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How Likely Is It That Scholars Will Find More of Sappho’s Lost Poems?

Sappho (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE) was a female early Greek lyric poet who flourished on the island of Lesbos, located just off the west coast of Asia Minor, and composed many poems in the Aeolic dialect of the Greek language. Her output was so prolific that the standard edition of her work in antiquity, which literary scholars working at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt produced in around the third century BCE, is thought to have spanned nine “books” or rolls of papyrus. Ancient audiences esteemed her as one of the greatest of all lyric poets, if not the greatest. She was known as the “Tenth Muse” and some even regarded her work as on par with that of Homer (the putative author of the Iliad and the Odyssey and most revered of all ancient Greek poets).

Sadly, nearly all of her poems have been lost. Only one poem, Fragment 1 (the “Ode to Aphrodite”) has survived to the present day totally complete. Only a handful of others—including Fragment 16 (the “Anaktoria Poem”), Fragment 31 (“Phainetai Moi”), Fragment 58 (the “Tithonos Poem”), and the “Brothers Poem”—are nearly complete. Most of what survives are tiny fragments of only a few lines or less. Nonetheless, today, many scholars of ancient literature regard Sappho’s more complete poems as among the greatest that have survived from antiquity. The fact that she is one of the very few female ancient Greek or Roman authors who have any works that have survived to the present day and the fact that she composed poems in which her female speaker openly discusses her erotic desire for other women have both further magnified contemporary interest in her work.

As a result of this, many people have wondered: How likely is it that more of Sappho’s poems will be recovered? To answer this question, in this post, I will discuss the history of how her work was transmitted in antiquity, how most of it became lost, how the parts that have survived have managed to survive, and, finally, how likely it is that someone will discover and publish any substantial material by her that is not currently known anytime in the next half century.

Jesus Had a Vagina (According to Medieval Christian Mysticism)

About a month ago, a whole host of right-wing media outlets, including The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the New York Post, NBC Montana, and Fox News, published a flurry of wildly sensationalist articles claiming that a dean at the University of Cambridge said that Jesus was transgender. As Candida Moss, a scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity who is the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham, points out in this article she wrote for The Daily Beast, however, and as I will discuss further in the first section of this post, this claim is entirely false; the dean in question actually said no such thing.

At the center of this controversy, however, stands a very strange and fascinating fact, which is well known to scholars and students of medieval western European art and mysticism, but which is not well known to the general public. As bizarre and improbable as it may sound, medieval western European Christians frequently depicted the wound that Jesus is said to have received in his side on the cross in a manner closely resembling a vulva. Although scholars disagree about what exactly these depictions indicate, most agree that the medieval people who made them and venerated them were conscious of this resemblance. In this post, I will explore the history of these depictions and what they may tell us about late medieval gender and sexuality.

Zwarte Piet Is a Racist Abomination

Zwarte Piet (whose name means “Black Pete” in Dutch) is a figure in the folklore of the Low Countries (i.e., the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg) who is said to accompany Saint Nicholas or Sinterklaas. In the weeks leading up to the feast day of Saint Nicholas, which is celebrated in the Netherlands on 5th December, he is traditionally portrayed by white actors or volunteers wearing blackface, along with thick red lipstick, a black wig of afro-textured hair, a large gold earring, and colorful faux-Renaissance-style clothing. These “Zwarte Pieten” traditionally take part in parades, entertain young children, and pass out cookie-like confectionaries known as pepernoten and kruidnoten.

Zwarte Piet has been a widely beloved figure among white people in the Low Countries for generations, but, for decades, some people (mostly people of color) have criticized the character as racist (because he is). Over the course of the past decade, and the past few years in particular, there has been something of a sea change, as a deracialized version of the character named Roetveegpiet (“Sooty Pete”), who wears light soot makeup instead of blackface, has eclipsed the traditional blackface version of the character in popularity.

Some white people have tried to defend the traditional Zwarte Piet by claiming that the character can’t be racist because he (supposedly) has no connection to the U.S. tradition of blackface minstrel shows. In this post, I intend to explore the real history of Zwarte Piet and demonstrate that the character does, in fact, owe very much to blackface minstrel shows and is, in fact, racist. Needless to say, readers should be forewarned that this post will discuss some truly deplorably racist material, including both historical and contemporary derogatory visual portrayals of Black people.

The Decline of Cursive Isn’t Historically as Big of a Deal as Most People Think

On 16 September 2022, Drew Gilpin Faust, a scholar of nineteenth-century U.S. history who specializes in the Antebellum South and who served as the president of Harvard University from 2007 until 2018, published an essay in The Atlantic titled “Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive,” in which she conveys her shock, consternation, and sorrow at having recently discovered that the majority of undergraduate students nowadays cannot read cursive and that, of those few who can read it, even fewer can write it. She expresses worry that, as a result of not being able to read cursive, students will not be able to read historical documents written in it and will be cut off from the historical past. This piece set off many conversations about cursive instruction in the U.S.

I am currently a twenty-three-year-old first-semester master’s student who just received my bachelor’s degree in May of this year, so I am very close in age to present-day undergraduates. Contrary to the sweeping declaration in the title of Faust’s article, I did receive full instruction in how to read and write cursive from third through fifth grades. Nonetheless, I think that the ongoing decline of cursive instruction in the U.S. is both less of a tragedy and less historically significant than many people (including Faust) are making it out to be. In this post, I intend to clear up a few popular misconceptions about the history of cursive writing.

Nonbinary Characters for Children Are Nothing New

In the past few years, nonbinary fictional characters have become increasingly common in literature, television, and other areas, including in books and programs intended for children. In just the past week, anti-trans activists have made quite a lot of noise complaining about children being exposed to these characters, because apparently the pronoun they is too risqué for innocent little children to hear.

Some readers may be surprised to learn that, while nonbinary characters are starting to appear much more frequently nowadays, characters of this kind—even ones meant for children—are nothing inherently new. Characters who are at least arguably nonbinary appear in some of the oldest surviving works of literature from ancient Mesopotamia and one of the earliest emphatically nonbinary characters in a work of English-language children’s literature appeared over a hundred years ago, in a work by a children’s author who is still quite famous today.

Does History Have a “Presentism” Problem?

On 17 August 2022, Dr. James H. Sweet, a tenured full professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is also the sitting president of the American Historical Association (AHA), which is the oldest and most prestigious association for professional historians in the United States and has the largest membership of any historical association in the entire world, published an essay in the official AHA newsmagazine Perspectives on History titled “Is History History?: Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Past.”

In the essay, Sweet declares that the massive problem of “presentism” is plaguing the historical discipline. He starts out with a halfway decent observation of the real problem of the relative decline in the number of historians studying pre-1800 historical topics over the course of the past few decades. Alas, he very quickly veers wildly off the rails into a reactionary tirade, in which he disparages scholars who study topics with contemporary political salience, such as “race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, [and] capitalism,” and spends the remainder of the essay complaining about things that have little direct connection to the work of professional academic historians, drawing multiple wildly irresponsible false equivalences along the way.

Naturally, this essay set off a veritable firestorm of controversy on social media, with many historians and other academics criticizing it. According to this article published by Inside Higher Ed, it also attracted hoards of Neo-Nazis such as Richard B. Spencer and other right-wing reactionaries, who have praised and defended the essay on Twitter and lambasted Sweet’s critics. For his own part, Sweet himself has issued a formal apology for “the damage I have caused to my fellow historians, the discipline, and the AHA,” but has not retracted any of the views he expresses in the essay. This post presents my thoughts about Sweet’s essay, including both criticisms and notes about issues he might have been better served to address if he is really concerned about “presentism” in the historical profession.

The Word ‘Fatwā’ Does Not Mean “Death Warrant”

If you’ve paid attention to the news anytime in the past few days, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve heard or read someone use the Arabic word fatwā (the plural form of which in Arabic is fatāwā). This word properly refers to a formal opinion or piece of advice that a qualified expert in Islamic religious law gives, generally in response to a specific question that an individual Muslim or group of Muslims asks.

Unfortunately, most non-Muslim people in the western world incorrectly believe that this word refers to a death warrant, and this is how many people have been using it in the past few days. In this post, I will explain in greater detail what the word fatwā really means and how so many people came to have this egregious misconception about the word’s meaning.

Yes, Transgender People Should Be Allowed to Use the Public Restroom of Their Gender Identity

This year, multiple Republican-controlled U.S. states have either passed or considered various bills that would prohibit transgender people from using public restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms that align with our gender identities. Additionally, a YouGov poll released last year indicates that U.S. adults are more likely to say that trans people should be banned from using restrooms and changing rooms that align with our gender identities than they are to say that we should be allowed to use them.

As most of my readers at this point know, I am a trans woman. The main focus of this blog is and will remain ancient history. Nonetheless, when it comes to important issues of civil rights, especially ones like this that have a direct and immediate impact on my own everyday existence, I feel it is necessary to use what platform I have to speak out and hopefully maybe change a few people’s minds. In this post, therefore, I will explain why laws banning trans people from restrooms and changing rooms serve no legitimate purpose, are generally unenforceable, and actively harm trans people.

In Ancient Greece, Children Wearing Drag Was a Religious Obligation!

As I discuss in great detail in this recent post I wrote about the ongoing right-wing attack on LGBTQ+ people in the United States, in the past month, right-wingers have been having a full-on moral panic about the existence of child-friendly drag performances. These rightists perceive drag itself as inherently sexual and therefore inherently inappropriate for children. Many of them are claiming that allowing a child to view any form of drag is somehow “child abuse” or “grooming.” In the heat of this moral panic, neo-fascists have disrupted and even planned violent attacks on drag performances that are billed as child-friendly and Republican lawmakers in multiple red states have proposed bills that would make it a crime to allow any person under the age of eighteen to view any kind of performance involving drag.

As I have already explained at greater length in my previous post, drag is just a variety of costume; it’s a person dressing up as a different gender. There is nothing inherently sexual about it. Although many drag performances for adult audiences do make use of sexual humor and innuendo and are therefore inappropriate for young children, such innuendo is not integral to drag itself and some drag performances can be genuinely child-friendly. Moreover, laws banning drag performances in the presence of children, if they are vaguely worded enough, could be used to criminally prosecute trans and gender-nonconforming people for wearing clothes associated with a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth in any public place where children could conceivably be present.

In this post, I thought I would mention, from an ancient historical angle, that the ancient Greeks would be absolutely baffled by twenty-first-century U.S. right-wingers’ paroxysms over child-friendly drag. All the female roles in Greek drama were originally portrayed by men in drag at religious festivals where at least older children were present, it was a religious custom for men to dress in drag for certain religious festivals and occasions where children could be present, and the ancient Athenians even had a festival at which two adolescent boys were religiously mandated to dress in drag themselves.

The Right Wing’s Ongoing Attack on LGBTQ+ People

This post is going to be a bit of a departure from my usual ancient history content. As some of my readers already know, I am a transgender woman. I am also bi/pansexual. Unfortunately, for roughly the past year and a half, but especially the past month, the political right wing in the United States has been increasingly making queer people, especially transgender people, into a primary target for vilification and attack. I can’t possibly cover everything the right has been doing in the past year and a half to attack us, but I feel it necessary to make my readers aware of just a tiny bit of some of what they have been doing and saying.

In the past month, Republican lawmakers have continued to push increasingly restrictive legislation and policies to take away or drastically curtail the existing rights of queer people, especially transgender people. Right-wing pundits have dedicated much time and attention to propagating a false, bigoted, and dangerous narrative that LGBTQ+ people are “grooming” children for sexual molestation. Meanwhile, neo-fascist and right-wing extremist groups have relentlessly targeted, harassed, and even tried to violently attack events associated with Pride and the LGBTQ+ community all across the United States. Sadly, all signs strongly indicate that things are only going to get much, much worse from here over the next few years, especially for those living in Republican-controlled states.

This post will be a very long one and it will discuss many deeply depressing topics. Nonetheless, I urge you, if you are a straight, cisgender person who genuinely cares about the wellbeing of any queer person, please read this post to the very end, since it will cover some very important information about the ongoing evisceration of queer rights in the U.S.