Know Your History: Sappho

LGBT, NewsBites — By Speak Equal on October 13, 2009 at 2:51 am
Sappho was a poetess of Ancient Greece. She is thought to have written nine books of poems, although the first written record of her is not dated until approximately the third century BC, nearly a hundred years after she lived. It may be said that in her was born the greatest lyric poetess of all time. By the Middle Ages, all copies were lost.

Only one poem from Sappho survives in complete form, “Hymn of Aphrodite.” The longest fragment of Sappho’s poetry is only 16 lines long. Sappho was a lyric poet who developed her own particular meter, known as Sapphic meter, and she was credited for leading an aesthetic movement away from classical themes of Gods, to the themes of individual human experiences. Sappho wrote mainly love poems, of which only fragments survive, save a single complete poem, “Hymn to Aphrodite.”

Sappho’s poems usually focus on the relationships among women. This focus has given rise to speculation that Sappho’s interest in women was what today would be called homosexual or lesbian; the word “lesbian” comes from the island of Lesbos and the communities of women there.

Sappho’s poetry centers on passion and love for various personages and both genders. The word lesbian derives from the name of the island of her birth, Lesbos, while her name is also the origin of the word sapphic; both words were only applied to female homosexuality beginning in the 19th century.[3][4] The narrators of many of her poems speak of infatuations and love (sometimes requited, sometimes not) for various females, but descriptions of physical acts between women are few and subject to debate.[5][6] Whether these poems are meant to be autobiographical is not known, although elements of other parts of Sappho’s life do make appearances in her work, and it would be compatible with her style to have these intimate encounters expressed poetically, as well. Her homoerotica should be placed in the seventh century (BC) context. The poems of Alcaeus and later Pindar record similar romantic bonds between the members of a given circle.[7]

Sappho’s contemporary Alcaeus described her thus: “Violet-haired, pure, honey-smiling Sappho” (ἰόπλοκ᾽ ἄγνα μελλιχόμειδε Σάπφοι, fr. 384). The 3rd century philosopher Maximus of Tyre wrote that Sappho was “small and dark” and that her relationships to her female friends were similar to those of Socrates:

What else was the love of the Lesbian woman except Socrates’ art of love? For they seem to me to have practised love each in their own way, she that of women, he that of men. For they say that both loved many and were captivated by all things beautiful. What Alcibiades and Charmides and Phaedrus were to him, Gyrinna and Atthis and Anactoria were to the Lesbian.

[1] Kings College – http://departments.kings.edu/womens_history/sapph.html
[2] Wikipedia – http://wikipedia.org
[3] Douglas Harper (2001). “Lesbian”. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 2009-02-07.
[4] Douglas Harper (2001). “Sapphic”. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 2009-02-07.
[5] Denys Page, Sappho and Alcaeus, Oxford UP, 1959, pp. 142-146.
[6] (Campbell 1982, p. xi-xii)
[7] Anne Pippin Burnett, Three Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho, Harvard UP, 1983.

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