Sappho was married to Cercylas, a wealthy man from the island of Andrus , and had a daughter named Cleis. She became so popular in her time that the city of Syracuse built a statue to honor her when she visited.
In ancient and medieval times she was more famous for according to legend throwing herself off a cliff due to unrequited love for a male sailor name Phaon. This legend dates to Ovid and Lucian in Ancient Rome. Through fragments scattered through time we can piece together an overall picture of what her life must have been like.
It is evident through the praise of others that the loss of her work has been a huge blow to the literary world. She was renowned for her talent, her beauty, and for various alleged indiscretions. Allen, Sister Prudence. The Concept of Woman. Cambridge: Eden Press, This source is not a biography. She explores claims about sex and gender identity of philosophers both men and women, including Sappho. She provides translations of some works by Sappho and works that have been written about her and analyses them regarding the issue of gender.
Hallett, Judith P. Roman Sexualities. Lardinois, Andre, and Laura McClure. Princeton: Princeton University Press, He claims that the poetry of Sappho was closely modeled on the public speech genres of women in ancient Greece.
However exalted her reputation among the ancient literati, in Greek popular culture of the Classical period and afterward Sappho was known primarily as an oversexed predator—of men. Comic playwrights and authors of light verse portrayed Sappho as just another daughter of Lesbos, only too happy to fall into bed with her younger male rivals.
For centuries, the most popular story about her love life was one about a hopeless passion for a handsome young boatman called Phaon, which allegedly led her to jump off a cliff. Midway through the first century A. Some ancient writers assumed that there had to have been two Sapphos: one the great poet, the other the notorious slut.
There is an entry for each in the Suda. The page is blank. One scholar claimed to have found evidence that classes were taught on how to apply makeup. Classicists today have no problem with the idea of a gay Sappho.
But some have been challenging the interpretation of her work that seems most natural to twenty-first century readers: that the poems are deeply personal expressions of private homoerotic passion.
To answer that question, classicists lately have been imagining the purposes to which public performance of erotic poems might have been put. The late Harvard classicist Charles Segal made even larger claims.
Between the paucity of actual poems and the woeful unreliability of the biographical tradition, these debates are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.
Indeed, the study of Sappho is beset by a curious circularity. For the better part of a millennium—between the compilation of the Suda and the late nineteenth century—the same bits of poetry and the same biographical gossip were endlessly recycled, the poetic fragments providing the sources for biographies that were then used as the basis for new interpretations of those same fragments. Until the late nineteenth century, when the papyri started turning up, there were only the ancient quotations.
Since then, the amount of Sappho that we have has more than doubled. However lowly its original purpose, the dump soon yielded treasures. Papyrus manuscripts dating to the first few centuries A. Some were fragments of works long known, such as the Iliad, but even these were of great value, since the Oxyrhynchus papyri were often far older than what had been, until that point, the oldest surviving copies.
Others revealed works previously unknown. Among the latter were several exciting new fragments of Sappho, some substantial. From the tattered papyri, the voice came through as distinctive as ever:. Over the decades that followed, more of the papyri were deciphered and published.
That much, I reckon, Zeus knows. The poem closes with the hope that another, younger brother will grow up honorably and save his family from heartache—presumably, the anxiety caused by their wayward elder sibling. At last, that particular biographical tidbit could be confirmed. After the University of Cologne acquired some papyri, scholars found that one of the texts overlapped with a poem already known: Fragment 58, one of the Oxyrhynchus papyri.
The Oxyrhynchus fragment consisted mostly of the ends of a handful of lines; the new Cologne papyrus filled in the blanks, leaving only a few words missing. Finally, the lines made sense. Sappho alludes to the story of Eos, the dawn goddess, who wished for, and was granted, eternal life for her mortal lover, Tithonus, but forgot to ask for eternal youth:. If love of women, even in a non-sexual sense, and an exclusive focus on the needs and lives of women define a woman as a lesbian, then — yes — Sappho was a lesbian.
However, if a lesbian is defined more narrowly as a woman who has sex with another woman, then evidence to define Sappho as one is harder to establish. Of course, these two binaries are inherently artificial and without nuance. They are also ignorant of social constructionism, which insists on understanding an individual in her or his historical environment, its values, and its cultural specificities.
And, in the society of Archaic Mytilene, Sappho was not defined as a lesbian. That began with the Greeks and Romans of later centuries, who tended to interpret her skill as stemming from a perverted form of masculinity, which sometimes found expression in representations of her through the lens of a hyper-sexuality. The Sappho mystique is further confounded by later testimonies such as the 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia called the Suda or the Stronghold , which chronicled the history of the ancient Mediterranean.
In one of two entries on Sappho, readers are informed that she was in love with a ferryman by the name of Phaon whose rejection of her caused her to leap to her death from the Leucadian Cliff. This apocryphal history, which emerged in antiquity, went on to inspire artists, poets and playwrights for hundreds of years, despite the strange origins of Phaon as a figure of myth and legend. In the second entry on Sappho in the Suda, it is stated that Sappho was married, had a daughter by the name of Cleis, and was also a lover of women.
In Fragment , for example, Sappho sings of Cleis:. Sappho, following the poetic traditions of Archaic Greece, tended towards floral and natural imagery to depict feminine beauty and youth. Elsewhere, she evokes images of garlands, scents and even apples to convey feminine sensuality. Hers was largely a world of beauty, caresses, whispers and desires; songs sung in honour of the goddess Aphrodite , and tales of mythical love.
Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the dark earth, but I say it is whatever a person loves.
It is perfectly easy to make this understood by everyone: for she who far surpassed mankind in beauty, Helen, left her most noble husband and went sailing off to Troy with no thought at all for her child or dear parents, but [love? She extends her dictum with the example of the mythical figure of Helen of Troy , renowned in antiquity as the most beautiful woman in the world. Consequences be damned!
Sappho reveals that Anactoria is gone and is missed. She compares her, indirectly, to Helen and then evokes her beauty, namely her gait and her sparkling face. But they are also powerful, as she rejects the world of masculine warfare in preference for beauty and desire. In another well-preserved piece, Fragment 31, Sappho evokes the sensations she experiences as a result of being seated opposite a beautiful woman:.
He seems to me equal in good fortune to the whatever man, who sits on the opposite side to you and listens nearby to your sweet replies and desire-inducing laugh: indeed that gets my heart pounding in my breast.
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