SAPPHO
Meet Sappho.
The Poetess of ancient Greece has mystified readers for millennia. Hailing from the isle of Lesbos, her legacy has inspired some of queer vocabulary’s greatest hits (see: “lesbian,” “sapphic,” and every queer-coded violet ever inked on paper or skin.) But for a woman often dubbed the OG Lesbian, there’s actually very little we know of her lived life. What most of us can agree on is this:
Sappho lived on the Greek isle of Lesbos somewhere around 630-570 BCE. She was born to an aristocratic family in the city of Mytilene (or Eresos) and rose to prominence as the great lyric Poetess, her words and renown rivaled only by Homer (The Odyssey, The Iliad, those old yarns.)
Sappho revolutionized poetry by diving deep into the personal — giving voice to our emotional depths, first-person narratives, and innermost yearnings (ahem, Fragment 31.) She took the sweeping war epic and turned it inward — to the hidden battles of the human heart. She refined poetic form and perfected her own indelible meter: the Sapphic Stanza. She performed her work with a lyre in hand, setting the stage for soulful singer-songwriters to come. Plato named her “The Tenth Muse.” Her face graced coins and statuary for centuries. And her most impassioned subject matter? Women.
Sappho loved women. She wrote of them sensuously, ardently, and prolifically. Her words pulse “more naked than flesh.” And while it’s certainly problematic to impose modern sexual “identities” onto historical figures who pre-dated these concepts (especially those who existed over 2,000 years ago), it doesn’t surprise me in the least that Sappho has become a queer icon. She’s certainly one of mine. She writes of feelings and sensations felt by women *for* women. She pours palpable love into her gaze and verse. And she sings these words into a canon utterly stripped of female voices and same-sex sentiment.
Sappho is thought to have penned over 10,000 lines of verse… only 650 lines of which still survive. What remains is almost entirely in fragments — a line here, a line there, sometimes not more than a single word on crumbling papyrus (downrushing… honeyvoiced… mythweaver.) Her longest surviving work (“Ode to Aphrodite”) runs a mere 28 lines long. (Compare this to the nearly 28,000 lines of verse — alive, well, and assigned in high schools annually — written by her historic counterpart, Homer.)
All nine volumes of Sappho’s complete works burned with the Library of Alexandria. It’s rumored that Saint Gregory of Nazianzus and Pope Gregory VII lit a match to all her remaining verse (because, you know, patriarchy + women-loving-women.)
Historians are divided on most of her personal biography. Was she married to a man named Kerkylas… or is this name in the historic record an archaic, tongue-in-cheek jab? (no mentions of him in her writing and his name roughly translates to “Dick from Men’s Island.” No joke.)
Did she have a daughter named Cleis… or was this a mistranslation (the interpreted words for “daughter” and “child” being the same.)
Was she the headmistress of a girls’ school… or was this a profession foisted upon her by later “moral” generations to rationalize the female subjects of so many of her poems? (also, not moral and… creepy?)
Did she leap to her death in the name of unrequited love for a ferryman (thanks, Ovid) or was this a lampooning revisionist myth courtesy of the historical boys’ club?
Through all of these unknowns, Sappho’s legacy (if not her physical work) endures. There’s a reason her verses have been buried, “cleansed”, and subverted. There’s a reason her passion — however she would have defined it — transcends. If a powerful institution feels threatened by words, you can bet a disempowered community feels heartened and seen by them.
Each generation, for better or worse, creates their own Sappho — replacing the blank fragments with meaning of their own. Today’s Sappho is sexually-liberated, queer-celebrated, and free. I’d like to think she’d raise a glass (and lyre) to that.
