This is June 6th post. It's just running late.
So, everyone knows the word Lesbian, and some of you probably know the word Sapphic. Both of those are because of this rather special lady.
Sappho was born around 620 BCE, which is over 2,500 years ago. I say 'around' because no one is exactly sure when she was born/died. It was a bit too long ago, and there aren't a lot of surviving records that we can use for this.
Despite us knowing she was a poet, we don't have a lot of her work to read anymore because of time being excellent at destroying things. And what Time didn't destroy of it, it's suggested that the Catholic Church might have done just to get rid of lesbian poetry.
We know more about her because there are comments from other authors in a similar time period who said things about her lovely and erotic poetry describing her relationships with other women. Plato, who everyone probably knows, actually drew on her works for his description of romantic love. Which makes sense since he's pretty happy with gay relationships. Greeks overall were very happy with love being whatever it is.
As a woman born in Lesbos, it's considered likely that she got married, but there are a few conflicting reports. Depending on your source, one suggestion was that she married a guy who died quickly, and that's how she was given so much free reign.
Another thing about her that is possible but not positive, is that she, or her protegee, started a school for girls. She might have taught the young women less formally than a school, or started a school her protegee ran, but we don't know for sure.
This is a quote from World History Encyclopedia, link below. I wanted to include it for anyone that has any question about what the Greeks may have thought about this.
As there was no distinction between homosexual and heterosexual relationships in ancient Greece (or elsewhere, as the terms are a modern-day invention), it is likely that Sappho addressed a wide range of topics and had no reason to exclude her characters’ sexual orientation any more than she would any aspect of an individual.
By the time Sappho died, there were already a few comments from others that the term lesbian no longer means 'one from Lesbos', but instead means a woman who prefers women.
Interestingly, while I'm reading about her, there are several people who want to say that she might have just been putting on a persona and not actually gay. Part of me doesn't want to assume things, because we all know that writers can write from points of view they don't hold, but this is Ancient Greece. There is no reason for her to not have felt what she wrote, and it would be weird for her to
No one is really sure about her death. There are some who believe that she threw herself off a cliff over unrequited love for a man, but others attribute that to a man who didn't like her and wanted to destroy her reputation.
You know what? There's a lot more about her that's interesting, including a lot of debates about her because history has shaped her in a dozen different ways, but it's a bit impossible to figure out what to believe because there is so much that has been tossed around by people who want to vilify her for being the sources of the word 'Lesbian' or are in awe of her writings or any of a dozen other positions. I think, at this point, there isn't really anything I could say about her that I can be really sure about, other than that she's now dead.
Hopefully this is interesting for you and you can take a moment to think about the woman who gave a name to woman-to-woman love and has spent 2,000 years being treated in so many ways just because of it.
Sources:
Poetry Foundation-- Sappho of Lesbos
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