Chapter 8 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho interrogates the question of how Sappho’s poems were performed, looking at different theories put forward by modern scholars and the difficulties involved in advancing a fully convincing hypothesis.

The Flavian Age marked a decisive political break with the Julio-Claudian past. And yet Flavian literature has been repeatedly defined through a sense of epigonality, one that it itself cultivated, as Hinds observes. But, as Hutchinson comments of modern European literature, which also defines itself through ‘an anxiety of lateness’, backward-looking paradoxically can be associated with forward-thinking; lateness is one of the animating impulses of aesthetic creation. I shall argue here that, despite their different political and social conditions, Catullus was a foundational author in the development of the short poem for the Flavian poets Martial and Statius and their close contemporary Pliny the Younger, whose political career began under Domitian. All three authors raise the question of the cultural status of a form of poetry that from Catullus onwards was often described as lusus (‘play’) or iocus (‘jest’).

This introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Sappho provides an overview of the book as a whole by examining key themes and giving an account of the different sections of which the volume is composed.

Chapter 6 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho ponders Sappho’s relationship with her other archaic poets and contemporary poetic traditions, including iambic poetry (Archilochus and Hipponax) and choral poetry (Alcman and Bacchylides).

On an October afternoon two hundred years ago the poet John Keats paid a visit to his friend and literary mentor, Leigh Hunt. They were so absorbed in their conversation that they forgot the time, and Keats was obliged to spend the night in Hunt’s cottage, where an extemporary bed was made up for him in the library. But he failed to drop off to sleep, so stimulated was he not only by the conversation with his friend but also by his literary surroundings. He therefore resorted to writing part of the poem later known as Sleep and Poetry, in which he describes the circumstances of the poem’s genesis, attacks the poets of a previous generation, and delivers a manifesto for the new poets such as Hunt himself.

Playing a video game is a very communicative activity. Set aside the ideas that communication only happens between humans and that communication only happens with words. We communicate with animals, machines and the built environment all the time, conveying our needs, aspirations, designs and emotions as we live in and shape our world. We do the same when we play video games, inhabiting a virtual space and forging our path through it. Understanding how we communicate with a video game, and how a video game communicates with us, helps us understand the fundamental elements of the video game text (like graphics, sound, narrative and music) and how they fit together. It also helps us to be able to shape and direct those communications, if we are in the business of constructing or composing for video games.

When studying a video game’s musical soundtrack, how do we account for the experience of hearing the music while playing the game? Let us pretend for a moment that a recording of Bastion (2011) is not from a game at all, but a clip from perhaps a cartoon series or an animated film.1 We would immediately be struck by the peculiar camera angle. At first, when ‘The Kid’ is lying in bed, what we see could be an establishing shot of some sort (see Figure 10.1). The high-angle long shot captures the isolated mote of land that The Kid finds himself on through a contrast in focus between the bright and colourful ruins and the blurry ground far beneath him. As soon as he gets up and starts running, however, the camera starts tracking him, maintaining the isometric angle (from 0:02 in the clip). While tracking shots of characters are not uncommon in cinema, this particular angle is unusual, as is the rigidity with which the camera follows The Kid. Whereas the rigidity is reminiscent of the iconic tricycle shots from The Shining (1980), the angle is more similar to crane shots in Westerns like High Noon (1952). It would seem easy to argue that the high angle and the camera distance render The Kid diminutive and vulnerable, but David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson warn against interpreting such aspects of cinematography in absolute terms.

The significance of video game music does not end when we turn off the console, shut down the PC or leave the arcade. It has an extended life far beyond the boundaries of the game itself. Perhaps the most obvious way that video game music is encountered outside the game is through recordings and performances of game music.

The poems of Catullus were rediscovered around 1300. Manuscript copies were made throughout the fourteenth century, but circulated little, though it appears that Petrarch had access to the text around the middle of the century, and it has sometimes been supposed that he owned a copy of it. Then, in the last quarter of the century, the Florentine humanist Coluccio Salutati had transcribed for him a new complete manuscript, descended at third hand from the original (V), and itself now known as R; and back to this copy most of the proliferating manuscripts of the fifteenth century can be traced. The rebirth of Catullus, therefore, coincides with the ‘Renaissance’ itself: a point to which the looming presence, in traditional accounts, of Petrarch near the beginning of both processes – the assimilation of Catullus and the larger ‘revival of antiquity’ – lends emphasis.

Chapter 7 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho considers the generic identity of Sappho’s poetry, noting the elusiveness of this idea in many of her fragments and proposing a new approach to the question.

Contemporary audiovisual objects unify sound and moving image in our heads via the screen and speakers/headphones. The synchronization of these two channels remains one of the defining aspects of contemporary culture. Video games follow their own particular form of synchronization, where not only sound and image, but also player input form a close unity.1 This synchronization unifies the illusion of movement in time and space, and cements it to the crucial interactive dimension of gaming. In most cases, the game software’s ‘music engine’ assembles the whole, fastening sound to the rest of the game, allowing skilled players to synchronize themselves and become ‘in tune’ with the game’s merged audio and video. This constitutes the critical ‘triple lock’ of player input with audio and video that defines much gameplay in digital games.

Chapter 19 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho takes the narrative into the culture of fifth and fourth-centry Greece, showing Sappho’s immense and varied significance, made e.g. into a typical figure of fun on the comic stage, but also Plato’s praeceptor amoris in the Phaedrus.