• DOI:10.1086/449585
• Corpus ID: 161865691

Sappho, Herodotus, and the "Hetaira"

@article{Lidov2002SapphoHA,
  title={Sappho, Herodotus, and the "Hetaira"},
  author={Joel B. Lidov},
  journal={Classical Philology},
  year={2002},
  volume={97},
  pages={203 - 237}
}

• Joel B. Lidov
• Published 1 July 2002
• History
• Classical Philology

That dot leads to the second, for what is visible on the papyrus before the rho is merely a dot of ink, and it is not compatible with an omega.1 The printed text depends entirely on a story about Sappho and her brother Charaxus. According to ancient reports, Charaxus went to Egypt as a wine merchant, became enamored there of a slave-prostitute named Rhodopis, and lavished sums on her; at the least he bought her her liberty. Upon his return to Mytilene, Sappho, calling the woman not Rhodopis but Doricha, composed a poem or poems attacking him, or perhaps both him and her, on account of this expenditure. With A]opiXa, fragment 15b could be interpreted as part of Sappho's invective. The discrepancy between the printed text and the papyrus led me to reexamine our understanding of the evidence for the story. It first occurs in a digression in Book 2 of Herodotus (without the name Doricha) and it recurs with additions (including the name) and variations in Strabo, Athenaeus, Ovid[?], and other late sources; an epigram of Posidippus also refers to it. I have concluded that all the evidence that bears on the story will not help restore this or any other fragment of Sappho and does not point to the existence of any such narrative or rebuke in poems known or lost to us. For from Herodotus' tale of the hetaira Rhodopis, interpreted in the context of his narrative, and from the hints in the later sources, what we can reconstruct is not a poem of Sappho's but a stage in the fifth-century reception of Sappho and her poetry, one most likely represented in the work of Cratinus or of another of Herodotus' comic contemporaries.