![]() "I think that Sappho was predominantly attracted to women emotionally," Johnson says. The term homosexual and the term lesbian are very late into the English vocabulary." The ancient Greeks did not have a term for it, so scholars who work on culture and sexuality in the ancient world use a more neutral term, which is "same-sex attracted." "The ancients did not use those terms of themselves. "It's a vitally important question, and that's why it's asked every single time," Johnson says. The real pun could have been that she preferred women.īut back to Sappho, was she or wasn't she? In other fragments, the names used for Sappho's husband vary and are often puns, joking about his virility rather than providing his actual name. "Because there's no way in ancient Greek society that you'd have a kid without a marriage ceremony and a very legitimate process."Īlthough Sappho wrote about her brothers and other women she knew, there have been no references to her husband found in her works. "She would have to have a husband to have a child," Johnson says. Cleis is also mentioned in the Suda, so her existence is generally agreed upon, and Sappho's daughter provides evidence that the poet was married to a man. Although she was part of an aristocratic family, Sappho's stature as one of the most important poets in Western history, or even a respected poet in her own time, is an unusual turn of events.įor corroboration, these inclusions are matched with early biographical sketches from antiquity up to the Suda, an early Byzantine encyclopedic text written in Greek, whose writers would have had access to ancient materials that have now been lost. That she came from the island of Lesbos, Greece, is agreed upon. and 615 B.C.E., and has been the subject of much opinion during the past two-and-a-half millennia. We're referring of course to the poet Sappho. These facts alone would be interesting enough, but what's even more astounding is this poet was a woman who composed lyric poetry at a time when women didn't do that. The fact that scholars have been interested in studying these bits and pieces for hundreds of years is a testament to their impact and beauty. Modern poetry enthusiasts might recognize one of ancient Greece's most well-known poets from just one surviving poem and many other surviving fragments of work. Historically, translators have heterosexualized Sappho's poems, and masculinized the objects of her affection however, contemporary historians generally accept that her poems portray homoerotic feelings.The picture depicts Sappho embracing her fellow poet Erinna in a garden at Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, Greece. Both hetero- and homosexual (in the contemporary definition) legends of Sappho exist for example, one story has her married to Kerkylas, a wealthy man from Andros, while a second story ends with her suicide into the sea due to her unrequited love to Phaon, a sailor. While the terms lesbian and sapphic are both attributed to Sappho and her poems, controversy remains as to her own sexuality. New discoveries have been made as recently as 2013, and one contemporary discovery in 2004 completed a fragmented poem for the first time in decades. However, very little of her work has survived, for a myriad of reasons notably that she wrote in Aeolic Greek, a dialect that Latin translators of the time could not read, and though she was quite prolific, her work has simply been lost over the centuries. Sappho was incredibly popular at the time and was honored in coinage and pottery long after her death. She is thought to have had one child of her own, named Cleïs after her mother - as was traditional - though some historians speculate, based on Sappho's own poems, that this person may have been a younger lover. According to Ovid's Heriodes, her father died when she was seven. It is well-attributed that she came from an aristocratic family, and records suggest that she was the only daughter of four children of Skamandronymous and Cleïs. Sappho was born on the Greek island of Lesbos sometime around 620 BCE.
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