Phèdre’s Sapphic Speech: Racine’s <i>Phèdre</i> , Sappho’s ‘Fragment 31’, and the Theatrical Sublime
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In one of the most famous passages from Phèdre (1677), Racine makes what some of his contemporaries recognized as an allusion to Sappho’s ‘fragment 31’, a poem whose only known source is Longinus’s On the Sublime . This essay re-examines this allusion within the context of the play’s initial performance by considering what Sappho’s words could have come to mean when spoken by the actress Marie Champmeslé. It argues that Phèdre’s Sapphic speech marks an important moment not just in the history of Sappho’s reception but also in the history of the sublime, one where the ideological divisions that separate the theatrical sublime of the French neoclassical period from a more Romantic, masculine, and anti-theatrical sublime start to take shape.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".