Sappho’s looks, and how Sappho looks at beauty

Abstract

Reading the words of Sappho’s songs, we cannot picture her looks, that is, we cannot imagine what she looked like—I say it here in colloquial English. But we can readily imagine what she looked at—especially the beautiful things, the beautiful people. In this essay, I can show that Sappho’s looks in the ancient world—the way she looked—could be pictured as a mirroring of the way she looked at beauty. For examples, I will focus on two faces. The first example comes from visual art. It is the face of a beautiful young woman painted on an Athenian vase produced in the early fifth century BCE. For my introductory illustration, I show a close-up, at the end of this paragraph. We see here a beautiful woman who is identified, by lettering painted next to her, as Sappho. As for the second example, it comes from verbal art—from a song of Sappho. It is the face of another beautiful young woman, named Anaktoria, envisioned in Song 16 of Sappho. Relevant to my focusing on these two faces of two beautiful women is the Greek word prósōpon, which is actually used at line 18 of Song 16, and the face in this context belongs to Anaktoria, but the view of this face also belongs, indirectly, to the viewer of this face, who is the speaking “I” of Sappho. I say it this way because the Greek noun prósōpon, like the English verb look, can refer to a two-way stream of vision—you see what you look at through your own eyes and you can be seen as what you look like through the eyes of someone who looks back at you. In other words, the prósōpon both projects and reflects vision, and that is why this word means ‘mask’ as well as ‘face’, since ancient masks were conventionally viewed as projections of an identity other than yours, not concealments of your own identity.