Was Sappho Really a Lesbian?

One of the questions that I have frequently encountered online in discussions about ancient Greece is the question of whether the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE) was really a lesbian. On the surface level, the answer to this question seems like an obvious “yes.” After all, Sappho wrote poems in which she very expressly describes her erotic desire for other women, the word lesbian itself literally comes from the name of the island where she lived, and its synonym, the word sapphic, comes from her own name. There is even an entire subreddit about queer erasure called r/SapphoAndHerFriend, making fun of people who try to deny that Sappho was a lesbian.

I fully agree that there is no sense in which Sappho can be accurately described as “straight.” On the other hand, though, it would be an oversimplification to say that she was a lesbian in the contemporary sense. For one thing, the ancient Greeks generally did not think about sexuality in terms of which gender (or genders) a person was erotically attracted to, but rather in terms of whether they took the active or passive role during sex. There were no words in Ancient Greek in Sappho’s time that meant “gay,” “bi,” or “straight.” As such, it is highly unlikely that anyone in her time would have seen erotic attraction to women as a sign of any kind of innate identity.

Furthermore, the character “Sappho” who is the main speaker in Sappho’s poems is most likely a fictionalized literary persona, meaning that it is difficult to untangle the relationship between the speaker in the poems and the historical poet who composed them. Finally, given the fact that the vast majority of Sappho’s poems have not survived to the present day and ancient people told many stories about her having supposedly had affairs with men, it is possible that her character may have expressed erotic desire for men in poems or parts of poems that have not survived, which would make her what twenty-first-century westerners would consider bisexual.

Ancient versus modern concepts of sexuality

Before we delve into the issue of Sappho’s sexuality, I feel that it is important to discuss the differences between ancient and modern concepts of sexuality. Generally speaking, most people living in the English-speaking world in the twenty-first century tend to assume that each person has an innate sexual orientation that remains fixed throughout their life and is a defining aspect of their identity. In other words, each person is inherently “straight,” “gay,” “bisexual,” or something else.

The ancient Greeks, however, generally did not think about sexuality in these sorts of terms. In fact, there are no words in Ancient Greek that are equivalent to the English words “straight,” “gay,” or “bi.”

The ancient Greeks did, of course, recognize that most people have some degree of preference for sexual partners of a certain gender. Unlike modern people, however, they did not generally see these preferences as being written in stone and they did not usually regard a person’s sexual preference as a fixed, innate part of their identity. An anonymous ancient poem in the Greek language that is preserved in the Greek Anthology 5.65 illustrates this ambivalence quite succinctly:

“Αἰετὸς ὁ Ζεὺς ἦλθεν ἐπ᾽ ἀντίθεον Γανυμήδην,
κύκνος ἐπὶ ξανθὴν μητέρα τὴν Ἑλένης.
οὕτως ἀμφότερ᾽ ἐστὶν ἀσύγκριτα· τῶν δύο δ᾽ αὐτῶν
ἄλλοις ἄλλο δοκεῖ κρεῖσσον, ἐμοὶ τὰ δύο.”

This means, in my own translation:

“As an eagle Zeus came to godlike Ganymedes
and as a swan to the tawny-haired mother of Helene.
In this manner, the two [passions] are incomparable. Of the two,
one seems better to some; for me, both are good.”

Instead of focusing on the genders of a person’s sexual partners, the Greeks generally tended to be much more concerned with the role that a person took during sex. Normative ancient Greek sexuality was extremely phallocentric. It generally held that sex was supposed to be an activity in which a free adult man proved his manliness by dominating a woman, an adolescent boy, or an enslaved man by penetrating one or more of their orifices.

For a free adult man to penetrate someone was considered superior, masculine, and glorious, while for a free adult man to be penetrated was considered inferior, unmanly, and shameful. Thus, it was seen as perfectly acceptable for a free adult man to have sexual partners of all genders—as long as he was always the one who penetrated his partners and never the one who was penetrated.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix by the Briseïs Painter dated to c. 480 BCE, showing an erastes (the adult male partner in a pederastic relationship) kissing an eromenos (the adolescent boy partner)

Sadly, nearly all the Greek authors whose works have survived to the present day were men and most of them weren’t really interested in anything that women did while there were no men around. As a result, outside the poems of Sappho, there are extremely few surviving sources that discuss homoerotic love and attraction between women at all.

I have written an entire separate blog post in which I discuss and analyze most of the surviving ancient Greek and Roman sources that discuss same-gender-attracted women. I highly recommend reading that post if you are interested in this topic. Nonetheless, I will summarize some of the main points that are relevant to this post here.

As best as we can tell from the relatively few surviving sources, in the Greek world during the Archaic Period (lasted c. 800 – c. 490 BCE), it seems to have been generally socially acceptable for women and girls to form erotic relationships with other women and girls.

The male lyric poet Alkman, who flourished in Sparta in around the seventh century BCE, composed a choral song for young women to perform known as the Louvre Partheneion, in which the women openly flirt with each other, praise each other for their physical beauty, and openly express erotic desire for each other. Meanwhile, Sappho portrays her persona as speaking unabashedly about her erotic desire for other women throughout many of her poems (as I will discuss more later in this post).

Female homoeroticism was also apparently an acceptable subject to be celebrated in artistic depictions during this period. A polychrome plate from the island of Thera dating to around 620 BCE or thereabouts depicts a scene of two women, who appear to be around the same age and of roughly the same social status, facing each other holding garlands. The woman on the left is reaching out to touch the chin of the woman on the right in an unambiguous gesture of erotic courtship that is far more commonly attested in scenes of male pederasty.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a polychrome plate from Thera dating to c. 620 BCE depicting a homoerotic scene of two women, with one woman touching the chin of the other in a gesture of courtship

The male lyric poet Anakreon of Teos (lived c. 582 – c. 485 BCE), who may have been born while Sappho was still alive, has a poem in which his speaker, an older man, describes his attempt to seduce a beautiful young woman from the island of Lesbos, who (much to his disappointment) dislikes his white hair and is more interested in another woman.

This poem (which is numbered as Fragment 358) has been preserved through quotation by the Greek writer Athenaios of Naukratis (lived c. late second century – c. early third century CE) in his Deipnosophistai or Wise Men at Dinner 13.72. The Greek text reads as follows:

“σφαίρῃ δηὖτέ με πορφυρῇ
βάλλων χρυσοκόμης Ἔρως
νήνι ποικιλοσαμβάλῳ
συμπαίζειν προκαλεῖται·
ἡ δ᾿ ἐστὶν γὰρ ἀπ᾿ εὐκτίτου
Λέσβου, τὴν μὲν ἐμὴν κόμην,
λευκὴ γάρ, καταμέμφεται,
πρὸς δ᾿ ἄλλην τινὰ χάσκει.”

This means, in my own translation:

“Once again, with a purple ball,
golden-haired Eros strikes me
and summons me to play
with the young woman with the broidered sandals.
But she is from well-settled
Lesbos. She finds fault with my hair,
for it is white,
and she is gaping after another woman.”

This poem is fascinating for a couple of reasons. The first reason is because, although the speaker seems annoyed that the young woman isn’t interested in him, he does not seem to regard her attraction to another woman as abnormal or any kind of perversion.

The second reason is because the speaker portrays the young woman’s problem with him as his age, rather than his gender. A modern person might read this passage and think that the woman is not interested in him because he’s a man and she’s gay, but the speaker claims that she’s not interested in him because she’s young, he’s old, and she’d rather be with a woman who’s presumably closer to her own age. There is no trace of the notion of “sexual orientation” anywhere in this poem.

This basically summarizes the main evidence for female homoerotic attraction in the Greek Archaic Period. As far as we can tell from these sources, most people seem to have seen women’s erotic attraction to other women as essentially no different from any other kind of erotic attraction. They did not see it as a fixed or defining characteristic of a person’s identity.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a Roman marble bust depicting how the artist imagined the Greek lyric poet Anakreon might have looked, based on an earlier Greek original

The modern concept of “sexual orientation” is the result of a very long, complicated history that begins with early Christianity. While the polytheistic Greeks and Romans thought about sexuality primarily in terms of the sexual roles of penetrator and penetrated, early Christians living in the Roman Empire came to see sexuality primarily in terms of the gender of a person’s sexual partners.

They came to regard sexual intercourse between a man and a woman as normal and natural and sexual relations between two people of the same gender as a form of “sinful” perversion. (A very interesting book on the subject of the early Christian transformation of the Roman understanding of sexuality is Kyle Harper’s From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity, published in 2016 by Harvard University Press.)

Even so, until the nineteenth century, people had no notion that each person has a fixed “sexual orientation” that is rooted in their innate psychology. Then, in the nineteenth century, a movement emerged among early western physicians and psychiatrists to reclassify certain behaviors that mainstream Christianity had traditionally regarded as “sinful” as instead being the result of mental illness.

The terms homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual were all first popularized by the Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (lived 1840 – 1902) through his book Psychopathia Sexualis, the first edition of which he published in 1886. Although Krafft-Ebing does not address same-gender attraction in the first edition of this book, in later editions, he defines sexual attraction to persons of the same gender as a hereditary degenerative mental illness. He names this illness homosexuality and the people who “suffer” from it homosexuals.

Over the course of the twentieth century, people who experienced erotic attraction to persons of the same gender accepted the medical establishment’s claim that same-gender attraction is a fixed part of a person’s identity that is rooted in their innate psychology. They broke with the medical establishment, however, by insisting that there is nothing wrong with being attracted to people of the same gender, embracing terms like “gay,” “lesbian,” and “bisexual.”

Sappho, however, lived way back in the seventh century BCE, when early Christian condemnation of same-gender attraction as sinful, the nineteenth-century western medical establishment’s pathologization of it as mental illness, and twentieth-century queer rights activists’ reclaiming of queer identity as positive were all still hundreds of years in the future. She therefore probably did not think about her own sexuality in terms of an innate, fixed identity, but rather in terms of something more like a vague preference.

ABOVE: Photograph of the Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebbing, whose 1886 book Psychopathia Sexualis helped popularize the terms homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual

On the use of the word lesbian

The modern English word lesbian, of course, comes from the name of the Greek island of Lesbos. Sappho was born on this island and apparently lived on it for most of her life. Modern people therefore have a tendency to incorrectly assume that the use of the word lesbian to mean a woman who is exclusively erotically attracted to other women goes all the way back to Sappho’s own time.

It is true that Anakreon’s Fragment 358 seems to associate women who are erotically attracted to other women with Lesbos. Despite this reference, however, the term lesbian was not generally used in antiquity to refer to women who were erotically attracted to other women.

In fact, in antiquity, Lesbos was apparently much more commonly associated with a very different sort of sexual activity. As I discuss in several previous posts, including this one from January 2021 and this one from February 2021, the Greek verb λεσβιάζω (lesbiázō), which literally means “to act like a Lesbian,” was apparently used in antiquity to mean “to perform blowjob.” A scholion, or ancient scholarly commentary, on Aristophanes’s comedy The Wasps, line 1346, states that this use of the word arose from the fact that the women of Lesbos were said to have invented blowjobs.

There are several isolated instances of writers using the Greek word Λέσβιαι (Lésbiai), which literally means “Lesbian women,” to refer to women who are erotically attracted to other women throughout later antiquity and the Middle Ages. Most notably, the Syrian satirist Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE) uses the word in this manner in his Dialogues of the Courtesans 5.2. Writing centuries later, the Byzantine Roman scholar and archbishop Arethas of Kaisareia (lived c. 860 – c. 939 CE) uses the word in the same manner in his commentary on the church father Klemes of Alexandria’s treatise Exhortation to the Hellenes.

The word lesbian, however, did not become widely used in reference to women who are erotically attracted to other women until the late nineteenth century—around the same time that Krafft-Ebbing was alive.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the city of Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesbos as it looks today

Sappho the character versus Sappho the historical figure

As I think I have shown, Sappho probably did not define her own sexuality in terms of the modern concept of sexual orientation. This, however, still leaves the important literary and historical question: Was Sappho what modern people would consider a lesbian?

When talking about Sappho, it is important to remember that there are really two Sapphos: there is the character of Sappho who appears as the primary speaker in Sappho’s poems and then there is the historical figure of Sappho, the actual living, breathing human being who composed those poems. These two figures are related, but they are not necessarily identical.

We should not automatically assume that anything the speaker in Sappho’s poems says in the first-person is necessarily true about Sappho the historical figure. It was the norm for Greek poets during the Archaic Period to develop highly artificial literary personas that they would adopt for composing and performing their poems.

For instance, possibly the very earliest ancient Greek poet whose works have survived to the present day in a state of relative completion whom scholars consider to have been a real, historic individual is Hesiodos of Askre, who most likely lived in around the late eighth century BCE.

Hesiodos wrote a long didactic poem in dactylic hexameter titled Works and Days, in which he tells us quite a bit about his supposed personal life. He comes across as a colorful personality: a farmer who is dedicated, hard-working, and frugal, but also virulently misogynistic, cynical, and acrimonious. Much of the poem is written in the form of unsolicited advice to his good-for-nothing brother Perses, who supposedly cheated him out of his inheritance by conspiring with corrupt authorities and has now become impoverished through his own prodigality and laziness.

Many scholars, however, believe that most or all of what Hesiodos tells us about his personal life is a literary fiction. Even Hesiodos’s name is probably, at the very least, not the name he was given at birth, but rather a pseudonym or a name he performed under, since the name Ἡσίοδος (Hēsíodos) is clearly formed from the verb ἵημι (híēmi), meaning “to emit,” and the noun αὐδή (audḗ), meaning “voice.” The name therefore literally means “He Who Emits the Voice,” which sounds far more like a name that he chose for himself as a poet than a name his parents gave him.

Meanwhile, Πέρσης (Pérsēs), the name of Hesiodos’s supposed brother to whom the Works and Days is mostly addressed, literally means “the Destroyer.” The name fits his personality, which suggests either that Perses is a fictional character entirely invented by Hesiodos or that Hesiodos has given his actual brother a pseudonym in order to protect his identity.

We should be aware that Sappho’s persona in her poems may be just as artificial as Hesiodos’s persona in his.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bronze portrait head discovered in the Villa of the Papyri in Pompeii, believed to be a fictional representation of the poet Hesiodos

The character Sappho’s evident attraction to women

As we shall see in a moment, western philologists have long tried to deny that there is any element of homoeroticism in Sappho’s poems. In this day and age, though, I don’t think that there can be serious doubt about the fact that the character Sappho who appears in Sappho’s poems is very expressly portrayed as erotically attracted to women.

Sappho’s only poem that has survived to the present day totally complete with no lacunae or parts missing is Fragment 1, also known as the “Ode to Aphrodite,” which has only survived to the present day in the state we have it because the Greek historian and rhetorician Dionysios of Halikarnassos (lived c. 60 – c. 7 BCE) quotes it in his essay De Compositione (On Literary Composition) 23 as a poetic example of a particular literary style which he calls the “γλαφυρὰ καὶ ἀνθηρὰ σύνθεσις” (“polished and flowery style”).

In the poem, the character Sappho prays to the goddess Aphrodite and begs her to alleviate the pain caused by her unrequited erotic longing for another woman. The Greek text of the poem reads as follows:

“ποικιλόθρον’ ἀθανάτ’ Ἀφρόδιτα,
παῖ Δίος δολόπλοκε, λίσσομαί σε,
μή μ’ ἄσαισι μηδ’ ὀνίαισι δάμνα,
πότνια, θῦμον,

ἀλλὰ τυίδ’ ἔλθ’, αἴ ποτα κἀτέρωτα
τὰς ἔμας αὔδας ἀίοισα πήλοι
ἔκλυες, πάτρος δὲ δόμον λίποισα
χρύσιον ἦλθες

ἄρμ’ ὐπασδεύξαισα· κάλοι δέ σ’ ἆγον
ὤκεες στροῦθοι περὶ γᾶς μελαίνας
πύκνα δίννεντες πτέρ’ ἀπ’ ὠράνωἴθε-
ρος διὰ μέσσω·

αἶψα δ’ ἐξίκοντο· σὺ δ’, ὦ μάκαιρα,
μειδιαίσαισ’ ἀθανάτῳ προσώπῳ
ἤρε’ ὄττι δηὖτε πέπονθα κὤττι
δηὖτε κάλημμι

κὤττι μοι μάλιστα θέλω γένεσθαι
μαινόλᾳ θύμῳ· ‘τίνα δηὖτε πείθω
ἄψ σ’ ἄγην ἐς ϝὰν φιλότατα; τίς σ’, ὦ
Ψάπφ’, ἀδικήει;

καὶ γὰρ αἰ φεύγει, ταχέως διώξει,
αἰ δὲ δῶρα μὴ δέκετ’, ἀλλὰ δώσει,
αἰ δὲ μὴ φίλει, ταχέως φιλήσει
κωὐκ ἐθέλοισα.’

ἔλθε μοι καὶ νῦν, χαλέπαν δὲ λῦσον
ἐκ μερίμναν, ὄσσα δέ μοι τέλεσσαι
θῦμος ἰμέρρει, τέλεσον, σὺ δ’ αὔτα
σύμμαχος ἔσσο.”

This means, in my own English translation:

“Intricate-throned, deathless Aphrodite,
deception-weaving child of Zeus, I beseech you,
do not subdue my spirit with either sufferings or sorrows,
mistress,

but rather come here; if ever, at some other time,
you heard my voices from afar
and listened and, leaving behind the golden home of your father,
you came,

yoking your chariot, and your beautiful, swift sparrows led you
over the dark earth,
quick, fluttering wings away from heaven-aither
through the middle

and, straightaway, they arrive. And you, oh fortunate one,
smiling with your deathless face,
asked what again I have suffered and why
I again am calling you

and what I am very much longing to happen
in my raving spirit. ‘Which woman this time do I persuade
to lead you back into her affection? Who, oh Psappho,
is mistreating you?

For, even if she flees, soon she will chase,
and, if she does not accept gifts, she will give others,
and, if she does not love, soon she will love,
even though she does not want to.’

Come to me also now, and release me
from difficult worry, and accomplish however much
my spirit longs for you to accomplish, and you yourself
be my ally in combat.”

ABOVE: Painting made by the Greek painter Georgios Margaritis sometime before 1842, depicting how he imagined Sappho praying to Aphrodite in her Fragment 1 might have looked

Sappho’s most famous poem today is probably Fragment 31, which is also known as “Phainetai Moi” after its incipit in the original Greek. The poem is composed in Sapphic stanzas and has been preserved almost in its entirety through quotation by the Roman-era writer Longinos in his treatise On the Sublime 10.1–3. In the poem, Sappho vividly describes her feelings of intense longing and envy while watching the woman whom she erotically desires consorting with a man. The poem reads as follows:

“φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν
ἔμμεν᾽ ὤνηρ, ὄττις ἐνάντιός τοι
ἰσδάνει καὶ πλάσιον ἆδυ φωνεί-
σας ὐπακούει

καὶ γελαίσας ἰμέροεν, τό μ᾽ ἦ μὰν
καρδίαν ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόαισεν·
ὠς γὰρ ἔς σ᾽ ἴδω βρόχε᾽, ὤς με φώναι-
σ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ἒν ἔτ᾽ εἴκει,

ἀλλ᾽ ἄκαν μὲν γλῶσσα †ἔαγε†, λέπτον
δ᾽ αὔτικα χρῶι πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν,
ὀππάτεσσι δ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ἒν ὄρημμ᾽, ἐπιρρόμ-
βεισι δ᾽ ἄκουαι,

†έκαδε μ᾽ ἴδρως ψῦχρος κακχέεται†, τρόμος δὲ
παῖσαν ἄγρει, χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας
ἔμμι, τεθνάκην δ᾽ ὀλίγω ᾽πιδεύης
φαίνομ᾽ ἔμ᾽ αὔται·

ἀλλὰ πὰν τόλματον ἐπεὶ †καὶ πένητᆔ

This means, in my own English translation:

“That man seems to me equal to the deities,
the one who sits across from you
and, beside you, listens to
your soft speaking,

and your laughing lovely: that truly
makes the heart in my breast pound;
for, as I look at you briefly, it is no longer
possible for me to speak,

but my tongue has broken, and, right away,
a subtle fire has run beneath my skin,
I cannot see anything with my eyes,
and my ears are buzzing,

†a cold sweat pours down me,† and a trembling
seizes me all over, and I am sallower than grass:
I feel as if I’m not far off dying.

But all things must be endured, since †even a pauper†”

The final stanza of the poem is, unfortunately, incomplete.

ABOVE: Painting by Jules Joseph Lefebvre, painted in 1884, depicting how he imagined Sappho might have looked

Sappho’s poems contain frank descriptions of her own erotic attraction to women, but they are rarely ever sexually explicit. In fact, Fragment 94, also known as “Sappho’s Confession,” is the only poem in which she ever seems to allude to herself as having sex with a woman and, even in this poem, the way she describes it is highly decorous, almost euphemistic. The poem as a whole is a description of a parting conversation between herself and another woman. In it, Sappho says to the other woman:

“‘χαίροισ᾿ ἔρχεο κἄμεθεν
μέμναισ᾿, οἶσθα γὰρ ὤς σε πεδήπομεν·
αἰ δὲ μή, ἀλλά σ᾿ ἔγω θέλω
ὄμναισαι [ . . . . ] . [ . . . ] . . αι
. . [ ]καὶ κάλ᾿ ἐπάσχομεν.
πό[λλοις γὰρ στεφάν]οις ἴων
καὶ βρ[όδων κρο]κίων τ᾿ ὔμοι
κα . . [ ] πὰρ ἔμοι περεθήκαο,
καὶ πό[λλαις ὐπα]θύμιδας
πλέκ[ταις ἀμφ᾿ ἀ]πάλαι δέραι
ἀνθέων ἔ[βαλες] πεποημμέναις,
καὶ πολλωι[ ]. μύρωι
βρενθείωι. [ ]ρυ[ . . ]ν
ἐξαλείψαο κα[ὶ βασ]ιληίωι,
καὶ στρώμν[αν ἐ]πὶ μολθάκαν
ἀπάλαν πα . [ ] . . . ων
ἐξίης πόθο[ν ].’”

Here is M. L. West’s English translation of the poem in his book Greek Lyric Poetry, published in 1994 by Oxford University Press:

“Go, be happy, and think of me.
You remember how we looked after you;
or if not, then let me remind
. . .
all the lovely and beautiful times we had,
all the garlands of violets
and of roses and . . .
and . . . that you’ve put on in my company
all the delicate chains of flowers
that encircled your tender neck
. . .
. . .
and the costly unguent with which
you anointed yourself, and the royal myrrh.
On soft couches . . .
tender . . .
you assuaged your longing . . .”

The German scholar Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (lived 1848 – 1931), who is possibly the most renowned classical philologist of all time, insisted in his book Sappho und Simonides: Untersuchungen über griechische Lyriker, published in 1913, that the phrase “ἐξίης πόθο[ν ],” meaning “you assuaged your longing,” couldn’t possibly refer to any kind of sexual activity between Sappho and the other woman and instead simply refers to the other woman’s desire for sleep.

I, however, think that Wilamowitz’s argument is nothing but a desperate attempt to deny what is clearly in the text. I think that, in this passage, Sappho is very clearly talking about her having sex with the woman to whom she is speaking.

ABOVE: Sappho and Erinna, painted in 1864 by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon

The character Sappho’s daughter Kleïs

At the same time, however, it is clear that the character Sappho is not what modern people might call a “gold-star lesbian” (i.e., a woman who has only ever had sex with other women and has never had sex with a man). For one thing, we know that the character Sappho has a daughter named Kleïs, because she talks about her in several of her poems.

Sappho’s Fragment 132, which has been preserved through quotation by the grammarian Hephaistion, who lived in around the second century CE, in his Handbook on Meters 15.18, reads as follows:

“ἔστι μοι κάλα πάις χρυσίοισιν ἀνθέμοισιν
ἐμφέρη <ν> ἔχοισα μόρφαν Κλέις ἀγαπάτα,
ἀντὶ τᾶς ἔγωὐδὲ Λυδίαν παῖσαν οὐδ᾿ ἐράνναν . . .”

This means, in my own translation:

“There is for me a beautiful child, bearing a form
similar to golden flowers, my most beloved Kleïs
in whose place I would not take all of Lydia, nor lovely . . .”

Some have tried to argue that Kleïs is not Sappho’s daughter, but rather a younger lover. Judith P. Hallett, however, argues quite convincingly in her article “Beloved Cleïs,” published in 1982 in the academic journal Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica, volume 10, pages 21–31, that Sappho’s wording in this poem strongly suggests that Kleïs is, in fact, her daughter, not her lover. You can read Hallett’s article on JSTOR if you have access.

Sappho also addresses Kleïs by name in Fragment 98 in a way that makes the most sense if we interpret Kleïs as Sappho’s daughter. Sappho begins by talking about her mother’s advice on how girls should decorate their hair. Then, she moves on to address Kleïs, explaining to her why she cannot buy her a decorated headband from the city of Sardis that she wants. She says:

“σοὶ δ᾿ ἔγω Κλέι ποικίλαν
οὐκ ἔχω πόθεν ἔσσεται
μιτράν <αν>·”

This means:

“But for you, Kleïs,
I have no way to acquire a decorated
headband.”

She then seemingly goes on to describe the specific political situation that is preventing her from acquiring such a decorated headband. The poem, however, is too fragmentary to tell exactly what this situation is.

To me, Fragment 98 sounds far more like something a mother might say to her young daughter than something a woman might say to her lover. First, the fact that Sappho begins by talking about her own mother establishes mother-daughter relationships as a focus of the poem. Furthermore, the fact that Sappho goes on to seemingly explain the situation that is preventing her from acquiring the decorated headband gives us the impression that she is talking to a child who is too young to understand the complexity of politics.

ABOVE: Painting by the Austrian Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt, painted between 1888 and 1890, showing how he imagined Sappho might have looked with her daughter Kleïs

The character Sappho’s probable marriage to a man

Obviously, in order for the character Sappho to have a daughter named Kleïs, she must have had sexual intercourse with a man at some point. This, however, should not be in any way surprising. Ancient Greek people generally believed that the most important duty of every “respectable” free woman was to marry a man and bear him as many strong, healthy children as possible (preferably sons). Heterosexual marriage and bearing children were therefore inescapable social imperatives for all “respectable” free women.

Greek parents usually forced their daughters to marry sometime when they were in their mid-to-late teenaged years. Although the exact age at which Greek girls married varied considerably depending on factors such as locale, time period, and the particular attitudes and beliefs of her parents, most girls seem to have married when they were between the ages of fourteen and nineteen.

In most cases, teenaged girls were forced to marry men who were more than a decade older than them, and sometimes much older than that. The Greek philosopher Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BCE) states in his Politics 1335a that the ideal age for a woman to marry is when she is eighteen years old, but that the ideal age for a man to marry is when he is thirty-seven.

Greek marriages were typically primarily arranged between a girl’s father and the man seeking to marry her. The extent to which a teenaged girl had any say in which man she married probably varied considerably. Some fathers probably gave their daughters considerable say in which man they married, but it is likely that many girls had little or no say in the matter and their fathers simply made the decision for them entirely.

It is very likely that, like most Greek women, the character Sappho was married to a man at a young age and remained married to him for some period of time. It is likely that Kleïs is a product of this marriage. The fact that none of Sappho’s surviving poems mention anything about her having a husband may suggest that this presumed husband died when she was still fairly young or the marriage somehow otherwise ended. We can’t really know for certain.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic red-figure pyxis attributed to the Marlay Painter dating to between c. 440 and c. 430 BCE, depicting a wedding procession

Is the character Sappho what we would consider bisexual?

The mere fact that the character Sappho has a daughter and has most likely been married at some point does not necessarily mean that she is erotically attracted to men. As I think I have established, marriage for women in ancient Greece was a social requirement, not a matter of personal desire. Nonetheless, we should not rule out the possibility that the character Sappho may be erotically attracted to both women and men.

There are no surviving poems by Sappho in which a speaker who is clearly identifiable as the character Sappho expresses erotic desire for a person who is unambiguously identified as male. There are, however, surviving fragments in which an unidentified female speaker declares her erotic desire for a person whose gender is not clear. The most infamous example of this is Fragment 102, which Hephaistion preserves through quotation in his Handbook on Meters 10.5:

“γλύκηα μᾶτερ, οὔτοι δύναμαι κρέκην τὸν ἴστον
πόθῳ δάμεισα παῖδος βραδίναν δι᾿ Ἀφροδίταν.”

This means, in my own translation:

“Sweet mother, I cannot weave my loom,
since I have been overcome with desire for a παῖς [i.e., “child” or “young person”], because of slender Aphrodite.”

Unfortunately, Hephaistion does not provide any useful information whatsoever about the context of these two lines, so it is impossible for anyone to know for certain who the speaker is.

We do know that the speaker in this passage is female, because the word δάμεισα, which describes the speaker, has a feminine ending. We can also guess that she is most likely relatively young, judging by the fact that she is talking to her mother. The speaker could be Sappho herself, her daughter Kleïs, or another female character. Most people, though, assume that Sappho herself—perhaps a young Sappho—is the speaker.

This fragment is virtually always mistranslated. For instance, Diane J. Rayor’s translation of the fragment in her book Sappho’s Lyre: Archaic Lyric and Women Poets of Ancient Greece, published in 1991 by the University of California Press, reads as follows on page 63:

“Sweet mother, I cannot weave – slender Aphrodite has overwhelmed me with longing for a boy.”

Meanwhile, the version of the fragment that has become most widely circulated on the internet appears to be a version of Rayor’s translation that has been tendentiously edited to say “girl” instead of “boy”:

“Sweet mother, I cannot weave – slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl.”

This modified version of Rayor’s translation has been posted everywhere. On 14 April 2018, a user on Twitter posted the modified version of Rayor’s translation accompanied by an illustration of two women sitting against a flower bush with their hands together. Sometime around the same year, a user on Reddit posted an illustration of the modified version of Rayor’s translation surrounded by purple flowers in the subreddit r/actuallesbians. You can even buy a throw pillow with the edited version of the fragment attributed to Sappho on it!

The problem is that both Rayor’s original translation and the edited version that has become widely circulated on the internet are tendentious, since the word παῖς can, in fact, refer to a young person of any gender. The gender of the specific παῖς in this passage is not clearly specified in the portion of the poem that has survived, meaning we cannot say whether the speaker is longing for a young man or a young woman.

Some people may say that we can safely assume that Sappho is the speaker and we know Sappho was a lesbian, so she must be longing for a woman. I, however, do not think that this is necessarily a correct assumption. Even if Sappho is the speaker of this particular line (which she might not be), just because we know that the character Sappho is attracted to women does not necessarily mean that she is exclusively attracted to women.

ABOVE: Detail of an Attic black-figure lekythos attributed to the Amasis Painter dating to between c. 550 and c. 530 BCE depicting two women working at a loom from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

The problematic nature of the Sapphic testimonia

Given the highly ambiguous and fragmentary nature of Sappho’ own poems as they have survived to the present day, in order to find more information about whether she composed poems in which her persona expressed erotic desire for men, we must turn to the testimonia (i.e., things that ancient authors say about her in surviving works that can sometimes provide information about the parts of her corpus that have not survived). Unfortunately, here I must insert a word of caution; ancient testimonia in general are highly problematic and they are especially problematic when it comes to Sappho.

On the one hand, ancient authors had access to far more of Sappho’s corpus than readers do today in the twenty-first century. On the other hand, though, they also had a highly irresponsible habit of making speculative assumptions about poets’ lives based on the statements and actions of fictional characters in their work. If, for instance, a poet portrays one of their characters as visiting a certain location or having a certain experience, then ancient authors would frequently assume that the poet themself had visited that location or had that experience.

The testimonia for Sappho are especially problematic because we know that a fictionalized parody of her became an extremely popular character in Athenian comedies of the late fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The comic playwright Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiphanes, Diphilos, Ephippos, and Timokles, who all flourished in Athens during this period, are all known to have written and produced comedies titled Sappho.

All of these comedies have been lost and no information about any of them apart from their titles has survived, except for the one by Diphilos, which Athenaios helpfully records in his Deipnosophistai 13.72 (= 13.599d Causabon/Olson) apparently portrayed the male lyric poets Archilochos and Hipponax as rival admirers competing for Sappho’s affection.

The scholar Ariana Traill hypothesizes in her paper “Acroteleutium’s Sapphic Infatuation (Miles 1216–83),” published in The Classical Quarterly 55, no. 2 (2005): 518–33 and available at this JSTOR link, on page 532, that the humor of Diphilos’s play most likely derived from the farcical situation of two lyric poets with lower-class, everyman personas, whose poems were often invective and/or obscene, competing for the affection of Sappho, who was known for her poised, aristocratic persona and her highly polished poetic style.

In any case, most scholars believe that these comedies had an enormously outsized influence on Hellenistic and Roman perceptions of Sappho as both a historical and literary figure. Sadly, because the vast majority of Sappho’s own work has been lost, the later comedies about her have all been lost, and we know so little for certain about how these comedies portrayed her, it is extremely difficult to tell when a statement that an ancient author makes about her is based on something that she herself said in her own work or on a later comic playwright’s portrayal of her.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a Roman marble portrait head dating to the early first century BCE, based on an earlier Greek original, depicting the Athenian comic playwright Diphilos, who is attested to have written a comedy titled Sappho

The legend of Sappho and Phaon

As I have previously discussed in this post I wrote in December 2019, by the late fourth century BCE, a legend had developed, which claimed that Sappho fell madly and passionately in love with a beautiful young ferryman named Phaon. Then, however, the legend says that Phaon abandoned Sappho and she, unable to bear the terrible pain of him abandoning her, dramatically killed herself by jumping off a cliff on the island of Leukadia into the sea.

The earliest surviving reference to this story comes from the Athenian comic playwright Menandros (lived c. 342 – c. 290 BCE) in a speech that was apparently spoken by a temple servant in the opening scene of his fragmentary comedy The Leukadian Woman:

“ἐνθαδί,
ὁρᾷς, μεγάλη τις. τὴ]ν [γὰ]ρ ὑψηλὴν λέγεις,
οὗ δὴ λέγεται πρώτη Σαπφὼ
τὸν ὑπέρκομπον θηρῶσα Φάων᾿
οἰστρῶντι πόθῳ ῥίψαι πέτρας
ἀπὸ τηλεφανοῦς.”

This means, in my own translation:

“Here,
you see! A big [rocky outcropping]! You say the one high-up,
where indeed it is said that Sappho was the first,
chasing the over-boasting Phaon,
with stinging longing, threw herself from the rock,
seen from afar.”

Scholars have long struggled to understand the origin of this story, since none of Sappho’s surviving fragments ever mention anyone named Phaon. Furthermore, a later tradition claims that it was not Sappho the poet who desired Phaon and killed herself after he abandoned her, but rather a totally different woman named Sappho who was a hetaira from Lesbos. Modern scholars generally agree that this tradition is highly unlikely to have developed if the story of Sappho’s desire for Phaon were really present in her own poems.

Most scholars therefore believe that Sappho did not compose any poems in which she spoke of her erotic desire for any man named Phaon. Somehow or another, though, at least one ancient writer got the impression that this story was in Sappho’s poems.

Most likely in around the 340s or 330s BCE, a paradoxographer named Palaiphatos wrote a work titled Περὶ Ἀπίστων, which means On Unbelievable Tales. In this work, he attempts to come up with “rational” explanations for various traditional Greek myths by removing all the supernatural elements. The preserved text of this treatise includes section 48, which the editor Jacob Stern believes is not the genuine work of Palaiphatos, but rather a later addition to the work by an author of uncertain date whom he dubs “Pseudo-Palaiphatos.”

This section tells the story that Phaon was an aged ferryman on the island of Lesbos. Aphrodite met him disguised as an old woman and, out of kindness, he ferried her across the water without a fee. As a reward, she made him young again and extraordinarily attractive. Then, in the very last line of the section, Pseudo-Palaiphatos tersely adds: “οὗτος ὁ Φάων ἐστιν, ἐφ’ ᾧ τὸν ἔρωτα αὑτῆς ἡ Σαπφὼ πολλάκις ἐμελοποίησεν” (“This is the same Phaon for whom Sappho often sang her eros”).

ABOVE: Sappho, Phaon, and Amor, painted in 1809 by the French Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David, portraying Sappho in the arms of her legendary male lover Phaon

How, then, do we explain how Palaiphatos (or Pseudo-Palaiphatos) came to believe that Sappho composed poems about her eros for Phaon? The eminent nineteenth-century German philologist Karl Otfried Müller was the first person to propose the solution that most scholars today accept in his A History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, volume 1, page 174.

We know from ancient sources that Phaon was the name of a mythic lover of Aphrodite who was sometimes equated with Adonis. We also know that Sappho composed poems about Adonis, since at least two of her surviving fragments mention him by name (Fragments 96 and 140). Müller therefore proposes that she may have composed poems praising the mythic figure of Phaon and later audiences may have misinterpreted these poems as evidence that she was madly in love with a real mortal man named Phaon.

Most scholars today accept some version of this hypothesis. The scholar André Lardinois suggests in his paper “Subject and Circumstance in Sappho’s Poetry,” originally published in Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 124 (1994): 57–84 and now available at this JSTOR link, on page 60, that Sappho might have composed a poem in which Aphrodite expressed her erotic desire for Phaon and later audiences, perhaps overly eager to learn more biographical details about her life, misinterpreted this poem, incorrectly believing that she herself was the speaker.

ABOVE: Sappho and Phaon, painted in 1812 by the French painter Michel Martin Drolling

Sappho the historical figure

I think that it is abundantly clear that the character Sappho, who is the speaker in most of Sappho’s surviving poems, is erotically attracted to women and has some kind of history of having had sex with men. Unfortunately, when it comes to Sappho the historical figure, things are much more complicated. I think that there are three main possibilities for the relationship between the historical Sappho and the character Sappho.

The first possibility is that Sappho wrote all of her poems about her own life experiences and the historical Sappho and the character Sappho are therefore exactly the same figure, with no differences between them. This possibility is not totally ridiculous; after all, there are poets in modern times who are known to have written very honestly about their own life experiences. I, however, think that this possibility is too naïve to be realistic, since, as I discussed at the beginning, it was very much the norm for ancient Greek lyric poets to adopt literary personas.

The second possibility is that the character Sappho who appears in Sappho’s poems is based on the historical Sappho, meaning that she has the same essential personality and inclinations as the historical Sappho, but the specific situations she describes in her poems and at least some of the other people she writes about are fictional. I personally think that this possibility is by far the most likely.

ABOVE: Detail from The Parnassus, painted between 1510 and 1511 by the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael, showing what he imagined Sappho might have looked like

The third possibility is that there is no connection whatsoever between the historical Sappho and the character Sappho. According to this possibility, the Sappho who appears in Sappho’s poems is purely a fictional character born out of the historical Sappho’s imagination. If this possibility is correct, then the historical Sappho may not have actually been named Sappho, may not have actually been interested in women, or, indeed, may not have even been a woman herself at all.

I think that the third possibility is by far the least likely. The emotions and attitudes expressed by Sappho in her poems seem far too real for them to have been completely made up by someone whose life and personality were nothing at all like those of the speaker in the poems. I think that the literary Sappho must be, at least to some extent, based on the historical Sappho.

In line with this assumption, I am convinced that the historical Sappho was indeed a woman who was erotically attracted to other women. Some scholars have seriously argued that Sappho was actually a man, but this argument is essentially based on nothing other than the sexist assumption that a Greek woman couldn’t have written poetry of the quality which Sappho wrote.

Sappho consistently refers to herself in her poems as feminine and no ancient author writing within centuries of her lifetime ever tried to claim that she was really a man (which, in some ways, is actually surprising, given how patriarchal ancient Greek society was).

If we accept that the historical Sappho was indeed a woman, then it makes the most sense to also accept that she was erotically attracted to women. It’s true that a woman who was exclusively erotically attracted to men could write poems about women who are attracted to other women, but it seems far less likely that she would have an interest in doing so and far less likely that she would be able to make the emotions expressed in those poems seem convincing.

ABOVE: Painting made by the French Academic painter Charles Mengin in 1877 depicting Sappho preparing to jump off the Leukadian cliff, as describing in the legend of Sappho and Phaon

Regarding r/SapphoAndHerFriend

Lastly, I want to make a note about r/SapphoAndHerFriend. I think that, in general, the subreddit’s mission of calling out queer erasure is an admirable one. Nonetheless, the subreddit can sometimes get a bit extreme or even downright silly.

For instance, as I was looking through the subreddit the other day, I saw a post where someone highlights a quote from the Wikipedia article about the “Ode to Aphrodite” talking about the performance context of the poem:

“The poem contains few clues to the performance context, though Stefano Caciagli suggests that it may have been written for an audience of Sappho’s female friends.”

The post is tagged “Academic erasure.” The problem is that this isn’t really erasure.

We can probably safely assume that Sappho did have female lovers, but she presumably also had at least some genuinely platonic female friends. (After all, it would be rather silly to assume that Sappho had sex with every single woman she was ever close to.)

All poetry written in Greek in Sappho’s time was intended for oral performance. Unfortunately, we have virtually no concrete information whatsoever about the contexts in which the vast majority of Sappho’s poems were originally meant to be performed. The performance contexts of her poems are widely debated among lyric specialists—as in, you could read a dozen different articles and read more than a dozen different possible performance contexts for just about any given poem.

The “Ode to Aphrodite” does explicitly describe the character Sappho’s desire for a woman, but this does not necessarily mean that the poem was originally intended to be performed for an audience exclusively composed of Sappho’s female lovers. Think about how, today, there are queer songwriters who write songs about their attraction towards people of the same gender that are intended for public performance in front of people who are not their lovers. The fact that the poem itself describes homoerotic feelings does not mean that Sappho couldn’t have performed it for members of a platonic friend group.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Stefano Caciagli’s argument is correct. I am personally skeptical toward the idea that we can know much of anything about the specific, original performance contexts of Sappho’s poems (apart from a few obvious cases, such as her epithalamia, which are quite conspicuously meant to have been performed at weddings). As I said before, performance context is an area where we have very little information and unfounded speculation of all kinds is rife. What I am arguing here is merely that it is not automatically queer erasure to say that Sappho might have performed some of her poems for platonic female friends.

Unfortunately, hasty and unwarranted accusations of queer erasure like this one are quite rampant on r/SapphoAndHerFriend. Queer erasure is definitely a real thing, it is bad, and we should condemn it, but I think that it is important to exercise caution and examine statements more carefully before we jump to condemn them as erasure.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic red-figure hydria dating to between c. 440 and c. 430 BCE, depicting Sappho sitting on a chair reading from one of her poems, surrounded by three women, one of whom is holding a lyre