Irene, London, December 2022
Who was Sappho?
Sappho, the most well-known and influential female classical poet, lived in Mitylene, capital of the Greek island of Lesbos from around 630-570 BC. She produced lyric poetry
(poetry that was performed with a musical accompaniment on the lyre) and was attributed with the invention of the plektron, a type of lyre. The majority of her work has not survived, unfortunately, but we do have many fragments of her work. Scholars have assumed that a lot of her work is autobiographical, with some fragments referencing real people, such as her brothers Charaxos and Larichos. However, very few facts about her life, such as her birthplace and manner of death, can be confirmed.
Sappho was renowned amongst the Ancient Greeks: even Plato, who held the opinion that most poetry had no place in the ideal state, called Sappho the ‘Tenth Muse’ (the Nine Muses were Olympian goddesses of literature, science and the arts, thought to bestow inspiration and enthusiasm into poets and artists) and she was the only woman included in the canon of Nine Lyric Poets admired by the scholars at the Library of Alexandria. Sappho’s work is varied in content, ranging from epithalamia to invocations of the gods. One of the most well-known fragments is Fragment 31:
Sapphics and Violets
The term ‘Lesbian’ originally meant ‘someone from Lesbos’, but nowadays it can also be taken to mean a homosexual woman (or any non-male identifying person attracted to solely non-male identifying people) as a result of Sappho’s fame and renown for her poems expressing erotic desire towards women. Despite this fact, scholars cannot confidently say that Sappho herself was a lesbian- indeed, attaching such a label to an Ancient Greek figure living over 2,000 years ago would be anachronistic. Another term derived from Sappho, ‘sapphic’, refers to any woman attracted to other women, regardless of whether said woman is also attracted to men or not.
A common motif found in Sappho’s work is nature: she often describes flowers and other nature-related images in her poetry, specifically mentioning roses, violets, hyacinths and crocuses, to name a few. Fragments which best exemplify this are: 2, 5, and 14. Also commonly found in Sappho’s work is the colour purple or violet. Violet is one of the original colours on the rainbow flag created in 1978. For this reason it is thought that Sappho contributed to the association of the colours purple and violet with both sapphics and the wider queer community, as well as the violet flower, which was first associated with lesbians after the production of the play The Captive in 1926. The play was among the first Broadway plays to tackle the theme of lesbianism, featuring a female protagonist, Iréne, sending violets to another female character as a symbol of her love, perhaps inspired by Sappho.
Sappho and Phaon (1809), by Jacques-Louis David
The Romans and Sappho
Sappho’s love for other women was very well-known among Romans. The two Roman poets most associated with Sappho were Catullus and Ovid: Catullus was a poet of the late Roman Republic, also renowned for his expressive, emotional lyric poetry. The Sapphic imprints on Catullus’ work are evident, and the poet even did a translation of Fragment 31 into Latin. The ‘Lesbia’ mentioned in much of his work (see Catullus 2, 5, 7, 85 for examples) is a nickname for the object of his desires, taking inspiration from Sappho the Lesbian. Sappho also makes an appearance in Ovid’s Heroides: the letter from Sappho to Phaon is the only one in Ovid’s collection written from the perspective of a real historical figure. Ovid’s Sappho abandons her initial sexuality, declaring Phaon as her one true love and holding him in higher esteem than the multitude of women she has known in her lifetime, and plans to hurl herself into the sea out of grief. Ovid’s creation of this particular fictitious legend about Sappho significantly undermined the perception of Sappho as an openly ‘sapphic’ historical figure, considering his own wide reach in the literary world, as the fictional Sappho of Ovid became merged with the real Sappho in the minds of many for the next 19 centuries.
Sapphic writers and Imagism
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.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, Sappho has provided poetic inspiration for countless other writers, including male literary greats like Tennyson and Baudelaire. But she has been an even greater inspiration to other women writers, in particular Virginia Woolf: the existence of such a famous and openly expressive female poet in Ancient Greece gave Woolf the courage to pursue her same-sex relationship with Vita Sackville-West and to write in an era when female writers were little acknowledged.
H.D. , or Hilda Doolittle, was a highly influential poet of the 20th century, producing work informed by her extensive classical knowledge and scholarship of Sappho. She was an important figure of the brief Imagist movement of the 1910s, with her friend/ex-fiancé/editor Ezra Pound claiming that he himself, alongside H.D. and her husband Richard Aldington, invented the principles of Imagism. The Imagists found Sappho, Catullus, and Villon to be the best writers of all time, whose poetry set the standards by which new lyric poetry should be judged. While the Imagists also borrowed from French, Chinese, and Japanese culture, H.D. and Aldington foremostly believed Imagism to have been derived from Hellenism. Pound’s and H.D.’s imagist poetry drew heavily from Sappho in style, theme and content. In this way Sappho’s legacy has persisted through the ages, and the Archaic Greek poet manages to stay relevant to both the queer community and the literary community.
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