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Sappho: the lesbian poetess
10-06-2013 18:19Sappho is one of the few female poets whom we know of from ancient Greece. She was born in the island of Lesbos in 630 B.C. and the clearly homosexual nature of her poetry gave rise in the 19th century to the word lesbian, meaning “a woman who has sexual feelings for other women.”
The typical subject of Sapfo’s verse is her physical love for several of the young women who were her co members in a local cult of the goddess Aphrodite. Her works, of which only two short poems and some 150 fragments survive today, have been much admired since ancient times for their directness of expression and personal honesty. She wrote in the Aeolic dialect and vernacular of Lesbos, a place with strong lyric tradition.
According to later writers, Sappho was married and had a daughter, Cleïs. Modern writers often assume that Sappho was a music teacher or similar, but her poems show only that she led a group of younger women in an official worship of Aphrodite, specifically in observing the goddess’ religious calendar and in maintaining various shrines in and around Mytilene. Sappho’s sexual involvements with her young colleagues would seem to grow out of this sincere devotion to the goddess of sex and nature. But there is also the melancholy fact that, no matter what, the girls were detained to be married off by their families.
The private world of Sappho and her lovers represents the female response to an outside world created by men, a world of politics, war, and male homosexuality, which excluded even upper-class women except as wives and mothers. Among Sappho’s admirers in later generations was the philosopher Plato, who called her the tenth Muse.
The village of Eresus where Sappho was born in the island of Lesbos is a world famous holiday destination for lesbians (homosexual women). Legend has it that Sappho in order to avoid to get involved sexually with a man, she threw herself into the sea from the Leucadian cliffs, a locale that still bears the name “Sappho’s rock”.
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