It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that being a Lesbian should ever raise eyebrows. But there really was something in the Aegean waters lapping against Lesbos in the sixth century BC: remarkable things, culturally and politically, were happening on that island. Yet most of those have been entirely obscured to the human eye by the sheer brilliance of Sappho. Not only is this woman easily the most celebrated female poet from across the twelve centuries of Greco-Roman literature, but she is very probably the most famous poetess in the complete annals of world history.
But how little we know! Sappho — or Psappho in the local dialect — lived from roughly 620 to 570 BC. This places her in the era when city states all over Greece were experimenting wildly with all conceivable forms of governance. Amid such tumult, after years of civic instability, Mytilene — the primary city of Lesbos — decided to steady the ship of state by raising its most successful general Pittacus to the position of invited tyrant.
It may be that this sudden shift in power dynamics destabilised Sappho’s aristocratic family. According to some (admittedly later and suspect) accounts, she was forced to flee the island for a while — to Syracuse, on Sicily, then at the far western end of the Greek-speaking world. If true, this would have been a fine time to start singing of loves lost.
In later life, at any rate, Sappho is very much active on Lesbos: there she runs what seems to be a sort of finishing school for unmarried maidens, teaching the essential accoutrements of literature, song, dance, and feminine grace. And perhaps something else too: while Sappho was celebrated in antiquity as a prodigiously successful lover of men, she also came to be an exemplary connoisseuse of other unusual tastes.
Come the next century, the great comic poet Aristophanes finds it irresistible, in his state-sanctioned comedies for the Athenian public, to include some nudge-nudge and wink-wink about Lesbian women. The verbs Lesbizein and Lesbiazein should really signify nothing more than “acting like someone from Lesbos” but in practice their primary meaning was, well, cunnilingus.
This unambiguously sexual dimension to Sappho and her circle was too much for some later biographers, who were forced to delineate two distinct Sapphos. On the one hand, we have the beautiful poet and her beautiful verses; on the other, we confront some sex-addled degenerate who just happened to share the same name. While this dichotomy seems laughable, there are still scholars who seek to recreate a pure and unadulterated Sappho, whose character and integrity has been grossly tarnished by misogynists, perverts, and academics.
So what does Sappho actually have to say for herself? Or, rather, to sing: as a lyric poet, her words were written for performance with the lyre. And she had plenty to sing: hymns to praise the gods, hymeneals to celebrate the weddings of friends, and homages to celebrate the lovely women of her entourage. Her primary inspirations were love, beauty, marriage and divinity. Many of her compositions are first-person paeans to female friends. The one poem we possess from Sappho in full (Fragment 1) is an ode to Aphrodite which prays for the goddess’s help in winning the affection of a girl. And in another famous poem (Fragment 31) Sappho sings of her helpless frustration at seeing a beloved girl trapped in conversation with a man.
We could know so much more. But the world is unfair. Beyond that one complete poem, everything else that Sappho wrote is now either fragmentary or lost entirely. It is estimated that she wrote some 10,000 lines over her unknowably long life; if so, we have to lament that we have lost well over 90 per cent of the corpus. We can now only read 650 lines, which survive spread between several ancient authors, who quote mere snippets, and tantalising papyrus scraps salvaged from Egyptian rubbish heaps and mummy cartonnage.
Sappho’s artistic success was, and is, immense. Just as Homer was unquestionably “The Poet” among the Greeks, the world-famous medic Galen tells us that “The Poetess” unquestionably meant Sappho. She was lauded in antiquity as the “tenth muse” — alongside the nine divine sisters; not only was she the only woman to find a place among the Hellenistic canon of the Nine Lyric Poets, but her poetry was pointedly gathered by experts for circulation in nine books.
Yet the very things that won Sappho so much fame — her beautiful Aeolic Greek and her intimate and passionate subject matter — are paradoxically what conspired to her near-total disappearance. The Byzantine scholars who ultimately decided what was worth spending expensive time and resources on copying favoured the mainstream dialect of Attic Greek, and had no interest in preserving the poetry of Sappho’s circle of self-pleasuring parthenoi. So her papyri crumbled to dust.
The glimpses of Sappho’s sublime, vivid, sensuous, arresting verses are fleeting, but unforgettable
We therefore squint at Sappho as if through a glass darkly: bewitched by her lyrical spell, we struggle to make sense of the scraps set before us. Most biographical questions remain dispiritingly insoluble. Maybe she was married, maybe not. Probably she had a daughter; perhaps not. Maybe she was exiled to Sicily for political intrigue, possibly not. Maybe she committed suicide by cliff-leap out of love for the gorgeous ferry-cum-fisherman Phaon, very probably not. It is certain, however, that she was a great influence on generations of poets to come: Sophocles, Euripides, Callimachus, Catullus, Horace, and even Virgil could not escape her lure.
The great biographer Plutarch somewhere described Sappho’s verses as “truly mingled with fire”, lines which “draw up the heat of her heart.” This must be true, but our own age has only the embers to tend. The glimpses of Sappho’s sublime, vivid, sensuous, arresting verses are fleeting, but unforgettable. Whether or not she really was Greece’s first female poet, she has been for countless others the first woman to sing in a way that the heart can hear and never forget.
