Sunset ^beta

Chapter Text

First: I am not a historian, a classicist, a sociologist, a musician, a queer theorist, or an anthropologist; I’m a librarian by training but not (yet, please let it be a yet, please send me good career vibes) by profession. I do not speak Greek, and I definitely can’t read it. Any mistakes I have made should be attributed to my own ignorance and misinterpretation, and not that of the scholars whose work has been so generously shared with the world through publications and public institutions. While I primarily used my university’s library to access books I cite, all of them should be accessible through any public library in the United States through inter-library loan programs, and articles are accessible to the public through JSTOR with an account. (With the exception of Ancient Sex: New Essays, which I did not access directly, but the chapter cited is accessible through JSTOR.)

This chapter is subdivided into three parts: my notes and explanations, a listing of specific verses from which I quoted or took inspiration, and the bibliography.

Research Note:

This fic is intended to be set on the island of Lesbos/Lesvos/Mytilene in approximately 600 BCE, while the poet Sappho was active. Sappho is perhaps the most famous woman of Ancient Greece, a person whose identity and relationships to gender, sexuality, and the literary canon has been under constant debate and revision for more than 2,500 years. Today, her legacy is inextricable from our understanding of both ancient and modern female homoeroticism and homosexuality. Our words for female sexuality, sapphic and lesbian, both derive from Sappho of Lesbos, and her poetry has resonated with and inspired many of our queer foremothers. This is for good reason: among her corpus are a number of beautiful and resonant poetic lines proclaiming the poet-narrator’s love and desire for women, proclaiming the love and erotic desire of girls for their female peers and mentors, and many invocations of Aphrodite that are, themselves, portraits of her feminine beauty through a female gaze.

When I first started this fic, I knew I had to incorporate Sappho into it. I have done this in three ways: first, by incorporating a performance of her poetry into the plot; second, by using the setting of her Ode to Aphrodite (LP 2) for the setting of the erotic action; third, by quoting her both directly and indirectly throughout. These quotations are labelled in the first chapter using hover-text, and a full list is below.

To better understand how female homosexuality was viewed in Sappho’s time, I turned primarily to Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome by Sandra Boehringer, originally published in French in 2007 but not translated into English until 2021, and the collection Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World, edited by Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Lisa Auanger. Like most things from the ancient world, what comes down to us is very patchy, and like most things in the ancient world involving women, it has been filtered through thousands of years of male gaze, decisions, commentary, and silence. Sappho’s legacy is the largest part, but not the entirety; other elements, including a visual representation of a clearly female-female amorous exchange on a ceramic plate held at the Archaeological Museum of Thera in Santorini, do exist, and from them the scholars I have read have reached a few conclusions:

1. Female-female relationships did exist (I know, water is wet, but scholars do have to establish these kinds of things! Can’t study what you don’t know exists!);
2. They do not appear to have necessarily conformed to the same kind of hierarchical structure as man-boy and man-woman relationships, although there is the potentiality of hierarchical woman-girl relationships which mirror the man-boy relationship, especially in Sparta;
3. This was an acceptable part of society, as evidenced by its inclusion in nationalistic and cultic songs in Sappho’s corpus in particular, as well as in some later humoristic poetry that appears to be in conversation with Sappho’s legacy;
4. It was not part of the male erotic imagination, as evidenced by the total silence on the subject by men, who make up the vast majority of the surviving corpus.

The ceramic plate, pictured below, was particularly inspirational to me. Boehringer’s description of it contextualized it beautifully, and I copied it closely in my writing. According to Boehringer, the exchanging of garlands and the touching of the chin are what mark this out as explicitly a love scene. In addition to the subjects both being depicted as female, the other thing that makes this unique is that the women are presented in equal height, their eyes on an equal line. Generally, in similar scenes involving man-boy and man-woman relationships, Boehringer says that the man is depicted as having higher status through literal positioning of him as taller than his counterpart. In ideal sexual relations as conceived by Ancient Grecian society, hierarchy was intertwined with penetration, and the man would penetrate the boy or woman who was his sexual partner. As I sought to portray Aziraphale and Crowley as social equals within the context in this society, like the women in the plate, I avoided acts that would include penetration during the part of the story where they are having sex.

In my understanding of how poetic performance fits into Greek society, I am indebted to A Companion to Greek Lyric, which I did not read in full but did read several chapters of by many different authors. Adrian Kelly’s chapter, Epic and Lyric, explains the performance contexts of lyrical poetry, as Sappho wrote, pointing out that while lyric poetry is generally associated with more private contexts like symposia, “choral lyric poetry […] obviously found a natural home in public performances.” As one of the few things about Sappho the historical person that can be considered relatively settled is that she certainly wrote choral poetry, it has seemed likely to many scholars and interlocutors throughout history that she was a chorus leader. Athanassaki’s chapter The Lyric Chorus was helpful to me in understanding the role chorus played in civic and religious life in Ancient Greece. Formal performances were given frequently for all kinds of civil and religious events, most notably for festivals, for both public and private occasions.

Sappho’s Fragment 2 is a beautiful poem, mostly complete, that envisions an idealized temple to the goddess in a sacred grove, complete with apple trees, blooming roses, and a babbling brook flowing through a meadow. It’s a gorgeous poetic setting, which Annette Giesecke explores and explains in methodical detail in her chapter Lyric Space: Sappho and Aphrodite’s Sanctuary. I used Fragment 2, Giesecke’s exploration of its spatiality in the literary mind, and the way its elements interact and intertwine with Good Omens and its basis in the English Christian tradition to, I hope, intertwine the ideas of the sacred grove of Aphrodite and the garden of Eden. While the association of apples and Crowley is obvious, the use of the rose is less common in Christian iconography. In my own mind, the two most obvious meanings of the rose in the English context are that of love and discord intertwined, exemplified by the rose in Romeo and Juliet that represents their love despite the war between their families: “’Tis but thy name that is my enemy / […] That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” I thought this a very fitting flower for the fraught relationship between Crowley and Aziraphale, as star-crossed as lovers can be, and conceived of this night spent together as analogous to Romeo and Juliet’s singular night together before the tragedy tragedizes.

Apples and roses are recurring motifs in Sappho’s poetry, as Aphrodite is the god she most often references; so are nightingales. Just as our Ineffables have special associations with nightingales through the song “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” and the English canon is shot through with nightingales signifying the safety and anonymity of the cover of darkness including in Romeo and Juliet, Sappho references nightingales to invoke both the cover of night and the coming of spring. In fact, she even calls the nightingale the angelos of spring, a word which is usually translated in this context as “herald” or “messenger” but can also be translated as “angel,” as Ben Johnson, an Elizabethan playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare, did when quoting Sappho in his incomplete play The Sad Shepherd. It’s also interesting to me to note that daimon, the word which would eventually become the English demon, in archaic Greece referred to minor gods, including Eros.

My method of selection for which translations of Sappho to use was very scientific: I went to the public library, located the poetry, and checked out the two collections that were on the shelf. Unfortunately, this means that the translation most people are familiar with, by Anne Carson in 1954, was not referenced in the writing of this fic. Happily, however, I found both Willis Barnesworth’s and Jim Powell’s translations more than sufficient for my purposes. Barnesworth’s collection included a lot of interesting information about his translation process, Sappho’s legacy in Greek poetic canon, the history of the fragments of her poetry which have survived and which have been destroyed, and some references to other translations, which is where I discovered Johnson’s use of Sappho. Powell’s 2019 translation included several fragments that have surfaced since Carson’s 1954 translation, including two that were discovered in 2014. I discovered Klinck’s Woman’s Songs in Ancient Greece late in the process, largely after I had already quoted Barnesworth and Powell all over the place, but her translations of other poets helped me understand more fully the role of women in general and of Sappho’s positioning in particular within the world of archaic Greek lyrical poetry.

As a final note, I used the terms peplos and chiton to refer to Aziraphale and Crowley’s dresses rather than Doric chiton and Ionian chiton. Following the rough timeline from Smith & Sneed’s blog post for UC Boulder’s Classics department, Aziraphale is lagging behind fashion by a good fifty years, but if she keeps lagging, in another hundred or so she’ll be back on trend!

What follows is a complete list of all poetry I directly or indirectly quote in this fic. I also took much inspiration from Sappho’s corpus as a whole, the play Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare, The Bible, and, of course, Good Omens.

Poetry used:

• “Hagesikhora, blossoms on her head / like imperishable gold. / And the silver look of her face— / What can I tell you openly?” Partheneion, Alcman, trans. Gregory Nagy, lines 53-56.
• “It is true: all the royal purple / in the world cannot resist. / No fancy snake-bracelet, / made of pure gold, no headdress / from Lydia, the kind that girls / with tinted eyelids wear to make themselves fetching.” Partheneion, Alcman, trans. Gregory Nagy, lines 64-69.
• “like some star shooting across the sparkling heavens, or a golden sapling, or a soft feather.” Fragment 26, Alcman, trans. Claude Calame, lines 66-68; from Boehringer, trans. Preger.
• LP 2, Sappho, which is too long to quote here, and which I referenced from Barnestone, Powell, and Giesecke.
• “Night // Virgins / with all night long sing / of the love between you and your bride / in her violet robe. // Wake and call out young men / of your age, / and tonight we shall sleep less than / the bright-voiced nightingale.” LP 30, Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone
• “Please, my goddess, goldencrowned Aphrodite, / let this lot be mine.” LP 33, Sappho, trans. Jim Powell
• “I long and yearn for” LP 36, Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone
• To Eros, “You burn us” LP 38, Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone
• “__] but clever high-lace / sandals hid her feet, a delightful piece of Lydian” LP 39, Sappho, trans. Jim Powell
• “Eros arrived from heaven wrapped in a purple mantle.” LP 54, Sappho, trans. Jim Powell
• “Yet I love refinement and Eros has got me / brightness and the beauty of the sun.” LP 58c, Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone
• “blame / delicate / Artemis” LP 84, Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone
• “Never yet, O Irana, have I met / anyone more aggravating than you are.” LP 91, Sappho, trans. Jim Powell
• “In Sardis / her thoughts turn constantly to us here, // to you like a goddess. She was happiest / in your song. // Now she shines among Lydian women / as after sunset / the rosy-fingered moon // surpasses all the stars, and her light reaches / equally across the salt sea / and over meadows steeped in flowers. // Lucent dew pours out profusely / on blooming roses, / on frail starflowers and florid honey clover.” LP 96, lines 1-12, Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone
• “But a girl / with hair yellower than a torch flame / need wear // a wreath of blooming / flowers, or lately maybe / a colorful headband // from Sardis / or some Ionian city” LP 98a, Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone
• “Of all stars the most beautiful” LP 104b, Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone
• LP 136, Sappho
  • “spring’s messenger, the nightingale with her voice of longing” trans. Jim Powell
  • “Nightingale with your lovely voice / you are the herald of spring” trans. Willis Barnstone
  • “The dear good angel of the Spring, the Nightingale” Ben Johnson’s paraphrase in The Sad Shepherd.
• “mingled with colors of every kind” LP 152, Sappho, trans. Jim Powell
• “The moon appeared in her fullness / when women took their place around the altar” LP 154, Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone
• “Coming to Aphrodite’s temple, let us see / her image, how it is adorned with gold. / Polyarchis placed it there, for she gained great / wealth from her own radiant body.” Nossis, Epigram 5, trans. Anne Klinck.
• Act II Scene II and Act II Scene V, Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare.

Bibliography:

Alcman (2016). Partheneion (Nagy, G., Trans.). The Center for Hellenic Studies. (Original work published circa 700 BCE). https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/alcman-partheneion-sb/.

Boehringer, S. (2021). Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome (Anne Preger, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 2007).

Gilhuly K. (2015). Lesbians Are Not from Lesbos, in R. Blondell and K. Ormand (eds.), Ancient Sex: New Essays, Ohio State University Press. http://www.jstor.com/stable/j.ctv3s8shv.7.

Green, E. (2022). Subjects, Objects, and Erotic Symmetry in Sappho’s Fragments. In N. S. Rabinowitz and L. Auanger (eds.), Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World. University of Texas Press.

Klinck, A. (2008). Woman’s Songs in Ancient Greece. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Sappho (2009). The Complete Poems of Sappho (Barnestone, W., Trans., 2^nd edition). Shambhala Productions. (Original work published circa 600 BCE).

Sappho (2019). The Poetry of Sappho: An expanded edition, featuring newly discovered poems (Powell, J., Trans., 2^nd edition). Oxford University Press. (Original work published circa 600 BCE).

Shakespeare, W. (1597). Romeo and Juliet. https://shakespeare.mit.edu/romeo_juliet/full.html.

Skinner M. (2002). Aphrodite Garlanded: Eros and Poetic Creativity in Sappho and Nossis. In N. S. Rabinowitz and L. Auanger (eds.), Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World. University of Texas Press.

Smith, S. & Sneed, D. (2018). Women's Dress in Archaic Greece: The Peplos, Chiton, and Himation. University of Colorado, Boulder Department of Classics. https://www.colorado.edu/classics/2018/06/18/womens-dress-archaic-greece-peplos-chiton-and-himation.

Swift, L. (2022). A Companion to Greek Lyric. John Wiley & Sons.

World History Encyclopedia (2021). Polychrome Plate from Thera. https://www.worldhistory.org/image/14202/polychrome-plate-from-thera/. https://www.worldhistory.org/uploads/images/14202.jpg.