This chapter focuses on Sappho’s engagement with epic, by focusing on the appeal and significance of her songs for audiences beyond Lesbos. The argument is in three parts. First, it demonstrates that Lesbos was famous for its women and its songs also independently of Sappho: her songs helped to increase the reputation of her native island by revealing exactly what went into the making of its glamorous women. In fragments 98, 44, and several others, we see lovely women and precious goods crossing the sea and causing great delight on arrival – or disappointment when they fail to materialise. Likewise, Sappho’s own songs must have travelled overseas causing pleasure and, simultaneously, increasing the value of Lesbian exports, including women (whether they travelled overseas as brides or upmarket courtesans). Second, this chapter observes that, in both Sappho and Alcaeus, heroic characters drawn from the Trojan saga are always involved in travelling and getting married. Finally it makes the point that, in Sappho’s extant fragments, intertextual engagements with epic work primarily by superimposing the itineraries of people dear to her onto the routes traced by heroes and heroines in their own journeys of homecoming and homemaking.

Chapter 3 looks at the way Sappho responds to material objects in Homer, and explores how plaiting becomes a metaphor for Sappho’s own poetic production. With readings of some of the lesser-known fragments (e.g., frr. 102V, 110V, and 22), as well as a re-examination of Aphrodite’s famed epithet (poikilothronos) in fr. 1, this chapter highlights Sappho’s generic range and poetic creativity, as well as her noncompetitive appropriation of the affects of fear, desire, and breathlessness that are associated with weaponry in the Iliad. In Sappho’s lyrics, similar emotions are produced by women’s garments, jewelry, and other forms of bodily adornment. The chapter ends with an interpretation of Alcaeus 140V, whose orientation towards Homeric weaponry, it is argued, is distinctly more aspirational than wily and playful.

This chapter considers how the language of memory and knowledge indexes tradition. In Homeric epic, characters’ memories coincide with the audience’s recollection of intertextual and intratextual episodes (e.g. Aeneas’s flight from Achilles, Heracles’ labours, Diomedes’ wounding of Ares) and sometimes mark selective retellings of tradition (e.g. Agamemnon on recruiting Odysseus). On occasion, characters’ knowledge even extends proleptically to the future (e.g. Hector on Achilles’ death). Few comparable cases of characters’ mythical recall are visible elsewhere in archaic epic or lyric poetry because of our fragmentary evidence and differences in narratological presentation. But lyric poets also index tradition through the memories of their narrators, evoking both other myths (e.g. Theognis on Odysseus) and their own wider cycles of song (e.g. Sappho). They also appeal directly to the audience’s knowledge (e.g. Pindar on Ajax, Bacchylides on Thebes). From Homer onwards, memory and knowledge proved recurring but varied indices of allusion.

Chapter 2 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho investigates the island of Lesbos, home of Sappho, during the archaic period (sixth and fifth centuries BC), and how its geography – both of the island itself, and of its place within the wider Greek and Mediterranean worlds – is reflected in her poetry and in the poetry of her contemporary, the poet Alcaeus.

Chapter 5 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho considers the relationship between Sappho and her contemporary, the poet Alcaeus, examining the literary and visual evidence and the different ways that scholars have interpreted it.

The first chapter is concerned with the roles of Hyperborea in hymns and sanctuaries. It brings together fragments of Archaic and Classical material related to the great sanctuaries of Apollo at Didyma, Delphi and Delos and explores the uses of the distant North in the positioning of all three sites. It looks at how the interaction of ritual and commemoration could instrumentalise boreal remoteness to frame divine presence in sanctuaries that claimed a certain centrality. The first, introductory section of that chapter revisits the themes of divine arrival and absence through the lenses of cosmography. The second section is focused on an inscribed bone tablet from the northern Black Sea, an object consecrated to Apollo of Didyma. The third section, focused on the traces of Alcaeus' hymn to Apollo, analyses the poem's story of Apollo's arrival to Delphi from Hyperborea as a cosmographic document. The fourth and final section of the first chapter looks at the Delian record through the traces of Olen's hymn to Eileithyia, and the important cultic presence of the Hyperborean Maidens on the island. With that hymnic material, this chapter aims to explore the challenges and illustrate the significance of studying cosmography through cult and place.