Have Scholars Really Only Just Now Figured Out That Sappho’s Supposed Husband’s Name Is Dirty Joke?

As many readers are already aware, I am a queer woman who is currently a graduate student in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies. For a couple of years now, I have been following the subreddit r/SapphoAndHerFriend, which is named after the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho, who is known for her homoerotic work, and is dedicated to showcasing humorous or mildly infuriating examples of queer erasure. It’s an amusing space. Unfortunately, people are constantly making posts in the subreddit about Sappho that are, shall we say, factually dubious. For instance, users frequently make posts in which they make fun of “historians” for having supposedly believed for ages in total earnestness that Sappho had a husband named “Kerkylas of Andros,” which they say translates as “Dick Allcock from the Isle of Man.”

Posts of this kind are a frequent occurrence, but this one happens to be the most recent. These posts regularly ignore the fact that the claim they mock “historians” for having supposedly believed only occurs in one extremely late, notoriously uncritical premodern source and modern scholars have generally recognized it as an obscene joke for nearly 170 years. Additionally, I think that people should be aware of some rather discomforting information about the man whose translation of the name they keep sharing.

Background: Sappho in Athenian comedy

As I previously discussed in this post I wrote back in August 2021, in the late fifth and fourth centuries BCE, a fictional parody of Sappho became an extremely popular stock character in Athenian comedies. Although only a small number of fragments of comedies that featured Sappho as a character have survived to the present day, references in surviving works attest that the comic playwrights Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiphanes, Diphilos, Ephippos, and Timokles, who all flourished in Athens during this period, all wrote comedies with the title Sappho.

Because so little information about the comedies themselves has survived, it is impossible to say much for certain about how they portrayed her. Nonetheless, the surviving evidence (which is admittedly quite limited) seems to indicate that these comedies depicted her as a caricature of a hyper-erotic woman who is constantly passionately lusting after various men.

These comedies seem to have exerted an outsized influence on audiences’ perceptions of Sappho as both a historical and literary figure during the Hellenistic and Roman Periods. Notably, later authors who were desperate to find any biographical information they could about early Greek poets sometimes resorted to relying on old Athenian comedies as historical sources.

Unfortunately, because the comedies themselves have not survived and ancient authors don’t always cite their sources, it is often difficult or impossible to identify precisely which statements that Hellenistic and Roman authors make about Sappho are based on her actual poetry and which ones are based on her portrayal in Athenian comedies.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a Roman marble portrait head dating to the early first century BCE, based on an earlier Greek original, depicting the Athenian comic playwright Diphilos, who is attested to have written a comedy titled Sappho

Kerkylas of Andros: a name only attested in the Souda

The general pervasiveness of the story that scholars once seriously believed that Sappho had a husband named Kerkylas of Andros on the internet stands in sharp contrast to the claim’s meagre attestation in surviving premodern sources. In fact, this claim only occurs in exactly one source: the entry for Sappho in the Souda, which is an encyclopedia in the Greek language that was compiled in the tenth century CE—over a millennium and a half after Sappho’s lifetime.

Multiple compilers most likely contributed to the Souda. Although nothing reliable is known about their specific identities, they were certainly Christian speakers of the Greek language and they relied heavily on earlier Greek-language commentaries and reference works, mostly ones composed by Christian authors. They were also notoriously uncritical in their use of sources, frequently did not cite which sources they relied on, and frequently incorporated entries and passages from earlier compilations wholesale without attribution.

The Souda is a valuable resource because it preserves much information about antiquity that is not found in any other sources and that would otherwise be lost. Nonetheless, for the reasons I have just described, it is also a source that scholars must treat with immense caution, since it is often difficult or impossible to identify where its information comes from and a great deal of what it says, especially about the lives of ancient poets, is simply garbage.

The entry on Sappho states, as translated for the Souda On Line:

“She was married to a most wealthy man, Kerkylas, who operated from Andros, and she had a daughter by him, who was named Kleis.”

Unsurprisingly, the Souda does not cite any sources for this claim, but modern scholars have generally recognized that it must ultimately originate from a joke in one of the now-lost Athenian comedies about Sappho. The reason why we can be so sure of this is because the name Kerkylas of Andros is an obscene pun.

ABOVE: First page from a printed edition of the Souda encyclopedia from the fifteenth or sixteenth century CE

The name Kerkylas derives from the Greek noun κέρκος (kérkos), which means “tail” and is also an obscene word for penis, roughly equivalent to the English word dick. Meanwhile, Andros is a real Greek island that lies at the northern end of the Kyklades, which are a group of islands in the south Aegean. Its name, however, sounds like ἀνδρός (andrós), which is the genitive singular form of the third-declension masculine noun ἀνήρ (anḗr), meaning “man.” Thus, literally translated into English, the name Kerkylas of Andros means “Dick of Man.”

At some point, either the anonymous compiler of the Souda entry themself—or, more likely, the author of an earlier reference work on which the Souda compiler relied—evidently read one of the ancient comedies about Sappho, encountered a joke of some kind about her having a husband named “Kerkylas of Andros,” and mistook this as a serious, historical claim about the name of the poet’s husband.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the location of Andros in the south Aegean

Scholarly recognition of Kerkylas of Andros as a joke name

Modern scholars have generally not been nearly so oblivious as the Souda compiler; they have recognized the true nature of the name Kerkylas of Andros for the past nearly 170 years. The Scottish scholar William Mure already points out that the name is a joke in his A Critical History of the Language and Literature of Ancient Greece, volume three, which was published in London in 1854, on page 278:

“Whether Sappho was ever married is doubtful, but the balance of evidence is strongly on the negative side of the question. She is familiarly alluded to by Horace and other classics as the ‘Lesbian maiden;’ nor is there any notice of a husband but on a single recent and very questionable authority, where the broadly indecent etymology of the names, both of the individual on whom the honor is conferred and of his birthplace, sufficiently proves them fictitious. Both titles are inventions, there can be little doubt, of the comic authors above alluded to, satirically reflecting on the weaker points of Sappho’s character.”

This paragraph was published in 1854!

ABOVE: Portrait of the Scottish classical scholar William Mure, who recognized the name Kerkylas of Andros as a joke as early as 1854

All the respected German classical scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also recognized the name Kerkylas of Andros as an obvious joke. For instance, as the Reddit user gentlybeepingheart keenly points out in a reply to the post I linked at the beginning of this article, the German philologist Hans Flach writes the following in his monograph Geschichte der griechischen Lyrik (History of Greek Lyric), published in 1884, on page 490:

“Dass der Name Kerkylas aus der griechischen Komödie stammt, in welcher Sappho leider zu oft Gegenstand boshafter Angriffe gewesen war, geht aus seiner obscoenen bedeutung hervor.”

For those who don’t read German, this means:

“That the name Kerkylas derives from Greek comedy, in which Sappho was sadly too often an object of malicious attack, is obvious from its obscene meaning.”

ABOVE: Portrait of the German philologist Hans Flach, printed in the second edition of his book Der deutsche Professor der Gegenwart (1886)

Similarly, the eminent German philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (lived 1848 – 1931) writes in his monograph Sappho und Simonides: Untersuchungen über griechische Lyriker, published in 1913, on page 24:

“Aus dieser Sphaere einer im Grunde harmlosen Erfindung wird auch der Gatte Κερκόλας Ἄνδριος stammen mit dem durchsichtigen Namen Virbius Caudinus. Daß er in der Vita allein erscheint, deutet darauf, daß kein Name des Gatten in den Liedern vorkam.”

This means:

“From this domain also derives the basically harmless fabrication of the husband Κερκόλας Ἄνδριος [Kerkolas of Andros] with the transparent name Virbius Caudinus. That he alone appears in the biographical tradition therefore indicates that no name of her husband occurred in her songs.”

Here, instead of translating the joke into German, his native language, Wilamowitz decorously attempts to render the joke into Latin as Virbius Caudinus. Virbius is attested in Roman literature as a name for the mythical hero Hippolytos, the son of Theseus the king of Athens and the Amazon queen Hippolyte, but it also echoes the Latin word vir, meaning “man.” Meanwhile, Caudinus literally means “from Caudium,” which was a town in southern Italy, but it echoes the Latin word cauda, which means “tail” or “penis.”

ABOVE: Photo of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Muellendorff, taken around 1917 or 1918

Even standard reference works of classical studies already noted that the name Kerkylas of Andros is a joke over one hundred years ago. The German classical philologist Wolfgang Aly writes in his 1920 entry on Sappho for Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, also known as the Pauly-Wissowa, a standard German-language encyclopedia of classical studies:

“Der Name der Mannes (zu κέρκος cauda und aus ‘Andros’ zu ἀνήρ) ist Komödienerfindung.”

In English:

“The name of her husband (at κέρκος cauda and from ‘Andros’ at ἀνήρ) is a comic invention.”

Even the translation of Kerkylas of Andros into English as “Dick Allcock from the Isle of Man” that people on the internet keep quoting is far from new. The American classical scholar Holt N. Parker, who was a professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati from 1991 to 2016, coined that translation for his paper “Sappho Schoolmistress,” which he originally presented orally at the 1991 annual meeting of the American Philological Association (now renamed the Society for Classical Studies) in Chicago and later published in 1993 in the journal Transactions of the American Philological Association 123: 309–351.

In other words, that exact translation has been floating around for the past thirty years now.

Parker’s problematic later history

Sadly, this brings me to the final issue that pertains to the ubiquitous posts in r/SapphoAndHerFriend touting the translation “Dick Allcock from the Isle of Man,” which is that users in the subreddit should probably be more aware of who they are actually quoting.

As some readers may be aware, the discipline of classics has had a very long and frequently sordid history. Many prominent scholars in the field have been despicable human beings. Notably, Wilamowitz, whom I mentioned earlier, was a racist, classist, rabidly antisemitic German nationalist. Although he was never a member of the Nazi Party and he died over a year before Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, his later writings especially display many disturbing ideological affinities with the German völkisch movement, of which the Nazi Party was a part (Flaig, “Towards ‘Rassenhygiene,’” 105–127).

Wolfgang Aly, whose article on Sappho in the Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft I have also cited above, was a full-on member of the Nazi Party. In fact, he officially joined the Nazi Party on December 1st, 1931—only a few months after Wilamowitz’s death and still over a year before Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany—and was the very first faculty member of the University of Freiburg to join the party officially.

Despite the fact that no shortage of evil people have flourished in the discipline of classics, Holt N. Parker is a strong contender for the prize of the most truly vile person to hold a tenured position in the field within my own lifetime. You see, the reason why Parker stopped being a professor at the University of Cincinnati in 2016 is because, according to a Justice Department press release, on March 15th of that year, acting under a search warrant, FBI agents conducted a search of his home, in which they recovered a damaged flash drive that contained nearly one thousand image and video files of child sexual abuse material, including at least one that included an infant victim.

Parker confessed that, for years, he had been downloading, viewing, and trading child sexual abuse material online “nearly every day,” that he had recently downloaded the videos and images on the flash drive off the internet, and that, when he found out that officials were searching his home, he had attempted to destroy the flash drive to destroy the evidence. He pled guilty to possessing and trading child sexual abuse material and was sentenced to four years in prison for this offense in January 2017.

Far more information is publicly available about Parker’s sordid and illicit activities than what I have said, but I will not repeat that information here. Readers are welcome to seek it out on their own, but I will warn them that it is truly disturbing, horrific stuff. Even reading about it is enough to make my skin crawl and make me feel like I can never be clean again.

Despite the uncomfortability of the matter, I feel (following the lead of the ancient historian Roel Konijnendijk, who wrote an excellent answer to a question in r/AskHistorians two years ago that dealt with this same topic) that readers should at least be aware of Parker’s history so they can make an informed decision on whether or not they wish to continue to quote and share his translation.

Works cited

• Aly, Wolfgang. “Sappho.” Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft II.2357-85. 1920.
• Flach, Hans. Geschichte der Griechischen Lyrik. Tübingen: Verlag und Druck von Franz Fues, 1884.
• Flaig, Egon. “Towards ‘Rassenhygiene’: Wilamowitz and the German New Right.” In Out of Arcadia: Classics and Politics in Germany in the Age of Burckhardt, Nietzsche and Wilamowitz, edited by Ingo Gildenhard and Martin Ruehl, 105–27. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 79. London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2003.
• Mure, William. A Critical History of the Language and Literature of Antient Greece. Vol. 3. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1854.
• Parker, Holt N. “Sappho Schoolmistress.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 123 (1993): 309–51.
• von Wilamowitz-Muellendorff, Ulrich. Sappho und Simonides: Untersuchungen über griechische Lyriker. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1913.