How enviable are the sources available for modern history, from the earliest periods on up: autograph letters, diaries, even published books, and, since the nineteenth century, photographs, films, and sound recordings. in comparison, the women of antiquity are close to lost. But not altogether; most famously, of course, the poetry of Sappho attests to a woman’s ability to leave a literary mark (see essays collected in E. Greene 1996). it should be noted that Sappho is not the only extant woman writer from antiquity - far from it; Jane Snyder (1989) provides a reliable guide to ancient women authors, not only poets but philosophers, letter writers, travel writers. The Hellenistic epigrammatist Nossis should be considered along with any reading of Sappho (M. Skinner 1989).
However, the mere fact of the disappearance of so much that women wrote must make us wonder about the cultures that found what they had to say so dispensable. Some was destroyed by early Christians, it is true; Tatian, for example, remarks on how the members of his community - particularly women - strive to rid themselves of “licentiousness,” such as Sappho’s works (Gaca 2003: 237-38). But it was Cicero’s freed slave Tiro, or whoever collected Cicero’s letters, who passed over the letters of Cicero’s wife Terentia, his beloved daughter Tullia, and his friend Caerellia, along with, in all probability, his correspondence with Clodia Metelli. Whatever the Christians did with Sappho, and granted the letters of Jerome remain while the replies from his numerous female correspondents do not, we still have many more pages of writing by Christian women than from all of the previous millennium. The poet Proba, the travel writer Egeria, and, venturing into the middle ages, the tenth-century nun Hrotsvitha, with her plays modeled on the language of Terence - all suggest what has been lost from the earlier period. This is a major lamp-post issue: if we want to know about ancient women, we’d do better if we looked late rather than early (G. Clark 1993; Holum 1982).
World History
