CHAPTER 12
Annette Giesecke
The emphasis on poetic personae in Archaic lyric—poets announcing their own names and ostensibly relating their own experiences—has enormous significance for audiences eager to conjure fully animated private and public spaces in the period. As much lyric is written in the first person and, as a result, is cast as a form of personal narrative, it seems to offer a degree of tangibility unavailable to audiences of epic, whose “authors,” Homer and Hesiod, present themselves as mouthpieces of the gods, inspired bards but not composers.1 In the case of epic there is necessarily no sense that the poets possess firsthand knowledge of the sagas that they recount; their subject matter, centered on gods and heroes, is remote both in time and place. By contrast, lyric poets tend to position themselves as experiential guides proffering glimpses into a fictive, albeit wholly human, and thus “relatable,” world. Hereby these poets entice audiences to conjure their personae, to share their projected feelings and emotions, and, in the mind’s eye, to see the places and spaces that, in their poems, they inhabit, long for, and imagine. Among lyric poets, the most intensely personal and affective is Sappho, the so-called Tenth Muse, whose erotic, gynocentric subject matter and use of language sets her work apart from that of her peers (for discussion of her work more broadly, see Lardinois (Chapter 18) in this volume). Among lyric poems, both Sappho’s and her male contemporaries’, her prayer to Aphrodite for divine epiphany is the most richly textured in terms of spatiality. Its mesmeric vividness strongly invites the audience to enter its tantalizing space:
δεῦρύ μ’ ἐκ Κρήτας ἐπ[ἱ τόνδ]ε ναῦον 1a
ἄγνον, ὄππ[αι τοι] χάριεν μὲν ἄλσος
μαλί[αν], βῶμοι δ’ ἔ⟨ν⟩ι θυμιάμε-
νοι [λι]βανώτωι. 4
ἐν δ’ ὔδωρ ψῦχρον κελάδει δι’ ὔσδων
μαλίνων, βρόδοισι δὲ παῖς ὀ χῶρος
ἐσκίαστ’, αἰθυσσομένων δὲ φύλλων
κῶμα καταίρει. 8
ἐν δὲ λείμων ἰππόβοτος τέθαλεν
ἠρίνοισιν ἄνθεσιν, αἰ δ’ ἄηται
μέλλιχα πνέοισιν [
[] 12
ἔνθα δὴ σὺ … . (.)ἔλοισα Κύπρι
χρυσίαισιν ἐν κυ|λίκεσσιν ἄβρως
ὀμμεμείχμεμον Θαλίαισι νέκταρ
οἰνοχόαισον 16
Come here to me from Crete, to this holy temple, where is your
pleasant grove of apple trees and altars fragrant with smoke of
frankincense;
Therein cold water babbles through apple branches, and the
place is all shadowy with roses, and from quivering
leaves comes slumber down;
Therein a meadow, where horses pasture, blossoms with
flowers of spring, and gently blow the breezes…;
There, Cyprian goddess, take…and pour gracefully in golden
chalices nectar that is mingled with our festivity. (Fr. 2)2
At first blush, the poem’s topography or literary geography appears clear enough, as there is ample detail from which to construct a mental image. The place to which Sappho summons Aphrodite, the Cyprian goddess, is a temple or shrine beside or near a grove of apple trees that shades a babbling brook. In this place, cooled by gentle, soporific breezes, roses grow in profusion, and spring’s bright blossoms carpet a meadow flecked with grazing horses. The text, only a fragment of a larger, now-lost whole, engages all the reader’s senses with readily-conjured sights, sounds, smells, and tactile sensations: the forms of temple, apple trees, brook, roses, and meadow; the sounds of water and wind; the refreshing coolness of wind and water; the fragrance of roses. One is left with the dominant impression of a wilderness replete with munificent nature’s gifts, the temple nearly forgotten. But what do we really know about the place that Sappho so elegantly renders?
The deeper one’s preoccupation with identifying this Sapphic space becomes, the more profound one’s recognition of its intangibility. Where, for instance, is the temple? Is it on Aphrodite’s sacred isle of Cyprus? Was—or is—it real? Is the description founded on nostalgia or another form of subjective memory? Were the verses perhaps conceived at the sacred site? Whether real or fictive, is the temple’s surrounding landscape wilderness or garden, rural or urban, private or communal, personal or social? Is the space marked as human or divine—or is it instead liminal, existing somewhere between heaven and earth? Is it a place of healing or of harm, harmony, or dissonance? Is it static or dynamic? Is it gendered, reflecting the presumed femininity of narrator and goddess? Is it the creation of author or audience or both? What clues to these questions and others might the literal spaces—gaps—in the preserved text have contained?
While the text presents its navigators with challenges at every turn, its enigmatic poetic space can offer a wealth of valuable, provocative inferences about the poetess and her world—and about the relation of these to the cultural landscapes of all her post-Archaic audiences, Greek and otherwise. “Spatiality,” in turn, provides invaluable navigational tools.
Spatiality and Modes of Spatial Discourse
Spatiality is a dynamic, heterogeneous branch of literary and cultural criticism spawned by postmodern concerns and anxieties about personal and social displacements resulting from a relentless, accelerating, technology and politically-driven shift in spatial and geographic limits. In the words of cultural historian Celeste Olalquiaga, the postmodern condition is one in which
[w]e no longer perceive ourselves as continuity but as location…. It is no longer possible to be rooted in history. Instead, we are connected to the topography of computer screens and video monitors. These give us the language and images that we require to reach others and see ourselves.
(1992: 93)
Spatiality’s roots lie in diverse, complementary fields of inquiry that include philosophy, geography, anthropology, architecture, urban studies, sociology, political theory, and literary criticism. Those many individuals whose work has shaped, and continues to shape, contemporary spatial discourse include political geographer and urban theorists Edward Soja and Kevin Lynch; architect Christian Norberg-Schulz; philosophers Henri Lefèbvre, Gaston Bachelard, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault; and literary theorists Barbara Piatti, Bertrand Westpfahl, and Robert Tally Jr. The term “spatiality” is itself closely associated with Tally, who has methodically traced the evolution of spatial studies and the relevance of spatial discourse to literature in particular. As Tally notes, literature “functions as a form of mapping, offering its readers descriptions of places, situating them in a kind of imaginary space, and providing points of reference by which they can orient themselves and understand the world in which they live.” He adds that literature helps readers to “get a sense of the worlds in which others have lived, currently live, or will live in times to come,” and provides writers with “a way of mapping the spaces encountered or imagined in the (their own) experience” (2013: 2). On the assumption that literature may be viewed as a form of map, allowing readers to picture places and spaces through narratives that take place in them and characters that populate and shape them, then literary cartography, literary geography, and geocriticism, all interrelated subsets of spatiality, have a great deal to offer readers of Sappho’s enigmatic poem. It is also the case that while the “spatial turn” in literary studies is a post-World War II phenomenon, recognition of the spatial quality of texts and the cartographic nature of narrative discourse dates back to antiquity. This is manifested, for example, in the linguistic equation of narrative and textile as things that are woven (texts) and in the millennia-old impulse physically to map Odysseus’s wanderings.
Cyprus and Lived Space
Returning to Sappho’s poem and its spatiality specifically, an assumption has long, but not universally, been made that, owing to the verses’ descriptive vividness, the place described is real (Page 1955: 40). If real, finding Aphrodite’s temple would appear to be critical in determining the poem’s geographic location as a lived space, its “geospace” (Piatti 2008: 22–23). Here Sappho’s reference to the goddess as “Kypris,” goddess of Cyprus, may be of help. Indeed, there is no place more closely linked to Aphrodite in cult and mythology than Cyprus and, more specifically, Paphos, the site of the goddess’s most important sanctuary.3 According to Greek mythology, it was on this island that the goddess, born of the sea’s foam, first stepped ashore, in close proximity to the town of Paphos.4 As for Paphos, site of modern Kouklia, tales of its foundation vary, but a close connection with Aphrodite is everywhere apparent.5 For example, the mythographer Apollodorus (Bibl. iii.14) records that a foreign prince Cinyras came to Cyprus, founded Paphos, successfully won the daughter of the island’s king, Pygmalion, in marriage, and sired the handsome Adonis, who later would win the goddess’s heart. Pygmalion, meanwhile, is known to readers of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as the creator of an ivory statue in female form so lovely that, although having publicly eschewed the pleasures of the flesh, he became utterly enamored of her. Aphrodite heard his fervent prayers for the statue’s animation, and a daughter who would give her name to Paphos was born of their union (10.220–518). Ovid’s tale identifies Cinyras as this Paphos’s son and the protagonist of a harrowing tale of incest. Unbeknown to him, Cinyras’s own daughter Myrrha had conceived a passion for him. The girl’s nurse engineered their ill-fated union, and an impregnated Myrrha, begging for a divine reprieve from both life and death, was transformed into a myrrh tree. Her tears became the precious resin burned on the altars of the gods, and the baby Adonis emerged from her trunk. The Roman historian Tacitus, too, recounts lore linking Cinyras and Aphrodite: Cinyras is said to have consecrated the Aphrodite temple at Paphos, and his descendants, the Cinyradae, constituted its priesthood (Hist. 2.3).
Earliest references to Aphrodite as Kypris already appear in Homer’s Iliad, conventionally dated to the eighth century, (5.330–342, 347–362, 418–430, 454–459, 755–761), and details of her sanctuary at Paphos emerge from a passage in the Odyssey describing Aphrodite’s flight, upon discovery in her lover Ares’ embrace, “to Paphos, on Cyprus, where lies her sacred precinct and her smoky altar, and there the Graces bathed her and anointed her with ambrosial oil, such as abounds for the gods who are everlasting, and put delightful clothing about her, a wonder to look on” (ἐς Πάφον. ἔνθα δέ οἱ τέμενος βωμός τε θυήεις./ἔνθα δέ μιν Χάριτες λοῦσαν καὶ χρῖσαν ἐλαῖωι/ἀμβρότωι, οἷα θεοὺς ἐπενήνοθεν αἰὲν ἐόντας,/ἀμφὶ δὲ εἵματα ἕσσαν ἐπήρατα, θαῦμα ἰδέσθαι 8. 362–366).6 The precinct, her chief earthly abode, is similarly described in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite as possessing “a sweet-smelling temple” (θυώδεα νηόν) and “fragrant altar” (βωμός τε θυώδης) (58–59). Both descriptions of the precinct correspond, or at the very least do not conflict, with Sappho’s. While the origins of Aphrodite and her cult are less than clear, it is generally conceded that Cyprus played a significant role in her genesis, likely the result of fusing Greek and Oriental influences. The archaeological record suggests that a female fertility cult, perhaps centered on a fertility goddess, already flourished at Paphos around 3000 BC. Through migrations and trade the region was exposed to new forms of fertility cult from Anatolia and the Levant in the following millennia during the Bronze Age (roughly 2500–1050 BC): cults of the goddesses Ishtar and Astarte, both descended from the Mesopotamian Inanna (Burkert 1987: 152–153; Karageorghis 2015). Aphrodite, a syncretization of these, may then have been adopted by the Greeks into their pantheon. The temple precinct at Paphos, modified repeatedly in subsequent centuries through Roman times, dates back at least to the Late Bronze Age (twelfth century BC), a fact that corresponds with the legend of the temple’s founding by Cinyras at the time of the Trojan War. At this juncture, the sanctuary’s temenos, or sacred area, appears to have been delimited by a wall constructed of large ashlar blocks. The courtyard contained columns with stepped capitals and horns of consecration, both features typical of Aegean Bronze Age architecture and, together with Mycenaean Greek pottery, signaling the presence of Aegean peoples. Hellentistic and Roman-era coins and seals suggest an ultimate tripartite division of the central shrine, its main cella containing a conical stone representing the goddess (Karageorghis 2000: 11–18, 77; 2002).
Thus far the reader-geographer would appear to rest on firm ground, for there is good reason to believe that Paphos housed Sappho’s temple. Yet, there were several notable places of the goddess’s worship on Cyprus beyond Paphos, among them Amathous, Golgoi, Tamassos, and Salamis.7 Further, “Kypris” is Aphrodite’s most common epithet or cult title in Greek literature. Applying this descriptor does not anchor a given narrative to Cyprus any more than calling Zeus “Olympian” necessarily locates him on his mountain throne in every context. All that can actually be assumed is that the goddess had a special relationship to Cyprus. The worship of Aphrodite, on the other hand, was extremely widespread in the Greek world. Material evidence of her cult has been found in Northern Greece, especially Thebes; in Attica, both in the city of Athens and in the city’s territory; and in Megara and Corinth. It has been found, too, in the Peloponnese—Sicyon, Hermione, Epidauros, Argos, Arcadia, Elis; in the islands, including Crete and Cythera; at Greek colonies in Asia Minor; on Sicily and in Italy; at Naucratis in Egypt; and at Saguntum in Spain (Farnell 1896/2005: 615). Mention of Crete in the first line of Sappho’s fragment has prompted identification of the temple as located on that island. Could the Cyprian goddess’s temple not be on Crete, or could it not just as plausibly be on Sappho’s native island of Lesbos?
Place, Space, and Genius Loci
The natural setting of Sappho’s temple might reasonably provide further clues for readers wishing to determine “where” the action of the poem takes place. The “imageability” of a place, its capacity to create memorable images, is crucial to the endeavor of the “wayfinder” as he or she navigates (or “cognitively maps”) any given terrain by relying on distinct landmarks (Lynch 1960). “Place,” for its part, is more than a geographic location. Place, as observed by Christian Norberg-Schulz, is a “total phenomenon that we cannot reduce to any of its properties” (1979: 7–16). Therefore, comprehending the “totality of place” entails determining both its three-dimensional organization—its space—and “its particular identity or spirit,” the genius loci. In his phenomenological excursus on architecture, Genius Loci, Norberg-Schulz adds that nouns denote places (e.g., “country,” “grove,” “street,” “forest,” or “building”); prepositions demarcate spaces (e.g., “below,” “above,” “inside,” “behind”); and adjectives describe character or spirit (e.g., “protective,” “festive,” “barren,” “fertile,” “threatening”). The natural setting of Sappho’s temple, a well-watered grove of apple trees amid a sea of roses and abutting a blooming meadow can instantly be characterized as fertile, comforting, breezy, shady, fragrant, and cool. It is also anything but wilderness. Rather, there is every indication that the place described is a form of garden, a cultivated place. Notable here is the presence of a single species of tree, the apple, under-planted with roses. Apples were typical orchard fruit, and roses were among the most highly valued and extensively cultivated flowers in Classical antiquity (Giesecke 2014: 23, 109). But apart from active cultivation, what both plants also have in common is their strong connection to Aphrodite. In mythology the apple had a long symbolic and religious association with fertility and sexual passion, the most (in)famous being the golden apple awarded by the Trojan prince Paris to Aphrodite.8 Appropriately, apples served both as love tokens and as gifts at weddings and engagements, connoting the desire for a fruitful union.9 As for the rose, this flower’s very origins were bound to Aphrodite. Roses were said to have sprung from the sand, suffusing the earth with color, when a newly foam-born Aphrodite first stepped ashore from the sea (Nonnus Dion. 41.118–25). Sappho’s landscape, then, bears both the indelible marks of active human cultivation and of a strong divine presence.
The plantings here of apples paired with roses, and the qualities with which these plants imbue the place, reveal this garden to be a sacred grove. Sacred groves, abundantly attested at cult sites, were at once dwelling places of the gods and places of worship (Carroll 2017). They were wooded places set apart from or, more properly, off-cuts (temenoi) literally carved out from the wilderness. They were distinct from forests that were filled with “strange and menacing forces” occasioning disorientation and anxiety (Bachelard 1964: 185), and they functioned as critical loci of interface between human and divine. Tree species in such groves often directly signaled what deity was honored there. As the elder Pliny notes in his Natural History, certain trees were sacred to particular gods: the oak to Zeus, the olive to Athena, the laurel to Apollo, and the myrtle, like the apple, to Aphrodite (12.2.1). The sacred place that Sappho describes is more than a sacred grove, however. Its space is delimited top to bottom by heaven (whence Aphrodite descends) and earth. Laterally it is defined by the boundary of the temenos, the line between wild and cultivated that marks the point of the sacred space’s very being, or as Martin Heidegger calls it, “presencing” (1971: 154). The cultivated space contains—is internally ordered by—a temple, grove, smoking altar, brook, and meadow for grazing. Taken together, these things or markers more clearly define the space and more completely determine its environmental character. The sacred space that Sappho describes could well be the type of sanctuary that assumed particular importance in the formation of the Greek poleis, or city-states. The creation of Greek cities depended on an inscription of nature that was accomplished by “claiming a landscape” through the erection of walls to enclose a settlement and/or the establishment of rural sanctuaries (Cole 2000: 481). This allowed gods inhabiting the countryside to become fully integrated in the city’s pantheon and marked agricultural land as belonging to the city’s territory. Rural sanctuaries thus served to separate one community’s arable land from another’s, at the same time delimiting civic space and creating civic identity (Giesecke 2007: 53–54). One wonders, however, if the sanctuary could not alternatively be sub-urban, or even urban if its host city was not entirely built up.10 And how is one to reconcile echoes of other, earlier and later poetic landscapes in any assessment of this place?
Locus Amoenus: Divine and Pleasant Place
In Sappho’s description, the sanctuary possesses qualities that align it closely with Aphrodite. Its landscape embodies the life-sustaining essence of the goddess, who incarnated not only human sexuality but also the fertility of the earth. Variously called “flowery” (Ἅνθεια), “goddess of the sacred gardens” (Ἱεροκηπεία), and “goddess in the gardens” (ἐν κήποις), Aphrodite was responsible for the blossoming of flowers and burgeoning of all vegetation.11 She infused water and soil with life-giving properties. The vegetal nature of the goddess was underscored by her link in cult with Adonis, who “personified the life of the fields and gardens that passes away and blooms again” and even by her association with horses grazing the fruits of the earth (Farnell 1896/2005: 649–650). At the same time, the sanctuary possesses qualities that align it with a distinct type of idealized landscape that appears frequently in ancient literature. The term or phrase now used to classify such a landscape, locus amoenus (pleasant place), is first found in the works of Cicero to denote an idyllic place or landscape (Fin. 2.107), but the locus amoenus, variously imitated by later Greek and Roman authors as context demanded, had already emerged as a topos in Greece’s earliest literature, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Hesiod’s Works and Days.12
The twentieth century spawned a series of scholarly works that sought rigorously to classify and catalog known instances of the locus amoenus. Ernst Robert Curtius identified the presence of a tree or group of trees, a meadow, and a spring or brook as minimum criteria (1954: 202). Gerhard Schönbeck, adopting a different approach, opined that there are no fewer than a dozen elements that, in different combinations, can characterize the pleasant place: 1) a breeze, 2) water (especially as a source of refreshment or cleansing), 3) animation (by god, human, or animal), 4) movement, 5) intimations of Spring, 6) abundance, 7) a garden quality, 8) mountains, 9) grove (single trees, forests, orchards, sacred grove), 10) sleep, 11) a warm breeze (Zephyr), 12) cicadas (1962: 18–60). Finally, Petra Hass determined that to qualify as a locus amoenus, a place description, however enchanting, must at a minimum be comprehensible (easy to survey or visualize), have a source of water, and safeguard or promote life (1998: 98). Regardless of criteria set selected, Sappho’s sanctuary qualifies as a locus amoenus. It has a sacred grove of apple trees, a meadow, a cooling brook, a shady drift of roses, and altars smoking with incense. It is swept by soporific breezes and is inhabited by divinities and mortals. Beyond a doubt, it is a divine and pleasant place. As such, is it not paradise?
Gardens and Paradise
Not surprisingly, Sappho’s divine and fertile garden has much in common with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic Garden of Eden. In the words of the Syrian monk John the Damascene (c.676–749 AD), Eden’s garden—planted by God with his own hands and the site where the first man and woman lived in harmony with nature and with God—was:
temperate and the air that surrounds it is the rarest and purest: evergreen plants are its pride, sweet fragrances abound, it is flooded with light, and in sensuous freshness and beauty it transcends imagination…a suitable home for him who was created in God’s image.13
The account of Eden in Genesis 2:8–9 adds another level of detail:
And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the middle of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it was parted and became into four heads.
Sappho’s garden sanctuary shares basic structural elements and qualities with the Garden of Eden: both are fragrant, fertile, well-watered, bounded, and planted with sacred trees. As will also be seen, both are equally elusive. These correspondences result from a shared ancestry in the sacred gardens of the ancient Mediterranean. In their most basic form, they were microcosms of the earth, containing distinctive stones, water, and trees. Such places were not designated as sacred by humans but rather “discovered” (Eliade 1963: 369). In these meaningful places open-air altars and, later, temples were erected. They necessarily possessed a boundary separating sacred from profane. Not coincidentally, the notion of boundary is embedded in the word “paradise,” which became more or less synonymous with Eden. Paradise is derived from ancient Greek paradeisos, which in turn was derived from the Median paridaeza (a walled enclosure), a word corresponding with Old Persian paridaida and Babylonian pardesu (Bremmer 2002: 109–120). Judging from extant Babylonian, Elamite, and Greek texts, the semantic range of “paradise” was considerable, encompassing vineyards, orchards, nurseries, luxurious pleasure gardens, hunting parks, and storage spaces for produce. Even Plato’s Academy was designated a paradeisos—logically enough, as Plato’s school took its name from the shaded walks and groves sacred to the obscure hero Hekademos. Overt suggestions of prosperity and pleasure associated especially with the royal parks (paradeisoi) of Persian kings would lead to the translation of Hebraic Gan Eden in Genesis (3:23) as paradeisos tēs tryphēs (paradise of pleasurable luxury) in Greek and to the conception of the Qur’an’s paradise as gardens. Sappho’s lush temenos, too, is certainly a paradise.
Archaeological and textual evidence underscores the notion that both Aphrodite’s sanctuary garden and Eden have roots extending to the kingdoms of the western Orient in the third and second millennia BC. Their predecessors include the gardens that feature in Sumerian myths of the god Enki and the hero Gilgamesh as well as the mountaintop garden of the mythical Persian king Jima. Their forerunners also include the gardens of historical Near Eastern kings who created royal gardens that welcomed the gods and that underscored their own proximity to the divine, since divine favor was required for the transformation of arid lands into lush and amply watered gardens. Among the gardener-kings were the Assyrian Tiglath-Pilesar I (reigned 1115–1077 BC), whose annals boast of his concern for the prosperity of his land and people, which he assured by the annexation of new territories, the expansion of cultivated land, and the importation and planting of exotic trees. “Plows I did harness throughout the whole of the land of Assyria and I heaped up more heaps of grain than my forefathers did,” the annals declare, adding:
Cedar, boxwood, Kanish-oak from the lands over which I gained control—those trees which none of the previous kings my forefathers had planted—I took and I planted them in the orchards of my lands. Rare orchard fruits, which did not exist in my land, I took and filled the orchards of Assyria [with them].14
Similar statements were made by numerous others, among them Assurnasirpal II (reigned 883–859 BC). On the occasion of the opening of his new palace at Nimrud in the year 879, he recounted an extraordinary horticultural achievement: “I excavated a canal from the Upper Zab River, cutting through a mountain at its peak. I named it ‘Canal of Abundance.’ I irrigated the pasturelands beside the Tigris River [and] I planted gardens in its vicinity with fruit trees of every kind.” In his palatial garden, he planted trees, cuttings, and seeds collected from all the lands through which he had traveled in the course of his campaigns, including cedar, cypress, box, juniper, myrtle, date palm, ebony, olive, oak, tamarisk, almond, terebinth, ash, fir, pomegranate, apricot, pine, pear, quince, fig, grapes, plum, mint, sycamore, and frankincense—in all some 41 species. “Canal-water came flowing down from above through the gardens,” he continued; “the paths are full of scent, the waterfalls [sparkle] like the stars of heaven in the garden of pleasure. The pomegranate trees, which are clothed with clusters of fruit like vines, enrich the breezes in this garden of delight.” The garden was so productive that the king could “gather fruit continuously in the garden of joys like a squirrel.” This gardener-king’s successors included Sargon II (reigned 722–705 BC), who constructed at Khorsabad a new capital with “a park like unto Mount Amanus … laid out by its side”—a marvel in this flat landscape—and in which were gathered “all the spice trees of the Hittite land” and “the fruit trees of every mountain.” This Amanus, a symbol of the king’s conquest of Hittite territories, is a mountain range in what is now south-central Turkey. Sargon II’s son Sennacherib (reigned 704–681 BC) did the same, building “a great park like unto Mount Amanus” near his own palace, again requiring a feat of engineering to sculpt the land. Later, at Babylon, the fabled Hanging Gardens of Nebuchadnezzar II (reigned circa 604–562 BC) rose. Reportedly, the Hanging Gardens were built by the king “to please one of his concubines; for she…, being a Persian by race and longing for the meadows of her mountains, asked the king to imitate, through the artifice of a planted garden, the distinctive landscape of Persia” (Diod. Sic. II.10). Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire, followed suit, building at Pasargadae a palatial garden—a complex of gardens interspersed with royal pavilions—that likely inspired the governors’ paradises established on Cyrus’s orders throughout the Empire. Insofar as such royal, sanctuary gardens embodied perfection, an ideal attainable by no one without divine intervention and presence, are they not utopian?
Utopia: The Good No-Place
As a garden, Sappho’s sanctuary is necessarily a utopian place, for gardens are essentially utopian constructs. But what is a garden, and in what sense is it utopian? As mentioned above, a garden is a cultivated place. “Cultivate” is derived from the Latin colo, colere and, more distantly (and more fundamentally), from the Indo-European root Kwel-, which carries a range of meanings, including “to turn over,” “revolve,” “circle,” movements that can all be seen in gardening activities such as the working of soil by plow and spade, the continuous action of picking herbs, and the demarcation of a garden plot (Finley 2015: 170). Importantly, the root also connotes “to sojourn,” “to inhabit,” and “to dwell.” Embedded in these diverse meanings is the inextricable link between plants, gardens, and humanity: the creation of gardens is necessary for human life—to dwell on Earth is to garden. Put differently, a garden is the result of humanity’s attempt to carve out an ideal place in nature and, in a sense, to perfect the earth so as to ensure its hospitability (Giesecke and Jacobs 2012: 9; Fairchild Ruggles 2018).15 Cicero calls the garden “a second nature” (altera natura, Nat. D. 2.150), a kinder, gentler nature than the untamed wilderness. Thus all gardens can be viewed as temenoi, off-cuts from the larger natural environment that are geared in some way toward human use, and they can take many forms ranging from sacred groves, ploughlands, and meadows used for grazing or picking flowers to loci amoeni, pleasant places affording respite and sensory delight. The creation of gardens, meanwhile, is predicated on hope—hope that what one has planted will grow and/or that the cultivated space will foster life-sustaining activities. Hope and the human drive for a better way of life, in turn, are the catalysts of utopian dreaming and the conception of utopias, loosely defined as projections—literary, political, social, architectural, or otherwise—of the utopian impulse (Giesecke and Jacobs 2012: 10).
As for the concept of utopia, it is deeply entrenched in spatiality and “place.” The word “utopia” was coined by Thomas More, in whose socio-political novel Utopia (1516) there appears the detailed description of an ideal society on an island called Utopia. The island’s and its society’s name is a neologism and a play on words, for u-topia can be understood as referencing the Greek ou-topos (no place), eu-topos (good place), or both simultaneously. Though possessing no known geographical location, it is far from true that Utopia lacks space and place. As an island, it is bounded on all sides, and it has cities, houses, fields, and gardens. While the publication of More’s Utopia formalized utopian discourse by giving it a name, the imagining of a social ideal long predated that work (Claeys and Sargent 1999: 1–7). Literary expressions of utopianism include Homer’s Scheria, the Phaiakians’
island, and the Garden of Alcinous; Hesiod’s Golden Age; Pindar’s Isles of the Blessed; Plato’s Republic; Vergil’s Elysian Fields; and, of course, the Biblical Garden of Eden, which has been called the “deepest archaeological layer of the Western utopia” (Manuel and Manuel 1979: 33).16 It has been said as well that every gardener, whether consciously or subconsciously, is motivated by the desire to re-create Eden, an ideal place (the abundant garden) and condition (harmony of life on Earth) lost (Giesecke and Jacobs 2012: 9). It is true, then, on many levels that Aphrodite’s sanctuary is a utopian place. It is a garden replete with paradisiacal resonances and thus an alluring place. It accommodates critical human interaction with the divine and, as will be explored further below, functions as a center of ritual and social cohesion. At the same time, the garden sanctuary defies geographical location, qualifying equally as Cypriot, a generic Greek (but specifically Aphrodisiac) temenos, a nostalgic composite of real and imagined, and a sentimental, wholly imaginary landscape conjured by a love-sick imagination.
Heterotopia: The Other Space
If Aphrodite’s sanctuary was a real place that could be definitively located geographically, then the place could still be described as utopian, possessing idealizing characteristics, but it could not be classed as a utopia. A utopia is a fiction. What, then, of heterotopia? According to Michel Foucault, utopia and heterotopia both are places that have a “relation with all other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (1986: 24–27). Utopias, however, “are sites with no real place,” presenting, as they do, society in a perfected form or “turned upside down.” Heterotopias, meanwhile, are grounded in reality much as a person’s reflection in a mirror presents the person in an unreal place but, simultaneously, anchors him or her to the place where the mirror stands or rests. Foucault identified various types of heterotopia. Among them are heterotopias “of crisis,” defined as “privileged or sacred or forbidden places” reserved for individuals who are in a liminal, transitional, or “crisis” state in relation to the rest of society. There are also heterotopias that are, in a sense, multiple. That is, they juxtapose several distinct types of places in a single place, even when, taken at face value, this would appear impossible. Heterotopias will often be linked with time in such a way that they “begin to function at full capacity when (people) arrive at a sort of absolute break with traditional time,” and they are bounded in some manner that at once “isolates them and makes them penetrable,” as in the case of a historically-themed vacation village where guests live in “re-discovered time” and can do so only by reserving a place there.
As regards Aphrodite’s sanctuary, if the place is real, it can be classed as a heterotopia. At the same time, it can be seen as participating in a heterotopian project irrespective of geographic definition. As already established, the sanctuary is a place “apart.” It is both a garden separated from wilderness and a sacred place separated from the profane. While theoretically open to anyone, sanctuaries could be accessed only by those who had first undergone ritual purification. This is perhaps most vividly demonstrated by Oedipus who, treading on sacred ground in an impure state, polluted the Grove of the Eumenides, albeit unwittingly (Sophocles, OC 1–576). Aphrodite’s sanctuary, in its Sapphic context, also conforms to what Foucault described as an absolute, fleeting temporality in the sense that, as a place of ritual and festival, it is not continuously activated and thus functions differently than a place like a city’s agora that, by continuous use, is interwoven with the unbroken passage of time. In the case of Sappho’s poem, Aphrodite’s pouring a libation for celebrants at the fragment’s close strikingly animates the heterotopic place and underscores its ritual purpose. Readers are left to guess the precise purpose or nature of the ritual, but there are reasons to suspect that the ritual may belong to the category of transition and “crisis” in Foucault’s sense of the word. It repeatedly has been suggested that Sappho (or her literary persona) was, perhaps in the guise of priestess, charged with overseeing the transition of young girls to adulthood.17 If this should be the case, then Aphrodite’s sanctuary, its landscape steeped in the generative essence of the goddess, would be an ideal location for a coming of age ritual to take place. Regardless of the particular ritual referenced in Sappho’s text, is the goddess’s sanctuary not at its core a deeply gendered place?
Gendered Place
This place of beauty, the fertile garden sanctuary that awaits the arrival of its sensual patron deity, is suffused with feminine allure. Significantly, the sanctuary, together with the festivities housed there, forms part of a larger world, the collective spaces that emerge from Sappho’s fragments. The world of the fragments is characterized by female intimacies, soft beds, perfumes, flowers, garlands, sacred groves, banquets, song, worship, and dances.18 Sappho’s world differs radically from pictures of archaic Lesbos that are captured in the work of her contemporary, Alcaeus. His best-known lines are those in which he “invents” the metaphor of the ship of state:19
This wave again comes [like] the one before: it will give us much labor to bale out, when it enters the vessel’s…let us fortify the [ship] with all speed, and run into a secure harbor…and let not unmanly hesitance take hold of any one [of us]…and let us not disgrace [by cowardice] our noble fathers lying under the earth…
(Fr. 6)
In the verses cited above, nature is cast as hostile and terrifying, and the polis, represented by the storm-tossed ship, is rocked by calamitous political instability. The atmosphere of this poem, together with its presentation of nature, is wholly unlike that of Sappho’s second fragment, where nature is bounteous, soothing, and safe.20 Under these dire circumstances, it is wholly appropriate that armor and weaponry are conspicuous, as Alcaeus writes elsewhere: “the great house is agleam with bronze, and the roof is full-dressed with shining helmets…bronze shining greaves hang round…a fence against the arrow’s might” (Fr. 140). Alcaeus evidences a thoroughly masculine, intense engagement with the political struggles of archaic Lesbos, places and situations that appear far removed from Sappho’s intimate ritual spaces and their social dynamics. Hers is a world inextricably bound to her identity both as the first and the preeminent woman poet in the ancient Mediterranean. As social geographer Doreen Massey notes, all spaces are inherently gendered, but, she adds,
they are gendered in … myriad different ways, which vary between cultures and over time…. [T]his gendering of space and place both reflects and has effects back on the ways in which gender is constructed and understood in the societies in which we live.
(1994: 185–186)
In other words, the gender of a place, or rather our perception of it, is fluid and tied to culturally determined, often unstated assumptions on the part of both actors and observers about what constitutes male and female activities that may take place in one space but not in another. In the case of Sappho’s poetry, readers (literary observers) over the ages have assumed that the poetess herself is an actor—the lead actor in her compositions—and that, in a sense, she necessarily created a world in her own image. But how can we even begin accurately to perceive Sappho’s world if we have no clear picture of Sappho herself or of the society in which she lived?
As some have observed, the Sappho that we think we know is herself nothing more than a text or collection of texts, and thus a form of social modality (DuBois 1995: 3; Yatromanolakis 2009a: 211). While we have no concrete, reliable details about her life, there is no reason to assume that she is a blank page. Rather, she is “a palimpsest,” a text “so thickly written over with critical accumulation that it is almost impossible to make out the words beneath” (Parker 1993: 311). This accumulation, fuelled by critics’ preoccupation with issues of gender and (homo)sexuality, shaped remarkably tenacious projections of Sappho as a music teacher, a sex-educator, and/or a priestess presiding over female coming-of-age rituals. Such projections rest on the most precarious of footings: readers’ assumptions, millennia deep, not explicit textual references. Nowhere in her extant work does Sappho openly claim to teach, guide, or initiate (Hallett 1979; Parker 1993). What we can cautiously say is that Sappho was a singer-poet, performing for an audience. How large or small this audience was, and whether entirely female, cannot be determined. Whether she performed in private, family contexts or in public, civic settings likewise cannot be determined.
Spatial gender and its relation to the gender of its creator has been a persistent and slippery theme in architectural discourse. A cautionary example of gender-fluid space or, more precisely, the fluidity of spatial gender-perception is that of fifteenth-century architectural theorist and utopian Antonio Averlino, more commonly known as Filarete. Filarete struggled to come to terms with Vitruvius’s notion that buildings, being based on the proportions of a man’s body, are therefore “male,” while the architect, their male creator, is functionally a woman with respect with the act of creation (Agrest 1991). Extending Filarete’s train of thought, one could surmise that a building, having been created by a man acting like a woman, would be transgender. In Sappho’s case it would follow that if literary space functions like built space, her poetic spaces must unequivocally be feminine, reflecting both the physical shape and gender of their creator. What, then, of Sappho’s social/civic role and the role of her own community in defining the gender of her poetic spaces? After all, spatial gender can legitimately be determined by its users as well as by users and creators in combination. Here the work of philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefèbvre, who highlights the social aspect of spatial production, is helpful (1991). In the Greek world, there are perhaps no spaces more closely associated with women and women’s activities than the interior chambers of the dwelling house. This, at least, is an impression given by Homeric and later Greek literary sources, where the oikos is a space of relative darkness hidden from the public gaze in which “women and slaves invisibly dealt with the necessities of material existence” (Jarratt 2002: 14). The oikos is set in opposition to the agora, “a space of visibility and freedom…an open field for [men’s] honorable distinction” (Jarratt 2002: 14). At the same time, literary and archaeological sources have revealed that the oikos, too, served important social and political functions. One thinks especially of the andrones (men’s rooms), settings for symposia, which have been characterized as “among the most important places where citizens, young and old, were prepared for their civic roles in the city-state” (Henderson 2000: 6). Symposia were gatherings of men, the only women in attendance restricted to dancers, wine-pourers, flute players, and courtesans—in other words, women were largely the “help” and the entertainment (on the symposium in Greek culture, see Węcowski (Chapter 5) in this volume). At these gatherings guests would discuss matters of concern to all of them, political, economic, and otherwise, and reaffirm a common value system. Thus symposia and the venues (private houses) at which they were held surely had a civic and political function. Further, the archaeological record has yielded little evidence for clear division of male and female spaces in the Greek house. House and marketplace accordingly cannot be strictly opposed to each other with respect to gender or function. Returning to Sappho and the gender-determination of Aphrodite’s sanctuary specifically—assuming that it to some degree reflects a real, historical place (or type of historical place)—one should allow for the fact that in the Greek world, men numbered among Aphrodite’s devotees, petitioners, and celebrants, for the goddess’s gifts excluded no one. It is thus equally possible that the “we” to whom Aphrodite ministers with her gift of nectar is a group of women, men, or both. Mixed-gender use is particularly likely if the sanctuary is a public place, an appendage of the polis and its civic functioning, rather than a sequestered private enclave. But can it be determined if the sanctuary is public or private, and are we to imagine a place that is purely Greek, (in)formed solely by Greek cultural norms?
Lesbian Cartographies
Given the physical location of Lesbos, which is closer to the Near East than to the West and mainland Greece, it makes sense to consider the impact of Oriental influences on Sapphic space. Indeed, archaeological investigation has revealed a continuous link between Lesbos and the empires of the East from the Bronze Age to the Archaic Period and beyond (Spencer 1995). The island received ceramics, metals, architectural styles, cult practices and, presumably, craftsmen from Anatolia. In her poetry, Sappho speaks of myrrh, frankincense, and cassia, aromatics from Arabia; textiles of saffron or Tyrian purple; and Lydian fields of flowers.21 Material remains, coupled with Sappho’s and Alcaeus’s poetry, have produced an admittedly fragmentary picture of Lesbian culture and society, but the impression is of a cosmopolitan society that belonged to a wider Hellenic community while, at the same time, bearing a heavily Asianizing imprint. Sappho’s poetic focus on luxury, pleasure, intimacy, and beauty may thus be seen as an Asianizing reflex. With overt references to Lydia and Egypt and to precious objects that hail from the East, Sapphic cartography differs inherently from that of Pindar, who looks west from the Greek mainland to Sicily and Magna Graecia, and from that of the tragic poets, who focus largely on the mainland centers of Mycenae, Argos, Thebes, and Athens (DuBois 1995: 179–182). At the same time, Sappho’s “Asianizing,” (ef)feminizing subject matter may reflect an Archaic Greek society in flux, in which women, especially of the upper classes, were allowed greater freedoms than they were in the Classical polis: freedoms to gather out of doors, to revel in luxuries, and to engage openly in discourses on women’s emotional fulfillment and physical pleasure (Griffith 2009). If Sapphic space is Asianizing and, by Classical standards, sexually liberated, is it also Lesbian in the modern sense? When inhabited by women, are hers different from the spaces described by other lyric poets treating similar themes (wine, altars, wreaths, perfume, banquets)? Are the spaces of Sappho’s poetry erotic or are they homo-erotic? Must the latter necessarily follow from the depth of Sappho’s yearnings and from the sensual nature of the intimacies described?
Conclusions: Her Space, Our Space, and Thirdspace
Poetry is not biography. All readers create their own Sappho, shaping and re-shaping her persona, refracted through the prism of the particular age and circumstances—historical, social, political—in which they live: a lover of women, a lover of young men, a wife, sister, and mother. By extension, all readers create their own Sapphic space; they do not “passively receive the spatial messages transmitted by the texts, but actively determine the often shifting and transient meanings to be found there” (Tally 2013: 79). Sapphic space is thus at once hers (Sappho’s, the creator’s) and mine/ours (the reader’s), inextricably entwined. Judging from the evidence afforded by the fragments, Sapphic space is also neither entirely real, lived space—anchored by specific place names and described in a level of detail unmistakable to the reader/navigator—nor is it wholly imagined, with no relation to the places and spaces of lived experience. Sapphic space is implicated in and shaped by Lefèbvre’s trialectic of perceived-conceived-lived space, which lies at the core of what Edward Soja calls Thirdspace: “a creative recombination and extension, one that builds on a Firstspace perspective that is focused on the ‘real’ material world and a Secondspace perspective that interprets this reality through ‘imagined’ representations of spatiality” (1996: 6). Sapphic space is simultaneously hers-ours, real-unreal, public-private, Greek-Asian, female-male, divine-mortal. Like all space, literary and otherwise, Sapphic space is polyvalent and the perception of it poly-sensory. It is a “dialectically interwoven matrix” (Wegner 2002: 182) of human actions and interactions, and the representation of it, as well as its symbolic potentialities, is informed by evolving modes of spatial experience and spatial imagination.
Where Sappho’s genius as a poet to large degree resides is in her ability to draw the audience into her literary world and to move us so deeply that we perceive her poetic spaces to be tangible, lived spaces whose gender associations and broader cultural infrastructure can be definitively determined. What, then, can we concretely surmise about the identity of Aphrodite’s sanctuary? That, as she tells us, it contains a shrine, an altar smoking with incense, a grove of apples and drifts of roses ruffled by a soporific breeze, a babbling brook, and a blooming meadow grazed by horses.
FURTHER READING
Tally 2013 provides essential background for approaching texts with an eye to considerations of space and place beyond the setting of a given narrative. Foundational texts in spatial studies include: Bachelard 1964 on the primacy of the home as emotional center versus the wilderness; Foucault 1986 on heterotopias, places that are “of this world” but somehow separate; Lefèbvre 1991 on the social defintion of space; Soja 1996 on Thirdspace, space partaking of both the real (Firstspace) and the imagined (Secondspace); and Levitas 2013 on utopias and utopianism. An introduction to gardens as utopian spaces—and the relation of all gardens to the originary Garden of Eden—can be found in Giesecke and Jacobs 2012. DuBois 1995, and 2010 are essential reading for the application of postmodern thinking to Sappho in particular, and Trümper 2010 provides a fundamental discussion of gendered space in an ancient Greek context.
Notes
1 This is particularly true of Sappho, in whose case most interpretation of her work has been biographically focused since antiquity (Parker 1993: 336). I wish to thank Laura Swift, Tyson Sukava, and Donald Dunham at the outset for their insightful comments.
2 The translation is slightly modified from Page 1955, as are those of all Sapphic fragments that follow, and the Greek text is also that of Page.
3 Two cities on the island’s southern coast were called Paphos. From the Roman Imperial period, these were differentiated as Old Paphos (Palaípaphos), the origins of which have been traced to the Chalcolithic and which was the site of the famous Aphrodite Sanctuary, and New Paphos (Néa Páphos), which was founded at the end of the fourth century BC (Canick and Schneider 2007: 480). All mentions of Paphos in this chapter refer solely to Old Paphos.
4 Greek and Roman literary sources preserving the myth include: HHDem. VI; Anacreon fr. 57; Diodorus Siculus 5.55.4; Pausanias 2.1.8, 5.11.8: Quintus Smyrnaeus 5.72ff.: Ovid Met. 4.521–38; Apuleius Met. 6.6; Seneca Phaed. 274; and Nonnus Dion. 1.86–88, 7.222–229, 12.45–47, 13.435– 443, 41.97–118. Not all of these passages refer to Cyprus in conjunction with the goddess’s birth from foam, and Hesiod Theog. 176–206 notes that after her foamy birth, Aphrodite first approached the island of Cythera and then came to Cyprus.
5 In Turkish, Kouklia (Greek) is called Kukla.
6 The translation of the passage from the Odyssey is Lattimore’s (1965: 130). Regarding the date of the Iliad, I believe that the poem, having roots in the Bronze Age, reached a critical juncture in its generation, a point of relative stability and completion, in the middle of the eighth century BC. Dating of the Homeric poems, however, remains disputed. See, for example, Nagy 1996a: 21, 40 and 2003: 2–3, who argues persuasively against an eighth-century dictation model in favor of consecutive periods of transmission, a movement from fluidity through transcription to ultimate textual crystallization in the second century BC.
7 Ulbrich 2008 details archeological evidence for sanctuaries and cult activity on Cyprus. Summary tables on pages 479–562 are particularly helpful and suggest that all of the sites listed have yielded materials coincident in date with Sappho.
8 See, for example: Apollodorus Epit. 3.9.2, Lucian Dial. Deor. 20, Apuleius Met. 1030, and Hyginus Fab. 92. A complete list of references is gathered in Littlewood 1968: 149–151.
9 Examples are meticulously assembled by Littlewood 1968: 154–157. These include Aristophanes Nub. 997; Sappho fr. 105; Stesichorus fr. 10; Theocritus Id. 2.120, 3.10–11, 5.88–89, 6.6–7, 11.10; Catullus 65.19–24; Horace Epist. 1.1.77–80.; and Vergil Ecl. 2.52, 3.64.
10 Ulbrich (2008: 199–252) proposes a refined taxonomy of sanctuaries in her study of Cyprus, distinguishing them as urban, suburban, peri-urban, and territorial, the last three being located outside a given city’s walls. She classes the Paphos sanctuary as urban but of a type located at the city’s edge.
11 Aphrodite is known specifically as Ἅνθεια at Knossos on Crete (Hesychius s.v, as cited in Theander 1937:468), as Ἱεροκηπεία at Paphos (Strabo 683), and ἐν κήποις in Athens (Pausanias 1.19.2).
12 Hera’s seduction of Zeus (Il. 16. 347–353), Calypso’s grotto (Od. 5. 55–74), Athena’s sacred grove (Od. 6.291–294), the Garden of Alcinous (Od. 7.112–132), Goat Island (Od. 9.116–141), the island of the Cyclopes (Od. 9.105–111, 181–189), the grotto at Phorkys’ harbor (Od. 13.102–112), the sanctuary of the nymphs on Ithaka (Od. 17. 204–211), and the rustic summer meal (WD 582–596).
13 The passage from John the Damascene is derived from Bockmuehl (2010: 200).
14 Quotations in this section are derived from Green’s collection of West Semitic royal inscriptions (2010: 48, 50, 54) and Stronach 1990. Comments on the gardens of Near Eastern monarchs are adapted from Giesecke 2015: 86: copyright of the previous work is mine.
15 The comment regarding hospitability specifically is from Fairchild Ruggles 2018.
16 See Homer, Od. books 7–8; Hesiod, WD 109–201; Pindar, Ol. 2.57 ff.; Plato, Rep. passim; Vergil, Aen. 6.535–543, 743– 744; Genesis 2.1–17.
17 That Sappho was an educator or priestess is suggested, for example, in Burnett 1983, Calame 2001, Ferrari 2010, Gentili 1988, and Hallett 1979. This position is critiqued in Parker 1993 and Stehle 1997. On the various theories of Sappho’s historical identity, see Lardinois (Chapter 18) in this volume.
18 See, for example, the following fragments for references to these themes. Intimacies: frr. 22, 23, 31, 94. Soft bedding: frr. 46, 94. Perfume and incense: frr. 2, 94, 101. Flowers: frr. 2, 55, 96, 105, 122. Garlands: frr. 81, 92, 94, 98, 125, 168, 191. Groves: frr. 2, 94. Banquets: fr. 2. Song: frr. 30, 44, 58, 70, 71, 103, 153. Worship: frr. 2, 9. Dance: frr. 70, 94.
19 Verses from Alcaeus are adapted from Page 1955: 183, 210.
20 This is not to say that nature in Sappho is always presented as beneficent (e.g., fr. 47), though in the extant works, this is largely the case.
21 On Arabian aromatics see frr. 2, 44, 94; on dyed textiles frr. 44, 54, 92, 98, 101; on Lydian flowers fr. 96.