Diane Rayor: “Ἔρος δηὖτέ μ’ ὀ λυσιμέλης δόνει, γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον.”

Ellie Brigida: Welcome to Sweetbitter, a podcast where we investigate the truth and controversies surrounding Sappho, her life, the Isle of Lesbos, and her relevance today. We’re your hosts, Ellie Brigida…

Leesa Charlotte: …and Leesa Charlotte.

EB: Before we get started this week, we just wanted to say sorry for the glitch in the audio last week.

LC: We were able to fix it pretty quickly, but if you’ve already downloaded the episode, it’s so glitch. So if that stopped you from listening through to the end, please delete it and redownload it and finish it, because it’s such a great episode, and we loved doing it.

EB: This episode is all about Sappho’s poetry. What did she write about and how did she write about it? What were her poems like to hear then and now?

LC: As we do each episode, we’re going to start with one of Sappho’s fragments, chosen by our resident poet, Alyse. Stay tuned until the end of the episode to hear our own version of the poem as a song. This week, we are going disco.

EB: I’m so excited for this.

LC: Alyse, will you tell us about the poem?

Alyse Knorr: Yes. I’ve chosen for this episode Fragment 130. I’m going to read it in English to you. It’s Diane Rayor’s translation, and then Diane herself will read it for us in Greek and explain it a little bit and unpack it a little bit. “Once again Love, that loosener of limbs, /  bittersweet and inescapable, crawling thing, / seizes me.”

EB: Wow. It just like–so few words, and yet it–the poem seizes me, right?

LC: And so we will say that for this song that we did for the episode, we actually use the Carson translation, so you’ll get to hear them both in this episode.

AK: It’s one of Sappho’s greatest hits. Diane will go into more about why it’s so great and what’s so interesting about it, and why it’s particularly important for our podcast. Yeah, it’s just–it’s classic Sappho, talking about eros and this concept of love as lack or desire, love as something that’s inflicted on you, something that’s violent, something that creeps up on you and inflicts itself on you. And, Anne Carson in her translations really talks a lot about how important it is to remember that the erotic kind of love that we’re talking about with Sappho is about pursuit and flight and–even if you look at Grecian urns and vases, they never show you two lovers kissing or embracing. They show you the moment when the beloved turns and runs, and the lover chases them. So eros is about that strong wanting and not having and the kind of loss of self that comes about when you’re desiring someone.

EB: All those people that love the chase.

LC: It’s me.

Diane Rayor: “Ἔρος δηὖτέ μ’ ὀ λυσιμέλης δόνει, γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον.” And the reason for that is it has “γλυκύπικρον,” “sweetbitter.”

EB: Yes. Wait so how do you say it? Gloopy-glooky?

DR: “γλυκύ–γλυκύπικρον.”

EB: “γλυκύπικρον.”

DR: That’s where we get “glucose,” “γλυκύπικρον.” Yeah.

AK: “γλυκύπικρον.”

DR: And this one is so amazing because it’s “γλυκύπικρον.” So, “sweetbitter.” “ἀμάχανον,” “we have no machinery to deal with this.” Okay? No remedy, nothing. “ὄρπετον,” where we get “herpeton,” “herpetology,” reptile, creepy, crawly thing.

AK: What!

DR: This is what eros is. “Eros, once again, that loosener of limbs, seizes me. Sweetbitter, without remedy. Creepy, crawly thing.”

EB: Love it.

AK: Oh, I love it. Sappho is such a trip.

DR: Yes, it is.

AK: So, Anne Carson in her translation talks about why the translation of the word “bittersweet” actually makes more sense to call it “sweetbitter.” It’s in her book, “Eros the Bittersweet.” Anne Carson says that the reason sweetbitter is a more accurate depiction of erotic love is because eros brings sweetness first, and then bitterness after that. When you fall in love with someone and then they leave you jilted, or they, you know, they leave you abandoned, the relationship begins in that sweetness and then is left in the bitterness. So there’s actually–that kind of simultaneous pain and pleasure in eros makes a lot more sense if you phrase it “sweetbitter.” So, love means suffering. It’s kind of like a blues. Eros is something that creeps up on you, you can’t fight it off, and Fragment 31 really kind of shows you just the way that eros can dissolve your limbs and take control of your body, and that’s why we named our podcast after this word, because it’s pretty classic Sappho.

LC: Very disco.

EB: It is very disco. Disco starts sweet and ends bitter. No, it’s all sweet. It’s all sweet.

LC: It’s all sweet.

AK: We were lucky enough to talk to Alex Purves. She’s a professor of Classics at UCLA and authored a book called, “Space and Time in Ancient Greek Literature,” and another book called, “Homer and the Poetics of Gesture.” And she talked with us about what makes Sappho’s work so special.

Alex Purves: She’s a shockingly good poet. Her use of language–it sounds so obvious to say, but–she has an incredibly kind of economic and–you might almost say understated–use of language, whereupon every word works in so many different directions. She fits within the genre of direct poetry. And she is in many ways similar to the kind of tradition around her of other poets. But she’s also very different, and she kind of sets herself off as different, like she will often kind of make either explicit or oblique statements in her poetry about how she’s doing something different to Homer, or the male tradition of poets. And so she kind of has a different set of interests, a different way of speaking about life, or about love, or about even her relationship with the gods, that is just kind of–on the one hand, it fits in with the culture, and it’s kind of part of that tradition and genre. But on the other hand, she’s doing something that’s really kind of unusual and different. And that has a lot to do, obviously, with her. She’s the only female poet that we really have from that period, in any particular detail or length.

EB: I love that quote from Alex because it really just illustrates how incredible Sappho was as a poet. Not just as a woman, but as the first lyric poet. And the influence she has today on poets like Alyse, who we are so lucky to have with us.

LC: Alyse, seeing as you’re our resident poet, and this episode is all about Sappho’s poems, and also just because we love you, we thought you might like to join us for the full episode. So would you like to keep hanging out with us?

AK: I’d love to keep hanging out with y’all.

LC: Amazing.

EB: Oh, wow.

AK: Always, forever.

EB: This is such a treat. This is the sweet part of bitter. The sweet part of Sweetbitter.

LC: It’s gonna be bitter when you leave us at the end, though.

AK: Oh, no.

LC: Yes, the next episode will be bitter without you.

AK: Glookoo–glookoo–I still can’t say it. I still can’t say it. Well thanks for letting me hang out with you guys for this whole episode, it’s really great to get to talk about Sappho and her poems. I think what’s really interesting that we’re going to hear about in this episode, is that in Sappho’s poems, love is such an intense experience, and it’s never simplified, and it’s never censored. Even when she’s writing ritual or religious poetry, you still just see tons and tons of erotic physical longing. And I just think that’s really, really interesting. And it’s something that makes Sappho’s work really, extremely powerful for us today.

AP: For some reason, is just sounds so ridiculous–it’s like you pick up Sappho and you start reading her, and it’s just–she speaks to you. I mean, she speaks to me. And I think that’s true of a lot of people. I also think that right now in our culture, where we don’t know how to talk about desire and love, it’s been so ruined by–it’s been kind of made trashy. Greeting cards, and Valentine’s Day, and romance. It’s become kind of boring to talk about love in our culture. And the thing about the Ancient Greeks is that they just really understood the violence of desire. It was like war. For Sappho too, it was like kind of going into battle. It’s just so strong and so unabashed. And the way they talk about desire is so unashamed, it’s almost like, because they have Aphrodite, it’s this kind of–just kind of baring yourself to the kind of violence that you’re suffering. It’s not always violence, but it can be understood as a kind of–I mean look at 31. She’s talking about this kind of almost dying in 31. And I think that we don’t have, anymore, a kind of way of expressing that form of desire. We don’t have the language anymore, for whatever reason. Maybe we have it in film, or we have it–but we’ve just kind of lost it a little bit in poetry. So the lyric poets will famously talk about, you know, being hit by eros. It’s like the wind coming down and knocking over an oak tree, or being smashed over the head with an axe. Like, it’s just not–it’s just a different set of imagery.

EB: It’s very violent.

AP: Exactly.

EB: Wow, that description of love as war, and how we, in our current society, have, you know, commodified love in a way, right? With the greeting cards and everything–that just hits so hard.

LC: Kind of like eros.

EB: Right? It hits so hard like eros. But I love it because even though the depiction of love in the media has been commodified, when you read Sappho’s poems, you can understand them. Because the human experience of love doesn’t equate with what you see on the greeting cards, right? Like you can relate to the wind knocking over an oak tree. It’s so good.

LC: So good.

EB: It’s so good.

AK: And it’s like, just for me, just really spooky that it’s that relatable, that you’re like, “Okay, this person who lived so many–I mean, two millennia ago–had the same feelings that I have.” I know we’ve said that before, but it just–it can never, like never ceases to fascinate me. And Ellie and I got to talk to a wonderful person named Jade Esteban Estrada, who’s a journalist, radio personality, and stand-up comedian. Out Magazine actually christened him the first gay Latin star. And he told us about how Sappho has continued to inspire him. Sappho actually inspired Jade to write a one-man show called, “Icons: The Lesbian and Gay History of the World,” which was a big hit in 2000. But his encounter with Sappho came entirely out of his personal experience.

Jade Esteban Estrada: A parallel that was happening in my life is that I had just gotten out of a relationship. And I was so incredibly heartbroken, so heartbroken. You know, that’s the thing about performers or people that, you know, get a lot of attention from the public. It’s sometimes harder for us when someone rejects us personally, and you’re like, “Wait a minute, but all these people, they love me. Why don’t you love me?” So I was so, like, heartbroken for the longest time. And I knew that I needed to go into my art to start to heal. And this is where I discovered Sappho. At the same time, I’m writing this show. I’m like, “I don’t even know what I want to write. I don’t even know how this is gonna work. Why did I say I was gonna do this?” You know, I’m just so upset about my relationship ending. And now I have the pressure of putting on this show. And theatrically, I know what I’m doing, but I don’t know if I could put a show like this together. And when I started reading about Sappho, and started to realize that expressing love and expressing desire and expressing all the different levels of love, and the things that happen, you know. And I was experiencing one of those things. I had experienced the things that Sappho was talking about in my relationship. And like, I couldn’t define how I felt because they were feelings, things that happened to my body, just like Sappho would talk about in the fragments of poems that we have about her. And then I started to get really inspired. Longing has always been a point of fascination for me in the spectrum of human emotions, because we cannot always have what we want. And sometimes it’s not the right time, and you cannot control people. So when it comes to love, longing is ever present. “Oh, you’re with another person,” or, “Oh, you’re on the other side of the room, and people are talking to you,” or, “Oh, we work together.” There’s just all sorts of things that would stop us from not getting what we truly want.

AP: She’s really interested in how to sketch a relationship. There’s some ways in which a lot of her poems are dealing with the kind of problem of having a conversation with somebody else–that idea of sketching a relationship through a dialogue. So she’s really interested in the second person voice. If you think about the way that she addresses Aphrodite, for example, in the first fragment, you know, when she calls Aphrodite down from the heavens. Or, as I mentioned, Fragment 94, where she addresses this woman who has to leave her and who’s sad at having to leave her. There’s a lot of poems where she’ll use the second person voice to kind of sketch the dynamics of a kind of intimacy. But then she will always kind of complicate that in some way by bringing in a kind of third point, like the third point of a triangle. So in Fragment 1, for example, the conversation between her and Aphrodite is already complicated by the fact that we’re being taken back to a previous conversation. And we’re discussing this third character, which is the woman Sappho loves and who is being rejected by. And so there’s always a kind of interesting turn in her poetry. The same could be said, the famous Fragment 31, the “phainetai moi” fragment, where, you know, it’s not only about how Sappho is affected by the girl or woman she’s sitting opposite. But it’s triangulated through her envy, or her jealousy, of the man sitting next to the woman. And so, I feel that she is really kind of unusually gifted at setting out the terms of an intimacy, always with the understanding that it’s impossible just to have a single straight dialogue between the “I” and the “you” voice. There’s another fragment where she talks about asking one character to pick up her lyre and sing of that character’s desire for another character. But it’s all put within the mouth of Sappho. And that just seems so classic of the way that Sappho kind of sets up that kind of–on the one hand, desire is very simple, right? Like she says in 16, it is that “the most beautiful thing is that which one loves.” It’s that simple. But on the other hand, it’s never simple. There’s always a kind of–whether it’s that the object has left, or there’s a kind of break in the contact with the object of desire, or there’s a kind of triangulation–there’s always some way in which she complicates that thing, which is also the most fundamental and simple thing, which is that we all love.

LC: So I feel like we’re just getting a lot more evidence here that Sappho is indeed a Shane, because there seemed to be a lot of love triangles.

EB: Yes, Sappho was always entangled with more than one person.

LC: Absolutely. And sometimes even goddesses. It’s wild.

EB: Sappho was in the middle, and it’s just like, let’s map out to Aphrodite–Aphrodite over here, who’s attached to–

LC: We 100% need a lesbian map.

EB: Yes, our Sappho lesbian map, out now.

LC: Alice Pieszecki, where are you?

EB: The Sappho chart.

AK: There’s always that thing that comes between that adds the third point to that triangle. For my wife and I right now, it’s our cat. Our cat has been like, really kind of all up in our relationship lately. You know, like, we’ll be hanging out and the cat just crawls between us on the couch. And I’m like, “Wait a minute. This is my wife.”

EB: So have you started writing poetry about your cat?

AK: I need to, I need to. It’s very important.

EB: I think you can definitely do some Sappho-inspired cat poetry.

AK: Thanks for the request.

EB: There’s nothing more gay than that.

AK: That sounds perfect.

EB: You’re welcome.

LC: I look forward to reading it, Alyse.

AK: Oh, man. Not as much as I look forward to writing it and sharing it with you.

LC: And on that note, we’ll be back after a quick break, so you can go and feed your cat.

AK: So, here’s the thing, though, you guys. In talking to Alex, we discovered that as much as we talk about eros in Sappho’s work, and as much as that’s her main jam and the main thing she’s interested in, that’s not the only thing she’s interested in.

AP: We tend to only know like three or four of her poems. There’s like four famous ones. I would say that the most amazing thing about Sappho is to actually read all of her fragments, like even the little two-line ones. Reading them all, you find so many kind of hidden treasures that nobody has–nobody really talks about, because the “big four” kind of dominate. I guess the other thing that we should say about Sappho is that, with these new discoveries, with this new poem called the “Brothers Poem,” which is talking about her brother being at sea on a merchant ship, and she’s waiting for him to come home, and she’s worried. The whole family is worried that he won’t come back safely. We have to kind of–we have to be really careful not to think that she’s only interested in questions of love and desire, because we tend to frame her that way. I think it’s also important to understand that she was interested in family, economy, the general kind of business of living and being in society, these questions do come up in her fragments. And I think it’s a bit of a surprise for us when we got the “Brothers Poem,” to realize that this is not a poem about desire and love. This is about your feelings for your brother and your worries about, you know, whether he’s gonna be okay in his job and he’s gonna make it home okay, and he’s going to–the kind of mercantile aspect of what it means to be a Greek. We probably should mention that that is important, too.

EB: You teach a class on Sappho. So when you are teaching her, what do you think resonates the most with the students?

AP: I think for the undergraduate class that I taught, which was a kind of freshman seminar in translation, I think that what the students found most surprising about Sappho was how much there was to talk about, like how we could spend a whole 50-minute period discussing ideas within a single fragment. There’s so much to unpack and to talk about, in translation as well as in Greek.

EB: Yeah, it’s almost like we could talk for 50 minutes on a podcast about all of her fragments.

LC: Oh my gosh, what would that be like?

EB: It’s so strange.

LC: Yeah, but I love listening to the way that students respond to Sappho through all of these professors. So we also spoke to Professor Marguerite Johnson about the simultaneous accessibility and sophistication of Sappho’s work.

Marguerite Johnson: So yes, she’s melodramatic, and she’s a drama queen, but the sophistication of her knowledge of Archaic Greek literature that came before her is phenomenal. And that adds a complexity. So in a way, her poems are quite deceptively simple and dramatic, but they’re so learned and they’re so intellectual.

AP: And, you know, one of the things that I find interesting about Sappho is that she will focus on very small, ephemeral, domestic, or feminine, but she kind of rescues them from the pejorative sense. She talks about, you know, putting flowers in your hair, she talks about trinkets, bracelets, cups, ‘jus.’ she’ll talk about silences and gestures, and moments that are kind of fleeting or transient, in a way that she’s not so worried about something having to be fixed, that the way that the epic tradition is more invested in fixing. You know, like for example, you could think about Fragment 44, where she talks about Andromache being brought into the city as the bride of Hector. And we know what’s going to happen to Andromache and to Hector, and we know the whole tradition of the Trojan War that is coming. But she focuses on the kind of moment of celebration that the items that Andromache has brought with her, that are mostly jewelry items, kind of small, but important to the family. And the kind of setting up the sound of the celebration, the song and the instruments going up into the air. And that kind of like–Sappho allowing her poetry to kind of dissolve into the air is very distinctive, I think, of her style. And it strangely matches really well with the state of her fragment. So people have talked about the way that’s the aesthetics of the fragment–even though obviously she didn’t compose in fragments, the fact that we have her in fragments is a kind of really interesting match. And it kind of, I think, does influence the way we read her, as well. It’s kind of blurring around the edges.

EB: That is one of the things that I just love about Sappho, just the importance she creates for womanhood, right? All of these feminine things and the importance that she gives to them and it makes me as a woman feel important. Like I’m sure she made the women in her time feel important, too. So I think it’s really cool.

LC: I mean, a lot of feminist international relations theory focuses on this: what men and women think are important. For example, what creates security? Is it guns and ships, or is it health care and education for all? And I think that even though Sappho’s poetry isn’t political, this is a good demonstration of that dichotomy.

AK: This private and intimate, you know, personal, individual style and approach of Sappho’s work is one of the things that is extremely revolutionary about her work. It’s not just something cool that we think is interesting in her work. It predates what poets do today. Poets today write as “I,” individual voices, about their individual feelings. So even if Sappho’s work, as many scholars think, was performed in public at ceremonies and rituals, the way she focuses on the particular and the specific, rather than the general, and the individual woman’s voice–this was the very first time–she was one of the first people, ever, to write first person emotional poetry. Not only the first time we hear a woman’s voice, not only the first time we hear, you know, the first gay woman talking about her desire and emotion. She’s also one of the first humans ever to express their emotions in art as an individual set of emotions and concerns. So this is huge, especially in a place like Greece that’s so community-oriented and public, and Homer is writing from, like, “divine inspiration” instead of his own personal experience. Sappho comes along and expresses individual thoughts and emotions. So she has this lyric “I” that’s truly revolutionary. And I think that that’s interesting on a lot of levels.

LC: If anybody was wondering what it was like to be with Alyse drunk at a bar, I just imagine this would be it. Like I saw you sitting next to somebody at the bar, yelling at them about how important Sappho is. And that is something that I would do, and I think that you would be the same.

AK: I would definitely be doing that. Because it’s just so exciting that the first time, really, in human history that, in a meaningful, way you get to see a lone voice expressing emotion, that it is, you know, a woman writing about her love for other women–this means that every time you hear a song or a poem today that’s an individual speaker expressing their individual thoughts or emotions, it seems influenced, but it’s women who loved women and wrote about that. That like gives me chills.

EB: I was getting goosebumps while you were talking, so I understand. Like, yes, keep it coming.

AK: Okay, so for the next few clips, you’re going to hear from Alex, Jade, and Diane all about the different ways that Sappho is important, starting with how straightforwardly she explains to us about women loving women desire in her work.

AP: I think Sappho is really unbelievably important on this issue, because, you know, so much of what we look at from antiquity or from Classical–from early Classical material is just coming from the male voice. And I think it’s really interesting to think about her, as we talked a little bit earlier, the way in which she carves out her voice. And she’s very, very effective at kind of setting herself up. You know, she doesn’t talk about herself so much as, “I am a woman, therefore,” but she says, “I am not this person, I’m not that person.” She’s very good at kind of setting up her voice. And that’s really interesting. And, you know, she talks just very straightforwardly about female desire. And female desire, both as a woman and for women. And I think that can be really refreshing. It just doesn’t seem to be any kind of an issue in Sappho’s poetry. As far as her world is concerned, she is forthright about how she desires and what and who she desires.

DR: And even though I can’t hear her sing it, the poetry itself is song. And the way her–what she talks about is women-centered. And it’s like we get this glimpse back in time, just this little window into what were women thinking about. We have, you know, so much what men were writing about and thinking about, and here we have these few glimpses of what was important to her, to her society, to her women. So we get this glimpse, and I love it.

EB: Why do you think, Diane, Sappho still matters today?

DR: Oh, my. That’s always the hardest question for me. I’ll give it a shot. I mean, one thing is beauty is always important. So a good song, a good love poem. Come on! And the way that it touches us now, that I can feel it.

JEE: Why she was important? Wow. I mean, to see the role that lyric poetry played in the first place as it, you know, trickled down into the modern era. You can look at any rap ballad, you can look at any rock ballad, or any song that’s popular, like on Sirius XM or something right now. And there are elements that we’ve learned. We’ve learned those styles of expression through lyric poetry, and she was one of the greats of that time period. We don’t express ourselves without being influenced by Sappho, and that’s how I would explain, from my perspective, what she taught us. In today’s society, we have so much more information about mental illness and mental health, that we have words now, to express how we feel, so that we don’t fight or get angry or use emotions, you know, for things that are not productive. She started humans on that path of expressing ourselves. It ratified those emotions. It was like–this is the human experience, it’s okay to express yourself this way. When you don’t know what to say about how you feel about this person in front of you. And if they make you feel like you can’t speak, or they make you sweat, I always come to that.

EB: And now, a taste of what’s to come on Sweetbitter.

Diane Rayor: The things that have survived, we have them written down on one piece on a pot shard, so a little fragment of a pot. We have them on parchment, so animal skin and papyrus, as well as ones that were just cited by grammarians, or other people. And so they got written down and recorded.

Jane Montgomery Griffiths: A little dispiriting when your greatest fame is your absence.

Chris Mason: There were nine volumes, each approach, and we just have this little tiny fragment.

AK: It’s tragic.

Chris Mason: That’s what’s great about this Tithonus poem, is that it brings us hope that there’ll be more poems recovered.

LC: Thanks for listening to Sweetbitter. Our next episode is going to be released in three weeks on the 3rd of December, as we’re taking a break for the holidays. So, Happy Thanksgiving, y’all. As always, stick around until the end of the podcast to hear our original song for Fragment 130, written and performed by us.

EB: This is probably my favorite out of all of them, so stay and listen.

LC: Because the video is also in person.

EB: Yes. And when we did it, it was, like, my mom was dancing with us. Like, I am sorry, I’m going to keep going on about this, but like I am a disco queen. Like I am a child of disco. I wish I lived in the 70s and I could just, like, be a disco baby. Because it makes me so happy.

LC: There also might be matching jumpsuits.

EB: Yes.

LC: Maybe.

EB: It’s gonna be great. If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review us. It really helps, especially written reviews on Apple Podcasts. Or, if you have the means, you can support us on Patreon. We have a new tier, “Tyche, Goddess of Fortune.”

LC: Hopefully, hopefully.

EB: She’ll bring you lots of fortune, right? And there’s a ton of bonus content, including bonus lesbian poetry readings with Alyse, song downloads, and, if you join at the “Hera, Queen of Olympus” tier, Alyse will even write a poem for you.

LC: Wow, wow.

EB: I want that.

LC: Yeah, me too. I still don’t have a poem. Hint, hint. Thank you so much for our new patrons this week: John, Clarissa, Alice, Lily, Ellen, and Crystal. We love you. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at @sweetbitterpod, or contact us on our website, sweetbitterpodcast.com.

EB: Sweetbitter is an independent production by me, Ellie Brigida, Alyse Knorr, and Leesa Charlotte. Our artwork is by Istela Illustrated, music is by Lyre ‘n’ Rhapsody. Special thanks to Chris Mason and Old Songs, Marguerite Johnson, Jade Esteban Estrada, Alex Purves, and Diane Rayor for sharing their love of Sappho with us.

LC: You can read more about our guests and where to find them on our website in the “About” section. Also on our website, you can now find Sweetbitter merch! So we have Sappho nail clippers, we have a plectrum. We have tees, we have totes, oh my!

EB: Can you maybe just–why do we have nail clippers? What’s the significance of that?

LC: For reasons, Ellie.

EB: Okay, great. So we have nail clippers for reasons. We have plectrums, which are picks.

LC: Also for reasons.

EB: Also for reasons, which is a guitar pick. The pick is really cool.

LC: It’s so beautiful.

EB: It has an engraving on it of one of Sappho’s poems. So, if you want to feel like the coolest queer girl ever, playing your guitar with a Sappho plectrum, like come on!

LC: I think it would be like the perfect Christmas gift for your girlfriend, honestly.

EB: Yes, agreed.

LC: Like, who doesn’t want a Sappho plectrum for Christmas?

EB: I want one. I’m probably gonna get one. I’m like, “How much money can I spend on this podcast?” And we also have tees and totes, which, also a great gift. The tees–we have an eros tee, and we also have totes with our logo, which I know I love the logo. I know we’re getting a lot of really good feedback on the logo.

LC: It’s beautiful.

EB: So if you want the logo on a tote bag, it’s a pretty cool graphic to get, yeah.

LC: Absolutely. I also love the tee that we have, which is “Sappho’s Girls” tee, which says “Anaktoria and Athis and Gongola.” So if you want to have a really obscure Ancient Greek lesbian t-shirt, we got you.

EB: Yes. I love it. And now, without further ado, our song for Fragment 130.

Diane Rayor: “Ἔρος δηὖτέ μ’ ὀ λυσιμέλης δόνει, γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον.”

Ellie Brigida: Welcome to Sweetbitter, a podcast where we investigate the truth and controversies surrounding Sappho, her life, the Isle of Lesbos, and her relevance today. We’re your hosts, Ellie Brigida…

Leesa Charlotte: …and Leesa Charlotte.

EB: Before we get started this week, we just wanted to say sorry for the glitch in the audio last week.

LC: We were able to fix it pretty quickly, but if you’ve already downloaded the episode, it’s so glitch. So if that stopped you from listening through to the end, please delete it and redownload it and finish it, because it’s such a great episode, and we loved doing it.

EB: This episode is all about Sappho’s poetry. What did she write about and how did she write about it? What were her poems like to hear then and now?

LC: As we do each episode, we’re going to start with one of Sappho’s fragments, chosen by our resident poet, Alyse. Stay tuned until the end of the episode to hear our own version of the poem as a song. This week, we are going disco.

EB: I’m so excited for this.

LC: Alyse, will you tell us about the poem?

Alyse Knorr: Yes. I’ve chosen for this episode Fragment 130. I’m going to read it in English to you. It’s Diane Rayor’s translation, and then Diane herself will read it for us in Greek and explain it a little bit and unpack it a little bit. “Once again Love, that loosener of limbs, /  bittersweet and inescapable, crawling thing, / seizes me.”

EB: Wow. It just like–so few words, and yet it–the poem seizes me, right?

LC: And so we will say that for this song that we did for the episode, we actually use the Carson translation, so you’ll get to hear them both in this episode.

AK: It’s one of Sappho’s greatest hits. Diane will go into more about why it’s so great and what’s so interesting about it, and why it’s particularly important for our podcast. Yeah, it’s just–it’s classic Sappho, talking about eros and this concept of love as lack or desire, love as something that’s inflicted on you, something that’s violent, something that creeps up on you and inflicts itself on you. And, Anne Carson in her translations really talks a lot about how important it is to remember that the erotic kind of love that we’re talking about with Sappho is about pursuit and flight and–even if you look at Grecian urns and vases, they never show you two lovers kissing or embracing. They show you the moment when the beloved turns and runs, and the lover chases them. So eros is about that strong wanting and not having and the kind of loss of self that comes about when you’re desiring someone.

EB: All those people that love the chase.

LC: It’s me.

Diane Rayor: “Ἔρος δηὖτέ μ’ ὀ λυσιμέλης δόνει, γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον.” And the reason for that is it has “γλυκύπικρον,” “sweetbitter.”

EB: Yes. Wait so how do you say it? Gloopy-glooky?

DR: “γλυκύ–γλυκύπικρον.”

EB: “γλυκύπικρον.”

DR: That’s where we get “glucose,” “γλυκύπικρον.” Yeah.

AK: “γλυκύπικρον.”

DR: And this one is so amazing because it’s “γλυκύπικρον.” So, “sweetbitter.” “ἀμάχανον,” “we have no machinery to deal with this.” Okay? No remedy, nothing. “ὄρπετον,” where we get “herpeton,” “herpetology,” reptile, creepy, crawly thing.

AK: What!

DR: This is what eros is. “Eros, once again, that loosener of limbs, seizes me. Sweetbitter, without remedy. Creepy, crawly thing.”

EB: Love it.

AK: Oh, I love it. Sappho is such a trip.

DR: Yes, it is.

AK: So, Anne Carson in her translation talks about why the translation of the word “bittersweet” actually makes more sense to call it “sweetbitter.” It’s in her book, “Eros the Bittersweet.” Anne Carson says that the reason sweetbitter is a more accurate depiction of erotic love is because eros brings sweetness first, and then bitterness after that. When you fall in love with someone and then they leave you jilted, or they, you know, they leave you abandoned, the relationship begins in that sweetness and then is left in the bitterness. So there’s actually–that kind of simultaneous pain and pleasure in eros makes a lot more sense if you phrase it “sweetbitter.” So, love means suffering. It’s kind of like a blues. Eros is something that creeps up on you, you can’t fight it off, and Fragment 31 really kind of shows you just the way that eros can dissolve your limbs and take control of your body, and that’s why we named our podcast after this word, because it’s pretty classic Sappho.

LC: Very disco.

EB: It is very disco. Disco starts sweet and ends bitter. No, it’s all sweet. It’s all sweet.

LC: It’s all sweet.

AK: We were lucky enough to talk to Alex Purves. She’s a professor of Classics at UCLA and authored a book called, “Space and Time in Ancient Greek Literature,” and another book called, “Homer and the Poetics of Gesture.” And she talked with us about what makes Sappho’s work so special.

Alex Purves: She’s a shockingly good poet. Her use of language–it sounds so obvious to say, but–she has an incredibly kind of economic and–you might almost say understated–use of language, whereupon every word works in so many different directions. She fits within the genre of direct poetry. And she is in many ways similar to the kind of tradition around her of other poets. But she’s also very different, and she kind of sets herself off as different, like she will often kind of make either explicit or oblique statements in her poetry about how she’s doing something different to Homer, or the male tradition of poets. And so she kind of has a different set of interests, a different way of speaking about life, or about love, or about even her relationship with the gods, that is just kind of–on the one hand, it fits in with the culture, and it’s kind of part of that tradition and genre. But on the other hand, she’s doing something that’s really kind of unusual and different. And that has a lot to do, obviously, with her. She’s the only female poet that we really have from that period, in any particular detail or length.

EB: I love that quote from Alex because it really just illustrates how incredible Sappho was as a poet. Not just as a woman, but as the first lyric poet. And the influence she has today on poets like Alyse, who we are so lucky to have with us.

LC: Alyse, seeing as you’re our resident poet, and this episode is all about Sappho’s poems, and also just because we love you, we thought you might like to join us for the full episode. So would you like to keep hanging out with us?

AK: I’d love to keep hanging out with y’all.

LC: Amazing.

EB: Oh, wow.

AK: Always, forever.

EB: This is such a treat. This is the sweet part of bitter. The sweet part of Sweetbitter.

LC: It’s gonna be bitter when you leave us at the end, though.

AK: Oh, no.

LC: Yes, the next episode will be bitter without you.

AK: Glookoo–glookoo–I still can’t say it. I still can’t say it. Well thanks for letting me hang out with you guys for this whole episode, it’s really great to get to talk about Sappho and her poems. I think what’s really interesting that we’re going to hear about in this episode, is that in Sappho’s poems, love is such an intense experience, and it’s never simplified, and it’s never censored. Even when she’s writing ritual or religious poetry, you still just see tons and tons of erotic physical longing. And I just think that’s really, really interesting. And it’s something that makes Sappho’s work really, extremely powerful for us today.

AP: For some reason, is just sounds so ridiculous–it’s like you pick up Sappho and you start reading her, and it’s just–she speaks to you. I mean, she speaks to me. And I think that’s true of a lot of people. I also think that right now in our culture, where we don’t know how to talk about desire and love, it’s been so ruined by–it’s been kind of made trashy. Greeting cards, and Valentine’s Day, and romance. It’s become kind of boring to talk about love in our culture. And the thing about the Ancient Greeks is that they just really understood the violence of desire. It was like war. For Sappho too, it was like kind of going into battle. It’s just so strong and so unabashed. And the way they talk about desire is so unashamed, it’s almost like, because they have Aphrodite, it’s this kind of–just kind of baring yourself to the kind of violence that you’re suffering. It’s not always violence, but it can be understood as a kind of–I mean look at 31. She’s talking about this kind of almost dying in 31. And I think that we don’t have, anymore, a kind of way of expressing that form of desire. We don’t have the language anymore, for whatever reason. Maybe we have it in film, or we have it–but we’ve just kind of lost it a little bit in poetry. So the lyric poets will famously talk about, you know, being hit by eros. It’s like the wind coming down and knocking over an oak tree, or being smashed over the head with an axe. Like, it’s just not–it’s just a different set of imagery.

EB: It’s very violent.

AP: Exactly.

EB: Wow, that description of love as war, and how we, in our current society, have, you know, commodified love in a way, right? With the greeting cards and everything–that just hits so hard.

LC: Kind of like eros.

EB: Right? It hits so hard like eros. But I love it because even though the depiction of love in the media has been commodified, when you read Sappho’s poems, you can understand them. Because the human experience of love doesn’t equate with what you see on the greeting cards, right? Like you can relate to the wind knocking over an oak tree. It’s so good.

LC: So good.

EB: It’s so good.

AK: And it’s like, just for me, just really spooky that it’s that relatable, that you’re like, “Okay, this person who lived so many–I mean, two millennia ago–had the same feelings that I have.” I know we’ve said that before, but it just–it can never, like never ceases to fascinate me. And Ellie and I got to talk to a wonderful person named Jade Esteban Estrada, who’s a journalist, radio personality, and stand-up comedian. Out Magazine actually christened him the first gay Latin star. And he told us about how Sappho has continued to inspire him. Sappho actually inspired Jade to write a one-man show called, “Icons: The Lesbian and Gay History of the World,” which was a big hit in 2000. But his encounter with Sappho came entirely out of his personal experience.

Jade Esteban Estrada: A parallel that was happening in my life is that I had just gotten out of a relationship. And I was so incredibly heartbroken, so heartbroken. You know, that’s the thing about performers or people that, you know, get a lot of attention from the public. It’s sometimes harder for us when someone rejects us personally, and you’re like, “Wait a minute, but all these people, they love me. Why don’t you love me?” So I was so, like, heartbroken for the longest time. And I knew that I needed to go into my art to start to heal. And this is where I discovered Sappho. At the same time, I’m writing this show. I’m like, “I don’t even know what I want to write. I don’t even know how this is gonna work. Why did I say I was gonna do this?” You know, I’m just so upset about my relationship ending. And now I have the pressure of putting on this show. And theatrically, I know what I’m doing, but I don’t know if I could put a show like this together. And when I started reading about Sappho, and started to realize that expressing love and expressing desire and expressing all the different levels of love, and the things that happen, you know. And I was experiencing one of those things. I had experienced the things that Sappho was talking about in my relationship. And like, I couldn’t define how I felt because they were feelings, things that happened to my body, just like Sappho would talk about in the fragments of poems that we have about her. And then I started to get really inspired. Longing has always been a point of fascination for me in the spectrum of human emotions, because we cannot always have what we want. And sometimes it’s not the right time, and you cannot control people. So when it comes to love, longing is ever present. “Oh, you’re with another person,” or, “Oh, you’re on the other side of the room, and people are talking to you,” or, “Oh, we work together.” There’s just all sorts of things that would stop us from not getting what we truly want.

AP: She’s really interested in how to sketch a relationship. There’s some ways in which a lot of her poems are dealing with the kind of problem of having a conversation with somebody else–that idea of sketching a relationship through a dialogue. So she’s really interested in the second person voice. If you think about the way that she addresses Aphrodite, for example, in the first fragment, you know, when she calls Aphrodite down from the heavens. Or, as I mentioned, Fragment 94, where she addresses this woman who has to leave her and who’s sad at having to leave her. There’s a lot of poems where she’ll use the second person voice to kind of sketch the dynamics of a kind of intimacy. But then she will always kind of complicate that in some way by bringing in a kind of third point, like the third point of a triangle. So in Fragment 1, for example, the conversation between her and Aphrodite is already complicated by the fact that we’re being taken back to a previous conversation. And we’re discussing this third character, which is the woman Sappho loves and who is being rejected by. And so there’s always a kind of interesting turn in her poetry. The same could be said, the famous Fragment 31, the “phainetai moi” fragment, where, you know, it’s not only about how Sappho is affected by the girl or woman she’s sitting opposite. But it’s triangulated through her envy, or her jealousy, of the man sitting next to the woman. And so, I feel that she is really kind of unusually gifted at setting out the terms of an intimacy, always with the understanding that it’s impossible just to have a single straight dialogue between the “I” and the “you” voice. There’s another fragment where she talks about asking one character to pick up her lyre and sing of that character’s desire for another character. But it’s all put within the mouth of Sappho. And that just seems so classic of the way that Sappho kind of sets up that kind of–on the one hand, desire is very simple, right? Like she says in 16, it is that “the most beautiful thing is that which one loves.” It’s that simple. But on the other hand, it’s never simple. There’s always a kind of–whether it’s that the object has left, or there’s a kind of break in the contact with the object of desire, or there’s a kind of triangulation–there’s always some way in which she complicates that thing, which is also the most fundamental and simple thing, which is that we all love.

LC: So I feel like we’re just getting a lot more evidence here that Sappho is indeed a Shane, because there seemed to be a lot of love triangles.

EB: Yes, Sappho was always entangled with more than one person.

LC: Absolutely. And sometimes even goddesses. It’s wild.

EB: Sappho was in the middle, and it’s just like, let’s map out to Aphrodite–Aphrodite over here, who’s attached to–

LC: We 100% need a lesbian map.

EB: Yes, our Sappho lesbian map, out now.

LC: Alice Pieszecki, where are you?

EB: The Sappho chart.

AK: There’s always that thing that comes between that adds the third point to that triangle. For my wife and I right now, it’s our cat. Our cat has been like, really kind of all up in our relationship lately. You know, like, we’ll be hanging out and the cat just crawls between us on the couch. And I’m like, “Wait a minute. This is my wife.”

EB: So have you started writing poetry about your cat?

AK: I need to, I need to. It’s very important.

EB: I think you can definitely do some Sappho-inspired cat poetry.

AK: Thanks for the request.

EB: There’s nothing more gay than that.

AK: That sounds perfect.

EB: You’re welcome.

LC: I look forward to reading it, Alyse.

AK: Oh, man. Not as much as I look forward to writing it and sharing it with you.

LC: And on that note, we’ll be back after a quick break, so you can go and feed your cat.

AK: So, here’s the thing, though, you guys. In talking to Alex, we discovered that as much as we talk about eros in Sappho’s work, and as much as that’s her main jam and the main thing she’s interested in, that’s not the only thing she’s interested in.

AP: We tend to only know like three or four of her poems. There’s like four famous ones. I would say that the most amazing thing about Sappho is to actually read all of her fragments, like even the little two-line ones. Reading them all, you find so many kind of hidden treasures that nobody has–nobody really talks about, because the “big four” kind of dominate. I guess the other thing that we should say about Sappho is that, with these new discoveries, with this new poem called the “Brothers Poem,” which is talking about her brother being at sea on a merchant ship, and she’s waiting for him to come home, and she’s worried. The whole family is worried that he won’t come back safely. We have to kind of–we have to be really careful not to think that she’s only interested in questions of love and desire, because we tend to frame her that way. I think it’s also important to understand that she was interested in family, economy, the general kind of business of living and being in society, these questions do come up in her fragments. And I think it’s a bit of a surprise for us when we got the “Brothers Poem,” to realize that this is not a poem about desire and love. This is about your feelings for your brother and your worries about, you know, whether he’s gonna be okay in his job and he’s gonna make it home okay, and he’s going to–the kind of mercantile aspect of what it means to be a Greek. We probably should mention that that is important, too.

EB: You teach a class on Sappho. So when you are teaching her, what do you think resonates the most with the students?

AP: I think for the undergraduate class that I taught, which was a kind of freshman seminar in translation, I think that what the students found most surprising about Sappho was how much there was to talk about, like how we could spend a whole 50-minute period discussing ideas within a single fragment. There’s so much to unpack and to talk about, in translation as well as in Greek.

EB: Yeah, it’s almost like we could talk for 50 minutes on a podcast about all of her fragments.

LC: Oh my gosh, what would that be like?

EB: It’s so strange.

LC: Yeah, but I love listening to the way that students respond to Sappho through all of these professors. So we also spoke to Professor Marguerite Johnson about the simultaneous accessibility and sophistication of Sappho’s work.

Marguerite Johnson: So yes, she’s melodramatic, and she’s a drama queen, but the sophistication of her knowledge of Archaic Greek literature that came before her is phenomenal. And that adds a complexity. So in a way, her poems are quite deceptively simple and dramatic, but they’re so learned and they’re so intellectual.

AP: And, you know, one of the things that I find interesting about Sappho is that she will focus on very small, ephemeral, domestic, or feminine, but she kind of rescues them from the pejorative sense. She talks about, you know, putting flowers in your hair, she talks about trinkets, bracelets, cups, ‘jus.’ she’ll talk about silences and gestures, and moments that are kind of fleeting or transient, in a way that she’s not so worried about something having to be fixed, that the way that the epic tradition is more invested in fixing. You know, like for example, you could think about Fragment 44, where she talks about Andromache being brought into the city as the bride of Hector. And we know what’s going to happen to Andromache and to Hector, and we know the whole tradition of the Trojan War that is coming. But she focuses on the kind of moment of celebration that the items that Andromache has brought with her, that are mostly jewelry items, kind of small, but important to the family. And the kind of setting up the sound of the celebration, the song and the instruments going up into the air. And that kind of like–Sappho allowing her poetry to kind of dissolve into the air is very distinctive, I think, of her style. And it strangely matches really well with the state of her fragment. So people have talked about the way that’s the aesthetics of the fragment–even though obviously she didn’t compose in fragments, the fact that we have her in fragments is a kind of really interesting match. And it kind of, I think, does influence the way we read her, as well. It’s kind of blurring around the edges.

EB: That is one of the things that I just love about Sappho, just the importance she creates for womanhood, right? All of these feminine things and the importance that she gives to them and it makes me as a woman feel important. Like I’m sure she made the women in her time feel important, too. So I think it’s really cool.

LC: I mean, a lot of feminist international relations theory focuses on this: what men and women think are important. For example, what creates security? Is it guns and ships, or is it health care and education for all? And I think that even though Sappho’s poetry isn’t political, this is a good demonstration of that dichotomy.

AK: This private and intimate, you know, personal, individual style and approach of Sappho’s work is one of the things that is extremely revolutionary about her work. It’s not just something cool that we think is interesting in her work. It predates what poets do today. Poets today write as “I,” individual voices, about their individual feelings. So even if Sappho’s work, as many scholars think, was performed in public at ceremonies and rituals, the way she focuses on the particular and the specific, rather than the general, and the individual woman’s voice–this was the very first time–she was one of the first people, ever, to write first person emotional poetry. Not only the first time we hear a woman’s voice, not only the first time we hear, you know, the first gay woman talking about her desire and emotion. She’s also one of the first humans ever to express their emotions in art as an individual set of emotions and concerns. So this is huge, especially in a place like Greece that’s so community-oriented and public, and Homer is writing from, like, “divine inspiration” instead of his own personal experience. Sappho comes along and expresses individual thoughts and emotions. So she has this lyric “I” that’s truly revolutionary. And I think that that’s interesting on a lot of levels.

LC: If anybody was wondering what it was like to be with Alyse drunk at a bar, I just imagine this would be it. Like I saw you sitting next to somebody at the bar, yelling at them about how important Sappho is. And that is something that I would do, and I think that you would be the same.

AK: I would definitely be doing that. Because it’s just so exciting that the first time, really, in human history that, in a meaningful, way you get to see a lone voice expressing emotion, that it is, you know, a woman writing about her love for other women–this means that every time you hear a song or a poem today that’s an individual speaker expressing their individual thoughts or emotions, it seems influenced, but it’s women who loved women and wrote about that. That like gives me chills.

EB: I was getting goosebumps while you were talking, so I understand. Like, yes, keep it coming.

AK: Okay, so for the next few clips, you’re going to hear from Alex, Jade, and Diane all about the different ways that Sappho is important, starting with how straightforwardly she explains to us about women loving women desire in her work.

AP: I think Sappho is really unbelievably important on this issue, because, you know, so much of what we look at from antiquity or from Classical–from early Classical material is just coming from the male voice. And I think it’s really interesting to think about her, as we talked a little bit earlier, the way in which she carves out her voice. And she’s very, very effective at kind of setting herself up. You know, she doesn’t talk about herself so much as, “I am a woman, therefore,” but she says, “I am not this person, I’m not that person.” She’s very good at kind of setting up her voice. And that’s really interesting. And, you know, she talks just very straightforwardly about female desire. And female desire, both as a woman and for women. And I think that can be really refreshing. It just doesn’t seem to be any kind of an issue in Sappho’s poetry. As far as her world is concerned, she is forthright about how she desires and what and who she desires.

DR: And even though I can’t hear her sing it, the poetry itself is song. And the way her–what she talks about is women-centered. And it’s like we get this glimpse back in time, just this little window into what were women thinking about. We have, you know, so much what men were writing about and thinking about, and here we have these few glimpses of what was important to her, to her society, to her women. So we get this glimpse, and I love it.

EB: Why do you think, Diane, Sappho still matters today?

DR: Oh, my. That’s always the hardest question for me. I’ll give it a shot. I mean, one thing is beauty is always important. So a good song, a good love poem. Come on! And the way that it touches us now, that I can feel it.

JEE: Why she was important? Wow. I mean, to see the role that lyric poetry played in the first place as it, you know, trickled down into the modern era. You can look at any rap ballad, you can look at any rock ballad, or any song that’s popular, like on Sirius XM or something right now. And there are elements that we’ve learned. We’ve learned those styles of expression through lyric poetry, and she was one of the greats of that time period. We don’t express ourselves without being influenced by Sappho, and that’s how I would explain, from my perspective, what she taught us. In today’s society, we have so much more information about mental illness and mental health, that we have words now, to express how we feel, so that we don’t fight or get angry or use emotions, you know, for things that are not productive. She started humans on that path of expressing ourselves. It ratified those emotions. It was like–this is the human experience, it’s okay to express yourself this way. When you don’t know what to say about how you feel about this person in front of you. And if they make you feel like you can’t speak, or they make you sweat, I always come to that.

EB: And now, a taste of what’s to come on Sweetbitter.

Diane Rayor: The things that have survived, we have them written down on one piece on a pot shard, so a little fragment of a pot. We have them on parchment, so animal skin and papyrus, as well as ones that were just cited by grammarians, or other people. And so they got written down and recorded.

Jane Montgomery Griffiths: A little dispiriting when your greatest fame is your absence.

Chris Mason: There were nine volumes, each approach, and we just have this little tiny fragment.

AK: It’s tragic.

Chris Mason: That’s what’s great about this Tithonus poem, is that it brings us hope that there’ll be more poems recovered.

LC: Thanks for listening to Sweetbitter. Our next episode is going to be released in three weeks on the 3rd of December, as we’re taking a break for the holidays. So, Happy Thanksgiving, y’all. As always, stick around until the end of the podcast to hear our original song for Fragment 130, written and performed by us.

EB: This is probably my favorite out of all of them, so stay and listen.

LC: Because the video is also in person.

EB: Yes. And when we did it, it was, like, my mom was dancing with us. Like, I am sorry, I’m going to keep going on about this, but like I am a disco queen. Like I am a child of disco. I wish I lived in the 70s and I could just, like, be a disco baby. Because it makes me so happy.

LC: There also might be matching jumpsuits.

EB: Yes.

LC: Maybe.

EB: It’s gonna be great. If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review us. It really helps, especially written reviews on Apple Podcasts. Or, if you have the means, you can support us on Patreon. We have a new tier, “Tyche, Goddess of Fortune.”

LC: Hopefully, hopefully.

EB: She’ll bring you lots of fortune, right? And there’s a ton of bonus content, including bonus lesbian poetry readings with Alyse, song downloads, and, if you join at the “Hera, Queen of Olympus” tier, Alyse will even write a poem for you.

LC: Wow, wow.

EB: I want that.

LC: Yeah, me too. I still don’t have a poem. Hint, hint. Thank you so much for our new patrons this week: John, Clarissa, Alice, Lily, Ellen, and Crystal. We love you. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at @sweetbitterpod, or contact us on our website, sweetbitterpodcast.com.

EB: Sweetbitter is an independent production by me, Ellie Brigida, Alyse Knorr, and Leesa Charlotte. Our artwork is by Istela Illustrated, music is by Lyre ‘n’ Rhapsody. Special thanks to Chris Mason and Old Songs, Marguerite Johnson, Jade Esteban Estrada, Alex Purves, and Diane Rayor for sharing their love of Sappho with us.

LC: You can read more about our guests and where to find them on our website in the “About” section. Also on our website, you can now find Sweetbitter merch! So we have Sappho nail clippers, we have a plectrum. We have tees, we have totes, oh my!

EB: Can you maybe just–why do we have nail clippers? What’s the significance of that?

LC: For reasons, Ellie.

EB: Okay, great. So we have nail clippers for reasons. We have plectrums, which are picks.

LC: Also for reasons.

EB: Also for reasons, which is a guitar pick. The pick is really cool.

LC: It’s so beautiful.

EB: It has an engraving on it of one of Sappho’s poems. So, if you want to feel like the coolest queer girl ever, playing your guitar with a Sappho plectrum, like come on!

LC: I think it would be like the perfect Christmas gift for your girlfriend, honestly.

EB: Yes, agreed.

LC: Like, who doesn’t want a Sappho plectrum for Christmas?

EB: I want one. I’m probably gonna get one. I’m like, “How much money can I spend on this podcast?” And we also have tees and totes, which, also a great gift. The tees–we have an eros tee, and we also have totes with our logo, which I know I love the logo. I know we’re getting a lot of really good feedback on the logo.

LC: It’s beautiful.

EB: So if you want the logo on a tote bag, it’s a pretty cool graphic to get, yeah.

LC: Absolutely. I also love the tee that we have, which is “Sappho’s Girls” tee, which says “Anaktoria and Athis and Gongola.” So if you want to have a really obscure Ancient Greek lesbian t-shirt, we got you.

EB: Yes. I love it. And now, without further ado, our song for Fragment 130.