Notes on the Ancient Reception of Sappho

The absence and presence of Sappho in ancient literary criticism is telling of her reception, not least in the Roman context, as this chapter shows. It argues that through various approaches to Sappho we can observe the dynamics of ancient literary theory, where inter alia the contrastive concepts of ἀλλότριον‎ (‘what belongs to someone else’) and οἰκεῖον‎ (‘what is one’s own’) prove productive for enhancing our understanding of categories such as gender, translation, and—more broadly—reception in the ancient world. The chapter covers reflections on literature in ancient literary critics, combined with analyses of passages from the poetry of Sappho and Roman poets such as Lucretius, Catullus, Horace, and Ovid.