[Andrew Dalby]

I'm glad, nopardons, that you feel sure of these things: that Homer travelled around, that Sappho was an anomaly, that women in ancient Greece were for BREEDING. It's good to have certainties. I admire your decades of reading ancient Greek and Latin (I claim 37 years of Greek, which isn't much) and yet I'm still uncertain of some of the things you're certain of!

[nopardons]

Well, except for some books ( fictional ones, I might add ), written in the late 1960s, which were pushing matrilineal/feminist matriarchies preceding patriarchies in all ancient societies, the general consensus of archaeologists and sociologists, based on written and physical remains, ancient Greece was an ultra patriarchal society, in which women didn't count for much, in regards to such things are writing/memorizing poetry.

Only a few fragments of Sappho's poetry are still extant and no other poetess is known. She is the only female author known. And while there has been the constant debate as to whether or not Homer was one man, a "head bard", who each generation took that name, and several other such theories, the names of many male writers, from ancient Greece, have come down to us through millennia.