This chapter focuses on Sappho fr. 1V and argues that as an attentive reader of the Iliad – and of the shame and humiliation experienced by its female characters, both divine and mortal – Sappho, rather than attempting to outdo Homer, or to contest his canonicity, amplifies and recasts “minor” episodes from Homeric epic. Her approach is neither overtly competitive with, nor subservient to, the older poet in that she does not aim to recreate the contours and feel of the original. Instead, in a manner designed to make visible what epic suppresses, she returns us to some of the Iliad’s marginal and dismissed characters, showing us the generative potential of painful experiences, such as Aphrodite’s defeat in Iliad 5 at the hands of Diomedes, and her feelings of shame as she is rebuked by the mortal warrior and demeaned by her father, Zeus. The consolation of her mother, Dione’s, reparative embrace anticipates the similar sort of “repair” Sappho herself, as named speaker of her “Ode to Aphrodite” finds in that poem’s evocation of Aphrodite.

Starting with a brief overview of the Homeric tradition to which Sappho and her ancient listeners on Lesbos may have had access, the chapter then looks at different models of intertextuality, within both oral poetic and textual contexts, and teases out how these shape our understanding(s) of Sappho’s reception of Homer. The nonhierarchical, “avuncular” mode of intertextual interpretation is introduced as one that allows readers to find common ground between poets, rather than focusing exclusively on their latent rivalries.