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Anactoria (or Anaktoria; ) is a woman mentioned in the work of the Ancient Greece poet Sappho. Sappho, who wrote in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BCE, names Anactoria as the object of her desire in a poem numbered as fragment 16. Another of her poems, fragment 31, is traditionally called the "Ode to Anactoria", although no name appears in it. As portrayed by Sappho, Anactoria is likely to have been an aristocratic follower of hers, 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. "Anactoria" is written from the point of view of Sappho, who addresses the title character in a long monologue written in rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter. The monologue expresses Sappho's lust for her in sexually explicit terms; she first rejects 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 by openly approaching then-taboo topics such as lesbianism and dystheism. Anactoria later featured in an 1896 play by H. V. Sutherland and in the 1961 poetic series "Three Letters to Anaktoria" by Robert Lowell, in which an unnamed man loves her before transferring, unrequitedly, his affections to Sappho.
In the phrasing of Garry Wills, fragment 16 portrays Anactoria as "menacingly desirable". Sappho describes her manner of walking as attractive, and her face as having amarychma, a word literally meaning or and likely also to indicate beauty in movement. Based on its allusions to other literary works, particularly those of Hesiod, the term may also indicate that Anactoria was a young, virgin girl of marriageable age. The Anactoria portrayed in Sappho's work is generally considered to have been a follower of Sappho, who educated aristocratic girls with the partial aim of preparing them for marriage.
A reference to "Anagora" in the Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine encyclopaedia, is generally considered to refer to Anactoria; the name "Anagora" has been interpreted as an error in the manuscripts, or alternatively by Denys Page as the real name of "Anactoria", to whom Page conjectures Sappho gave a pseudonym to protect her identity and reputation. The Suda names "Anagora" as a native of Miletus, a major Greek city of Ionia. Christopher Brown suggests that Anactoria's absence in fragment 16 was because she had left Sappho's company to return to Miletus and marry; Eric Dodson-Robinson suggests that fragment 16 may have been written for performance at Anactoria's wedding, or for a Symposium event shortly after it. However, George Koniaris suggests that Anactoria may equally have left Sappho's company to be with her family or to work as a musician, and Glenn Most points out that the poem gives no indication of the length of Anactoria's absence: he argues that it may only have been a matter of a few days. Martin West has argued that Sappho generally uses the name of the objects of her desire, such as Anactoria, when portraying their relationship with her as finished or her own attitude towards it as hostile.
Sappho's expressed love for Anactoria is one of few examples of a woman expressing same-sex desire to survive from pre-modern literature. Andrew Ford has argued that Sappho's presentation of Anactoria may be Archetype rather than a representation of any specific individual, while Judith Hallett and André Lardinois have suggested that the speaker may not have been intended as an autobiographical portrayal of Sappho herself. The classicist and archaeologist David Moore Robinson called the description of Anactoria in fragment 16 "the finest lines in all Sappho's poetry".
The poem was both sensational and controversial for its treatment of taboo topics such as lesbianism, cannibalism and dystheism, as well as for its parody of both Sapphic and Biblical texts. Its content is sexually explicit and Sadomasochism; it was termed "frankly pornographic" in a 1971 article by David Cook. Swinburne's publication of "Anactoria", along with that of his "Sapphics", led to what Lawrence Lipking has termed his "ostracism". Catherine Maxwell and Stefano Evangelista have described "Anactoria" as both "infamous" and among Swinburne's most famous poems. Later critics have read it as a commentary on Romanticism poetic authority, a critique of Victorian sexual and religious orthodoxies, and a meditation upon Sappho's position in history and literature.
While a student at Harvard University, H. V. Sutherland wrote a verse drama, Sappho, or Archilochus and Hipponax, which was performed by Harvard and Wellesley students in January 1896. In the play, Anactoria is initially loved by the poet Alcaeus, who leaves her for Sappho. In his 1961 collection Imitations, the American poet Robert Lowell wrote "Three Letters to Anaktoria", a series of poems including an adaptation of Sappho's fragment 31 as its first. In Lowell's poems, the unnamed, hypothetical man alluded to in fragment 31 becomes the main subject of the series: he loves Anaktoria, transfers his affections to Sappho, and later, in Lowell's words, "withdraws or dies". In painting, Anactoria's name is inscribed on one of the seats of the theatre depicted in the 1881 work Sappho and Alcaeus by Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
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