised. You're being very. You're being slightly torture with Charlotte. Questions were raised about where exactly this papyrus had come from and whether the people who publicized it quite had the right to it.
- [29:38]
Mary Beard
If you're very interested in this. I did do some reporting in the Guardian about this, and the reason I'm being sort of slightly convoluted is that it's quite legally tricky. But anyway, if you fancy searching for my name and Sappho on the Guardian, you can find out a lot more because it's a very, very convoluted, kind of tricky and very interesting story. But.
- [30:00]
Anita Anand
But it's taking us away from the poetry.
- [30:04]
Mary Beard
Well, we. We really do want to talk about the poetry and I suppose we've. We've. We've already said this a bit, but I think it's just important to think again that we can't recover the context in which this poetry would first have been experienced. We're reading it off the page. We're reading it in very fragmentary form. In Les Boss, it would have been sung in some kind of public performance. We're not entirely sure about those contacts. There may have been drinking parties, there may have been weddings, they may have been semi private. We don't know. But what we do know is that there's a public performance element and there's music and that Sappho played music and sang and she played. Played the lyre and she supposedly even invented the plectrum. But it's just worth bearing that in mind when we talk, as we will do as modern 21st century people, about these poems on the page. But there's one poem I would really like to talk about because it was also one of those that I sort of discovered for myself as a teenager. And again it is absolutely incomplete. It's very fragmentary and thus very short. It's just three lines and in Anne Carson's translation, this three line fragment goes as A sweet apple turns red on a high branch, high on the highest branch. And the apple pickers forgot. Well, no, they didn't forget, were not able to reach. And that's it. That's it. That's the poem as we have it. It's about desire. It's about the thing that you desire being out of reach. It's not forgotten, it's that you cannot reach it. And it's a poem. Desire is a thing that's always about not being able to get the thing that you want. There's always a gap between you and the thing that you are desiring. And there's something so extraordinary about that poem because it almost. Because of, because of the fact that it's fragmentary, because of the fact that it's sort of destroyed and we can't get at it. This poem that's about desiring something that you can't quite reach sort of almost enacts that poetically because we can't reach the poem itself. You are left wanting the rest of this poem and you cannot ever get it. It's always out of reach. So there's something. I mean this is, it's in a sense this sort of relationship to the fragmentary ness of Sappho is paradoxical because Sappho's poems were full and rich and complete when they were first encountered. And now we're left with these fragments and shards and bits and pieces that somehow the fragmentary ness has its own power. And I really think for me that's summed up in that particular fragment and that just feeling that kind of oh, I want the rest of it but I can't have it. But wanting something and not being able to have it is what this poem is also about. It really hit me on the head again reading that as a teenager.
- [33:31]
Anita Anand
Well, it hit long before it hit Ezra Pound on the head when an he gave his version of Sappho celebrating the fact that you could only see a few words. There's that one famous Pound poem which just says Spring too long, Gongula girl's name. And you think somehow that says it all we don't need. What is really interesting about those kind of fragmentary poems is that you don't actually need more because as soon as you've said spring too long gongular, you can feel the rest yourself. You don't need, you don't need more words.
- [34:13]
Mary Beard
But I mean, some of the, some of the. If you flick through a volume of Sappho translations, you get these sort of one line fragments because they tend to be a line that's quoted by somebody else and very often they are just, okay, I'm going to give you some examples. Earth embroidered with flowers. That's it. I talked with you in a dream, Aphrodite. That's it. It's just glorious.
- [34:44]
Anita Anand
I'm going to play devil's advocate though here because I think there's a sense in which, well, some people listening might think, well, it's all right, she knows all about this Sappho stuff. And then, you know, she reads three words and thinks, isn't that wonderful? But what on earth, what on earth is all this about? You know, and to some extent, I think the fragments are crucially important. They have, they've enticed and entranced and intrigued people. But if all we found was them and we hadn't actually seen any of the longer poems that Sappho wrote, and you've talked about a couple, I don't think these fragments would do their job in quite the same way.
- [35:29]
Mary Beard
I know, I agree with that. And I think one poem that it would be lovely to talk about actually Mary is a longer and less sort of tantalizing poem. And it's that poem that begins, some say an army on horseback, some say on foot, and some say ships are the most beautiful things on this black earth. But I say it is whatever you love. And then the poem goes on to say, you know, the reason I'm saying this is because just think about Helen, Helen of Troy, who left her husband and went sailing off to Troy without a thought for her child or for her parents. And the poem sort of fades out a bit, it's not complete, but you get this idea that, you know, Helen did the thing, she went after what she loved, she left behind all this stuff that she didn't love. And then the poem goes on to say that, you know, having thought about, having talked about Helen, that reminds me of Anactoria. Anactoria is not a famous person. Anactoria is somebody in Sappho's life, a woman reminding me of Anactoria, who is gone and whose lovely walk and bright shimmering face I would rather see than all the chariots and armed men in Lydia. And for me it's a kind of wonderful the way that poem moves from talking about armies and ships and then goes through into thinking about One singular mythological woman, Helen of Troy, the most beautiful, the most famous, the most seductive woman in Greek mythology, and then moves down again down the scale and takes. Takes one woman, Anactoria, who's in Sappho's life, who is the thing that Sappho loves more than the idea of all these glorious armies and glorious navy. And it's a kind of amazing subverting of the sort of dominant poetic ideal at the time, which is Homer's Iliad, which is all about armies and glorious feats of arms and men. And she. She takes that kind of rhetorical framework and brings it down to her girlfriend. And I love it.
- [37:47]
Anita Anand
That is what I think about that poem now. You know, I think some say that, you know, army, whatever, but I say it's the person you love that's important. And I would. I now feel that if you want to see somebody in early Greece
- [38:08]
Mary Beard
taking
- [38:09]
Anita Anand
a really well aimed potshot at male values, that's what I'd point to and say, look, here we have.
- [38:17]
Mary Beard
I feel there's a but coming on there.
- [38:19]
Anita Anand
There is but wait half a tick now. I think that she's setting up that heroic masculine ideal and putting a pin in it. And you don't see many people in the ancient world putting a pin into the ideology of heroic masculinity. And there are some. Ovid would be in Rome, a good example, and Catullus we've already talked about. But Sappho does it with, I think, absolute. With simplicity. I remember, however, that when I first read that poem, and it's amazing how those kind of first readings stick in your mind. It was not at school, it was at university. And I remember exactly how it was lectured about, which was quite the reverse. And this thought has never, never entirely gone away. The line was, look, even when Sappho wants to talk about her girlfriend, she can't escape Homer. Sappho is trapped by a worldview which is defined by Homer, and however much she tries to kick against is impossible to understand her. She is enthralled to Homeric vision of the world. Now, I don't any longer think that. I'm not sure I ever did. But it's never quite gone away, that subversion. It's a more general point, isn't it? When you subvert an ideology, you are partly parasitic. The ideology.
- [40:05]
Mary Beard
Yeah.
- [40:06]
Anita Anand
So Sappho is both dependent on that masculine ideology and telling you that she wants to unpick it.
- [40:15]
Mary Beard
Yeah.
- [40:16]
Anita Anand
Complicated.
- [40:17]
Mary Beard
It is complicated. I guess it. But I. I kind of feel like that's a Bit of a. Whoever was teaching that in Cambridge in the 19 Gap.
- [40:27]
Anita Anand
The 1970s.
- [40:28]
Mary Beard
The 1970s. I didn't want, you know, slightly undermining the brilliance of. I don't know, it's just the way, you know, sometimes you read a poem and it's about the way where the poem starts and how the poem moves. And even though we don't have the end of this poem, so we don't
- [40:49]
Anita Anand
know that, she doesn't say, but thank God, now the armies are coming back.
- [40:52]
Mary Beard
Yeah.
- [40:52]
Anita Anand
No, it's possible there might be a horrible surprise at the end of the day.
- [40:56]
Mary Beard
That is very true. That is very true. But even taking those parts, the way it moves from armies to Helen of Troy's domestic arrangements and this thing, she went off to Troy without even a thought for her child. And then reminding me of Alactoria with her lovely walk and her bright, shimmering face, which I would rather see than all the chariots of Lydia. The other thing, I guess that reminds me is the other thing that's really great about Sappho is that is her world is full of beautiful, shimmering objects. And in the poem that I read right at the very beginning, there is this extraordinary word which is the first usage of this word. And as far as we know, I think it's probably the only usage unless anybody was absolutely kind of imitating her Poikilothron, which means spangled throned or shimmering throned or decorated throne. I mean, you know, it's very hard to express in English, but it's an adjective attached to Aphrodite. It's like saying Aphrodite of the elaborately decorated throne. All of that sense of a delight in beautiful things or also a delight in the natural world. There's an amazing poem where, you see, she shows you poetically, water flowing down, as it were, and in the foreground of the boughs of an apple tree,
- [42:33]
Anita Anand
which is just so lovely emotionally. I'm with you. But I find sometimes that reading Sappho, I find I have a subversive reaction to her own subversion that I want to subvert.
- [42:48]
Mary Beard
Because you're a contrarian.
- [42:50]
Anita Anand
Because I'm a contrarian, you know. Right. And I think, okay, so in that poem where she says, look at Helen, she went off to Troy, leaving her baby behind. Do you think that's nice? No.
- [43:00]
Mary Beard
God, no. But it's showing you how strong and how. How powerful this desire for the thing that you love is. It's more powerful than an army because it causes you to abandon your child.
- [43:12]
Anita Anand
But it's also, you know, I think you, by the time you start to see that her passion for anactoria might be similar to Helen's passion for Paris, you start to think, come on, guys, maybe we're being told that this is not just personally destructive, but it is.
- [43:34]
Mary Beard
Well, there's a reason it's being compared to armies.
- [43:37]
Anita Anand
It's because it's gonna kill you and other people.
- [43:40]
Mary Beard
The Sappho is the first person to describe love as bittersweet. Although in her Greek she invents one word. It's actually sweet, bitter. But anyway, bittersweet. Now it's such a cliche that love is bittersweet, but as far as we know, Sappho was the first person to, to tell us, to teach us that love is amazing and it is absolutely awful and destructive to some extent.
- [44:09]
Anita Anand
I think my, you know, you're sensing that I've just got little bits of resistance, the margins. And I, I disapprove of some of my resistance because I think that it's very easy for bits of real classical radicalism to become so inbuilt into modern stereotypes and cliche that when we see what was the very first use of something we think, oh, well, well, yeah, come on, we've heard that one before. Well, we have heard that one before. But when Sappho performed that in whatever she performed it at, people were gobsmacked. It was. This poetry was so new. And I think one of the challenges, and you're better at doing it with Sappho than I am. I think one of the challenges is to think what would it have been like never to have heard this kind of stuff before.
- [45:10]
Mary Beard
Do you know what? I have never studied Sappho and maybe,
- [45:15]
Anita Anand
maybe that's a good thing from your point of view.
- [45:17]
Mary Beard
Maybe that's why I like it so much. It was never ruined by academia for me.
- [45:22]
Anita Anand
Well, it's been enhanced by academia, I think, for me, but it's blocked off some ways of being surprised. I mean, surprised by it. I think that ancient culture, ancient poetry, ancient art works best when suddenly it's an eye opening moment and you can get so familiar with it. Particularly when it's very much ingrained in a whole set of conventions of subsequent Western culture. You can lose the surprise value of it.
- [45:59]
Mary Beard
Yeah.
- [46:02]
Anita Anand
I would like though to take us back a bit to the whole idea of the fragment and fragmentariness.
- [46:09]
Mary Beard
Absolutely. It's so important, I think, to how we understand and why Sappho has remained with us, actually.
- [46:17]
Anita Anand
Yeah. And I think that you can See, exactly. I think it's, you know, I would slightly have a suspicion that is quite an elitist reading of Sappho. But you can see. Well, most modernist poets are elitists, so, you know, surprise, surprise, eye roll. But you can see how the idea of the incompleteness kind of being an example of the very idea of passion that it's trying to convey. You can see exactly how that works. And I think that's very important. And it's quite hard to kind of put together with the other bits of Sappho that we know. But I think it has a bigger role in how Sappho's been received than that. I mean, you can think about how people have talked about or incorporated Sappho in from the 19th century, probably before up to now. And, you know, there's some very obvious games to play that you can see that the idea of gay women in the late 19th and early 20th century seeing something here that was talking about their own experience. You can see that women who had always been told they had no creative voice could see in Sappho that that could not be true. There was the tenth muse. You could see, you know, 1960s feminists, gay or not, thought that Sappho was somebody who stood out for them in the ancient world. But I think the fragmentariness adds to that, because I think that if you go through, and I've been having a look at this recently, you go through references to Sappho novels, about Sappho poetry, the dedicates itself to Sappho artworks which call themselves Sappho. And you can see that she's everywhere. Sappho is actually everywhere. And, you know, we started off by thinking that we think about the ancient world as male. And that's true in a way, but there's an awful lot of Sappho about in modern Western culture. But that's helped by the fragmentariness, because what I found myself thinking is that the fragmentaryness allows for us to reinvent her all the time.
- [49:05]
Mary Beard
There's a gap, and into those gaps we pour ourselves. So Sappho, because she's fragmentary, has left space for us to complete these ideas, to complete these poems, to rebuild them, to rework them, to remake them into something for every single generation.
- [49:24]
Anita Anand
Yeah, And I think that that goes beyond the sense, which I think is very important about Sappho as quotes, the gay icon, or Sappho as the woman creator. Sappho as a kind of distant role model.
- [49:39]
Mary Beard
It's.
- [49:40]
Anita Anand
Sappho can be ours in a way that it's something that's quite hard to make an ancient poet are. We can admire them, we can enjoy them, we can be have our minds changed by them, but we can be Sappho.
- [49:59]
Mary Beard
Yeah. And I think that's what I've always. Maybe you've just identified. The thing that I love so much about Sappho is she makes space for us to really be intimate with her, just as she's so intimate with the goddess Aphrodite.
- [50:13]
Anita Anand
You've been being Zephrod over for the last 30 minutes or so.
- [50:17]
Mary Beard
Perhaps not in every single sense, but I'm willing to give anything a go.
- [50:22]
Anita Anand
I hope everybody is going to go away and try a few Sapphic fragments at least. Thank you very much for listening. If you've got any questions, any comments, any criticisms that you'd like to share, we really love to hear it and you can find us on Instagram at Instant Classics Pod, or you can email us at instantclassicspod@gmail.com. and yes, we will read them and we don't care how pedantic you are.