The reception of Sparta, especially the Three Hundred, through 18th-century France, 19th- 20th-century Germany, 19th-century America, the Second World War, the Cold War, and today. A considering of how Sparta’s own distortion of Thermopylae in antiquity has been amplified throughout the centuries to leave us with the legacy of Thermopylae as a war for freedom when at the time it was not framed in any such way.

Chapter 2 addresses Aristotle’s use of artefacts as counterexamples or central elements in counter-arguments against Plato and the Academy. The common opinion, within the Academy, that there cannot exist Ideas of artefacts is used by Aristotle to highlight the internal incoherence of the Platonic theory (Met. A 9, 990b8–15; Met. B 4, 999b15–20; Met. K 2, 1060b23–8). Moreover, the case of artefacts offers evidence that Ideas are either inert thus superflous (Met. A 9, 991b1–7; GC 2.9, 335b18–24), or even in contradiction with the coming-to-be of individual substances (Met. Z 8, 1033b19–24). The chapter shows that in these passages Aristotle is using artefacts dialectically against Plato’s separation of Ideas and concludes with a reflection on the notions of separation and substantiality.

This final chapter shows how further enquiry into artefacts’ metaphysics forces us to return to artefacts’ physics. At the same time, this further enquiry is in turn shown to fall outside the interests of a metaphysician and to be the task of a natural philosopher. For this reason, the chapter looks at artefacts as objects of inquiry and distinguishes between perspective of the natural scientist, the maker, and the user on the one hand, and the perspective of the metaphysician on the other. This discussion allows us to wrap up the results, to reassess the relationship between the Physics and the Metaphysics, and to evaluate the respective contributions of these works to Aristotle’s ontology of artefacts.

This chapter introduces the concept of reparative reading and explains the benefits of reading Sappho and Homer through a reparative lens. It argues that previous scholarship has applied a notion of intertextuality that is competitive and hierarchical, thus missing out on key elements of Sappho’s engagement with Homer. It also introduces the reader to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a queer theorist, poet, and fiber artist and anticipates some of the parallels between Sedgwick and Sappho as reparative readers. An overview of Sedgwick’s career, her understanding of queerness and the social and historical contexts for her evolving sensibilities as a reparative reader are provided, as is a preview of the following chapters.

A study of Agesilaus and his Penhellenism and mission to "free the Greeks" of Asia. Agesilaus wanted to be commemorated as a liberator well outside of Sparta, which was a major contributor to Sparta’s decline as increased wars weakened Sparta irreparably.

Introduction to Spartan society and commemoration. A discussion of terms, methods, and themes. An introduction to memory studies. A look at the topography of ancient Sparta.

This chapter focuses on Sappho fr. 1V and argues that as an attentive reader of the Iliad – and of the shame and humiliation experienced by its female characters, both divine and mortal – Sappho, rather than attempting to outdo Homer, or to contest his canonicity, amplifies and recasts “minor” episodes from Homeric epic. Her approach is neither overtly competitive with, nor subservient to, the older poet in that she does not aim to recreate the contours and feel of the original. Instead, in a manner designed to make visible what epic suppresses, she returns us to some of the Iliad’s marginal and dismissed characters, showing us the generative potential of painful experiences, such as Aphrodite’s defeat in Iliad 5 at the hands of Diomedes, and her feelings of shame as she is rebuked by the mortal warrior and demeaned by her father, Zeus. The consolation of her mother, Dione’s, reparative embrace anticipates the similar sort of “repair” Sappho herself, as named speaker of her “Ode to Aphrodite” finds in that poem’s evocation of Aphrodite.

Together with Chapter 1, this chapter helps contextualize the closer readings and case studies that follow by providing an introduction to reparative reading and the cultures of critique (and post-critique) within which it emerged over the past several decades. It also discusses some of the key features of Sedgwick’s development of reparative reading, including shame, materiality, queer futures, and the oscillation between paranoid and reparative positions.

Starting with a brief overview of the Homeric tradition to which Sappho and her ancient listeners on Lesbos may have had access, the chapter then looks at different models of intertextuality, within both oral poetic and textual contexts, and teases out how these shape our understanding(s) of Sappho’s reception of Homer. The nonhierarchical, “avuncular” mode of intertextual interpretation is introduced as one that allows readers to find common ground between poets, rather than focusing exclusively on their latent rivalries.

Taking Penelope’s exemplary remembering of Odysseus as its point of departure, this final chapter argues that Sappho’s lyrics shift the focus of women’s remembering from male to female objects, in this way creating an “avuncular” variation on the Odyssey’s conjugal paradigm. The fragments examined display the “sisterly” dynamics that exist alongside marriage – something the Odyssey itself does not explore. Sappho’s fragments feature the girls and women that wives once were before they were married. The bonds that remembering sustains in Sappho’s world exist alongside the vertically inflected (conjugal, maternal) relationships that more visibly defined a woman’s life. The scenes of recollection are appropriately adorned with lightly woven wreathes, fabrics, flowers, fragrant oils, suggesting the precariousness and fragility of these bonds, in comparision with the supposed enduringness of marriage and patrilineal lineage, with its accumulated household wealth passed on from one generation to the next.