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emma_in_dreamJosephine Balmer put together a collection of the surviving work of women poets of Greece and Rome.
Some of them survive in the merest snatches. Sulpicia the Satirist is represented by two lines, which survived in a study on Juvenal (her well known, male, contemporary). The review of Juvenal itself disappeared but was quoted by an Italian Renaissance scholar. So, here is her entire surviving oevre:
‘If we could only set it straight, restore that sagging mattress -
then you’d see me stripped, laid bare, entwined with Calenus.’
Virtually nothing is known about the authors - mostly what can be gleaned from the surviving fragments of their work. But I am going to count Sapho, as she and her home island have become adjectives for same-sex love.
‘Sapho represents, then, all the lost women of genius in literary history, especially all the lesbian artists whose work has been destroyed, sanitised or heterosexualised in an attempt to evade “lesbian intertextuality”.’ Susan Gubar, Re-Reading Sapho: Reception and Transmission (1996)
Sapho wrote:
The muses have made me happy
in my lifetime.
And when I die
I shall never be forgotten.
Some of them survive in the merest snatches. Sulpicia the Satirist is represented by two lines, which survived in a study on Juvenal (her well known, male, contemporary). The review of Juvenal itself disappeared but was quoted by an Italian Renaissance scholar. So, here is her entire surviving oevre:
‘If we could only set it straight, restore that sagging mattress -
then you’d see me stripped, laid bare, entwined with Calenus.’
Virtually nothing is known about the authors - mostly what can be gleaned from the surviving fragments of their work. But I am going to count Sapho, as she and her home island have become adjectives for same-sex love.
‘Sapho represents, then, all the lost women of genius in literary history, especially all the lesbian artists whose work has been destroyed, sanitised or heterosexualised in an attempt to evade “lesbian intertextuality”.’ Susan Gubar, Re-Reading Sapho: Reception and Transmission (1996)
Sapho wrote:
The muses have made me happy
in my lifetime.
And when I die
I shall never be forgotten.
