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Chapter 6 - Sappho fr. 44V, or Andromache’s “No Future” Wedding Song

from Part II - Sappho and Homer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2023

Melissa Mueller
Melissa Mueller
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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Summary

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.

Keywords

Sappho 44VHectorAndromachereproductive futurismLee EdelmanIliad 22epithalamiareparative readingheroic immortalitykleos
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Sappho and Homer
A Reparative Reading
 , pp. 132 - 153
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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