SOURCE: Walker, Jeffrey. “Argumentation Indoors: Alcaeus and Sappho.” In Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity, pp. 208-49. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Walker considers the performance contexts of Alcaeus and Sappho's poetry, particularly the question of whether or not their audiences consisted chiefly of like-minded friends.

Observe Alcaeus's nobility, brevity, and sweetness combined with forcefulness, and also his use of figures and his clarity, as far as that has not been ruined by his dialect; and above all the êthos of his political poems. Quite often if you were to strip away the meter, you would find political rhêtoreia.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Imitation 421s

And the [love] of the Lesbian [Sappho] … what else could it be but this, the technê erôtikê of Socrates? … For what Alcibiades and Charmides and Phaedrus were to him, this to the Lesbian were Gyrinna and Atthis and...