Anactoria
Sappho, who wrote in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE, names Anactoria as the object of her desire in a poem numbered as fragment 16.
Anactoria later featured in an 1896 play by H. V. Sutherland and in the 1961 poetic series "Three Letters to Anaktoria" by Robert Lowell, in which an unnamed man loves her before transferring, unrequitedly, his affections to Sappho.
I would rather see her lovely step and the radiant sparkle of her face than all the war chariots in Lydia and soldiers battling in arms.
[4] It has also been speculated that Anactoria may be the unnamed character in fragment 96, written to another of Sappho's female companions, possibly Atthis.
[8] Sappho describes her manner of walking as attractive, and her face as having amarychma, a word literally meaning 'flashing' or 'sparkling' and likely also to indicate beauty in movement.
[9] Based on its allusions to other literary works, particularly those of Hesiod, the term may also indicate that Anactoria was a young, virgin girl of marriageable age.
[11][d] A reference to "Anagora" in the Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine encyclopaedia, is generally considered to refer to Anactoria;[14] the name "Anagora" has been interpreted as an error in the manuscripts,[11] or alternatively by Denys Page as the real name of "Anactoria", to whom Page conjectures Sappho gave a pseudonym to protect her identity and reputation.
[19] Martin West has argued that Sappho generally uses the name of the objects of her desire, such as Anactoria, when portraying their relationship with her as finished or her own attitude towards it as hostile.
[22] The classicist and archaeologist David Moore Robinson called the description of Anactoria in fragment 16 "the finest lines in all Sappho's poetry".
[15] She is mentioned in a poem traditionally attributed to the first-century BCE Roman poet Ovid; the fifteenth of his Heroides.
[26] In the second century CE, the rhetorician Maximus of Tyre compared the relationship between Sappho and Anactoria with that of the philosopher Socrates and his male acolytes such as Alcibiades.
The poem is written from the point of view of Sappho, who addresses Anactoria in a long monologue written in rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter, which incorporates fragments from Sappho's poetry: the poem's first line is "My life is bitter with thy love", which alludes to fragment 130.
[33][h] The poem was both sensational and controversial for its treatment of taboo topics such as lesbianism, cannibalism and dystheism, as well as for its parody of both Sapphic and Biblical texts.
[38] Later critics have read it as a commentary on Romantic poetic authority, a critique of Victorian sexual and religious orthodoxies, and a meditation upon Sappho's position in history and literature.
[39] In his 1961 collection Imitations, the American poet Robert Lowell wrote "Three Letters to Anaktoria", a series of poems including an adaptation of Sappho's fragment 31 as its first.
[40] In painting, Anactoria's name is inscribed on one of the seats of the theatre depicted in the 1881 work Sappho and Alcaeus by Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
