This chapter offers a perspective on Latin literature from the neighbouring field of Roman history. It discusses what appears to be a growing intellectual divide between the two fields, a divergence that is surprising given the increased focus on the politics of literature among Latinists. The essay also offers some suggestions for bridging the gap.I suggest that Latinists could take a much broader view of the structures of power in which Latin texts were embedded, rather than focusing on the phenomenon of autocracy and high politics, that they might profitably continue to extend their attention to non-literary texts and especially inscriptions, and that they could work harder to speak to historians.

Sappho fr. 16V is often read as a repudiation of the heroic military ethos of Homer’s Iliad. It is argued here instead that the fragment presents Helen as an exemplar of how to negotiate erotic and personal preferences that lie outside of Homeric epic’s binaries. With Sedgwick’s “third alternative” as its model, the chapter traces some of the patterns that link Helen to Troy, in both epic and lyric, and explores how these intersect with the desire the singer of Sappho fr. 16V feels for her absent lover, Anactoria. Sappho, it is argued, chooses for herself the “third alternative” that the Iliad refuses, modeling her Anactoria on an almost-queer male hero from that poem, and at the same time celebrating Helen’s subversive orientation toward the poetics of female memory in the Odyssey.

This chapter offers a new reading of Sappho’s Tithonos Poem, and turns to Sedgwick’s “bardo” writings as a framework for exploring the feeling of suspension that characterizes Sappho’s poem. Sappho’s lyrics respond to the absences and silences in epic, as well as to what is more explicitly there. Often, the body in Sappho can be understood as providing cues for the voice, with symptoms arising within the body prompting the singer’s recall of certain mythical parallels. In the Tithonos Poem, for example, the singer’s sense of heaviness in her limbs prompts her recall of the mythical figure Tithonos, the ever-aging yet deathless lover of Dawn. It is argued that the singer’s own groaning lament becomes intertwined with that of Dawn for Tithonos, but it also potentially channels Achilles’ mourning for Patroklos. Sappho ventriloquizes the voices of Homeric characters. This has been acknowledged in the case of Helen but as this chapter argues, Achilles’ mournful lament also provides a surprising and powerful zone of contact between the worlds of epic and lyric.

Chapter 3 looks at the way Sappho responds to material objects in Homer, and explores how plaiting becomes a metaphor for Sappho’s own poetic production. With readings of some of the lesser-known fragments (e.g., frr. 102V, 110V, and 22), as well as a re-examination of Aphrodite’s famed epithet (poikilothronos) in fr. 1, this chapter highlights Sappho’s generic range and poetic creativity, as well as her noncompetitive appropriation of the affects of fear, desire, and breathlessness that are associated with weaponry in the Iliad. In Sappho’s lyrics, similar emotions are produced by women’s garments, jewelry, and other forms of bodily adornment. The chapter ends with an interpretation of Alcaeus 140V, whose orientation towards Homeric weaponry, it is argued, is distinctly more aspirational than wily and playful.

This chapter brings Sappho fr. 44V into dialogue with queer theorist Lee Edelman’s notion of reproductive futurism. As part of its represention of the wedding entourage of Andromache and Hector, Sappho fr. 44V invites us to reconsider the value of “undying fame” (aphthiton kleos) when this eminently heroic commodity is imported from martial epic into a poetic space where love, desire, and marriage overshadow military pursuits. It is argued that Sappho fr. 44V is a wedding song being queered at the very moment of its performance. It is not just not a real wedding song, and therefore a fictional wedding song – which is where those who have rejected the epithalamium hypothesis have tended to leave it. Rather, Sappho fr. 44V is a “wedding song” inverted, turned inside out.