An investigation of the Luvo-Hittite dammara- religious functionaries (male and female) and the borrowing of the term into Ahhiyawan (Ur-Aeolian) and, thence, European Mycenaean cult vocabulary as dumartes and its variant damartes (a scribal borrowing), and an exploration of the Anatolian source of the theonym Artemis. The intersection of both the cult title and divine name with Mycenaean dialect variation is carefully examined.

An examination of the Anatolian sources of Greek theogonic traditions, syncretistic myths that took shape in admixed Ur-Aeolian–Luvian communities in the Late Bronze Age, and descendent Aeolian assemblages of mythic and cult elements that persist into the Iron Age. Essential to many of these traditions is the presence of honey, especially honey having psychotropic properties of a sort that occurs naturally along the southern and eastern shores of the Black Sea.

This chapter focuses on Sappho’s engagement with epic, by focusing on the appeal and significance of her songs for audiences beyond Lesbos. The argument is in three parts. First, it demonstrates that Lesbos was famous for its women and its songs also independently of Sappho: her songs helped to increase the reputation of her native island by revealing exactly what went into the making of its glamorous women. In fragments 98, 44, and several others, we see lovely women and precious goods crossing the sea and causing great delight on arrival – or disappointment when they fail to materialise. Likewise, Sappho’s own songs must have travelled overseas causing pleasure and, simultaneously, increasing the value of Lesbian exports, including women (whether they travelled overseas as brides or upmarket courtesans). Second, this chapter observes that, in both Sappho and Alcaeus, heroic characters drawn from the Trojan saga are always involved in travelling and getting married. Finally it makes the point that, in Sappho’s extant fragments, intertextual engagements with epic work primarily by superimposing the itineraries of people dear to her onto the routes traced by heroes and heroines in their own journeys of homecoming and homemaking.

Starting with a brief overview of the Homeric tradition to which Sappho and her ancient listeners on Lesbos may have had access, the chapter then looks at different models of intertextuality, within both oral poetic and textual contexts, and teases out how these shape our understanding(s) of Sappho’s reception of Homer. The nonhierarchical, “avuncular” mode of intertextual interpretation is introduced as one that allows readers to find common ground between poets, rather than focusing exclusively on their latent rivalries.

This chapter argues that in Theocritus Idyll 7 Lycidas falls into none of the categories listed by Dover in his 1971 commentary (ostensibly a comprehensive list) but into a category he had overlooked, that of a fictional character from another poet’s work. This other poet, I suggest, was Philitas of Cos, whose very influential early Hellenistic poetry is known only from a few fragments and from later allusions and references. Among the many things explained by this hypothesis (and it remains only a hypothesis) are the Coan setting of Idyll 7’s narrative and the erotodidactic role of Philetas in Longus. The ‘Cydonia’ given as Lycidas’ origin becomes a Cydonia some kilometres north of Mytilene on Lesbos, arguably the hill-flanked coastal plain where Longus asks readers to imagine the estates on which Daphnis and Chloe pastured goats and sheep.

This chapter deals with local narrative traditions and the ritual acts associated with local sanctuaries (to the extent to which these can be fruitfully investigated) of Hera, whose cult titles Teleia and Basileia echo how she is portrayed in the archaic epic poetry. This is notably the case at Argos, Samos, and Perachora, where important sanctuaries of the goddess are located outside the city centre, but also in Olympia, ‘the Olympus on earth’, where the first monumental temple of the Panhellenic sanctuary of Zeus is associated with her. Her cults in Plataia, Delos, Lesbos, Corinth, Athens, and western Greece shows how her roles of spouse and sovereign overlap and to some extent come to be confused because of her complex relation to Zeus. This relation is crucial to understanding the expectations of Hera’s worshippers, although in a certain number of places the connection with Zeus is not made fully explicit.

Chapter 2 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho investigates the island of Lesbos, home of Sappho, during the archaic period (sixth and fifth centuries BC), and how its geography – both of the island itself, and of its place within the wider Greek and Mediterranean worlds – is reflected in her poetry and in the poetry of her contemporary, the poet Alcaeus.

Chapter 5 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho considers the relationship between Sappho and her contemporary, the poet Alcaeus, examining the literary and visual evidence and the different ways that scholars have interpreted it.

Chapter 10 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho describes the distinctive features of Sappho’s poetic dialect, highlighting especially significant points and noting particular difficulties.