THE AFTERLIFE OF SAPPHO'S AFTERLIFE

This article explores an important aspect of the constellation of elements that contribute to the construction of the image of ‘Sappho’ from antiquity to the twentieth century, that of Sappho's ultimate destiny after her fatal leap from the Rock of Leucas. I first argue that the story of Sappho's leap lies behind the description of the Underworld in a long fragment of a fifth-century Attic comedy, the Miners of Pherecrates, and that indeed ‘Sappho’ appeared as a character in the play. The next sections examine the background and the iconic function of Sappho's leap in the underground Basilica near Porta Maggiore in Rome and connects all these elements to the way in which the Underworld is represented in Sappho's textual fragments. The fifth section of the article deals with the ways in which Sappho's fate was reconfigured from the Renaissance onward, examining first visual, musical and dramatic representations. In the final part I focus on the ways the motif is transformed by Baudelaire and Yourcenar. The image of the poetess can shift from being an icon of an eschatological message of new life to one of an exemplary failure, two poles that have an impact both on the reception of classical antiquity and on the vision of the destiny of poetry itself.

a representation of the underworld for which we only have few and highly debated clues in her 'textual' tradition.
('character A') is a woman (as implied by the feminine participle (διατρίβουσ(α)) who has come back from the Underworld, and whose leisurely description of its wonderful joys is contrasted by 'character B' with the possibility of 'diving into Tartarus' immediately. 9 The identity of 'character A', who has experienced the pleasures of the Underworld, and who could dive into Tartarus, has remained so far an unsolved riddle. 10 There are, however, some important clues that can help us to get closer to the solution. In the first place, the image used to describe 'character A''s potential access to Tartarus deserves particular attention. There is, in fact, a famous female character well known for her fatal leap into the sea, and to whom abundant, if controversial evidence, attributes a privileged position in the kingdom of the dead. One of my aims in this paper is to argue for the identification of 'character A' with Sappho (or, at least, for a very strong link between them).
The image of the dive into Tartarus, as noted by all commentators, evokes Anacreon's representation of his crazy dive from the Rock of Leucas (376 PMG = 94 Gentili, 23 Leo): 11 ἀρθεὶς δηὖτ᾽ ἀπὸ Λευκάδος πέτρης ἐς πολιὸν κυμα κολυμβω̃μεθύων ἔρωτι Risinglook, once againfrom the rock of Leucas I dive into the grey sea, drunk with love.
The story of Sappho's leap from the Rock of Leucas is developed in full, among the sources available to us, in Sappho's Epistle to Phaon attributed to Ovid, 12 but is attested for the first time in Menander's Leucadia (fr. 1 Austin, Blanchard, 258 K.-T.), 13 a passage quoted by Strabo (10.2.9, 452c) as evidence that the poetess was the first one to threw herself from the promontory occupied by the famous temple of Apollo: 14 οὗ δὴ λέγεται πρώτη Σαπwὼ τὸν ὑπέρκομπον θηρωσα Φάων᾽ οἰστρωντι πόθῳ ῥιψαι πέτρας ἀπὸ τηλεwανους ἅλμα κατ᾽ εὐχὴν σήν, δέσποτ᾽ ἄναξ· (. . .?) εὐwημείσθω 5 τέμενος περὶ Λευκάδος ἀκτης . . . where they say that Sappho, first, in her hunt for haughty Phaon, goaded by her desire, threw herself from the far-seen rock in a leap, according to a vow made to you, mighty Lord. (. . .?) Let the sanctuary 5 by Cape Leucas be praised. 15 From what we know of the remnants of Menander's play, Sappho's story was not properly part of the plot, which, as usual in his comedies, dealt with contemporary events. It is clear that the story belonged to the traditional repertoire of tales on the poetess. Anacreon's image plays on the topical repetition (δηὖτε, 'look, once again') of a situation that is naturally extreme, and, one can imagine, hardly likely to be repeated. 16 The usual and very reasonable assumption is that Anacreon's image is inspired by the use of a similar image (a metaphor or a simile) already in Sappho that would be at the origin of the biographical tradition, 17 one of the several tesserae of the complex and creative but cannot be considered completely certain. An alternative adopted in the past, and, in my opinion possibly superior, is the very easy correction of ἀλλά into ἅλμα (Wordsworth (1844) 36), connecting the problematic words κατ᾽ εὐχὴν σήν, δέσποτ᾽ ἄναξ with what precedes, 'jumping, according to a vow she made to you, mighty Lord'. This would imply that Sappho's leap was linked to a vow to Apollo, as in Sappho's Epistle to Phaon,uotam) and would have the advantage of establishing a clear link between the Rock, the leap and the sanctuary of Apollo, which seems to be the focus of the fragment. Bentley's solution implies that Strabo's quotation is interrupted at mid-sentence and makes κατ᾽ εὐχὴν σήν (Bentley read σόν) difficult to understand. The collocation ῥιψαι . . . ἅλμα has various similar, but not identical, parallels with analogous nouns and verbs in tragic diction, notably with verbs indicating 'falling' and nouns with a cognate meaning in apposition; Archias, AP 7.214.4 οὐκέτι . . . ἀναρρίψεις ἅλμα, however, might point to a different construction. Even in this case, anyway, it is likely that the fragment in Hesychius came from the same context as the one in Strabo, but we cannot be sure it followed immediately after it. 15 Most editors understand πέρι in anastrophe (after Bernhardy): this, however, implies an impersonal use of the passive εὐwημείσθω, which seems at least very dubious. I switch back to the interpretation of περί governing the genitive in a local sense. 16 But see the bizarre story of Ptolemy 'the Quail' in Phot. Bibl. 190.153a.36-8 regarding one Makes from Bouthrotus who dived from the Rock four times to be delivered from the pains of love. The idea that in Anacreon δηὖτε should be linked to μεθύων ἔρωτι (Leo (2015) 180) and not to κολυμβω̃is very implausible as it would require an extremely convoluted sentence, and is not compatible with a natural word order and the poet's style. Anacreon's images for the onset of love, here as elsewhere, have the paradoxical quality of representing the repetition of unique imaginary experiences. 17 Cf., for example, Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1913) 31;Nagy (1973) 142 (further bibliography in Brivitello (1998) 201 n. 56). The motif of the suicide for love from the Rock of Leucas must have had further lyric currency, given that Aristoxenus (fr. 89 Wehrli, in Ath. 14.619d-e) mentions a song sung by 'women of old times' that he attributes to intertextual link between Anacreon and Sappho. The use of the verb κολυμβάω in Pherecrates is also of some interest: it is rarely found in poetry and the passage in Anacreon is likely to be its earliest attestation (as a simple or compound verb) before the later-fifth century. 18 It occurs also in the title of a mysterious work of Alcman, Κολυμβωσαι, The Women Who Dive, which (according to a very dubious source) would have been found buried by the head of the otherwise unknown Tyronichos (Tynnichos?) of Chalcis. 19 This too may point to an act of diving connected with radical changes of state, metaphorical or not. 20 There are, however, serious doubts regarding the actual existence of such a work. 21 The fact that in this title, too, we are dealing with female divers suggests, at any rate, that this might also be relevant to the constellation of passages we are examining here. 22 And, of course, the piece of information about the funerary use of a roll with this workbe it real or fictionaldoes evoke interesting eschatological implications. If this reconstruction of the play is correct, Pherecrates may be our earliest evidence for an evolution in the reception of Sappho which was eventually to give her story a special prominence in relation to ideas about the Underworld and more specifically about the fate of the soul after death, which will be the focus of the next section of this study. The leap into sea from the White Rock/ the Rock of Leucas indeed can be easily read as a metaphor of the passage to the afterlife. 23 This is image has been detected, more or less Stesichorus, on the love story of Euathlus and Calyce, which ends with the tragic dive of the heroine (277 PMGF = 326 Finglass; cf. Rutherford (2015), with bibliography). 18 The nomen agentis occurs in Aesch. Suppl. 408 (in a simile concerning intellectual exploration). The compound form ἐκκολυμβάω, without metaphoric connotations, appears in Aristophanes' Babylonians (fr. 82 K.-A.), which might be more or less contemporary with the Miners, and, slightly later, in Euripides' Helen (l. 1609). Its first prose attestations start with Thucydides.
19 Cf. Ornaghi (2018) 167 n. 51. 20 For a good critical survey of the dossier on this work see Ornaghi (2018), who conjectures that it dealt with a metaphoric dive, while leaving open the possibility that this was a later poem falsely attributed to Alcman. 21 Caution is in order especially because one of the two sources attesting the existence of the work is the summary of the Καινὴ ἱστορία, the New History, of the bizarre and largely untrustworthy Schwindelautor Ptolemy 'the Quail', preserved in codex 190 of Photius' Bibliotheca (151a 4-20 Henry). Here the genitive of the name of the author of the work is transmitted as Ἀλκμάνους: Meineke argued that this was a corrupt form not of the genitive of the name Ἀλκμάν (Ἀλκμανος), but of that of the shadowy author of comedies Ἀλκιμένης. The title is added as a sort of afterthought to the six books of Songs in the entry on Alcman in the Byzantine encyclopaedia Suda, s.v. α 1289 Adler. It is a well-known fact, though, that Suda made use also of the work of Ptolemy 'the Quail' (cf. Cameron (2004) 135 and148, andsources nos. 19-23 in Pagani (2006); Pagani herself ignores the important contribution of Cameron (2004) and thus does not consider Ptolemy as a possible source of Suda), and it is readily conceivable that the addition of this title was due precisely to a redactor who had taken note of the passage in Ptolemy (if this is so, we would have only one source for the existence of this work, and a very suspicious one at that). 22 In general on the various metaphorical variations on the image of the leap into the sea (especially in relation to female characters) see Beaulieu (2016), above all ch. 5, 'Leaps of Faith? Diving into the Sea, Women and Metamorphosis', 145-66, with rich bibliography. 23 In Sappho's biographical tradition the Rock of Leucas is identified with the cliff on the southern shore of the Ionian Island of Leucas, but the connection with the Λευκὰς πέτρη, the White Rock, at the entrance of the Underworld in Od. 24.11 has often been made. For an early scholarly interpretation of the diving image as convincingly, also in funerary iconography starting from the late-sixth century: in the so called Tomb of Hunting and Fishing (Tarquinia, around 520 BCE), and, more convincingly, in the Tomb of the Diver (Paestum, around 500-475 BCE). 24 In the case of the latter, the presence of a sympotic setting in other sections of the tomb has suggested the possibility that the dive might have been connected with mystery rites linked with the representation of the afterlife as involving the banquet of the blessed ones. 25 Some scholars, on independent grounds, have argued that the description of the Underworld Land of Cockaigne in Pherecrates might also be read as a parody of such expectations, though this too remains uncertain. 26 In any case, an eschatological reading of Sappho's leap is definitely attested some centuries later in the complex iconographic apparatus of one of the most impressive and enigmatic monuments of early Julio-Claudian Rome, the so-called Basilica near Porta Maggiore. This fascinating underground building was discovered by chance a little more than a century ago during repair works on the Rome-Cassino railway in 1917. It is dated to the late-first century BCE or the early-first century CE: it was built several metres below the level of the road in a zone of the city that hosted the funerary ground of the influential family of the Statilii Tauri and close to the horti Tauriani. The building, which has the structure of later basilicas, and in many respects anticipates features of the much later Christian 'churches', is richly decorated in various ways, most remarkably with stuccoes (originally partly painted), as part of an ambitious iconographic project. Following its discovery and publication it sparked a lively debate, especially among archaeologists and scholars of ancient religions. And while it continues to attract attention in these fields, it hardly features (beyond relatively few bare mentions in lists of images and footnotes) in the flourishing recent (and less recent) studies on Sappho's reception. 27 related to the passage into a new life, based on literary attestations of the motif, see Dieterich (1893) 28 and already Kock (1862) 90. 24 It is far from clear if the dive in the Tarquinia Tomb should be read as an eschatological symbol: cf. Hölscher (2020) 500-501; Ross Holloway (2006) 374-6 (though see still Cerchiai (2020)). On the Tomb of the Diver the debate is open: see at least Ross Holloway (2006), with bibliography, and most recently the essays in Meriani and Zuchtriegel (2020). Ampolo (1993) explored its similarities to an eschatological passage in Plutarch's De sera numinis uindicta (but this is based on the acceptance of a dubious conjecture of Pohlenz: see contra Taufer (2010) 100-3), and drew attention to the use of the verb δύνω ('to dive') in the 'Orphic' golden lamellae (on which see now also Bernabé (2020) 17-18). Bernabé (2020) connects the iconography of the Paestum tomb with Southern Italian 'Orphism' (cf. 14 n. 17, where, discussing previous bibliography, the author rules out the relevance of the case of Sappho on the basis of the later date of the Porta Maggiore Basilica, but does not explore the possibility of a much earlier tradition, though, of course, not necessarily within a 'Pythagorean' frame). For interpretations of the Tomb of the Diver that rule out an eschatological reading cf. at least Hölscher (2020) and Heinemann (2020) (among other contributions in Meriani and Zuchtriegel (2020)). 25 Cf. e.g. Bernabé (2020); contra Murray (2020), both with bibliography. 26 Rohde (1903)  The interpretation of the building's general iconographic project is difficult. Some of the images seem to belong to an 'Orphic-Dionysiac' background; 28 others are less clearly defined but do lend themselves to a reading as representations of (symbolic) death and new birth; others still feature scenes of life in the world of the living andit has been arguedin the Underworld. The series includes mythical scenes such as the abduction of the Leucippids and of Ganymede, Pentheus torn apart by the Bacchae and the punishment of Marsyas. The most influential reading of the complex, which with some divergences of detail is still generally accepted by most scholars, is that developed by François Cumont and later by Jérôme Carcopino, who proposed a religious interpretation of the building as related to a mystery sect, even though their specific identification of this sect with the 'Neopythagoreans' has been variously qualified or rejected.
The topographic location of the building, near the cemetery of the gens Statilia and the horti Tauriani, is one of the grounds that have led to posit of a link with the family of the Statilii Tauri. Titus Statilius Taurius, consul in 26 and in 7 BCE, had been at the command of the land forces of Augustus' army at the battle of Actium. Α few decades later, in 53 CE, under Claudius, his grandson, consul in 44 CE, was accused of being embroiled in magicae superstitiones (Tac. Ann. 12.59.2) and committed suicide before the process took place. The properties of the family seem to have been requisitioned by the state following his suicide (but the family did not suddenly disappear: his daughter, or niece, Statilia Messalina, was to become Nero's third wife). 29 A key argument for the Neopythagorean hypothesis was provided by the impressive scene depicted in the Basilica's apse (Fig. 1).
The scene represents on the right side a female character, holding with her right hand her veil filled by the wind and in her left hand a seven-stringed lyre, and stepping beyond the edge of a rocky cliff, accompanied, or pushed, by a little Eros. Before her is the sea, from which a muscular figure, apparently a Triton, 30 emerges from the waist upward spreading a textile to welcome the arrival of the woman, the tip of whose right foot seems already Figure 1. The apse of the underground Basilica near Porta Maggiore after the most recent restoration. © Soprintendenza Speciale Archeologia Belle Arti e Paesaggio di Roma to touch his left hand. To his right a further marine figure might be another Triton, holding an oar and a trumpet. 31 Above him, on the summit of an isolated, higher, rock, Apollo faces towards the woman, holding a bow in his left hand, and stretching his right arm towards her. After a few uncertain attempts at making sense of it, the scene was brilliantly interpreted by Densmore Curtis in 1920 as a representation of Sappho's leap from the Leucadian Rock, in the presence of Apollo, the patron deity not only of the local temple but also of the nearby sanctuary of Actium (which is arguably important with regard to the possible role played by Titus Statilius Statius). 32 After a few marginal hesitations, this interpretation has established itself, and is now generally accepted.
Carcopino found in this representation of Sappho's fatal leap an important clue for a 'Neopythagorean' reading of the Basilica, connecting the scene to Pliny, HN 22.20, a passage illustrating the magical properties of the eryngx or eryngium, a herb considered responsible for Sappho's falling in love with Phaon, and apparently much appreciated by Pythagoreans (test. 211b Voigt (only up to the word Sappho): portentosum est quod de ea [sc. erynge] traditur, radicem eius alterutrius sexus similitudinem referre, raro inuenta, set si uiris contigerit mas, amabiles fieri; ob hoc et Phaonem Lesbium dilectum a Sappho, multa circa hoc non Magorum solum uanitate, sed etiam Pythagoricorum). 33 The connection in itself is far from cogent, as Pliny only implies that the Pythagoreans had something to say on the herb, but does not state that they mentioned it in connection to Sappho. Carcopino also pointed to the important role played by Nigidius Figulus in the formulation of 'Neopythagoreanism' in late Republican Rome, suggesting that his theories may have influenced the iconographic programme of the building. Some progress on this front was made by more recent scholars (especially Sauron (1994)), but a precise identification of the religious background of this extraordinary monument cannot be made with any certainty. It will probably be safer to define it as eclectic, or syncretistic. 34 In any case, whatever label we wish to impose on these images, one can hardly doubt the central role of an allegorical/eschatological interpretation of Sappho's leap as representing the passage of the soul to a better life.
It is less certain how we should read the lower left portion of the decoration of the apse, representing a male figure wearing a short mantle, facing right, sitting on a rock by the sea in a pose of mourning (his cheek leaning on the palm of his hand). His interpretation as a repentant Phaon has no support in extant texts. M. Detienne (1958) read the figure as Odysseus on the island of Calypso, proposing a link to a Neoplatonic allegorical reading of the episode. More recently an identification with Philoctetes has been proposed (Cruciani (2000)). None of these seems compelling, but Detienne's remains in my opinion the most attractive. 31 Cf. Carcopino (1926), in particular 371-83 (= (2020) 248-56); Dörrie (1973) 191-201. For more recent descriptions and interpretations see Cruciani (2000); North (2012) 56-62. 32 It seems that the identification had already been advanced immediately after the discovery, but with scepticism, and without finding its way in a publication before the one by Densmore Curtis, after it was rejected by the archaeologist responsible for the first reports on the Basilica, F. Fornari: cf. Bendinelli (1926)  Within the very rich iconographic project of the Basilica there is another image that might be relevant to our argument. On the ceiling of the right (south) nave several scenes have been identified as representations of the blessed afterlife, along with mythological ones that can be read with varying degrees of certainty as exemplary for the various destinies of the soul. Among these scenes there is one depicting three wreathed female characters (Figs. 2a and 2b). The one to the left, entirely wrapped in her garments, is sitting facing the other two characters and is playing a musical instrument, identified by Carcopino as a lyre, and more precisely, by Bendinelli, as a triangular harp: he calls it a τρίγωνον, but given its shape it could be rather a πηκτίς, especially if one thinks, with West and others, that the term τρίγωνον referred more particularly to the right-angled 'spindle harp'. 35 The second character, to the right of a small altar placed before a pillar, 36 stands facing a female figure (with bare shoulders, i.e. younger?) seated to her left, to whom she seems to be giving an object which has been very dubiously interpreted as a plectron (Carcopino (1926) 143). To judge from the most recent available image (Fig. 2a), it looks more as if she is a holding an ampoule with a long neck and a single handle (a small lekythos?), while the woman in front of her is extending a small cup (?) in her right hand (in any case, the kind of harp represented in the same scene was not played with a plectron). Strong and Jolliffe (who label this a 'Group of Muses (?) or of initiates') compare the scene to the 'sacred conversations' of Renaissance painting ((1924) 94 n. 81), Carcopino gives it the vaguely suggestive label of 'mystic concert', while Bendinelli, with some reservations, interprets it as a music lesson. If we should indeed imagine that the scene takes place in the Underworld (as all scholars seem to do), it would be very attractive to link the wreathed female figure playing the string instrument with Sappho, to whose underworld performances we shall have occasion to return. 37

Sappho rediuiua?
It is of course not necessary to suppose that the character who has just returned from the Underworld in the Miners was represented as an 'initiate', since Pherecrates' parody focuses on other aspects. There are, however, several good reasons to think that this character is likely to have been Sappho herself. We have examined above the evidence for her presence on the Athenian stage in the fourth century, and the clues pointing to possible earlier comic Sapphic links already in the fifth century. There are other reasons for proposing this identification. An important recurring theme in Old Comedy is that of bringing back to life on stage ancient characters either through a visit to the Underworld (katabasis) or by having them return to the upper world (anabasis). Examples of this include Cratinus' Archilochoi and Cheirones (and perhaps also Laws, according to Bergk's reconstruction), Telecleides' Hesiodoi, Aristophanes' Gerytades and Frogs, and Pherecrates' Krapatalaoi (besides, of course, his Miners). 38 In some of these plays, known through a number of fragments and quotations (twenty or more) far greater than is the case of the Miners, we can reconstruct the presence and the identity of the revenant only on the basis of a single piece of evidence. In the Cheirones we can recognise Solon as a persona loquens only because of a quotation of a line in Diogenes Laertius (fr. 246 K.-A.). In Pherecrates' player's left thigh; from the image its apex seems to be hidden by the player's body; Maas and McInstosh Snyder (1989) 182 mention a case where the instrument 'has no visible support'. The few images in Vendries (1999) are all of right-angled harps, but more curved shapes, at more acute angles, as in our case, are attested (cf. for example a wall painting probably from Boscoreale in the Landesmuseum Württemberg, Arch 83/1 k and Lawergren (2011) 28 Fig. 2, with the reproduction of a bas-relief with a Dionysiac scene, without reference). 36 The pillar is identified by Strong and Jolliffe (1924) 94; Bendinelli describes it as a second chair, but its seat would be far too high, and the shape different from the one to the right; Carcopino (1926)  Krapataloi we know about Aeschylus' presence thanks to a single witness, a scholion on Aristophanes' Peace (fr. 100 K.-A.). The fact that no witness mentions Sappho's presence in the Miners (a play of which we have just two substantial fragments) cannot therefore be considered as a cogent objection to the identification proposed here. The identification of 'character A' with Sappho, rather than with some figure influenced by the Sapphic tradition, seems compelling. Not only is Sappho very well known for her fatal dive into Tartarus. Several of her fragments suggest a vision of the poetess's privileged position in the Underworld. Moreover, almost all of the revenants of Old Comedy are, in fact, poets (with a very small minority of politicians, as in Eupolis' Demoi and, perhaps, Taxiarchoi). 39 And in this category it would be very difficult to find a better alternative to Sappho.

Acherusian vegetation
The content of the two lines uttered by 'character B' in fr. 113 is not the only clue suggesting a link with Sappho in what remains of the comedy. 40 The only other fragment of this comedy containing more than a single word, fr. 114 K.-A., from a lyric portion of the play, provides a description of individuals walking within a landscape of blooming vegetation: ὑπ᾽ ἀναδενδράδων ἁπαλὰς ἀσπαλάθους πατουντες ἐν λειμωνι λωτοwόρῳ κύπειρόν τε δροσώδη κἀνθρύσκου μαλακων τ᾽ ἴων λείμακα καὶ τριwύλλου . . . treading over delicate brambles under climbing vines, 41 in a meadow rich in lotus, and dewy galingale and a garden of chervil and soft violets and clover.
These words were probably sung by the chorus, and it has been very reasonably assumed that the landscape described here was the place where the blessed dwell, where flowering meadows are a common topos in literary representations. 42 Within these topical 39 On Demoi cf. Telò (2007) 24-44 (Telò argues that Pyronides tried to bring back to life also the lyre-player Phrynis) and Olson (2017)  Urios-Aparisi (1992) ad loc. cites the Sapphic passages (among others) and has useful remarks on Sappho's influence on Pherecrates' lyrics (356), but has nothing to say on the Acherusian background of the two passages and makes no connection with fr. 113. 44 On the 'lotus' of these lines, and on its Homeric background and its echo in Sappho's Epistle to Phaon, see D'Alessio (2018) 97-8. Apart from the passages related to the interpretation of Il. 14.348 (one of Sappho's models), these seem to be the two only attested passages where terms connected to λωτός and δρόσος are collocated in proximity, a proximity made even more significant by the shared context of a description of a locus amoenus in the Underworld (an element lacking in the Iliad passage). Pherecrates' passage might be influenced also by the formulation of Hymn. Hom. Hermes 107 λωτὸν ἐρεπτομένας ἠδ' ἑρσήεντα κύπειρον (with a very different contextual background, of the fodder of the cows stolen from Apollo, cf. also Od. 4.603). 45 The text is lacunose and uncertain, but the sense is clear enough.
This is yet another tessera contributing to my argument that 'Sappho' in this play was not just an intertextual reference but a central topic and, arguably, a stage character, playing an important role in the construction of the image of the Underworld.

Sappho in the Underworld
Even allowing that most of the elements of the description of the Land of Cockaigne in the Pherecrates' passage are to be read as variations on a well-established comic topos, we should pay due attention to the fact that there are, in our extremely lacunose corpus, several elements in Sappho's own texts that may contribute to understand the reasons of her choice as a herald of a blessed afterlife.
The fragmentary nature of these texts requires, of course, some caution in their interpretation. However, notwithstanding some recent attempts at playing down their import, 46 I think that there should be no substantial doubt that they, at the very least, suggest Sappho's peculiar, positive vision of her destiny in the Underworld. This is not to say, however, that the surviving texts should be read as the expression of a group of initiates, or as reflecting mystery cultic practices. 47 In fr. 95, which we have just examined, a character (probably Sappho herself), persona loquens in the song, in a moment of discomfort expresses her wish 'to see the dewy banks of Acheron, covered in lotus', in terms that clearly present such vision as providing relief and consolation, thus innovating upon epic models. 48 In two other fragments, 55 and 65, 49 the text describes a condition of fame (of the poetess herself) or of lack of fame (of a woman she criticises) that is going to continue 'even in Hades' or 'even on Acheron's banks'. 50 The clear implication is that Sappho reckons herself among the individuals who will enjoy the effect of fame even in the Underworld. 51 A situation in which Sappho enjoys even in Hades, along with Alcaeus, the admiration of her audience is indeed depicted by Horace in Carm. 2.13.29-30 utrumque sacro digna silentio | mirantur umbrae dicere, 'the shades admire both of them while they recite poems worth of a sacred silence'. In a Sapphic fragment, which in a Ptolemaic papyrus precedes the poem beginning with lines 46 Cf., with different nuances, Palmisciano (1998); Burzacchini (2007); Bettarini (2008); Palmisciano (2017) 144-53, with further bibliography. 47 Cf. Hardie (2005).
48 Good remarks in Boedeker (1979) (her caution regarding the fact that the desire was uttered by the persona loquens seems excessive to me): the objections of Palmisciano (1998) 193-4 do not affect the very significant fact that the representation of Acheron as a place one longs to see has no parallel in previous models. 49 On fr. 65 see also Ferrari (2007) 62-70 (the question whether this fragment can be joined to other ones has no consequences for the issue we are examining here). 50 In fr. 55.3 the interpretation of καί in κἀν Ἀίδα δόμωι as copulative, rather than adverbial (Palmisciano (1998) 192 and n. 33), is impossible (as acknowledged now also by Palmisciano (2017) 145 n. 70 and 146). 51 If the fame, and the lack of fame, are located in the Underworld, an explanation focusing on the 'perpetuarsi del cantoe della connessa famapresso le generazioni a venire', rather than on the 'non dimostrata fede saffica in qualche forma di "esistenza" ultraterrena o di immortalità dell'anima' (Burzacchini (2007)  11ff. of fr. 58 (P.Köln. inv. 21351 + 21376), a badly damaged textual sequence suggests a comparison between the condition of the poetess 'now on earth' (l. 6) and that 'under the earth' (l. 4). 52 In the same context the text mentions the fact that 'she enjoys a befitting privilege' (ἔχοισαν γέρας ὤς ἔοικεν, l. 5). The fragmentary state of the text does not allow absolute certainty, but everything leads us to think that, as in Horace, the poetess did envisage a continuation of her musical and poetic practice in the Underworld. 53 A musical performance in the Underworld, or at least related to the Underworld, seems to be alluded to also in a late third-century epigram by Dioscorides, where Sappho is imagined as performing a thrēnos for Adonis together with Aphrodite: 'or, while performing a dirge together with Aphrodite, who mourns the young offshoot of Kinyras, you look at the sacred grove of the blessed' (ἢ Κινύρεω νέον ἔρνος ὀδυρομένῃ Ἀwροδίτῃ | σύνθρηνος μακάρων ἱερὸν ἄλσος ὁρη, AP 7.407.7-8 (epigr. 18 HE)). 54 The much-debated fr. 150, addressed by Sappho to her daughter, should be read against the background of the elements examined above: οὐ γὰρ θέμις ἐν μοισοπόλων ‹δόμωι› θρηνον ἔμμεν᾽ ‹ . . .› οὔ κ᾽ ἄμμι τάδε πρέποι . . . as it is not right that there should be a funereal song in <the house> of the servants of the Muses <. . .> this would not befit us.
To say that the funereal song should be banished from the house of the poets (in the sense, that is, that one should not sing such a song for them: the fact that on other occasions poets should or could compose funereal songs for others is not at issue here) is clearly a paradoxical statement that scholars have attempted to neutralise in various ways, adding more or less arbitrary qualifications (of mode, of time, of place) for the performance of such a funereal song, 55 qualifications, however, absent in the text, and whose casual 52 Bettarini (2008) 30 reconstructs the poem's meaning with Sappho stating: 'quando invece vecchia morirò e sarò sotto terra, pur tenendo l'insigne funzione che è propria dei cultori delle Muse, come si conviene, non potranno più ammirarmi (scil. le mie compagne) come ora che sono sulla terra'. Such a reconstruction betrays an intrinsic rhetorical weakness (an incongruous invitation to 'celebrate me now, since it will not be possible anymore once I am dead', with a very unlikely emphasis on the fact that, once dead, Sappho will not enjoy 'the privilege that befits her now on earth') and is explicitly built on the postulate that Sappho could not possibly envisage for herself a privileged status after her death. 53 Palmisciano (2017) 148 rules out that Sappho might have envisaged a privileged existence 'in Hades' (as opposed to the destiny of the ancient heroes, located in the Islands of the Blessed). This opinion, however, is based on the idea that the positions emerging from Sappho's texts should not diverge from the 'traditional' ones, thus obliterating the elements of strong, even paradoxical, innovative charge that Sappho's poetry often displays (Palmisciano (2017) 148-9, on the other hand, acknowledges that Horace 'sembra confermare quanto la stessa Saffo affermava nel carme del Papiro di Colonia, cioè che nell'aldilà avrebbe continuato a eseguire i suoi versi come faceva in vita'). 54 The relevance of this passage was pointed out to me by Serena Cannavale. Gow and Page (1965) 250 note that 'it is not plain at all what the μακάρων ἄλσος should be'. omission is made unlikely by the context itself of the quotation. 56 Barring contrary evidence, our source attributes to Sappho an absolute refusal of a funereal song for the servants of the Muses. And this is clearly because, in contrast to what one can imagine for common mortals, for whom death is naturally evil, 57 the poetess envisages for herself (exactly qua poetess) a privileged existence in the Underworld, where she would have continued to compose and perform songs, enjoying the admiration of her audience, as suggested also by the fragments examined above, and by Horace's vision.

Returns of Sappho
With the exception of Pherecrates' Miners (if my argument holds), and of the potential clues in the iconography of the Porta Maggiore hypogaeum, no ancient document offers glimpses on the ultimate fate of Sappho after her dive from the Rock of Leucas. Death or liberation from her sufferings? Sappho's Epistle, for obvious reasons, stops immediately before the last fatal decision. Ovid's friend, the poet Sabinus, author of the lost poetic replies to the Heroides, must have envisaged a happy ending, as testified by Ovid himself in a famous and tormented passage of his Amores (2.18.34 dat uotam Phoebo Lesbis amata lyram, 'the Lesbian one, having become the object of love, gives to Phoebus the lyre she had promised as a vow'). The outcome here did not involve death, or deliverance from love, but Sappho's dedication of her lyre, ex uoto, to Apollo, out of gratitude for her now requited love with Phaon (cf. Rosati (1996)). Her fatal leap, however, was to become the motif that more frequently marked Sappho's reception from the Renaissance onward. Even if only for the sake of providing a satisfying narratological denouement, the riddle of its outcome had to be faced and solved.
To my knowledge, one of the earliest modern representations of Sappho's suicide is that found among the illuminations (attributed to the circle of Jean Pichore) that adorn a copy of the late fifteenth-century French translation of the Heroides by Octovien de Saint-Gelais in fol. 197v of the manuscript Parisinus Fr. 874, produced towards the end of the first decade of the sixteenth century at Rouen, in the milieu of Cardinal Georges d'Amboise (Fig. 3). The image of the woman, chastely dressed from the top of her head to the tips of her feet, falling on the ground (not into the waves), with a rivulet of blood, leaves no doubt about the outcome of her decision. It would be hard to reconcile this iconography with the character of the sexually outspoken poetess in the Ovidian Epistle. This manuscript features some peculiar prose introductions to the Epistles, some of which publications offer ample bibliography on the issue (including Cannatà Fera (1990) 12, on the semantic overlap between θρηνος and γόος). 56 It is likely (as suggested also by the metre) that Maximus of Tyre did omit a few words when citing these lines. It is very unlikely, however, that such omission involved implications about important qualifications on the issue that was crucial to Maximus' purpose (in his text the citation buttresses a comparison with the behaviour of Socrates in Plato's Phaedo, banishing lamentations for his impending death, and ordering that Xanthippe leave the room).  Durrieu and Marquet de Vasselot (1894) 14-15;Brückner (1989)). In the prose introduction to her Epistle, Sappho is presented as a 24-year-old widow, 'royne de Pirnance', discoverer of music and instruments, who falls in love with Phaon, the already-married 28-year-old son of a rich Sicilian merchant, who has arrived with his ship in her port, in a city called 'Tollo'. 58 It does not seem to have been noticed that in this manuscript the French text of Sappho's Epistle all too significantly modifies the gist of the original translation of de Saint-Gelais, in a way that makes its character much more compatible with her visual representation. Its text, for example, has eliminated all references to Sappho's earlier homosexual loves. Lines 15-20 of the Latin Epistle refer to Sappho's rejection of her previous female loved ones after she fell in love with Phaon. In all the other manuscripts I have consulted, 59 and in the early printed editions which I was able to access, these lines are rendered, with a certain degree of looseness, and with several problems regarding the interpretation of the Greek proper names, but without altering their substance, in eleven French lines, including a mention of 'les trois pucelles que j'ay si fort aimée' and of 'Atthis si belle et que tant fort valoit', who 'plus ne me plaist ainsi qu'elle souloit'. In Fr. 874, on the other hand, the whole section is rewritten and slightly abridged (it corresponds to only seven lines in the French text) in such a way as to delete any possible allusions to homosexual inclinations. 60 Two other manuscripts of the translation, London, British Libr., Harley 4867 and Oxford, Balliol College Libr., 383 offer a (slightly earlier, probably late fifteenth-century) representation of Sappho immediately before her leap (the Balliol manuscript, Fig. 4) or in the act itself of leaping (the Harley manuscript, Fig. 5). 61 In both cases the image is remarkably different from that of Paris, BnF, Fr. 874: Sappho is not veiled and has with her signs of her poetic/music activity (a lute and a book in the Harley manuscript; a lute and a harp in the Balliol manuscript, which also features a stream of watera river, apparently, not the seaunder the rock). In neither case is there any hint at the final outcome of her leap. The representations in these manuscripts 62 precede by very few years the entirely different Sappho of Raphael's Parnassus in the Stanza della Segnatura 58 Cf. Hériché-Pradeau (2020 Brückner (1989) does not elaborate, though, on the impact of such abridgments on the content, an issue which would be worthy of more detailed analysis. For other cases of manipulations in early modern and later Italian translations of Sappho's Epistle to Phaon see Cesaro (2015) and Galbiati (2015). 61 Cf. Saxl and Meier (1953) 191-3 and 409-12. On the Balliol manuscript cf. Mynors (1963) 360-1. 62 In all the other manuscripts I have been able to consult the representations of Sappho are not related to her leap.
In San Marino, Huntington Libr., H M 60 (whose text of the Epistle I have not been able to access) she appears (as

T H E A F T E R L I F E O F S A P P H O ' S A F T E R L I F E 67 T H E A F T E R L I F E O F S A P P H O ' S A F T E R L I F E 67
(1510-11), which also (albeit in a very different way) reflects the legacy of the Ovidian Epistle if, as it has been convincingly assumed, the roll with her name the poetess holds in her left hand is to be interpreted as the famous signature/name of the Epistle itself. 63 The difference from the illumination of the French Heroides is not only a matter of classical sensuousness: in representing Sappho on his Parnassus, Raphael effectively anticipates the sublimation of her worldly suffering resulting in the triumph of poetry. When, in fact, Sappho entered the narratological engine of more complex constructions, the suspended outcome of the Heroides tradition was bound to become a problematic dénouement, and the heroine's reaching a state of liberation or even apotheosis is revealed as an almost unavoidable solution allowing the granting of a happy ending to the story. The first 'literary' work, to my knowledge, that moves clearly in this direction is the opéraballet Le triomphe des arts, with a libretto by Antoine Houdar de la Motte and music by Michel de la Barre, performed at the Académie Royale de Musique on 16 May 1700. 64 Its second entrée has as its theme the Triumph of Poetry exemplified by Sappho who, made desperate by Phaon's rejection, reacts, once again, with her suicidal move, jumping down from the Rock. In Scene VI a repenting Phaon mourns her fate and asks the music to cease, but Neptune informs him that the poetess has become a goddess, one of the Muses: 'Cesse de plaindre une déesse: | Sapho prend sa place en ce jour | entre les filles de Figure 5. British Library, Harley 4867, fol. 177v. Reproduced by permission of the British Library mémoire. | Le Ciel qui prend soin de sa gloire | veut l'égaler a son amour.' Houdar de la Motte had no ancient precedent for this narratological solution (the only parallel being the Greek epigrams where Sappho is presented as the tenth Muse), and in his introductory notes defends the innovative character of his choice, even regretting that he did not give more space to a proper representation of the welcome of Sappho on Parnassus. 65 This absence of precedent is made good for in Vénard de la Jonchère's Sapho (1772), where the poetess is the victim not only of Phaon's fickle behaviour but also of Venus' scheming against her. In Act II, Scene VII, in her despair Sapho throws herself from the Rock of Leucas, with an address to Apollo. The god rescues the poetess, bringing her to Parnassus, where she is welcomed by the Muses and rescued, once again by Apollo, also from the menace of Time.
It is against the background of this well-established eighteenth-century tradition of Sappho's apotheosis, which did not entail a properly tragic twist, that in the nineteenth a tradition emerges which attributes to Sappho a self-consciously heroic dramatic character, with F. Grillparzer's Sappho (performed on stage in 1818). In this play, the superhuman poetess, yet again disappointed by Phaon, moves from a Medea-like revengeful fury to the realisation that she does not in fact belong to the human world, where she will never be able to find happiness, but to that of the gods. This is a recurrent motif in the whole drama, whose final consequence is Sappho's leap from the Rock of Leucas, as a return to her divine status: Act III, Scene II, ll. 947-54 'Hier ist kein Ort für mich als nur das Grab. | Wen Götter sich zum Eigentum erlesen | Geselle sich zu Erdenbürgern nicht . . . Von beiden Welten eine muss du wählen. | Hast du gewählt, dann ist kein Rücktritt mehr'; Act V, Scene III, l. 1722 (Phaon) 'Zeig dich als Göttin! Segne, Sappho! segne!'; ll. 1727-9 'Mit Höhern, Sappho, halte du Gemeinschaft | Man steigt nicht unbestraft von Göttermahle | Herunter in den Kreis der Sterblichen'; l. 1783 'Den Menschen Lieb, und den Göttern Ehrfuhrcht' (a line repeated by Sappho in her very last words, Act V, Scene VI, ll. 2025-8); Act V, Scene VI, ll. 2041-2 (Rhamnes) 'Es war auf Erde ihre Heimat nicht | Sie ist zurückgekehret zu den Ihren' (the drama's last words). 66 Along similar lines we should read also the interpretation of Sappho proposed in J. J. Bachofen's Mutterrecht (1861), where Sappho is seen as the priestess of the great mother-goddess, identified with Aphrodite: 'So . . . umschliesst Sappho in der Welt ihrer Gefühle alle Seiten der Göttin, der sie dient, mit welcher sie daher auch in der Volkstradition von dem jetzt menschlich gedachtet Phaon und dem Leukadischen Sprung zu Einer Gestalt verschmolzen erscheint.' 67 65 In his Rèponse à la critique following the libretto, printed also on pp. This is not, however, the only way in which Sappho's fate was presented in the nineteenth century. It is easy to compare and contrast Grillparzer's apotheosis with the stark refusal of any possible consolation in Leopardi's Ultimo canto di Saffo (1822), where the poetess imagines herself in a bleak Underworld ('rifuggirà l'ignudo animo a Dite', l. 56; 'e il prode ingegno | Han la tenaria Diva | E l'atra notte, e la silente riva', ll. 71-2, the poem's final lines). All of this reflects Leopardi's own outlook and can be contrasted with Sappho's actual terms of representation of the Underworld, described above (pp. 15-17). In particular it radically reverses the description of the dreary destiny of the soul of the woman who does not partake in the roses of Pieria (fr. 55). 68 In this Leopardi had an interesting antecedent in Vincenzo Maria Imperiali's Faoniade, a collection of hymns and odes of 'Saffo' (presented as 'translated' from Sappho) arranged as part of a biographical trajectory and published for the first time in Venice in 1780, and then several times well into the nineteenth century. In the last ode of the second part, titled A Vow to Apollo, Imperiali's Sappho envisages two possible outcomes of her leap. The first one is explicitly based on what is now our fr. 55, but transforms Sappho's address to another woman into a self-address:

Se andrai dell'Orco orribile
Nei regni oscuri e mesti, Del nome tuo memoria Più non sperar che resti. Più non sarai partecipe Delle purpuree rose Che del Parnaso colgonsi In su le vette erbose: Ma ignota andrai dell'Erebo Per la region fumante, Tra l'ombre tristi e pallide Eternamente errante. 69 Bachofen's influential book, the story of Sappho and Phaon and the leap from the Rock of Leukas was interpreted in mythological terms by Kock (1862), who developed an idea already formulated by Müller (1840) 174, who saw Phaon as a mythological equivalent of Phaethon: Phaon is a hypostasis of the Sun god, while Sappho is etymologically explained from the adjective σαwής as 'die helle, schimmernde', 'the bright, shimmering one' (86). This is an interpretation that (seldom if ever credited to Kock) reappears, with various modifications, in later scholarly and poetic readings; compare, in the scholarly field, Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1913) 31-40 andNagy (1973), and, in the poetic one, the beautiful creation of Giovanni Pascoli's Solon (1895) (on which see Piantanida (2021)  This is followed by an alternative of salvation, even if Imperiali notes that one should believe that in Sappho the fear of death prevailed over the hope of salvation. The latter option is not even envisaged by Leopardi, 70 who, by contrast, anticipates a theme that was to emerge from a later papyrus discovery, i.e. that of Sappho's longing for her own death as an escape from her suffering (which we examined above with regard to fr. 95). In any case, Sappho's apotheosis and the recognition of her divine nature as envisaged by Grillparzer show obvious limits if we are to move from the development of an (almost mythological) character to that of the reception of a poetic tradition. In later tradition Sappho comes back from her suicidal leap as the ambiguous image of a corpse, or as the symbol of a failure. In Lesbos, a poem first published in 1850 71 before briefly finding place within Les Fleurs du mal in 1857, soon to be expelled from the collection in the same year as one of the 'damned poems', Baudelaire offers an idealised vision of the island, as a land of full love not subject to the judgement of human or divine morality, and imagines the poet as charged with the mission to wait for the return of Sappho's corpse (ll. 46-55, 71- The reference to Sappho in L'école païenne was inspired by a cartoon where the poetess, aged, unattractive and with almost masculine traits, is pushed, obviously against her will, down from a rock by a little Cupid (Fig. 6). The inverted similarity with the scene in the apse of the Porta Maggiore Basilica (obviously unknown to Daumier: Fig. 1) is remarkable. 73 The use of the terms 'old carcasses' and 'blasphemy' establishes a clear potential link (with a radical inversion of meaning) to the 'adored corpse' of Sappho, and the 'blasphemy' that caused her death in Lesbos ('celle qui mourut le jour de son blasphème', l. 70; cf. also l. 66). This is a very good example of the 'contradiction' typical of the ideology of the Second Empire, which Walter Benjamin saw as one of Baudelaire's key traits: 'The same traits are found in Baudelaire's theoretical writings. He usually presents his views apodictically. Discussion is not his style; he avoids it even when the glaring contradictions in the theses he continually appropriates require discussion.' 74 DeJean ((1989) 270-1) reads this contradiction (without exploring the parallels I have highlighted in the text above) as a sort of marketing strategy to mark a difference from other contemporary literary and dramatic Sapphic creations. This, however, runs the risk of concealing the importance of the profound contradiction we find inside Baudelaire's own work (note that he published Lesbos both before and after his 1853 essay). The essay's formulation subverts in a very conspicuous way that of Baudelaire himself in his earlier poem.
The ambiguity of the figure of the corpse/carcass intersects in many ways with the figure of Sappho in Baudelaire. It will be useful to follow it by taking into account Lesbos (now usually read as the second poem of Les épaves) in its original and intended relationship with other poems that appeared in the same section of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal in 1857. The poem, number LXXX in the whole collection, was the third in its second section, also called Fleurs du mal. In the original sequence of this section, it was preceded by the poem Une martyrewhose title would have reflected on Lesbos' 'eternal martyre' (ll. 26, 30)prominently featuring the voyeuristic description of a female corpse, that of a woman beheaded in her apartment by an unknown lover/murderer. Her 'cadavre impur' (l. 49) thus originally immediately preceded Sappho's 'cadavre adoré' (Lesbos v. 54). Even more crucially linked to Lesbos is another poem, Un voyage à Cythére, number LXXXVIII in the 1857 edition, and the penultimate in the same section. This poem, which survives also in two manuscript versions, one of which dated January 1852, was first published in 1855 but probably goes back, like Lesbos, to the 1840s. It was inspired by an 1844 prose piece of Gérard de Nerval, taking the cue from his journey in the region, with an imaginative description of the abysmal gap separating the fantasy of the classicising journey to Cythera from the grim reality of Cerigo (the island's modern, Venetian, name), a barren land whose sight is for the narrator dominated by an imposing tripartite gallows from which a human corpse hangs. 75 The contrast between idealising classical memory and the rotting carcass is graphically intensified in Baudelaire's poem, in a way that makes its parallelism to Lesbos' Sappho unmistakeable. Lines 9-16, a hymn-like address to the island of Venus, and lines 21-4, evoking (in contrast) the image of a temple scene, recall in their topicality analogous sections of the address to the island in Lesbos: Ce n'était pas un temple aux ombres bocagères, Où la jeune prêtresse, amoureuse des fleurs, Allait, le corps brûlé de secrètes chaleurs, Entrebâillant sa robe aux brises passagères. (Lesbos ll. 21-4) a final redeeming apotheosis. Her suicide itself is destined to failure. 'Mais ceux qui manquent leur vie courent aussi le risque de rater leur suicide.' The acrobat's fall is intercepted by the machineries of the circus. 'Étourdie, mais intacte, le choc rejette l'inutile suicidée vers les filets où se déprennent des écumes de lumière; les mailles ploient sans céder sous le poids de cette statue repêchée des profondeurs du ciel. Et bientôt les manoeuvres n'auront plus qu'à haler sur les sable ce corps de marbre pâle, ruisselant de sueur comme un noyée d'eau de mer.' Not an apotheosis, but not even a corpse: a statue condemned to go on living. 84

Conclusions
Among the texts we have examined above only one, that of Yourcenar, might have been composed in awareness of the representation of Sappho's leap in the Porta Maggiore Basilica. It is not at all inconceivable that, trained as a classicist as she was, Yourcenar might well have been familiar at least with Carcopino's monograph. It is possible that another source of influence for her would have been Strabo's passage, where, after a list of the famous and less famous characters who dived from Cape Leucas, we find the description of a local rite in which the leap involves real scapegoats (10.2.9): η̕ν δὲ καὶ πάτριον τοις Λευκαδίοις κατ' ἐνιαυτὸν ἐν τη̃θυσίᾳ του̃Ἀπόλλωνος ἀπὸ της σκοπης ῥιπτεισθαί τινα των ἐν αἰτίαις ὄντων ἀποτροπης χάριν, ἐξαπτομένων ἐξ αὐτου̃παντοδαπων πτερων καὶ ὀρνέων ἀνακουwίζειν δυναμένων τη̃πτήσει τὸ ἅλμα, ὑποδέχεσθαι δὲ κάτω μικραις ἁλιάσι κύκλῳ περιεστωτας πολλοὺς καὶ περισώζειν εἰς δύναμιν των ὅρων ἔξω τὸν ἀναληwθέντα.
It was an ancestral custom among the Leucadians, every year at the sacrifice performed in honour of Apollo, for some criminal to be flung from this rocky lookout for the sake of averting evil, wings and birds of all kind being fastened to him, since by their fluttering they could lighten the leap, and also for a number of men, stationed all round below the rock in small fishing boats, to take the victim in, and, when he had been taken on board, to do all in their power to get him safely outside their borders. 85 Just as the 'victims' in Strabo's rite face the leap tying to themselves wings and birds, so Yourcenar's acrobat is 'drapée de longs peignoirs qui lui restituent ses ailes' and keeps in her chests 'de débris d'oiseaux'. And, just as the indicted individuals forced to jump in Strabo (but, according to Photius, Lex. s.v. Λευκάτης, those who threw themselves down from the Rock were actually priests, ἱερεις; Servius on Aen. 3.279 uses the expression se auctorare suggesting the activity of individuals who would endanger their life for a wage, just as gladiators, or acrobats), 86 Yourcenar's Sappho is eventually rescued as a drowned body, but her destiny is unavoidably to go on living, as a pariah/outsider, 'beyond borders' (των ὅρων ἔξω). 87 Several of the options we have examined derive from the necessity to find narratological solutions to events developed around an iconic character who is the object of continuous reshaping, in ways that are sometimes close to stereotypes, but often reveal previously unsuspected potentialities. This has been Sappho's destiny since even before there was an 'edition' of her songs. This urge to reimagine Sappho's 'afterlife' opened the path, in antiquity and beyond, to a series of visions of the poetess as harbinger of an eschatological message, or as an exemplary failure, an image variously transformed, deformed and simplified, but returning, again and again, in new creative incarnations of one of the most powerful icons of ancient Greek poetry's legacy.