Irene, London, March 2023
‘The vast majority of women who lived pre-20th century would most likely not have received a classical education and been well-versed in Greek, unlike their male counterparts. As a result, translations of Sappho’s work done by male poets were the only translations available: this was a huge problem, as many chose to deliberately change the sex of Sappho’s love object, thereby erasing this fundamental aspect of her writing. This myth of the solely ‘straight’ Sappho was therefore perpetuated through the lack of access to the original text and compounded by the popularity of Ovid’s tale of Sappho and Phaon.’
Sappho’s fragmentation
Arguably one of the most well-known facts about Sappho is that very little of her work survives. One full poem exists, Ode to Aphrodite aka Fragment 1, as well as a few somewhat long passages, which were found in scholarly texts, for example Fragment 31 which was quoted in De Sublimitate. Smaller paragraphs, lines and sometimes even singular words have also been collected, mostly on scraps of papyrus or in the linings of Egyptian coffins in the Egyptian desert. In total, it is said that we now have around 3% of Sappho’s full body of work, an infinitesimally small figure; it is impossible to reconstruct much of her poetry from what we have.
The burning of the Library of Alexandria dealt a huge blow to scholars of Sappho, since the Library had contained all 9 volumes of her poetry. Another possible cause of this fragmentation of Sappho is religious aversion to lesbianism (or homosexuality in general). In the Roman Era, Sappho gained a reputation for being immoral and promiscuous among Christians, and so soon faded into oblivion. According to the 16th century scholar Scaliger, Pope Gregory VIII, upon becoming Pope in 1073, ordered that all Sappho’s works in Rome and Constantinople be destroyed because of her open discussion of erotic love and same-sex desire. However, this is most likely an untrue story. What is true, though, is that by the 12th Century a huge proportion of her work had been lost.
Attitudes toward lesbianism in Ancient Greece and Rome
The Ancient Greeks endorsed male homosexual relationships, with pederastic relationships between older men and adolescent boys deemed socially acceptable and educational. Unfortunately, the sae privileges were not afforded to female homosexuals since women were not seen as equal to men, andtheir relationships were deemed inferior. Aristophanes’ character in Plato’s Symposium likened sapphic love to heterosexual love, pronouncing both inferior to male homosexual love.
However, for most Greeks and Romans, her sexuality was not the biggest problem. A biography of Sappho from the early Hellenistic Period is the first source to discuss Sappho’s rumoured sexual orientation, saying “she has been accused by a few of being undisciplined and sexually involved with women” and dismissing it as defamatory. In fact, many people simply did not believe she was attracted to women since she was such a prominent figure. Critics primarily described her as ‘ατακτος,’ or ‘unmanageable’ in her sexual appetite. This descriptor was what plagued her reputation: in Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, he cited the question of “whether Sappho was a prostitute” as a pointless question that many loved to debate.
Early male scholars
In the 1800s and 1900s, male scholars happily consumed Sappho’s poetry but could not reconcile the beauty of her art with her queer identity. These men were so averse to female same-sex attraction that they purposely viewed her (clearly) queer poetry through a heteronormative lens. Many attempted to ‘save’ her reputation as a respectable poet by distancing her from the label of ‘homosexual’ which was seen as sinful and dirty at the time; the German scholar Wilamowitz-Moellendorff planted the story of Sappho being a schoolmistress, thus reframing her sapphic desires as love between a schoolteacher and her pupils. Others claimed that Sappho was a cult priestess, or a leader of a choir, or that the females mentioned were simply friends, and she was describing platonic bonds.
Swinburne and Wharton: Bringing Sappho the Lesbian to Britain ‘Sapho to Philaenis’ by John Donne, published in 1686, was the first English poem to explore Sappho’s desires towards women. But this was a rarity. Let us skip forward to the 1840s, when poets Baudelaire and Banville began to resuscitate the lesbian Sappho. The former’s collection Les Fleurs Du Mal initially contained the poems ‘Lesbos’ and ‘Delphine et Hippolyte.’ They were instantly suppressed, and the general public at the time did not have access to it. When in 1864 William Michael Rosetti sent Algernon Charles Swinburne a copy of the original, complete Les Fleurs Du Mal, he warned the young poet that should he be inspired to write similarly Sapphic poems, they would not be well received by the public.Swinburne went on to publish his own Sapphic poems, ‘Sapphics’ and ‘Anaktoria.’ These in turn inspired the scholar Henry Warton’s research into Sappho, which culminated in the publication of Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation in 1885. Wharton’s aim was “to familiarize English readers, whether they understand Greek or not, with every word of Sappho…” and his literal translations did include female pronouns, thus opening the door forinterpretations of same-sex love by anyone, not just classical scholars. Their influence in the literary sphere was great: later literary greats like Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle used Swinburne and Wharton as inspiration.
The Lesbian Awakening: Sappho’s Renaissance in Paris
Despite homosexual female relationships having existed for (presumably) just as long as homosexual male relationships and indeed any sort of romantic relationships, accurate depictions of said relationships by genuine sapphic women were few and far between prior to the 20th century. And so, for many women, Sappho served as one of the few much-neededexamples of a woman living as a sapphic, a rarity in an era which thus far had only ever seen male/male relationships depicted and praised. The fact that she lived thousands of years ago reaffirmed that homosexuality amongst women was valid and something that had been happening for many years; just like homosexuality between males, contrary to popular belief. Sappho’s poetry displayed no signs of perverseness or ugliness, instead portraying her feelings as beautiful and admirable.
In the early 20th century, modernist lesbian creatives and intellectuals flocked to the Left Bank in Paris, because lesbianism had become fashionable amongst high society in the 1920s. This community was referred to as ‘Paris Lesbos.’ Many members of the community studied and took inspiration from Sappho, in particular Natalie Barney, alesbianheiress and poet from America, who hosted a literary salon in Paris for over 60 years, and her lover Renée Vivien, a British lesbian poet*. They too were greatly inspired by Wharton’s translations and work on Sappho.
TERMINOLOGY
Homosexual and queer women were only widely referred to as ‘lesbians’ and ‘sapphics’ from the 1890s onwards, before which ‘lesbian’ was strictly a descriptor for the inhabitants of Lesbos. Nowadays, all these terms are simply indicative of one’s sexual orientation and hold no negative connotations, in part due to the prominence of Sappho, who was a reminder that Sapphics were just as real as their male counterparts, and that lesbian relationships should be taken seriously.
*Vivien was known as the ‘Muse of the Violets.’ However, this title is not directly linked to Sappho or homosexuality; it derived from her love of violet flowers, which reminded her of her childhood friend named Violet (although they were said to have had a romantic relationship)
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