Sappho's Reception in Imperial Greek Literature

Classics lecture by Ewen Bowie, Oxford University

Sappho was the only woman poet to attain canonical status in the ancient Greek world. The talk will explore how, at the same time as papyri document many readers of her poems in Greco-Roman Egypt in the first 3 centuries AD, Greek writers of different sorts - critics, philosophers, sophists and novelists - displayed their appreciation and knowledge of her poetry and sometimes reworked it to create their new, Sappho-scented prose and poetry.