SOURCE: Lardinois, André. “Subject and Circumstance in Sappho's Poetry.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 124 (1994): 57-84.

In the following essay, Lardinois questions modern historical reconstructions of Sappho as either a school-mistress or a symposiast, claiming instead that the historical evidence is most consistent with her occupation as an “instructor of young women's choruses.”

Holt Parker, in a provocative article in [Transactions of the American Philological Association] 123 (1993) 309-51, has questioned one hundred eighty years of classical scholarship on the relationship of Sappho to her addressees, if we take Friedrich Welcker's little monograph Sappho von einem herrschenden Vorurteil befreyt as the beginning of modern scholarship on the subject.¹ Parker argues that there is no credible evidence that Sappho's audience consisted of young, unmarried girls (316), and instead proposes that she sang at banquets about her love for other adult women (324, 346).² The positive aspect of Parker's paper is that it forces us...