Herodotus’ Rhodipus or Sappho’s Sobriquet? A Close Reading of Jesper Svenbro’s “The Messon of the Island of Lesbos: Toponym as Evidence in the History of Ideas, or Introduction to Ten Poems from The Name of Sappho’s Daughter”

Jesper Svenbro’s “First Prologus to the Charaxos-Poem” is the first in a series of poems dedicated to unraveling the identities of Sappho’s family members through their relationships to Anatolia, Lesbos, and the wider Mediterranean, including the enigma that is Doricha. It begins:

This selection is a primer: by first unraveling the legacy contained within Skamandrōnymos’ name Svenbro provides the method he uses throughout his poems to interpret the multifaceted histories contained within the names of ancient people and places. After exploring Svenbro’s examples and applying this primer to Doricha – whom Herodotus referred to as Rhodipus – I invoke Dionysus to bring chaos from order by liberally examining several etymological possibilities for the origin of this name. I conclude that Doricha was never her real name and is instead a sobriquet bequeathed by the jealous and intimidated Sappho.

Skamandrōnymos is a toponymic cognate of the river Scamander whose banks once ran alongside Troy’s walls, and which indicates his place of origin. Hector and Andromache named their son Scamandrius, whom the Trojans nicknamed Astyanax (chief of the city), so Skamandrōnymos also evokes an image not only of royalty but a connection to Homer’s Iliad and Anatolia’s deep history. Thus, Svenbro contends, Skamandrōnymos is more than a name; it is a toponym encoded with various elements including status, events, time, and place. That is, Skamandrōnymos is a history that reaches back to Troy as it also reaches forward to envelop Sappho, her brothers, and even Lesbos within its special heritage.

In “The Square Sail”, Svenbro argues that “[i]n a preliterate society… a name is as stable as an inscription” (262) and that written history must therefore begin with the study of proper names. For instance, Lesbos wine was valued across the Mediterranean and Sappho’s family’s names reflect the fact that they were vintners and traders. Charaxos means “plower of land and sea” (254), which closely matches Sappho’s description: “Say what you like about Charaxos / that’s a fellow with a fat-bellied ship / always in some port or other” (1-3). According to Svenbro, Erigyios “alludes to their father’s ‘athletic physique’” (254) and Larichos refers “to the ‘gulls’ following the ship far out to sea”. Strangely, Svenbro maintains that Sappho is decidedly “un-Greek”, and he makes no attempt to interpret it, but her name may be a cognate of the Greek sappheiros, which may have meant “lapis lazuli”, “sapphire”, and/or simply “blue”. 

Place names also absorb and transmit meaning. For example, in “With Pittacus, We Suddenly Stand in the Midst of the History of Ideas” Svenbro argues that the Greek mésson (“the middle”) is derived from Messa, a Lesbian city in which Pittacus sets forth the precedent that forgiveness is better than vendetta before laying down his authoritarian rule in exchange for a plot of land (261). Maiandrios follows Pittacus’ example, including the plot of land, and declares equality for all Samians. Where the world celebrates Athens as the mother of democracy, Svenbro locates its advent on the humble islands of Lesbos and Samos. This legacy would be all but forgotten if not for the remnant of memory that survives within mésson. Human actions and social events become infused into places, and those meanings are later extracted by invoking placenames.

This tradition of meeting-in-the-middle, of cooperation, carried on in hetaîroi, the “companions” of the Macedonian emperor’s shock cavalry, as it continued among the hetaîrai, the highly educated female companions who also served as artists, entertainers, and conversationalists Sappho associated with; the “so-called luxury whores” (259). Svenbro decries the Geisha-like reputation that followed this camaraderie down through the ages and instead compares the hetaîroi to followers of late 1960’s Western counterculture movements steeped in Marxist ideology. To Svenbro, hetaîroi is on par with “comrade”, a meaning lost behind the Athenians’ “smokescreen in the history of ideas” in their claim as originators of democracy. Not so, says Svenbro; the Lesbians achieve it first – but only after they encounter Dionysus.

In “The Wine God’s Mask” Svenbro recounts the legend that Dionysus worship was instituted after fishermen discover a floating mask of foreign design which the Delphic Oracle designates Fallen Dionysus; and it is Dionysus who opens Lesbians up to notions of otherness. In “Instagram with Dionysus Mask” Svenbro opines that Dionysus’ mask “places / alterity / at the center of the island’s / symbolic order” (267). The Lesbians embrace the sense of otherness Dionysus represents and at once become more willing to entertain, and experiment with, new concepts. The “mask is the sign of becoming-other / as wine is the method of becoming-other”. To wear a mask or to imbibe wine is to become someone else, and through the mask and the wine Lesbians learn that people and systems are mutable; they can change. It is Dionysus, the whipsaw nexus god where rationality, passion, agricultural production, and revolutionary change meet, who initiates Lesbos into new modes of thinking and being through which they eventually conceive and institute the world’s first democracy. However, in “Overdetermination”, Svenbro argues – via Althusser, who got it from Marx – that while social formation is determined first by the religious level, next by the economic level, and lastly by the political level, in 600 B.C.E Lesbos the political level rockets past the other two: Dionysus worship, which grew organically alongside wine cultivation and trade, could no longer keep pace with the island’s political exigencies.

Counterintuitively, Svenbro opines that in Lesbos, with Dionysus at the religious helm, “[t]the Other is not pushed away” (267), yet his essay begins with a discussion about Doricha, Charaxos’ ex-courtesan wife whom he met in Naukratis and bought out of slavery; a woman who incurs “Sappho’s… [aristocratic] …indignation” (250). This begs the question: if Lesbians are so progressive, why is Sappho so prejudiced?

Lesbos is a Greek island and Sappho’s mother’s name is Kleis, Greek for “Key”. Her father, Skamandrōnymos, whom Sappho “clearly resembles” (253) – a fact which will become pertinent shortly – is Anatolian. While his name suggests prestige via its connections to ancient Troy and Priam’s legacy, their lives on Lesbos as mere vintners and merchants places them firmly below Greece’s warrior caste, let alone nobility. Their family ships carry them to various ports across the Mediterranean from whence they surely return with wonderous descriptions of alien cultures and strange new implements of technē. Combined with their worship of Dionysus, Lesbos is a hub of otherness, so one might expect a brilliant poet such as Sappho to welcome Doricha’s strangeness. And this is the part where I call upon Dionysus to pummel my mind with possibilities so outlandish they hardly deserve any place in a fourth-year seminar.

For what if it isn’t Doricha’s strangeness that Sappho abhors, but her beauty? As previously mentioned, Sappho “clearly resembles her father” whom Svenbro describes as “dark in skin and small in stature”, even when “compared to his wife, Kleis”. Sappho was an anomaly among the Greek phenotype, and she must have stood out amongst Lesbian women, and perhaps not in a flattering way. Furthermore, in “Note To Namnet på Sapfos dotter (The Name of Sappho’s Daughter, Stockholm, 2017)” Svenbro argues that Doricha was not, in fact, a whore and that the new fragment contains ennépoisa which suggests “she is in possession of poetic competence” (270). Perhaps here lies another threat Doricha posed to Sappho: what if she was not only more beautiful than Sappho, but an equally talented hetaîrai, as well? And if Doricha, as Herodotus claims, tithed the iron ox basins that could still be found behind Delphi in his day and was “so famous that all Greeks knew the name of Rhodopis” (438) perhaps Sappho was threatened, too, by Doricha’s greater wealth as well as her reputation for generosity. And why does Herodotus call Charaxos’ wife Rhodopis while Sappho refers to her as Doricha? Rhodopis means “rosy-cheeked” while Doricha seems to be a feminine form of Dorian – the ethnic group who, along with the Aeolians, Achaeans, and Ionians, made up the Hellenes. However, given Sappho’s penchant for words, she may have intended Doricha to mean “A Gift for Rumors” or even “Sacrifice of Pus” if one amalgamates dōron (a gift, or sacrifice) with ichos (noise, echo, roar, or rumour) or ichōr (blood of the gods, or pus from a wound). If Sappho was familiar with early variants of the Latin dolor (pain) which arose from the proto-Italic dolōs that, in turn, stems from the Proto-Indo-European delh (to hew, to split) this may have added yet another layer of venom to Doricha. The obvious inconsistency lies in the use of lamda (λ) instead of rho (ρ), but, in certain contexts, and through the process of delateralization, one may be substituted for one another (I.e., when λ is followed by another consonant it becomes ρ). Heap all this upon an ancient and angry poetess’ right to coin a word any damn way she pleases and the possibility that Doricha was never Charaxos’ wife’s name in the first place becomes infinitely more probable. Doricha therefore represents Sappho’s repudiation of Rhodopis’ beauty, talent, and reputation through a clever sobriquet only a poet of Sappho’s caliber can achieve.

If this is a reach, I have only Svenbro to blame, for his initial deconstruction of Skamandrōnymos at the outset is the key to unlocking the meanings of ancient names and the histories contained therein. Svenbro, for instance, combines the Scandinavian sven (young man, or young warrior) with bro (bridge) to mean “Bridge of the Young Warrior”. Yakovenko* amalgamates the Hebrew Yakov (Jacob) with the Ukrainian enko (son) to mean “Son of Jacob”, a name which simultaneously evokes the image of the Hebrews’ patriarch valiantly wrestling with the angel as well as the Ukrainian patriarch was who shared the hero’s name. Hayes boasts no such noble origins and is simply derived from the Old English haese; that is, a “hedge”.

* Dr. Sergiy Yakovenko taught the ecopoetics seminar I wrote this essay for.

Works Cited

Herodotus. The Persian Wars: Volume I. Translated by A. D. Godly, Edited by Jeffrey Henderson, Harvard University Press, 1926, Loeb Classical Library, https://www.loebclassics.com/display/LCL117/1920/pb_LCL117.xvii.xml. Accessed Sept. 23, 2025.

Sappho. “Charaxos and Larichos.” Poetry, translated by William Logan, July 2016, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/89724/charaxos-and-larichos. Accessed Sept. 27, 2025.

Svenbro, Jesper. “The Messon of the Island of Lesbos: Toponym as Evidence in the History of Ideas, or Introduction to Ten Poems from The Name of Sappho’s Daughter.” Place Matters: Critical Topographies in Word and Image, edited by Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2022, pp. 249-72.