In the introduction to How Women Became Poets (HWBP), Emily Hauser calls attention to a remarkable fact: that Sappho, one of the most well-known poets from ancient Greece, is called âpoetâ only twice in all extant literature written by men to the end of the Hellenistic period (p. 19).[1] The absence of a poet term for Sappho cannot be explained by an absence of terminology for poets in Greek; Hauser shows that there was an abundance of such terms. Nor can it be explained by a lack of knowledge at the time that Sappho composed and sang songs for her community. In the Hellenistic period, Sappho was listed among the nine canonical Greek lyric poets. Why, then, did so many male writers deny Sappho a poet term? In this exciting and well-researched book, Hauser argues that Sappho was denied the title âpoetâ because the words that existed to name a poet were engineered to exclude women.
Despite its title, HWBP does not address how women became poets in the sense of who had access to an education in song; what womenâs lives were like; how, when, where, and to whom they performed their songs; or how their audiences responded. Most of that information has been lost, along with nearly all their poems. Instead, the bulk of the book records how Greek male writers in various periods and genres fenced off the terms for âpoetâ for exclusive male use while appropriating the female voice in their songs. The book also addresses how male writers developed different terminology to describe women poets (when they described them at all), and how female poets responded by creating their own terms. The book is also not really about how Greek-speaking women came to be called poets â as Hauser shows, until the Roman period, they mostly werenât. Rather, HWBP demonstrates through sensitive close readings of a variety of sources that the terms for poet were a âcontestâ in which gendered categories, norms, and hierarchies were both constructed and challenged (p. 22).
The book is organized into four parts, progressing roughly chronologically from the archaic to the Hellenistic periods, but with a discussion of the terms women poets employed for themselves and their craft reserved for the final part. Each part contains two to three chapters, and each chapter focuses on one major author or work until the evidence becomes more scant in Parts 3 and 4. Part 1 focuses on the term aoidos (âsinger,â âbardâ) in archaic Greek poetry, particularly Homer (Ch. 1), Hesiod (Ch. 2), and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (Ch. 3), arguing that, with some intriguing exceptions, the term aoidos is used exclusively to refer to male poets and often in contexts where womenâs voices are silenced, contested, or appropriated. Of these, the most revelatory chapter treats the story of how Hermes created the tortoise-shell lyre in the Homeric Hymn. Hauser shows that Hermes makes the tortoise into a âsingerâ (aoidos, Hymn. Hom. Merc. 25) by eviscerating her body and claiming her voice as his own. The evisceration, Hauser points out, is described in language that evokes rape. While many commentators have called attention to the erotic language Hermes uses to address the tortoise, Hauser is the first to note the rape analogy that describes the transformation of the female tortoise into a male singer. This chapter is thus a compelling demonstration of Part 1âs argument that the male singer claims power in song by violently silencing and appropriating the female voice.
Part 2 tracks the emergence of a new poet term, poiÄtÄs, derived from the verb poiein (âto makeâ), which fifth-century Greek writers favor over aoidos. Hauser demonstrates that poiÄtÄs, like aoidos, is marked as exclusively masculine in Aristophanesâ plays (Ch. 4) and Platoâs dialogues (Ch. 5), although the two writers differ in their beliefs about the degree to which poets should mimic the female voice. For Aristophanes, Hauser argues, mimicking women is an important stage in the process of becoming a male poet who educates men in the polis, whereas for Plato, this type of imitation is not just inferior, but even dangerous. Hauser also points out that both Aristophanes and Plato employ the female-coded metaphor of pregnancy to describe acts of male poetic creation. For example, Aristophanes describes his young self in the parabasis of Clouds as an immature girl (parthenos) who gave birth and exposed the child (his first play), which another girl (Callistratus, the producer) raised (Nub. 530-532). Diotimaâs speech in the Symposium likewise depicts male poets as pregnant with their poetic creations (209a). Hauser argues that these are also acts of appropriation that write women out of the process of begetting and delivering poems, although she also claims that Diotima elsewhere blurs these lines and may even cite a line of her own poetry (208c4-6; p. 155). Yet it remains the case that Diotima, like Sappho, receives no poet-term herself. Part 2 thus establishes the persistent gendering of poiÄtÄs as masculine in fifth-century Athens as a strategy for maintaining a gender hierarchy in which men also control the reproduction of song.
Part 3 turns to the development of language to describe women poets. Chapter 6 focuses on the use of aoidos in Euripidesâ plays to describe the Muses, female gods, sphinxes, shuttles, and birds, but never human women. Through their feminization of a masculine poet-term, Hauser argues, these examples can be read as exposing the gendered systems of language and status that âotherâ women in Greek society. Yet Hauser also recognizes that these instances, which never characterize human women as poets, can also be read as imposing the very constraints that the book identifies in Parts 1 and 2. Chapter 7 analyzes the terms that male writers did use for women poets. Highlighting the two instances in extant Greek literature up to the Hellenistic period when Sappho is given a poet term, Hauser argues that even in these instances male writers mark Sapphoâs difference from male poets. For example, Hauser notes that Herodotus refers to Sappho as a mousopoios (âmuse/music-maker,â 2.135.1), differentiating her from male poets, whom he regularly calls poiÄtai and never mousopoioi. He also associates Sappho with sexualized women such as Helen, Rhodopis, and Archidice, whom he criticizes for seeking renown. While Part 3 takes up the question of how women came to be called poets, therefore, it actually shows how poets like Sappho continued to be construed by male writers not as poets who happened to be women, but as women first and foremost.
Part 4 builds on Part 3 with two chapters that interrogate how gender informs authorship and poet terms in the fragmentary works of Greek women writers, such as Sappho, Nossis, Moero, Corinna, and even the oracular pronouncements of the Pythia at Delphi. Chapter 8 considers new terms that women poets used to describe their poetry in the face of this male tradition of differentiation, exclusion, and appropriation. For instance, Hauser argues that Sapphoâs term moisopolos in fr. 150 L-P responds to Hesiodâs identification of the male bard as âservant of the Musesâ (Theog. 100). In contrast to Hesiodâs implication of distance from the Muses, Sapphoâs term, according to Hauser, imagines mother and daughter singing in community with the female Muses. Finally, Hauser ends the book (Ch. 9) with a discussion of how women poets reclaimed their voice by reworking these masculinized terms. Although the evidence is very fragmentary, Hauser claims that women poets never use aoidos or poiÄtÄs to describe themselves. Instead, they perform variations on these terms, sometimes even wearing a male mask, while playfully winking at the reader. An especially complex example is Nossisâs tenth epigram, which is an epitaph for a male dramatist named Rhinthon. The poem proclaims, âI am Rhinthon of Syracuse, the tiny nightingale-ess (aÄdonis) of the Musesâ (10 G-P = Anth. Pal. 7.414). Hauser argues that the ânightingale-ess,â explicitly marked as feminine by the –is ending, but used of Rhinthon, a male poet, reveals the gender-bending female author behind the mask of the male speaker. Nossis thus self-consciously reclaims the nightingale, which had come to symbolize the male poetâs appropriation of the female voice.
With new and provocative readings of sources spanning over 700 years of literary history, HWBP is an ambitious project that convincingly demonstrates how central gender was for the articulation of the Greek poetâs identity and craft from the very beginning. Hauserâs application of Judith Butlerâs concept of performativity enriches her close readings by showing how the connection between gender and authorship in Greek literature is achieved through a series of âconstituting actsâ that repeatedly define poets as male and exclude, silence, and marginalize womenâs voices (p. 260). Through this lens, Hauser offers productive readings of both overlooked fragments and famous episodes, such as Telemachusâs banishment of Penelope from Phemiusâ performance for the suitors in Book 1 of the Odyssey. Other examples are less straightforward and sometimes less convincing. Hauser claims, for instance, that the Odysseyâs Clytemnestra threatens to âmake this her own taleâ (p. 33). Aeschylusâ Clytemnestra certainly does so, but in the Odyssey Clytemnestra never speaks, even in Agamemnonâs account. The Odyssey represents Aegisthus, not Clytemnestra, as the malevolent agent who banishes the bard and overcomes Clytemnestraâs âgood mindâ (Od. 3.266). Yet it is a strength, not a weakness, of HWBP that it includes evidence that is ambiguous and potentially challenging for its argument. Hauser often presents multiple possible interpretations of the evidence, demonstrating how complex these sources are. In the spirit of embracing multiple interpretations, I thought that the book could have pushed more against the scholarly formulation of the audience of some of these poems as exclusively male, particularly at the City Dionysia. Aristophanes imagines the women of Athens responding to Euripidesâ depictions of women in Women at the Thesmophoria. How does the male poetâs appropriation and imitation of female voices affect the polisâs women? Finally, while I understand the benefits of concentrating a discussion of female poetsâ work in the final two chapters, I did miss an in-depth analysis of Sapphoâs approach to this problem of authorship earlier in the book, especially since several of the examples in Chapters 4 to 7 touch on male poetsâ descriptions of and responses to Sappho. While Sappho fr. 150 L-P may contain the only discrete poet-term in Sapphoâs surviving corpus, I would have loved to read the author grapple with more of Sapphoâs extant fragments and how they imagine the poet, her relationship to the Muses, and her relationship to her audience.
Ultimately, HWBP succeeds in its goal of writing a new history of ancient Greek literature that centers the connection between authorship and gender. Too often scholarship about ancient Greek literature assumes that the subject position of the Greek male poet is the default or neutral position. This book corrects that scholarly tendency by showing that such a position has always been far from neutral, built as it is on the exclusion of female poets and the appropriation of the female voice. Whatâs more, HWBP convincingly demonstrates that female poets responded creatively to these acts of exclusion and appropriation. HWBP should be required reading for scholars and students of Greek literature. It is accessibly and engagingly written, and all Greek is transliterated and translated. As a result, the book can be profitably assigned even in undergraduate courses on Greek literature in translation. By revealing the strategies ancient Greek women poets used to respond to a hostile and exclusionary tradition, HWBP contributes an exciting new chapter to the history of Greek literature.
Notes
[1] Neither instance uses the term poiÄtÄs/poiÄtria from which the English term âpoetâ is derived: Herodotus calls Sappho a mousopoios (âmusic-makerâ) and Antipater of Sidon calls her an aoidos (âsinger,â âbardâ). See the discussion in Ch. 7.