Female lyric voices in the Odyssey

Homeric women are good singers: Circe and Calypso sing while weaving and Nausicaa sings while playing the ball with her comrades. However, the words of their songs are not reported: the poet seems to refrain from entering the world of female song. Nonetheless, their discourses and conversations are embedded with motifs comparable to female poetry, primarily Sappho’s songs. My paper thus aims at investigating the point of contacts between female narrative and discourse in the Homeric poems and the tradition of female lyric poetry, as exemplified by Sappho.