Sappho

---

(c. 630 – c. 570 BC) 

Sappho was an Archaic Greek poet from  the island of Lesbos. Sappho is known for her lyric poetry, written to be sung while accompanied by music. In ancient times, Sappho was widely regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets and was given names such as the "Tenth Muse" and "The Poetess". Most of Sappho's poetry is now lost, and what is extant has mostly survived in fragmentary form; only the Ode to Aphrodite is certainly complete. 

Sappho was a prolific poet, probably composing around 10,000 lines; today, only about 650 survive. She was best-known in antiquity for her love poetry; other themes in the surviving fragments of her work include family and religion. 

The word lesbian is an allusion to Sappho, originating from the name of the island of Lesbos, where she was born. However, though in modern culture Sappho is seen as a lesbian, she has not always been considered so. In classical Athenian comedy (from the Old Comedy of the fifth century to Menander in the late fourth and early third centuries BC), Sappho was caricatured as a promiscuous heterosexual woman, and the earliest surviving sources to explicitly discuss Sappho's homoeroticism come from the Hellenistic period. The earliest of these is a fragmentary biography written on papyrus in the late third or early second century BC, which states that Sappho was "accused by some of being irregular in her ways and a woman-lover". Denys Page comments that the phrase "by some" implies that even the full corpus of Sappho's poetry did not provide conclusive evidence of whether she described herself as having sex with women.

Today, it is generally accepted that Sappho's poetry portrays homoerotic feelings: as Sandra Boehringer puts it, her works "clearly celebrate eros between women". Toward the end of the 20th century, though, some scholars began to reject the question of whether Sappho was a lesbian — Glenn Most wrote that Sappho herself "would have had no idea what people mean when they call her nowadays a homosexual", André Lardinois stated that it is "nonsensical" to ask whether Sappho was a lesbian, and Page duBois calls the question a "particularly obfuscating debate". Some scholars argue that although Sappho would not have understood modern conceptions of sexuality, lesbianism has always existed and she was fundamentally a lesbian. Others, influenced by Michel Foucault's work on the history of sexuality, believe that it is incoherent to project the concept of lesbianism onto an ancient figure like Sappho. Melissa Mueller argues that Sappho's poetry can be read as queer even if the question of her lesbianism is undecidable.

Only fragments of her work remain, including this beautiful piece where the narrator is speaking to another woman. This poem is known as "Fragment 31" and although the end line is a little garbled owing to the deterioration of the original papyrus, it still speaks of an all consuming love between women:

"That man seems to me to be equal to the gods 

who is sitting opposite you and hears you nearby

speaking sweetly

and laughing delightfully, which indeed 

makes my heart flutter in my breast; 

for when I look at you even for a short time, 

it is no longer possible for me to speak

but it is as if my tongue is broken 

and immediately a subtle fire has run over my skin, 

I cannot see anything with my eyes, 

and my ears are buzzing

a cold sweat comes over me, trembling 

seizes me all over, I am paler 

than grass, and I seem nearly

 to have died.

but everything must be dared/endured, since (?even a poor man) ..."

We'll leave you with some prophetic words by Sappho, this time Fragment 2: 

I tell you

someone will remember us

in the future. 

To learn more about Sappho, click here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho

Biography comes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho

Poem is from: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/sep/05/poster-poems-sappho-reinterpreted-billy-mills  

Image is one of the earliest surviving images of Sappho, from c. 470 BC. She is shown holding a barbitos and plectrum, and turning to listen to Alcaeus, also from Wikipedia.