More than two and a half millennia ago, a woman, Sappho of Lesbos, composed and sang songs telling of the prayers and rites, the eroticism and the dreams of women. The lyric songs she com­ posed were well-crafted and emotionally evocative, sufficiently so to ensure their preservation through the centuries, and Sappho’s renown throughout much of the ancient world. The world she inhabited, or at least the world represented in her songs, was a community of women, a musically oriented environment that appears detached, separate from ‘public arenas’. She was one of the first women authors of recorded western culture1 and her songs tell of the worship of female gods and the idealisation of beauty and erotic love. Fragmentary as these songs now are, they appear to have been constructed in a manner that was woman-centred, to give expression to a woman’s desires and specificity. One of my desires is to map this woman-made world, to engage in an analy­ sis of the imagistic and symbolic constructs contained within a distinctive poetic territory. In the process I would like to direct my/your gaze at another, more positive view of womankind, a counterbalance to offset the negative images that prevail in later western culture.