Rhetoricians of Antiquity -- Sappho and Aspasia

For this week's posting, my professor has asked my class to discuss and compare the aforementioned female rhetoricians. I find myself hesitant and I struggle with the topic. The idea that the work of these two women barely survived only to be retained in fragments or kept alive through other's words inhibits my ability to compare them. What I know of Sappho especially seems to be written through biased lenses. Regardless of the translation, her poems tend to deal with interpersonal love on the whole whereas Aspasia's one surviving speech has a political focus. However, they both describe love profoundly. One writes of it in regards to other people and to the beauty around her, whereas the other writes of love in regard to the city of Athens and its beauty and nobility.
Another idea that plagues me deals with the lack of credit society gave these women. I know that some people out there might say, "But some considered Sappho the tenth muse!" or "Plato kept Aspasia's speech alive!" I argue that, flattering as it was, they received superficial credit. Few citizens of their country and their day looked and them and though that if these two women could be such rhetorical masters after claiming an education that maybe other women could as well. Instead, as Marie Delcourt points out, as quoted in Cheryl Glenn's "Sex, Lies, and Manuscript: Refiguring Aspasia in the History of Rhetoric," "It was all too amazing to be proper; and Aspasia was so brilliant she could not possibly be respectable." As we learned in class from reading Barbara Biesecker's "Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women Into the History of Rhetoric," Aspasia's situation represents the very idea of female tokenism. Society found it distasteful a woman should be so educated, despite the men who flocked to her for knowledge. Her esteem did nothing to raise up the women around her either. Sappho and Aspasia seem more than other women, rather than being average women given a chance at education.