an initiatory character that prepared young people for their future roles within the polis, girls as wives
and mothers, boys as citizens and soldiers. In Alcman’s poem, attention is called to the musical skill and
especially the physical attractiveness of the members of the chorus, and two girls in particular are singled
out as challenging each other for recognition as most beautiful and desirable. The rivalry among the
members of the chorus is, however, necessarily subordinated to the requirement that these young girls
perform in harmony, as they sing and dance together to the words and music that Alcman composed to
highlight the girls’ attractiveness. Interestingly, the girls’ charm is conveyed by Alcman’s comparing them
to fleet horses. Here the comparison does not serve a satiric purpose, as it does in Semonides. Rather,
Alcman’s choristers are sleek racehorses, competing for the esteem and admiration of the onlookers:
For Hagesichora outshines the rest,
like a filly in a flock of sheep,
a sturdy, prize-winning filly with hammering hooves,
the sort that soars aloft in one’s dreams.The members of Alcman’s chorus are obviously drawn from the leading Spartan families of the day, for
only girls from such families would have had the leisure and the opportunity for the kind of training in
music and dance that Alcman’s poetry demands. It is, in fact, primarily as a vehicle for socialization and
education that these choruses, and the songs written for them, existed. In the absence of formal schools,
the role of preparing boys and girls, particularly those of the leading families, to take their place as adults
in the polis fell to less formal circles, led by mature men and women of refined taste and literary
cultivation. One such, apparently, was the poet Sappho, who was a contemporary of Alcman’s but who
spent her life on the other side of the Aegean Sea, on the island of Lesbos. The philosopher Plato, who
had the opportunity to read much more of her poetry than survives to us and who himself was possessed
of an exceptional literary sense, suggested that the traditional number of the Muses should be increased so
as to include Sappho as the tenth. What little of her poetry does survive is dazzling beyond description
and amply justifies Plato’s enthusiasm. Like Alcman, she writes in her own local dialect, but in Sappho’s
case this is the Aeolic dialect, and she composes in a variety of meters that are characteristically Aeolic.
The most frequent subject of her passionate verse is the expression of erotic desire, often her own and
often directed toward other women or girls. (It is from these expressions in Sappho’s verse that in English
the word “lesbian” has come to have its current meaning.) In one tantalizing fragment, Sappho compares
the radiance of a girl to that of
the quince-apple at the end of the branch, the one
right at the very end, the one the fruit-pickers missed.
No! They can’t have missed it – they just couldn’t reach it.It is difficult to tell whether the female objects of Sappho’s passion are women of Sappho’s own age or
are unmarried girls who perhaps sang and danced in the choruses that performed some of Sappho’s songs.
Indeed, it is difficult, if not impossible, to tell in most instances whether a given song of Sappho’s was
performed, or was intended for performance, by a chorus or by a single performer, presumably Sappho
herself.
In the case of the song of Alcman’s discussed above there can be no doubt that it was composed for
performance by a chorus, because the girls who performed it are individually named in the text of the
poem, and the same is likely to be true of some or even many of Sappho’s songs. In Alcman’s song the
girls of the chorus direct expressions of erotic feeling toward one another and toward the female leaders
of the chorus. What we are dealing with, then, is poetry composed within a loosely organized social and
educational context, the socialization and the education taking the form of learning and publicly