
Lesbian
Fiction Herstory |

From
Whence The Name Came
©
2005 by Lori L. Lake
Part 2 of 5
"I
tell you, someone will remember us, even in another time."
~Sappho, Greek poet, teacher, and lesbian (c. 630 BCE)
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Once
upon a time, over 2,600 years ago, on an island called Lesbos, in
the sunny Aegean Sea near Greece, there lived a woman of the Aristocratic
class named Sappho (also sometimes spelled Psappha). She was beautiful
and blessed by the gods and goddesses with the gifts of poetry,
music, and teaching. Her poems were heralded, quite literally, near
and far. Great poets, statesmen, and historians of antiquity lauded
her name and praised her poetry. Sappho was the greatest and most
acclaimed woman of ancient history. |
Sea
View from Lesbos |

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All
of this is true.
But if it
also sounds a little like a fairytale, it is.
The legend of Sappho has lived on through 26 centuries, and yet,
few "facts" of her life are actually known. Too much
of the record has been purposely expunged from history. Purposely
deleted. Through the ages, men have tried to erase her from the
records and from memory. They have not wholly succeeded. Here's
what we know: |
Sappho
was a poetic genius. She came from the isle of Lesbos. In the custom
of her society, she apparently married and some say she had a daughter
named Cleis. She read and sang her poetry to enthusiastic crowds.
She was famous in her time . . . but of most interest to us, from
her legend and even from the shreds of poetry left behind, it is
clear Sappho loved women. In every way. She
was called simply The Poetess, just as The Poet meant Homer, and
later in history, The Bard referred to William Shakespeare. |
Sappho
worshipped and lauded Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Her poetry
frequently mentions Aphrodite with admiration and appeals to her
for intercession in Sappho's relationships with women. It is this
aspect of her poetry that would later get her in trouble. More
on that in a moment.
For at least
700 years after her death, Sappho was honored throughout Greece
and many parts of southern Europe. She had traveled a great deal
in her life - how else to explain that residents of Syracuse put
up a statue in her honor? Or that various regions honored her
by minting coins bearing her image? Or that a huge statue of her
was erected in the town square of Lesbos? They eradicated her
words, but they couldn't erase the statues. |
Sappho
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Sappho,
Lyre in Hand
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Sappho
was a lyrical poet, well-known for the tone, meter, and grace
of her poetry. This was music to the ears of listeners-literally.
She was often accompanied by a lyre or harp, and her work included
clever wordplay, allusions, metaphor, and humor. Single-handedly,
she redefined the already-existing lyric meter of the day. Her
work was so groundbreaking and marvelous that the Greek meter
she often used was named after her and continues to bear that
name to this day.
Sappho created
nine books of poetry, one of which was described as 330 stanzas
of Sapphic meter. She wrote of passionate love of women and all
that was feminine. She also wrote of the beauty of some of the
men of the time and about the beauty of nature and the simple
life, where love and sensuality were topics of real importance.
She was so respected that Dracon of Stratonica, Alexander the
Sophist, and Chamaeleon, a disciple of Aristotle, all wrote books
about her and her work. She influenced the writing and thought
of countless men, including Ovid, Catullus, Aristotle, Alcaeus,
and Epicurus. The philosopher, Plato, called her the Tenth Muse. |
But
something happened along the way that subverted the proper telling
of Sappho's life in the fairytale that is history. It is not clear
when Sappho's star stopped shining, but as early as 140 A.D., men
of the Christian church branded her a "whore" and described
her work as deviant, especially due to her "unnatural"
love of women. Some say her work was destroyed then, in the second
century. Others say this occurred as late as the eleventh century.
Either way, all that remains of the nine books of genius are fragments-actually
forty pieces that make sense and only one poem in its entirety,
and all are bits known only because they are contained within the
work of later writers who quoted her. |
By
all accounts, Sappho's reading and singing of her poetry had the
same emotional effect on her listeners as the music Beatles had
on the Western world in the 1960s. What happened to her reputation
and her poetry? Why are only fragments left when most of the works
of Homer still exist in their entirety? |

Ruins on Lesbos |
For
the last thousand years, it appears that many male scholars and
historians have worked busily to revise the history of many aspects
of the world, including Sappho's place of glory. Men tried to
wipe away her record, but enough of her poems live on. Over the
last 2,500 years, men have tried to claim that Sappho's lyrics
were written by a man. Unbelievable amounts of scholarship and
argument have been undertaken in attempts to prove that Sappho
was not lesbian in her sexual orientation-or if she was, her love
of women was never actually consummated. This went so far as a
legend being promulgated that she swore off women and fell in
love with a ferryman named Phaeon, and when he spurned her, she
jumped off a cliff to her death. As if!
History is
selective. The old saying is "to the victor go the spoils,"
and it's clear that those in power write the history books. Sappho
quite simply had to be written out. Her poems were subversive,
they encouraged something other than a heterosexual and male-dominating
model, and they placed a woman in a position of equality with
- or perhaps even superiority to - Homer. |
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And
yet . . . The
myth of Sappho . . . the legend . . . shreds of her words . .
. all live on. For 2600 years, women have clung to the belief
that once upon a time, in a more open-minded and glorious age,
women who loved women (and men who loved men, as well) were respected
and honored and even managed to thrive. |
But it wasn't
until the nineteenth century that women found ways to search for
and re-tell the story of Sappho. They dug beyond the fabricated
version of Sappho as a halfway decent heterosexual poet whose work
was lost, and they unearthed the truth-Sappho loved women in all
ways, and her work and life had been blotted out in order to preserve
male and heterosexual priorities. It
wasn't until 1898 that some of the final fragments of Sappho's
poems were found by the discovery of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri in
Egypt, and this surely must have spurred modern speculation. As
the nineteenth century drew to an end, interest in Sappho renewed
and women studied and researched her life and poetry. Where there
was little evidence or few facts, creative women wrote novels
and stories that painted Sappho in positive - and lesbian - light.
Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien had even traveled
to Lesbos on a quest to learn more. Once again, the records aren't
so easy to research, but women searching for and dreaming about
the existence of Sappho must have made an impact on the current
society of the late 1800s. How else to explain that the term Lesbian
first appeared in printed English in the 1890 Billings Medical
Dictionary? When the term first circulated in popular spoken lingo
is anybody's guess. |
Roman
Aquaducts at Moria |
English-speaking
women will never fully know the wonders of Sappho's work, not only
because so little of it was preserved, but also because the Sapphic
meter is unique to the style, tone, and rhythm of the Greek language
and does not translate to English. But the following translation
of a section of a poem, which lauds Aphrodite the Goddess of Love
and asks for intercession with Sappho's own love life, still packs
power, even in English: |

Statue
of Sappho
Mytilini, Town Square
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Glittering-Minded
Deathless Aphrodite Glittering-Minded
deathless Aphrodite,
I beg you, Zeus's daughter, weaver of snares,
Don't shatter my heart with fierce
Pain, goddess,
But come now, if ever before
You heard my voice, far off, and listened,
And left your father's golden house,
And came,
Yoking your chariot. Lovely the swift
Sparrows that brought you over black earth
A whirring of wings through mid-air
Down the sky.
They came. And you, sacred one,
Smiling with deathless face, asking
What now, while I suffer: why now
I cry out to you, again:
What now I desire above all in my
Mad heart. Whom now, shall I persuade
To admit you again to her love,
Sappho, who wrongs you now?
*
If she runs now she'll follow later,
If she refuses gifts she'll give them.
If she loves not, now, she'll soon
Love against her will.
Come to me now, then, free me
From aching care, and win me
All my heart longs to win. You,
Be my friend. |
In her article
"Sapphistries," feminist scholar Susan Gubar writes that
Sappho represents "all the lost women of genius in literary
history, especially all the lesbian artists whose work has been
destroyed, sanitized or heterosexualized." Despite centuries
of denial and exclusion and outright lies, we remember and we honor
the memory of this unique and singular woman, The Poetess. |
Modern
View of Lesbos and the Aegean Sea |
Lesbos,
a little island in the Aegean Sea . . . an island of olive groves,
wheat fields, wine cellars, and learning and love . . . a virtual
Garden of Eden . . . This is from whence our name, Lesbian, is
derived.
Lesbians
- women who love women - those who live the life that Sappho lived.
One of Sappho's
poem fragments is particularly prophetic: |
Byzantine
Castle on Lesbos |
"And
I say to you, someone will remember us
In time to come" |

Lesbos from the Water
|
Isn't
this the hope many people carry in their hearts-that their accomplishments
will not be lost and their lives will not have been lived in vain?
Women
of power, of beauty, and of grace. Women who contribute to their
families, communities, and the world. Women who should never be
overlooked, whose voices should never be silenced, never be erased
from the records of history. All lesbians, not just poets, should
pay Sappho homage as a "first" in recorded history.
The legend
lives on. Let it live on in truth. |
Questions?
Let me know by writing me at: Lori (at)
LoriLLake (dot) com.
Until next
time!
Lori |
This page last updated on July 2, 2022
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