Classical Poets on Love
Today we read a series of ancient poets on the topic of love and desire. Trigger Warning: both Hesiod and Ovid tell stories of sexual coercion.
Reading: Hesiod’s lyric poetry (~700 BCE) served, alongside Homeric epic, as the foundation of Ancient Greek culture. His account of creation foregrounds Eros (desire) as one of the fundamental drives in nature. (Hesiod-Theogony.pdf)
Reading: Sappho (~600 BCE) was celebrated in antiquity as the “tenth muse” because of the beauty of her lyric poetry. While few of her poems survive in full, we have an abundance of fragments, due to the frequency with which later writers quoted her. What’s puzzling is the cultural context in which her lyrics were performed, given the social strictures on women in Ancient Greece. Most scholars today believe she held an officially sanctioned position of some kind, whether as priestess of Aphrodite, supervisor of girls’ ritual education, or leader of a chorus of women dedicated to the Muses. (Sappho.pdf)
Reading: Ovid was one of the great Roman poets, whereas Hesiod and Sappho were both Greek. Born 43 BCE, he was banished to the Roman Empire’s far East because his voluptuous verse ran afoul of the aging emperor’s moralism. His Metamorphoses, published from exile in 8 CE, reworks Greek myth to present the world’s history as a seemingly endless, desire-driven sequence of changes. We are reading the story of one such metamorphosis, Apollo and Daphne. (Ovid Apollo Daphne.pdf)
Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:
- Hesiod’s creation invites comparison to the Enuma Elish. Point to something that the two stories have in common—or something that makes them distinct.
- Sappho is famous for presenting the first-person experience of desire. Quote a telling line or phrase and comment on the emotional experience it conveys.
- Aestheticizing violence: point to and discuss a moment in Hesiod or Ovid where beauty is mixed with or in proximity to violence. If you can, give a 1-sentence paraphrase of what the artist/author seems to be saying about the relationship between violence and beauty—or possibly art.
Further Reading: For those interested in the scholarly puzzle of Sappho, here are two scholarly pieces: