Anactoria

Anactoria (or Anaktoria) (Ancient Greek: Ἀνακτορία) is a woman mentioned by the Ancient Greek poet Sappho, who wrote in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE. Sappho names Anactoria as the object of her desire in a poem known as Fragment 16. Another poem by Sappho, Fragment 31, is traditionally called the "Ode to Anactoria", though no name appears in it. As portrayed in Sappho's work, she is likely to have been a young, aristocratic follower of Sappho's, of marriageable age. It is possible that Fragment 16 was written in connection with her wedding to an unknown man. The name "Anactoria" has also been argued to have been a pseudonym, perhaps of a woman named Anagora from Miletus, or an archetypal creation of Sappho's imagination.

The English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Anactoria" was published in his 1866 collection, Poems and Ballads. In "Anactoria", Sappho addresses the title character in a long monologue written in rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter. The monologue expresses Sappho's lust for Anactoria in sexually explicit terms, and has the poet first reject art and the gods for Anactoria's love before reversing her stance and claiming to reject Anactoria in favour of poetry. Swinburne's poem created a sensation amongst contemporary readers by openly approaching topics such as lesbianism and dystheism. Anactoria also features in an 1896 play by H. V. Sutherland and in the 1961 poetic series "Three Letters to Anaktoria", by the American poet Robert Lowell, in which an unnamed man loves her before transferring, unrequitedly, his affections to Sappho.