Sappho

We just couldn’t consider happenings in LGBT history without making at least some reference to our original namesake Sappho.

For those of you who have never heard of Sappho – she is considered to be one of the great female poets of the ancient world, a Greek lyrist who is thought to have been born some time between 630 and 612 BC, and who, by all accounts, seems to have lived on the island of Lesbos.

A ‘lyrist’ is one who writes poetry to be performed with the accompaniment of a lyre (a stringed instrument – a bit reminiscent of a hand-held harp), and Sappho influenced the prevailing poetry’s lyric meter (or rhythm) to the point that her ‘technique’ became known as Sapphic meter. Not terribly significant, you might think, in terms of LGBT history - but there’s more.

Sappho – amongst others – also flew in the face of the prevailing style in other ways too. In her day it was customary for poets to write from the viewpoint of gods or muses. Not for Sappho however. No, Sappho chose to write from the first person - she wrote of her own emotions and experiences, rather than those of the gods. She wrote of love and yearning and loss but the objects of her affections generally seem to be women. It has been claimed that it was through Sappho’s writing that female homosexuality came to be understood as a distinct sexual orientation, and practice. In fact, Sappho has become so synonymous with women-loving-women that the two most widely used words to describe female homosexuality – Sapphic and lesbian – are traceable to her.



There is also however, a great deal of debate surrounding Sappho and her penchant for women. Not least the legend that she threw herself from a cliff-top to her death because Phaon, a handsome ferryman rejected her amorous advances – not what you might expect from a lesbian! From the pieces of evidence available to our scholars however, it seems that Sappho was married but the homo-erotic content of her poetry has inspired a ferocious is-she-or-isn’t-she-lesbian-or-does-it-even-matter debate amongst academics.

The level and ferocity of this debate though is astounding considering how much of her poetry has actually survived. Only one complete poem and about 200 fragments of varying sizes of others are all that exists of her work. And although Homer usually carries the mantle of ‘greatest ever poet’, Sappho is frequently placed a very close second. Plato himself supposedly said of her:

Some say the Muses are nine: how careless!
Look, there's Sappho too, from Lesbos, the tenth.

Praise indeed.

There is much to read about Sappho but the surface that we have merely scratched in order to bring you a brief outline of her and her significance to our community seems to suggest that most classics scholars tend to support the Sappho-as-lesbian train of thought. But the lack of firm historical facts about her real life fans the flames of speculation, as does the necessity for translation of each piece of her surviving work. How much of her meaning, for example, is lost or ‘made up’ (if you like) by the very act of translating it?

While the classicists continue the debate however, we at Sapphic Central have followed in the footsteps of so many ‘sapphists’ before us and have very firmly thrown our hat into the Sappho ring. She is resolutely in our minds – and will forever be – the mother of lesbianism. It almost doesn’t matter whether she was lesbian herself, the content of her poetry opened the eyes of the world and showed it what is was – and is – to be lesbian. Our Sapphic identity owes much to Sappho, the one for whom our community is named, and the inspiration for our web-zine name.



Sappho’s Fragment 31 – as translated by Anne Carson:

He seems to me equal to the gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing – oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, a moment, then no speaking

is left in me

no: tongue breaks, and thin
fire is racing under skin

and in eyes no sight and drumming

fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking

grips me all, greener than grass

I am and dead – or almost

I seem to me.