“I Shall — #$% You And *@$# You”
Grappling With Censorship as a Queer Classicist
When I first learned that Catullus famously had an affair with a woman named Lesbia, I thought, Well, I can guess why she didn’t like him back. But Catullus’ Lesbia, as it turned out, was not a lesbian. Instead, both Lesbia and lesbians have a common origin: the poet Sappho, who lived on Lesbos and was therefore a Lesbian (note the capital L). Catullus was a fan of Sappho, and so he named his beloved after her. Gay women are also fans of Sappho, and so we named ourselves after her.
These two poets, Sappho and Catullus, have another thing in common: both express homoerotic desire in their poetry and, until recently, both were censored and misrepresented for it, even by experts of Latin and Greek.
Classics as a discipline has a history of exclusivity. Many of the scholars who were most influential in Classics over the past several centuries also systematically denied entry into the field to women and minorities, while at the same time erasing minority voices from antiquity. Lately, we’ve also seen internet misogynists accuse feminist classicists of trying to erase the Western canon. But, in fact, the opposite is true. Minority viewpoints have always been integral to the Western canon, even while scholars ignored, obscured, and censored them. The works of Sappho and Catullus were both subjected to this process because of their homoerotic content, deemed unacceptable by generations of classical scholars.
It has been dismaying to me to learn the parts played by classicists in suppressing and erasing certain voices in antiquity, especially when it came to the voices that most closely echoed my own. Sappho’s poem 1, for example, which is the only complete poem of what were once nine books of poetry, has Sappho beseeching Aphrodite to make her beloved love her in return. Aphrodite, amused that Sappho has found herself in this predicament yet again, assures her that by tomorrow, the roles will have switched and the beloved will chase Sappho in turn.
It’s fortunate for me that I had a number of beautiful and accurate English translations of Sappho to enjoy alongside the Greek. But earlier generations of queer women were not so lucky. The earliest translations of Sappho for European English-speakers come from the 18th and 19th centuries, and almost all handle Sappho’s homoeroticism in the same way: by censoring the gender of the beloved and mistranslating her as male.
A 1711 translation by the poet Ambrose Philips, for example, renders the beloved in poem 1 as “a gentle youth.” When Aphrodite comforts Sappho, she says, “Though now he shuns thy longing arms / He soon shall court thy slighted charms.” Pleasant rhyming aside, this is clearly a mistranslation of the Greek, since in another line, a feminine adjective marks the beloved as female. Compare Anne Carson’s more accurate 2002 version of the same lines: “For if she flees, soon she will pursue.”
I have found one instance of an uncensored translation of poem 1 from before the 20th century, in the second edition of Sappho by Henry Thornton Wharton. John Addington Symonds, a critic and historian in 19th century England, contributed his translation of poem 1 to this book. He rendered the above line as, “Yea, for though she flies, she quickly shall chase thee.” Homoeroticism restored!
Perhaps Symonds’ identity as an openly gay man influenced his translation. His book Male Love: A Problem in Greek Ethics and Other Writings includes the first printed instance of the word “homosexual” in English (borrowing the term from German). But Symonds’ translation of Sappho turns out not to be an exception after all, but the rule: in the third edition of Wharton’s text, Sappho’s beloved in Symond’s translation is amended to “he.” The preface to the third edition mentions the change, but without explanation. I wonder how the conversation between editor and translator went, with one fighting for and one against a lesbian love story. Whatever arguments Symonds may have put forward must have been quelled, because the inaccurate translation won out.
Ella Haselswerdt, in an essay published here on Eidolon, has a good explanation for why Wharton and others felt driven to misrepresent the love story in poem 1 as heteroerotic: “[T]here is something deeply threatening to a sadly common iteration of the male ego about women finding their pleasure in a context devoid of men.” Where there is romance between two women, ego prompts certain men to insert a man into the narrative.
And in fact, we see this insertion even in antiquity. After Sappho’s death, the story spread that she spurned women once she fell in love with a man named Phaon. In the (likely pseudo-) Ovidian epistle from Sappho to Phaon, Sappho renounces all the women she has loved and pledges herself to Phaon alone. So I guess Sappho just hadn’t found the right man!
Any queer women who have walked down a busy sidewalk holding hands have met with the quotidian version of this phenomenon: street harassers who assume your affection is for their benefit. Two women romantically involved, such men suppose, must deep down feel something lacking, and they often volunteer to fill that invented void. At its darkest extreme, the notion that two women can be content without a man has prompted violence and sexual assault.
But there’s also the more banal explanation for censorship of Sappho: editors were at the will of their publishers and audiences. It might have brought social censure or worse to publish a poem about same-sex love in 1711, when Ambrose Philips was writing. But by the late 19th century, when the terms “Sapphic” and “lesbian” were gaining popularity and cementing the connection between Sappho and female homosexuality in the Western world, classicists were no longer bowing to public pressure to de-queer Sappho. Instead, we see classicists ardently spearheading the movement to straighten her out.
And so, the argument came along that Sappho was not crooning gayly to other women, but rather, she was a teacher singing to her students. Yes, girls probably flocked from all over the Mediterranean to learn from Headmistress Sappho, everything from music to poetry and worship of Aphrodite — but a chaste Aphrodite. No sex stuff.
The idea of a virtuous Sappho-led boarding school was circulating already in the 19th century, but it was in the 20th century that that giant of classical scholarship, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff took up Sappho’s cause with all the zeal of a crusader. Wilamowitz was apparently incensed by a book called Les Chansons de Bilitis — an elaborate forgery claiming to be the true poems of an ancient Greek Lesbian named Bilitis, who was also a lower-case-l lesbian. Bilitis’ poems narrated the homoerotic entanglements of the women on Lesbos including, of course, Sappho.
In his 1913 Sappho und Simonides, Wilamowitz dedicates half a chapter to debunking the claims of Bilitis. Regarding what had come to be called lesbianism, he says, “Sappho has nothing to do with it.” Moreover, homoerotic love between women “has always been considered an aberration, an exception, almost a teras [Greek for monstrosity].” Sappho cannot be one of these types of women, for she is “a noble lady, a wife, a mother.”
While it’s true that the 10th century encyclopedia we call the Suda identifies a husband of Sappho, and her own poems acknowledge a daughter, neither of these identifications negates Sappho’s homoerotic poetry. And the suggestion that one cannot be both a lesbian and “a noble lady,” if you ask this lower-case-l lesbian, tells us more about Wilamowitz and his hang-ups than about Sappho.
Wilamowitz’ pearl-clutching rejection of a homoerotic Sappho was rebuked over the following decades. As Denys Page put it, “the [schoolteacher] theory finds no support whatever in anything worthy of the name of fact.” And it’s true: nowhere in Sappho’s fragments is there any mention of schools or teaching. But that didn’t stop the idea from taking firm hold. Various fragments have been bolstered as proof of Sappho the schoolteacher, like 131, which reads (Carson’s translation):
Atthis, to you it has become hateful,
To think of me and you fly off to Andromeda.
Under Wilamowitz’ theory, this becomes a poem about a student, Atthis, leaving Sappho’s school for a rival school, led by Andromeda. Never mind that the poem does not say this.
Bilitis was an important moment in the history of homosexuality. Decades on, queer women were still reading and celebrating Sappho, seeing a mirror in her poetry just as I did. But while my queer foremothers were celebrating Sappho, my classicist forefathers were going out on tenuous limbs to discredit the association between Lesbos and lesbians. After Wilamowitz, a new argument went that Sappho exemplified a female version of the pederastic erastes-eromenos relationship, parallel to what we see among men in the Symposium of Plato. Therefore, Sappho’s relationships with women were a historical circumstance, and “one cannot infer that Sappho was a lesbian at heart.”
Other scholars situate Sappho squarely within the male gaze with the suggestion that she was having sex with the women she sings to, but only to prepare them for marriage to men. And then, I’ve probably never felt more alienated from my field than when I read a 1970 article in Classical Quarterly, in which the idea was espoused that Sappho’s apparent homosexuality actually made it more likely that she was a schoolteacher, because homosexuals tend to choose professions where they can be around children, so that they can corrupt them.
At the time I was researching censorship of Sappho, I had only heard the name Wilamowitz in a venerated, almost deified tone. Learning how he and other greats would have closed the door to me — or, at least, held wildly offensive opinions about people like me — was disillusioning, to say the least. As a classicist, how do I grapple with this heritage? And more importantly, how do I make classics even more inclusive? How do I prove to incoming minds that ours is a world that celebrates diversity?
I don’t have any definite solutions, other than to shed light on past censorship of the classics. And Sappho is not an isolated case, nor was censorship of queerness reserved for women alone. In fact, a pattern began to emerge for me when I looked into censorship of Catullus. Aside from the above mentioned Lesbia, Catullus composed four amorous poems to Juventius, whose name literally means, “young man.” As in the case of Sappho, scholars over the last several centuries have censored Catullus’s homoeroticism.
In one of the more fanciful instances of censorship, we have an English book called the Adventures of Catullus from 1707. In the introduction to poem 24, the first poem addressed to Juventius, the editor La Chapelle explains that in Catullus’ social circle, there was a woman named Crastinia, whom Catullus and his friends thought resembled a certain young man. “The Verses that he made upon her were inscribed to Juventius; and there were but very few that understood the Mystery.”
So Juventius was apparently a nickname for a girl named Crastinia who looked very much like a boy, named Juventius. And who was Crastinia? I have no idea. She isn’t mentioned anywhere in Catullus’ poetry or anywhere else in classical literature, as far as I can find. I suppose I am one of the many who did not “under[stand] the Mystery.”
A less imaginative approach to the Juventius poems in the 18th and 19th centuries was simply to obscure the gender of Juventius, as we saw with Sappho poem 1. An 1821 translation of poem 48 by George Lamb is entitled “To his love,” and where we have the vocative Juventi in the Latin, Lamb gives us the vague, “my Fair.” On the other hand, Lamb’s poem 24 keeps an explicitly male Juventius as the addressee, but strips the poem of its erotic tone. As a result, there is no indication that these two poems, “To his love” and “To Juventius: On his choice of a friend” are addressed to the same person.
Likewise, in 1867, James Cranstoun turned Juventius into “a beauty.” And “the flower of the Juventian family” in poem 24 is pruned to, “O loveliest flow’ret!” Meanwhile, his introduction claims to abhor censorship and misinterpretations. Just as we saw with Sappho, Catullus’ homoeroticism was either mistranslated as a heterosexual love story or explained away as a platonic relationship.
But surely professional classicists were aware of the ruse, right? Editions for scholars couldn’t possibly get away with such blatant expurgation. To answer this, I turned to the 1889 commentary by classicist Robinson Ellis. Ellis, whose personal life was whispered about, includes all four Juventius poems. But even if the Latin is uncensored, Ellis nevertheless shies away from defining the relationship between Catullus and Juventius. In the commentary for poem 99, about Catullus feeling rejected by Juventius, Ellis withholds judgment, but refers to another scholar, who claimed that the Juventius poems “are unreal” and “serve as a contrast to the real love-poems, the Lesbia series.”
So professional classicists, too, found ways to write off the homoeroticism in Catullus. This tradition of censorship finally met with some disapproval, thankfully, after the heavily censored 1961 commentary of C. J. Fordyce. Fordyce’s brusque preface announces, “a few poems which do not lend themselves to comment in English have been omitted.” By “a few,” Fordyce meant 32 poems — out of a corpus of only 113. Among the omitted were two of the four Juventius poems — in fact, the two in which Catullus expresses affection toward Juventius. The poems about jealousy, which earlier translators had neatly turned into statements about social status and friendship, were kept.
But at this point, the classical community was less willing to embrace the moralistic censorship of the poems. Eduard Fraenkel’s book review opened with a quotation: “Is the poet castrated in English for adults?” (Ironically enough, this is a quote by the virtuous Sappho-defender Wilamowitz, who originally made this comment about censorship of Aristophanes’ Wasps.) This rejection of censorship came just a few years after Page’s dismissal of schoolteacher Sappho and marks the start of a change toward more open-minded scholarship. This change reflects a Western society that was inching toward tolerance of homosexuality.
It is no surprise that translators and editors ducked and weaved and bent over backwards to present the poems of Catullus as morally adherent to their eras. Already in the early Renaissance period, humanists like Politian were bombarded with homophobic attacks just for approaching the sensual and sexual poems of Catullus. So later scholars skipped or skewed poems that were “objectionable,” had “traces of turpitude,” that “could not be endured,” or “do not lend themselves to comment.” All these aspersions and more have justified the omission and distortion of Catullus’ love affair with Juventius.
One problem with Sappho and Catullus is that neither work has come down to us complete. Sappho’s poems are in tatters, and the book of Catullus’ poetry is flooded with textual issues. On top of this, we know next to nothing about the poets themselves. And though every classicist is trained not to take the poet’s narrative persona as an accurate representation of the poet, we can’t really help it. When I read Sappho, I see myself. Other readers who are not comfortable with the idea of gay ladies may read Sappho and imagine a Victorian schoolmistress.
Everyone is entitled to their own interpretation, but it becomes a problem when heteronormative interpretations intentionally and moralistically drown out the rare, minority voices from antiquity and encourage the viewpoint that Greece and Rome were only great because of straight, white, cisgender men. The truth is that Catullus’ poems to Juventius are not very different from his poems written to Lesbia. And Sappho’s verses to women are homoerotic. I consider it my job as a classicist and an angry queer person to expose and actively undo the centuries of censorship and erasure and to paint, for the next generation, a more colorful and accurate picture of antiquity.
Miriam Kamil is a PhD candidate in classical philology at Harvard.
