Dylan Madden Word Count: 452
Sappho’s Immortal Daughters Response
27 September 2017

There was more to talk about in Margaret Williamson’s discussion on Sappho. The chapter Sexuality and Ritual allowed her to dig deeper into the social and sexual roles of women in Greek society as well as towards Sappho and her poetry. She talked more about sexual identity for both female and their male counterparts in their patriarchal societies but also the term referring to their status as an individual rather than referencing sexuality as an “identity or attribute” (Williamson 96). She talks about how men and boys in the Greek society and their sexuality relied on their “masculine role, not their choice of object” (96). The next section focuses more on women and their roles in patriarchal society and from the women in most of the Greek tales, she realizes how “the battle of the sexes is significant thematically, not just for the individuals involved” (99). In every sexual battle discussed in most of the works we’ve read, I see the women trying to drive themselves out of being the subjective character and becoming more of a dominate …show more content…
It as angle in which Sappho herself played upon when she wrote her poetry as a means to worship the god of love Aphrodite. Williamson provides examples of festivals women in religion initiate while describing a festival called Thesmophoria, based on a play by Aristophanes and from an Athenian festival called Scira in which both celebrated under a goddess, in both cases, Demeter. Women in these festivals had different ways in which they could enact the “construction of their own sexuality”