3/11/2020 How ancient poetry can revitalise our erotic imaginations | Aeon Essays

Study in Orange (1904), by René Le Bègue. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933. Courtesy the MET
Museum, New York

Eros at play
Why the ancient erotic poems of Sappho and
Wallada bint al-Mustakfi are far more stimulating
than modern pornography
Jamie Mackay

A woman rests in a field surrounded by apple trees. Savouring the sounds and smells
of the shaded grove, she muses on the ‘sacred recess’ of her idyllic surroundings, and
surrenders herself to fantasy. e wind is ‘honey sweet’, the air perfumed with ‘musk
roses’. She is waiting for a lover. ‘Come to me from Crete,’ our narrator calls out to an
anonymous and distant figure. Her words are charged with desire. ‘Ice-water babbles’
among ‘flickering leafage’ while ‘horses’ – a traditional symbol of masculine virility –
‘graze knee-deep in flowers’. What has triggered this outpour of erotic yearning? Are
these the daydreams of a hot summer’s day? Is the subject drunk, as her eulogising of
the local ‘nectar’ might suggest? Might she even, as some critics have speculated, be
masturbating?

https://aeon.co/essays/how-ancient-poetry-can-revitalise-our-erotic-imaginations 1/7
3/11/2020 How ancient poetry can revitalise our erotic imaginations | Aeon Essays

For all the distractions of our contemporary lives, reading Sappho today remains just
as exhilarating as it was 2,000 years ago when, as one of the foremost poets of the
ancient world, her poems were widely anthologised. Her delicate style, her
withholding of details and delaying of pleasure, has drawn admiration from such
canonical figures as Charles Baudelaire and A C Swinburne, even Oscar Wilde, who
trilled ‘never had Love such a singer’.

Sappho’s restraint remains strangely gratifying today, when sexuality is so intensely

visual, imposed top-down through the peculiar marriage of pornography and pop
culture. Her verses are themselves pornographic, of course, but we’d be shortsighted
in aligning them with the music videos, high-street adverts and internet clips that
dominate our sexual imaginations today. Modern porn is, on the whole, relentlessly
present-tense, populated by anonymous bodies performing athletic feats for the
instant gratification of a voyeuristic audience. at Sappho’s work – intimate,
reflective, euphemistic – maintains its allure against such a backdrop is surely
significant, then. What does her work provide that modern porn cannot? And what
does this tell us about our sexual imaginations more generally?

Much of the answer can be attributed to the poet’s particular evocation of ‘the erotic’.
Today, the term conjures up images of burlesque performances, of teases designed to
prolong the often-rushed experience of modern sex. For the Greeks, though, Eros was
not an action but a god, the son of Aphrodite herself. He was bisexual, notoriously
unruly, and capable of intoxicating all beings with an irrational, manic energy. His role
in literature was quite precise: to shape pothos (desire) into kharis (gratification). His
preferred environments were gardens, which were in many cases imagined to be
populated with nymphs and naiads. If Eros’s main duty was to facilitate sexual
relationships, his divine nature also served to unite bodily experience with
metaphysics through an ambiguous, quasi-magical communion.

From the outset, poetry was tasked with explaining the limits of this exhilarating and
dangerous life force. All of the major classical writers – from Aeschylus and Pindar to
later Roman imitators such as Ovid – dedicated meditations to the god. Sappho,
though, was perhaps the most gifted at articulating his contradictory traits. In her
work, Eros is not a beast, like Pan or the satyrs. He is a ‘weaver of tales’, a storyteller
and seducer. At the same time, he is a ‘sweet, bitter, impossible creature’, a dualistic
and ambiguous force, anarchically transgressing the boundary between pleasure and
pain. One of Sappho’s most playful descriptions of Eros is as a ‘limbslackener’, a kind
of cosmic lubricant. In all cases, his real power is his unique capacity to bridge the
realm of ideas with corporeal reality. As Plato describes in his Phaedrus, there is no
separation between ‘forms’ and ‘the body’ in the sphere of Eros: both worlds are
united through the dualistic ontology of sex as both an activity and an idea.

S appho’s writing on love has aged better than Plato’s, thanks to the ease with
which the poet fuses such abstract metaphysics with more recognisable intimate
realities. Fragment 16, for example, begins with a reflection on Eros’s conventional
associations with ‘thronging cavalry’ and ‘foot soldiers’ which, she concedes, are for
some ‘the most beautiful of sights the dark Earth offers’.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-ancient-poetry-can-revitalise-our-erotic-imaginations 2/7
3/11/2020 How ancient poetry can revitalise our erotic imaginations | Aeon Essays

In the second half of the poem, however, Sappho goes on to define her own
contrasting aesthetic ideals. ‘Anactória,’ she writes, ‘I’d rather see her lovely step, her
sparkling glance and her face than gaze on all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and
glittering armour.’ is is a beautiful turn of phrase. e way her beloved walks, the
glint in her eye, is charged here with all the vitality of great battles and the power
games of the Olympians. For Sappho, the ‘everyday’ does not have to mean the
mundane domesticity of the oikos (household), it too can be charged with the drama
and turmoil of the epic:

[ the]
sweetness of your laughter: yes, that – I swear it –
sets the heart to shaking inside my breast, since
once I look at you for a moment, I can’t
speak any longer,

but my tongue breaks down, and then all at once a

subtle fire races inside my skin, my
eyes can’t see a thing and a whirring whistle
thrums at my hearing,

cold sweat covers me and a trembling takes

ahold of me all over: I’m greener than the
grass is and appear to myself to be little
short of dying.

At first, these lines might seem a little flat; rather straightforward precursors to the
ballads and love songs of later centuries. Look again, though, at the physical
descriptions. e ‘subtle fire’ that ‘races inside’ her skin, the near-blindness and sense
of ‘whirring’ are not mere butterflies in the stomach. For Greek poets, organs and
physiology were a way of diagnosing sexual excitement in quasi-medical terms.
Laughter, for example, and particularly ‘near-death’ experiences would have been
recognisable indicators of himeros (desire-in-fulfilment). With this in mind, the poem
reveals a meaning that is lost to many contemporary readers: it is not about nerves at
all, but the experience of orgasm!

Most of us have become accustomed to thinking of sex as something purely physical,

an act limited to the temporal confines of coitus itself. Modern pornography
perpetuates this through its prioritising of close-up action shots and hectic montages
over narrative continuity. Eros, by contrast, is best approached through anticipation,
memory and storytelling. In Sappho’s hands, we might say that poetry itself becomes
an erotic technology, a unique time-machine, capable of stretching and containing the
experiences of desire and climax into a unified artistic object.

G reek writers were not alone in the ancient world in understanding sex as
something potentially transcendental. As far back as 4000 BCE, poets were
imagining physical love as part of the Universe’s very substance. ‘Give me pray of
your caresses, my lord god, my lord protector,’ writes one anonymous author in a
prayer to the ancient Sumerian goddess Inanna. Similar responses to creation myths
can be found in works from Egypt, Persia and across the Near East. Manikkavacakar,
https://aeon.co/essays/how-ancient-poetry-can-revitalise-our-erotic-imaginations 3/7
3/11/2020 How ancient poetry can revitalise our erotic imaginations | Aeon Essays

the Tamil poet, describes himself transformed into ‘wax before an unspent fire’ and
possessed by ‘love’s unrelenting seizure’ during a shamanic ritual. Āṇṭāḷ, his
contemporary, describes her overwhelming desire to give her ‘swelling breasts’ to a
lord that ‘would fold [her] into his radiant chest’. e Kāvyaprakāśa, an anthology of
Sanskrit poetry, goes as far as to describe the preferred sex positions of various
divinities. We learn that the goddess Laksmi ‘loves to make love to Vishnu from on
top’, and that, when she puts her hand over his right eye ‘which is the Sun […] night
comes on’.

is diversity of sexual cosmologies is fascinating in its own right. If nothing else, it

reminds us that, while Eros looked a certain way to Greeks, his vital energy was
expressed through many different masks. Ancient polytheisms, with their pantheon
of gods, certainly seem to have provided a functional epistemology through which to
understand the complexity of sexual desire. Monotheistic religion has proved
arguably less capable. Indeed, one of the explicit functions of scripture historically
has been to contain the erotic drives and impulses that were permitted within the so-
called classical pagan worldview. A famous example is Paul’s Letter to the Romans
which condemns female promiscuity, homosexual sex and, it often seems, desire in
general. Muslims, meanwhile, are required by the Quran to refrain from extramarital
sex and, more generally, to ‘guard their private parts’.

Poetry, though, like sex itself, tends to find ways around such oppressive strictures. A
case in point is 10th-century Sicily. e island, where Sappho herself is thought to
have lived for a time in exile, was then governed as an emirate by the Aghlabid
dynasty, a minor power from modern-day Tunisia. Far from the centre of authority in
Baghdad, officials in this peripheral territory found it hard to enforce top-down
religious power. Cultural mixing between Muslims and non-Muslims was relatively
commonplace, and a melange of languages, customs and presumably sexual practices
were exchanged. Alcohol was consumed freely and was openly linked to poetry and
other Bacchanalian pleasures. Ibn Ḥamdīs, one of the island’s most renowned authors
from the period, celebrates ‘rose-coloured wine mixed with water, which reveals stars
among sun rays’ and allows the drinker to ‘hunt the care of the soul’. He describes sex
too, in bucolic and recognisably Sapphic terms. ‘When two bodies meet and are
consumed with passion,’ he writes, ‘the fruits of pleasure are harvested as soon as
they are planted.’

Poetry is a mechanism with the capacity to mimic the very

conditions that make sex enjoyable

Córdoba, then also under Muslim rule, served as a meeting point for this (by now
nomadic) tradition of cultural transmission. Here, Moorish tropes of opulence and
luxury were harmonised with classical eroticism in a more consolidated fashion. Ibn
‘Abd Rabbihi’s poem about an ‘unparalleled’ pearl – which was ‘by its own pudor
reformed and now cornelian’ – is clearly a panegyric to the clitoris. Ibn Zaydún recalls
‘delicious’ days spent ‘while fate slept’ as he and his partner indulged their fantasies
as ‘thieves of pleasure’. Western ideas about Islamic sexuality often linger on the
image of reclining emirs receiving sexual services from their numerous concubines.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-ancient-poetry-can-revitalise-our-erotic-imaginations 4/7
3/11/2020 How ancient poetry can revitalise our erotic imaginations | Aeon Essays

Really, this is a partial image. In fact, it was a woman, Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, who
most successfully merged Islamic sensuality with the formal tropes of Eros. ‘I give my
lover power over my cheek, and I offer my kisses to him who desires them,’ reads an
inscription on the sleeves of a transparent gown that Wallada wore to meet her
suitors.

Once again, though, it is the poet’s particularly skilful manipulation of temporality,

her evocation of sexual anticipation, that best demonstrates the enduring legacy of
classical eroticism:

When night falls, plan to visit

me.
For I believe night is the time that keeps
secrets best.
I feel a love for you that if the lights of
heaven felt, the Sun would not shine,
nor the Moon rise, nor the stars begin their
nightly journey.

Here, pleasure is delayed, imagined once again in the future tense, but with the novel
addition of an undeniably modern impatience. Nature cannot contain the author’s
passion, as was possible in Sappho’s ode to her Cretan lover. Instead, the verse is
stretched to breaking point, threatening the passing of day to night and with it the
very order of the Islamic world. ere is something obviously heretical about this. For
most Muslim poets, sexuality is a godly gift emerging as an aspect of Allah’s love.
Here, it is a human pleasure, recomposed from the memories of what were, at the
time, forgotten ancient sources. Once again, like Sappho, Wallada’s genius stems
from her treatment of poetry as functional tool, a mechanism with the capacity to
reveal and indeed mimic the very conditions that make sex enjoyable in the first
place.

hile temporal fluidity is certainly the most recognisable of Eros’s literary calling cards,

W the real power of the above poems stems from the confidence of the narrators.
ese are intimate, confessional voices, unflinching in their self-expression.
Just as importantly, they are ‘other-focused’, in a way that is rarely true of modern
porn. Among other descriptions, Sappho writes beautifully of a man who ‘matches the
gods’, Wallada of a lover whose body leaves her ‘burning with the brands of desire’. In
both authors’ work, subject and object are united through poetic logic. Modern porn
objectifies by reducing people to their performative sexual roles. Eros also requires
objectification, though he achieves this in a quite different way. Here, the other must
be mysterious and removed but, at the same time, fully realised: for an erotic poem to
work, readers have to believe that the unheard voice possesses all the burning
emotions of the speaker.

It’s tempting to see such ‘depth’ as something intrinsic to literature itself. It’s vital to
remember, though, that not all literary sex is erotic. e medieval period, in particular,
saw a flurry of works that diverged considerably from Sapphic tropes. ink of
Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, with its elaborate tales of transgression, deception

https://aeon.co/essays/how-ancient-poetry-can-revitalise-our-erotic-imaginations 5/7
3/11/2020 How ancient poetry can revitalise our erotic imaginations | Aeon Essays

and partner-swapping. is is not at all concerned with individual subjectivity, but

with satire and political commentary. e same might be said of Geoffrey Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales or William Shakespeare’s early farces. None of this is to downplay
these works’ various artistic merits. What it does demonstrate, however, is that the
‘obvious’ link between Eros and pornography would unravel over time, ultimately to
the point of separation.

It’s impossible to pinpoint exactly when and how today’s ‘modern porn culture’ was
established. It would take many centuries before a self-conscious distinction between
‘the erotic’ and ‘porn’ would prove necessary. However, Walter Benjamin’s much-cited
argument
<https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm>
of 1936 – that mass culture, and the ‘reproduction’ of art, drained the aura and
authenticity of expression – provides a useful philosophical framework for
understanding the conditions underpinning this shift. In the case of pornography
specifically, we could point to the lithograph, photography and film as catalysts of an
aesthetic that would focus more and more on ‘hollow’ anonymised bodies. e erotic
dualism of subject and object was, in such terms, gradually eclipsed by a consumer-
focused model better equipped to meet the demand for exchangeable commodities.

Every comma, like every mole on a human body, is an

individual marker

Growing secularism also played a role in this shift. As is well-known, in post-war

Europe, the monotheistic dogmatism that had characterised previous centuries began
to make way for more liberal attitudes. ‘Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-
three,’ as the English poet Philip Larkin quipped in ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (1974). While
many of the consequences were positive – including the relaxation of censorship
around porn – the implications for Eros were less positive. Representations of sex did
not go from being shameful to liberated overnight. On the contrary, driven by the
imperatives of markets and technology, porn became a kind of inescapable sleazy
wallpaper, losing its ties to art in the process. If Boccaccio and Chaucer marked a
move away from eroticism, post-war capitalism provided the conditions for porn to
evolve into a genre that, in the words of Alan Moore in 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom
(2009), ‘not only had no standards but also appeared to think it had no need of them’.

Of course, the erotic did not vanish altogether. From Dominique Aury (the pen name
of the French journalist Anne Declos) to E L James (who wrote the Fifty Shades series
of novels), contemporary writers continue to draw on classical tropes of desire and
subjectivity with varying degrees of success. Even in cinema, which has had a
particular role in displacing Eros, there are vital exceptions. Take Ingmar Bergman’s
film Persona (1966). Instead of bombarding the viewer with gratuitous nudity, the
director seeks to arouse through past-tense narrative and the spoken word. In one
particularly powerful scene, a woman describes an event in which she and a friend
had sex with some strangers on a beach (several times). e allure, though, comes
less from the graphic details than the confessional atmosphere itself. Just as Sappho
focuses on the anonymity of her subjects, and melting of bodies into their

https://aeon.co/essays/how-ancient-poetry-can-revitalise-our-erotic-imaginations 6/7
3/11/2020 How ancient poetry can revitalise our erotic imaginations | Aeon Essays

environment, so Bergman uses descriptions of the waves and sand, the mystery of the
strangers, to reinforce the thinking-feeling complexity of his narrator.

It’s curious, though, that with so many new-fangled options for titillation, poetry
remains so well-equipped to transmit Eros. e Italian philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’
Berardi provides one explanation in his definition <https://www.e-
flux.com/journal/39/60284/emancipation-of-the-sign-poetry-and-finance-during-the-
twentieth-century/> of verse as a ‘language of non-exchangeability’. Every element in
a poem is integral, he argues: no detail, word or line break can be altered without
fundamentally changing the individual nature of a work. Just as lovers in the truly
erotic imagination can’t be interchanged, neither can poems be ‘substituted’ by one
another. Every comma, like every mole on a human body, is an individual marker. If
capitalism seems happy to treat people as exchangeable utilities, poetry celebrates
what is unique and human to each subject. Presuming modern porn really does
represent the sexual imaginary of mass culture, Berardi’s argument emphasises just
how far outside of this paradigm Sappho’s or Wallada’s work lies.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of reading erotic poetry today is its capacity to help us
confront the problems of modern porn beyond the discourse of uncritical moral
panic. is is less a question of ‘perversion’ or ‘sin’ than recognising a relatively one-
dimensional idea of human sexuality for what it is. Erotic poetry is not just a
masturbatory aid – though it can also provide that function – it’s an attempt to
directly represent the complexity of human sexuality in a way that far exceeds the
ambitions of modern porn. Its power comes not from physicality in and of itself, but
from its sensitivity to the quasi-spiritual nature of desire and the intrinsic
mysteriousness of other people. Given the pertinence of such themes, it’s a shame
that this genre is still so often disregarded as relatively frivolous. Rejecting this easy
stereotype would surely be a start in facing up to the prudishness that strangely
lingers on in our apparently enlightened times. More profoundly still, it might even
help us cast off the imaginative constraints of mass culture and reclaim sexual
pleasure on our own unalienated terms.

Jamie Mackay is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in Internazionale, Frieze
and e Times Literary Supplement, among others. His is the author of ' e Invention of
Sicily' (forthcoming, Verso Books). He lives in Florence, Italy. 

aeon.co20 August, 2019

https://aeon.co/essays/how-ancient-poetry-can-revitalise-our-erotic-imaginations 7/7