In the third century B.C., Nossis took the Sappho’s poetry as a starting point of her own poetic work. Her reading of Sappho clashes with that of Athenian Comedy, which was to have such enduring repercussions. Renée Vivien undertakes the same operation, but her reading creates a two-fold tension: with the academic reading predominant at the time (Wilamowitz and Welcker) and with Les Chansons de Bilitis of Pierre Louÿs, which were addressed to a voyeuristic male audience. The employment of the same model leads to the appearance, in the Vivien’s work, of recreations of Nossis’s lyrics.