How Were Lesbians Regarded in Ancient Greece and Rome?

Within the past month, I have encountered at least three different people asking the question of how lesbians were perceived in ancient Greece and Rome. This is a topic that is rarely covered in ancient history and classics courses, so I decided that it was worth taking the time to write an in-depth article on the subject.

Unfortunately, while references to men’s homoerotic attraction and relationships are absolutely ubiquitous throughout the surviving ancient Greek and Roman sources, women’s homoerotic attraction and relationships are very poorly attested. To say that the primary sources on this subject are scant is an understatement. This paucity of evidence is mainly the result of the fact that nearly all the surviving ancient sources were written by men who were generally not interested in writing about anything women did among themselves when there were no men around.

Based on the admittedly very few sources that we have, though, homoerotic attraction and relationships seem to have been relatively common and not heavily stigmatized among Greek women in the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Eras. Attitudes toward women’s homoeroticism in the Roman world, by contrast, seem to have varied drastically. Roman-era sources variously portray women’s homoeroticism as a degenerate Greek perversion, as something that should amuse and titillate male audiences, as an absurd impossibility, as an allegation against which a woman’s reputation must be defended, and, finally, in some cases, something that should be accepted as normal.

A general note about the ancient Greek and Roman conception of sexuality

Before I discuss the ancient sources, it is important to clarify that modern concepts of sexual orientation are not directly transferrable to ancient Greece and Rome. As I have discussed on many previous occasions, including in this post from October 2020 about Achilles and Patroklos, this post from August 2021 about Sappho, and this post from January 2022 about ancient Greek and Roman sexual taboos, the ancient Greeks and Romans generally had no concept of “sexual orientation” as an innate identity based on which gender or genders a person was erotically attracted to. There are no words in Ancient Greek or Latin that are directly equivalent to the modern English terms “gay,” “lesbian,” “bisexual,” or “straight.”

The Greeks and Romans, of course, recognized that some people are more erotically interested in one gender over another, but they generally did not think of this preference as a fixed, innate aspect of a person’s identity. Instead of thinking about sexuality in terms of the gender or genders a person was attracted to, the Greeks and Romans usually thought of it in terms of the role that a person took during sex.

The normative Greek and Roman conception of sexuality was extremely phallocentric and entirely focused on penile penetration. Normatively speaking, the Greeks and Romans believed essentially that sex was supposed to be an activity in which a free adult man was supposed to prove his masculine superiority by using his erect penis to dominate an innately inferior person, such as woman, adolescent boy, or enslaved person, by penetrating them in one of more of their various orifices. To penetrate was seen as innately masculine, glorious, and superior, while to be penetrated was seen as innately feminine, shameful, and inferior.

In line with this conception of sexuality, it was seen as completely normal and acceptable for a free adult man to have sexual relations with women, adolescent boys, and enslaved people of any gender, as long as he was always the one penetrating his partner and never the one being penetrated. Free adult men who were suspected of taking the penetrated role in intercourse with another man or other men were widely mocked. People would call them degrading and shameful names, such as κίναιδος (kínaidos), βάταλος (bátalos), εὐρύπρωκτος (eurýprōktos), and μαλακός (malakós) in Greek or cinaedus, pathicus, and mollis in Latin.

As a result of this, with only a few noteworthy exceptions, whenever a Greek or Roman man tried to imagine two women having sex, he always imagined one partner wearing a strap-on dildo to penetrate the other partner in exactly the same way that a man with a penis would typically penetrate his sexual partners. The very idea that there might be any form of sex that doesn’t involve a partner with a penis penetrating the other partner seems to have rarely even registered to them.

This may partly explain why there are many ancient sources that mention husbands being concerned about their wives having adulterous sex with other men, but only one that I am aware of (which I will discuss shortly) that expresses concern about wives having adulterous sex with other women. Quite simply, for most Greek and Roman men, any kind of sex that didn’t involve a man with a penis penetrating someone wasn’t real sex and therefore a woman having sex with another woman was not real adultery and not something that men really needed to worry about.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix, dating to around 470 BCE or thereabouts, depicting a man having sexual intercourse with a woman in the missionary position

Alkman’s Louvre Partheneion and women’s homoeroticism in ancient Sparta

The oldest surviving source that discusses homoerotic attraction among Greek women is most likely the very early male lyric poet Alkman, who flourished in the Greek city-state of Sparta in around the seventh century BCE. His most complete and most famous surviving work is a poem known as the Louvre Partheneion, which was originally meant to be performed by a chorus of young Spartan women.

In the poem, the female speakers engage in openly erotic flirting with each other, praising each other for their physical beauty and expressing open erotic desire for each other. For instance, here are lines 73–81, in which the female speaker expresses her erotic longing for another woman named Hagesichora:

“οὐδ᾿ ἐς Αἰνησιμβρ[ό]τας ἐνθοῖσα φασεῖς·
Ἀσταφίς [τ]έ μοι γένοιτο
καὶ ποτιγλέποι Φίλυλλα
Δαμαρ[έ]τα τ᾿ ἐρατά τε ϝιανθεμίς·
ἀλλ᾿ Ἁγησιχόρα με τηρεῖ.
οὐ γὰρ ἁ κ[α]λλίσφυρος
Ἁγησιχ[ό]ρ[α] πάρ᾿ αὐτεῖ,
Ἀγιδοῖ [δ᾿ ἴκτ]αρ μένει
θωστήρ[ιά τ᾿] ἅμ᾿ ἐπαινεῖ;”

This means, in my own translation:

“Nor will you go the place of Ainesimbrota [and say]:
‘Let Astaphis become mine’
and ‘Let Philylla look my way,’
or ‘Damareta’ or ‘lovely Wianthemis,’
but rather Hagesichora keeps me.
For is not the lovely-ankled
Hagesichora present here?
She remains near Agido
and she applauds our chorus.”

To put this passage in context, writing many centuries later, but with access to many sources from the time that have since been lost, the Greek biographer and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) says in his Life of Lykourgos 18.4 that it was normal and common in Archaic and Classical Sparta for adolescent girls to take adult women as lovers, in an institution directly parallel to male pederasty.

ABOVE: Third-century CE Roman mosaic depicting how the artist imagined the Spartan poet Alkman might have looked

Sappho’s homoerotic poems

Alkman may have been the earliest lyric poet to discuss women’s homoeroticism in a poem that has survived to the present day, but he was certainly not the most famous to do so. That honor, of course, goes to Sappho (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE), a very early female Greek lyric poet who flourished on the island of Lesbos, which is located just off the west coast of Asia Minor (i.e., what is now the Asian part of Turkey).

Sappho composed many poems in the Aeolic dialect of the Greek language and she is one of the very few ancient Greek or Roman female authors who have any works that have survived to the present day. Her work was extremely highly revered in antiquity, she was the most eminent of the nine canonical lyric poets, some authors lauded her work as being on par with that of the legendary epic poet Homer himself, and she garnered a reputation as the “Tenth Muse.”

Sadly, extremely little of what she composed has survived to the present day and most of the poems that have survived are fragmentary. As I discuss in greater depth in this older blog post I wrote in December 2019, the loss of so much of Sappho’s poetry is most likely mainly due to a decline in the popularity of lyric poetry in general in later antiquity, combined with a later perception of the Aeolic dialect as difficult and obscure.

As I discuss in this blog post I wrote in August 2021, extremely little reliable information about Sappho’s life has survived and trying to reconstruct any kind of “biography” for her whatsoever is extremely problematic, especially given that the speaker in her poems most likely reflects an artistic persona rather than her actual, unvarnished thoughts and feelings.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic red-figure kalanthos by the Brygos Painter dating to c. 470 BCE, currently held in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen, depicting the lyric poets Alkaios (left) and Sappho (right) holding lyres and plectrums

In many of Sappho’s surviving poems, the speaker, who represents a most likely fictionalized version of the poet herself, speaks very openly about her erotic desire for other women. In one fragment, she even seems to allude to herself as having had sex with a particular woman on at least one occasion.

Her most famous poem is probably her Fragment 31, which is sometimes known as “Phainetai Moi” after its Greek incipit. It has been preserved nearly in its entirety through quotation by the Roman-era writer Longinos in his treatise On the Sublime 10.1–3. In the poem, the character Sappho vividly describes her intense feelings of envy and longing when she sees the woman whom she erotically desires consorting with a man:

“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

Here is my own 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 immediately
a slight fire runs 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†”

Here the extant text of the poem abruptly leaves off.

Sappho is at her most explicit near the end of the surviving portion of Fragment 94, which is sometimes known as “Sappho’s Confession.” In the poem, Sappho addresses her female lover, who is going away for some reason. She says to her, in the original Greek:

“‘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 translation of the poem, from his book Greek Lyric Poetry, published in 1994 by Oxford University Press, on pages 42–43:

“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 . . .”

Most contemporary scholars agree that the line about Sappho’s lover “assuaging her longing” “on soft couches” is a reference to her and Sappho having had sex.

As I discuss in this blog post I wrote in August 2021, there are problems with saying that Sappho the historical figure was a lesbian in the modern sense, since this statement elides a great deal of complexity. In particular, as I mentioned earlier, the concept of “lesbian” as a sexual orientation did not exist in Sappho’s time, the character of Sappho in the poems cannot necessarily be equated with Sappho the historical figure who composed them, and there are some indications that Sappho may have also composed poems in which she as a character expressed erotic desire for certain men, which would make the character Sappho closer to what most twenty-first-century people would describe as bisexual.

Nonetheless, I don’t think there can be any serious doubt that Sappho the character in the poems is very clearly sexually and romantically attracted to other women and, at least in the poems, she is able to express this attraction quite openly, without any apparent fear of social repercussions.

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

Anakreon’s poem about the Lesbian woman

The male Greek lyric poet Anakreon of Teos (lived c. 582 – c. 485 BCE), who was most likely born sometime near the end of Sappho’s lifetime and flourished about a generation after her death, composed a poem in which the male speaker, an old man, attempts to seduce a young woman from the island of Lesbos, who dislikes his white hair and displays more interest in another woman than she does in him.

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 13.72. It reads as follows in the original Greek:

“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.”

In this poem, the male speaker seems to be annoyed that the young Lesbian woman is not giving him the attention he wants, but he does not expressly condemn her erotic attraction to another woman as any kind of aberration or depravity.

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

Other evidence for women’s homoeroticism in Classical and Hellenistic Greece

There are a few depictions of homoerotic scenes between women in Greek pottery. For instance, a polychrome plate from the Greek island of Thera dating to c. 620 BCE depicts a homoerotic courtship scene between two women who appear to be roughly the same age and of similar social status. One woman is touching the chin of the other woman in a gesture that is familiar from Greek vase paintings of male pederastic courtship.

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

An Attic red-figure kylix dating to between c. 490 and c. 480 BCE appears to depict a naked woman crouching while she manually stimulates the genitals of another naked woman who is standing. Some scholars think this kylix actually depicts the crouching woman checking the standing one for pubic lice, but I don’t buy that explanation. This kylix stands out as possibly the only surviving ancient Greek or Roman depiction of lesbian sex that does not involve a dildo in some way.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix dating to between c. 490 and c. 480 BCE, depicting a naked woman manually stimulating the genitals of another naked woman

The Athenian philosopher Plato (lived c. 428 – c. 347 BCE) in his philosophical dialogue the Symposion 189c–192e portrays the comic playwright Aristophanes, a speaker in the dialogue, as telling an elaborate, comic fable about the supposed origin of erotic attraction, in the course of which he acknowledges the fact that there are some women who sexually and romantically prefer other women over men.

Plato portrays Aristophanes as saying that, originally, all human beings were spherical in body shape and they all had two faces, four arms, four legs, and two sets of genitals. He says that some humans had two penises, some had one penis and one vagina, and some had two vaginas. Then, these primordial humans tried to storm Mount Olympos and overthrow the deities, so Zeus cut every human into two, giving each one only one face, two arms, two legs, and one set of genitals.

Plato portrays Aristophanes as saying that those who came from primordial humans who had one penis and one vagina are men and women who are primarily erotically attracted to persons of the opposite gender, that those who came from primordial humans with two vaginas are women who are primarily attracted to other women, and that those who came from primordial humans with two penises are men who are primarily attracted to other men. Thus, he says that erotic attraction is really the desire for one’s other half. This is one of the very few surviving passages in all of Greek and Roman literature that seem to hint at something resembling our concept of sexual orientation.

ABOVE: Depiction of the primeval human according to Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposion

Plato portrays Aristophanes as seeming to have no problem with the fact that some women are more attracted to other women than they are to men. Instead, he treats it as simply a reality to be explained as part of his elaborate etiology. Plato’s own attitude toward homoerotic attraction and relationships in general, however, may have shifted to become more negative as he grew older.

The unnamed Athenian speaker in Plato’s Laws 1.636b–d, which Plato is thought to have written much later than the Symposion, near the end of his life, deplores same-gender sexual relations for both men and women as “παρὰ φύσιν” (“contrary to nature”). The Athenian speaker, however, is clearly voicing an opinion that goes against what the vast majority of Greek people at the time believed, so we should not take his statement as representative.

The female poet Erinna, who most likely flourished in the fourth century BCE, is best known for her poem “The Distaff” about the death of her companion Baukis, which has partially survived to the present day. Julia Barclay convincingly argues in her paper “The Honeycomb of Erinna: An Examination of Homoerotic Love, Loss, and Lamentation,” published in Canta/ἄειδε: A Journal in Classical Studies Vol. 2. No. 1 (2021), that this poem has a homoerotic dimension and, at least within the constructed world of the poem, the characters Erinna and Baukis are implied to have been lovers until they were separated, first by Baukis’s marriage and then by her untimely death.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of PSI 1090, a papyrus fragment bearing a portion of the text of Erinna’s Distaff

Asklepiades’s epigram attacking Bitto and Nannion

Thus, although the surviving evidence is extremely limited, the evidence we do have seems to suggest that, in the Greek world during the Archaic and Classical Periods, women erotically desiring and having sex with other women was fairly common. It is unlikely that everyone accepted it, but there does not seem to have been an especially strong social stigma against it. At the very least, it was a phenomenon that men in positions of power, and society in general, were generally willing to tacitly ignore.

In the Hellenistic Period, though, this situation may have started to change. The earliest surviving ancient Greek or Roman source that seems to attack women who have sexual relations with other women is a short epigram by the early Hellenistic Greek poet Asklepiades of Samos (lived c. 320 – after c. 263 BCE) that is preserved through its inclusion in the Greek Anthology 5.207:

“αἱ Σάμιαι Βιττὼ καὶ Νάννιον εἰς Ἀφροδίτης
φοιτᾶν τοῖς αὐτῆς οὐκ ἐθέλουσι νόμοις,
εἰς δ᾽ ἕτερ᾽ αὐτομολοῦσιν ἃ μὴ καλά. δεσπότι Κύπρι,
μίσει τὰς κοίτης τῆς παρὰ σοὶ φυγάδας.”

This means, in my own translation:

“The Samian women Bitto and Nannion are not willing to frequent
Aphrodite’s house in accordance with her own laws,
but desert toward other things, which are not beautiful. Mistress Kypris,
despise the women who flee from the bed in your company!”

Scholars since Kenneth Dover’s chapter “Two Women of Samos,” published in the 2002 book The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome, edited by Martha C. Nussbaum and Juha Sihvola, pages 222–228, have generally interpreted Bitto and Nannion in this poem as a female homoerotic couple. Thus, in this epigram, Asklepiades invokes Aphrodite—the very same goddess that Sappho four centuries earlier had regarded as her special patron—and calls upon her to despise women who pursue erotic relationships with other women.

This is, of course, just one short epigram by an individual male poet, so it is hard to know how to interpret it, but it is possible it may signal that, by the early third century BCE, wider Greek society’s perception of homoerotic relations among women was starting to turn more hostile.

Reception of Sappho’s sexuality in Rome in the first centuries BCE and CE

In the Roman world, this perception seems to have become vastly more complicated. Over the course of the first century BCE and first century CE, the stereotype of the tribas or tribade (i.e., a masculine woman who takes the active role in sexual relations with other women) gradually comes to dominate the sources dealing with women who have sexual relations with other women, especially those written in the Latin language. Many Roman authors during this period came to anachronistically impose this stereotype onto Sappho, interpreting her as a mannish tribade due to her relations with other women.

The Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus (lived 65 – 8 BCE), who is better known today in English as “Horace,” briefly references Sappho in his Epistles 1.19.28 as “mascula Sappho,” which means “manly Sappho” in Latin. He most likely gives her this epithet at least partly based on the fact that Roman men in his time generally perceived composing poetry as a male pursuit and therefore saw the fact that Sappho composed poetry as masculine, but he most likely also alludes to the perception of Sappho as sexually masculine as well.

ABOVE: Illustration by the German artist Anton von Werner (lived 1843 – 1915) showing how he imagined the Roman poet Horace might have looked

The Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (lived 43 BCE – c. 17 CE), who is better known in English simply as “Ovid,” composed a work known as the Heroïdes, which is a collection of pseudo-letters composed in elegiac couplets.

Each letter is written in the voice of a famous woman from literature or mythology and is addressed to a man whom she has either been in an erotic relationship with or wants to be in one with. Most of the letters are written in the voice of women from Greek or Roman myth and are addressed to men who have abandoned them.

The fifteenth letter in the collection, known as the “Epistula Sapphus ad Phaonem” or “Letter of Sappho to Phaon,” is written in the persona of Sappho and is addressed to a beautiful young Sicilian ferryman named Phaon, who is barely more than an adolescent. The letter portrays Sappho as absolutely obsessively infatuated with Phaon, who has abandoned her. This causes her to experience terrible grief and eventually leads her to kill herself by leaping off a cliff on the island of Leukadia into the sea.

The subject of Heroïdes 15 is different from the other letters in the collection, since, of course, Sappho was a real poet who lived in historical times, not a legendary heroine of the distant past. The style of the letter is different from the other Heroïdes as well. In fact, it is so different from the others that some scholars have disputed its authorship, claiming that it is not the work of Ovid at all. (I, however, remain convinced that Ovid did write the letter.)

ABOVE: Frontispiece illustration for an edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses printed in 1731 in Leipzig, showing what the illustrator imagined Ovid might have looked like. (No one knows what he actually looked like.)

The scholar Pamela Gordon argues convincingly in her chapter “The Lover’s Voice in Heroides 15: Or, Why Is Sappho a Man?” in the book Roman Sexualities, published in 1997 by Princeton University Press, pages 274–291, that Ovid portrays Sappho in this letter as a mannish tribade.

Early on in the letter, Ovid portrays Sappho as referencing the various women whom she has loved and declaring that they no longer matter to her, because her irrepressible longing for Phaon has totally replaced all erotic desire that she ever felt for anyone else. She says, in lines 15–20:

“nec me Pyrrhiades Methymniadesve puellae,
nec me Lesbiadum cetera turba iuvant.
Vilis Anactorie, vilis, mihi crede, Gyrinno;
non oculis grata est Atthis, ut ante, meis,
atque aliae centum, quas non sine crimine amavi;
inprobe, multarum quod fuit, unus habes.”

This means, in my own translation:

“Nor do the girls of Pyrrha and Methymna,
nor do the other throngs of Lesbian women benefit me.
Worthless is Anaktoria, worthless, believe me, is Gyrinno,
nor is Atthis pleasing to my eyes as she was before,
and the hundred other women, whom I loved not without reproach.
Wicked man, you, one man, hold that which was of many women.”

All the women that Ovid’s Sappho mentions here are ones that the real Sappho wrote about in her poems; she mentions Anaktoria in Fragment 16, Atthis in Fragments 49, 96, and 130, and Gyrinno in Fragment 82.

Gordon notes that the way Ovid’s Sappho openly boasts about all the women she has had sexual relationships with is totally removed from how “respectable” Roman women were expected to behave, but closely resembles the way that men are portrayed as boasting about their sexual conquests elsewhere in Latin literature.

Additionally, she observes that, in abandoning all her various female lovers, Ovid’s Sappho is treating them in exactly the same way that the male lovers to whom most of the Heroïdes are addressed have treated their women, casually throwing out their old partners and exchanging them for new ones.

Gordon also notes that the “Epistle of Sappho to Phaon” contains far more sexually explicit passages than occur in any of the other letters. In one particularly startling passage, Ovid’s Sappho describes herself either vividly dreaming about Phaon or sexually fantasizing about him while masturbating, eventually culminating in a graphic description of herself experiencing orgasm (lines 123–134). This passage is paralleled elsewhere in Latin literature of the time only by passages composed in a male voice.

Gordon notes that, apart from Phaedra (whom the goddess Venus has cursed to madly lust after her own young stepson Hippolytus), all the other women in the Heroïdes choose mature, masculine men as their partners and, again apart from Phaedra, none of them dwell on their lover’s beauty or physical appearance to any significant extent.

Sappho, by contrast, is a tribade. Her erotic desires are aberrantly masculine, so she prefers a young, beautiful boy rather than a mature man and, throughout her letter, she fixates extensively on his beauty to an even greater extent than Phaedra does for Hippolytus. Thus, in Ovid’s portrayal, even when Sappho erotically desires males, she remains the older, more experienced, dominant, sexually active partner.

ABOVE: Sappho and Phaon, painted by the French Neoclassical painter Pierre Claude François Delorme in 1833, showing Sappho and her young lover reclining together, with her clearly in the more dominant position

Evidence for Roman women’s homoeroticism from Pompeii

That being said, the prevailing Greek attitude which saw homoeroticism among women as relatively normal (or at least something that could be tacitly ignored) does seem to have influenced at least some Romans. We know that there must have been a tradition of women’s homoerotic poetry in the Latin language because, in 1888, Italian archaeologists discovered an inscription (CIL 4.5296) of a nine-line homoerotic poem written from the perspective of a female speaker to a female addressee scrawled on the wall of a hallway in house six of insula nine in Regio IX of Pompeii. The poem reads as follows in Latin:

“O utinam liceat collo complexa tenere
braciola et teneris oscula ferre label(l)is.
i nunc, ventis tua gaudia, pupula, crede.
crede mihi levis est natura virorum.
saepe ego cu(m) media vigilare(m) perdita nocte
haec mecum medita(n)s: multos Fortuna quos supstulit alte,
hos modo proiectos subito praecipitesque premit.
sic Venus ut subito coiunxit corpora amantum
dividit lux et se . . .”

Here is my translation:

“Oh, if only it were permitted for me to hold, wrapped around my neck,
your little arms and bear kisses to your tender little lips.
Go now, trust your happiness to the winds, little doll.
Believe me that the nature of men is fickle.
Often I would lie awake, lost in the middle of the night
thinking these things to myself: many men whom Fortune has lifted high,
those same men, cast out suddenly and headfirst, she presses down.
In exactly the same way, Venus suddenly joins the bodies of lovers,
daylight divides them and . . .”

The person who scrawled the poem on the wall was most likely not the original author and the poem is in imperfect meter, so the most likely explanation is that whoever scrawled the poem on the wall had read it somewhere and was imperfectly recalling it from memory when they inscribed it. Sadly, this poem is all the survives of what must have originally been a much vaster corpus of female homoerotic poetry in Latin.

The Romans also apparently found it acceptable to display explicit paintings of women having sex with other women in certain public buildings. The apodyterium or undressing room of the Suburban Baths in Pompeii was decorated with a series of eight frescoes, seven of which depict explicit sex scenes. (The eighth fresco depicts a lone naked man with what the Romans would have considered grotesquely huge, deformed testicles.)

Art historians still aren’t entirely sure what to make of these scenes, whether they were supposed to be arousing, comical, or both, but two of the scenes depict women having sex with each other. The first of these, Scene V, which is by far the most badly damaged and only partly discernable, depicts two women having sex together on a bed using a dildo.

ABOVE: Badly damaged wall painting from the Suburban Baths in Pompeii, dating to the first century CE, depicting two women having sex with each other using a dildo

The latter of these, Scene VII, which is also badly damaged, depicts a sexual orgy of two men and two women. On the left side of the scene, a man is shown anally or intercrurally penetrating another man. Meanwhile, in the center, a woman sucks the penis of the man who is being penetrated. On the right, a second woman is shown crouching down to perform cunnilingus on the first woman.

ABOVE: Another badly damaged wall painting from the Suburban Baths in Pompeii, dating to the first century CE, depicting a sexual orgy of two men and two women, with one woman performing cunnilingus on the other

Paul of Tarsos in his Epistle to the Romans

One of the earliest authors in the Roman Empire to specifically condemn female homoeroticism in an extant text is Paul of Tarsos, a Jewish man who became a prominent member of the Jesus movement that would eventually become Christianity. Paul’s seven authentic surviving letters, which are mostly addressed to communities of followers of Jesus throughout the Roman Empire, are the earliest surviving texts related to the Jesus movement and are now included in the canon of the Christian New Testament.

Paul was not a fan of sex or marriage in general. He remained unmarried and celibate his whole life. He writes in his First Epistle to the Corinthians 7 that, ideally, all Christians should remain unmarried and celibate like him and that a person should only marry as a last resort if they feel they cannot control their lusts otherwise, since “it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion” (1 Corinthians 7:9). With this generally negative attitude even toward normative sexual relations between a married man and woman, it is not surprising that Paul had an even more negative attitude toward female homoerotic relations.

Paul most likely wrote his Epistle to the Romans, a letter to the community of followers of the Jesus movement in Rome, at some point between late 55 and early 57 CE. In Romans 1:22–27, Paul denounces followers of traditional polytheistic religions, such as those of the Greeks and Romans, declaring that, because they committed idolatry, God punished them by allowing them to fall into disgusting and depraved lusts. He writes, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):

“Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.”

“For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.”

Although he does not say so explicitly, when Paul says “Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural,” he is almost certainly thinking of women having sex with other women and possibly women engaging in other sexual activities that he considered “unnatural” as well.

ABOVE: Fresco dating to the fifth or sixth century CE from the Grotto of Saint Paul at Ephesos, depicting the apostle Paul (left) and the legendary saint Thekla (right)

Martial’s Philaenis and Bassa

Paul was, however, far from the only author in the Roman Empire at this time to view female homoeroticism negatively. Roman satirists from the first century CE onward began to attack female homoeroticism as an unnatural and characteristically Greek perversion.

For instance, the Roman satirical poet Marcus Valerius Martialis (lived 38 or 41 – c. 103 CE), commonly known in English today as “Martial,” in the city of Augusta Bilbilis (modern-day Calatayud) in what is now the province of Zaragoza in northern Spain and is known for his satirical epigrams making fun of various fictional characters who embody familiar stereotypes.

In his Epigrams 7.67, Martialis makes fun of a masculine Greek woman named Philaenis, whom he portrays as, among other things, having regular sex in the penetrative role with both women and boys in exactly the same manner that might be typical of a Greek or Roman man. He writes:

“Pedicat pueros tribas Philaenis
et tentigine saevior mariti
undenas dolat in die puellas.
Harpasto quoque subligata ludit,
et flavescit haphe, gravesque draucis
halteras facili rotat lacerto,
et putri lutulenta de palaestra
uncti verbere vapulat magistri:
nec cenat prius aut recumbit ante,
quam septem vomuit meros deunces;
ad quos fas sibi tunc putat redire,
cum coloephia sedecim comedit.
Post haec omnia cum libidinatur,
non fellat—putat hoc parum virile—
sed plane medias vorat puellas.
Di mentem tibi dent tuam, Philaeni,
cunnum lingere quae putas virile.”

This means, in my own translation from the Latin:

“The tribade Philaenis ass-fucks boys
and, fiercer than a husband with a stiff erection,
she cleaves eleven girls every day.
Tied back, she also plays with a handball,
and she pats herself with sand, and she easily
swings around dumbbells heavy for weightlifters with her bicep,
and, muddying herself with filth from the palaestra [i.e., the wrestling place],
she is beaten by her greasy instructor with a scourge.
And she does not dine first or recline
until she has puked up seven wines eleven-twelfths unmixed,
toward which she then thinks it her own divine law to return
when she devours sixteen cuts of meat.
After all these things, when she is lusting,
she does not suck cock—she thinks that this is hardly manly—
but she plainly devours the middles of girls.
The deities give you back your mind, Philaenis,
you who think that to lick cunt is manly.”

Martial returns to mock Philaenis again in his Epigrams 7.70:

“Ipsarum tribadum tribas, Philaeni,
recte, quam futuis, vocas amicam.”

This means, again in my own translation:

“Tribade of tribades themselves, Philaenis,
rightly do you call she whom you fuck your girlfriend.”

The primary target of Martial’s satire in these poems is not so much Philaenis’s sexuality as her masculinity. He portrays her sexuality as merely one aspect of her aberrantly masculine behavior. His ultimate purpose is to portray Philaenis as a woman who possesses an unnatural desire to be like a man, but who can never really be like a man because she doesn’t have a penis and will therefore always be inferior and inadequate. In Martial’s view, her attempts at masculinity will always be failed attempts.

Judith P. Hallett argues in her chapter “Female Homoeroticism and the Denial of Roman Reality in Latin Literature” in the book Roman Sexualities, pages 255–273, that Martial repeatedly describes Philaenis as performing the phallic role of the penetrator in intercourse with women in order to emphasize her lack of a true penis. She also argues that the second-to-last line wherein Martial says “The deities give you back your mind” is a pun, because the Latin word mens, meaning “mind,” is reminiscent of the word mentula, meaning “cock.”

There is also a very explicit ethnic dimension to Martial’s portrayal. Martial characterizes Philaenis as Greek and her emphasizes her Greekness not only by giving her a very obviously Greek name, but also by describing her as engaging in activities that would be typical for a well-to-do, culturally Greek man, such as practicing pederasty, exercising at the gymnasion, wrestling in a palaistra, and reclining on a couch and drinking wine mixed with water as though at a symposion (i.e., a drinking party for well-to-do Greek men).

As Hallett points out in her chapter, on pages 261–262, even Martial’s vocabulary serves to further portray Philaenis as characteristically Greek; the words tribas (“tribade”), harpasto (“handball”), haphe (“sprinkled sand”), halteras (“barbells”), palaestra (“wrestling place”), and coloephia (“cuts of meat”) are all ones that Martial’s original readers would have easily recognized as being of Greek derivation.

Martial attacks another woman named Bassa who he claims has sex with women in his Epigrams 1.90, writing:

“Quod numquam maribus iunctam te, Bassa, videbam
quodque tibi moechum fabula nulla dabat,
omne sed officium circa te semper obibat
turba tui sexus, non adeunte viro,
esse videbaris, fateor, Lucretia nobis:
at tu, pro facinus, Bassa, fututor eras.
Inter se geminos audes committere cunnos
mentiturque virum prodigiosa Venus.
Commenta es dignum Thebano aenigmate monstrum,
hic ubi vir non est, ut sit adulterium.”

Here is my translation:

“Since I never used to see you, Bassa, in company with men,
and since no rumor was ever giving you a lover,
but instead every service around you was always met
by a throng of your own sex, not a man being present,
you used to seem, I admit, that you were our Lucretia—
but you (what a deed!) Bassa, are a fucker.
Amongst yourselves, you dare to unite twin cunts
and your monstrous lust feigns a man.
You have invented a portent worthy of a Theban riddle:
here there is no man, but yet there is adultery.”

Notice how, in obvious contrast to Philaenis, whom Martial presents as an over-the-top caricature of a woman who is constantly and very publicly performing masculinity, Martial presents Bassa as a married, outwardly normal-seeming, feminine woman who is secretly doing something horrifically masculine in private.

Also notice how Martial’s initial assumption about Bassa is that she is an utterly chaste housewife. He even goes so far as to compare her to Lucretia, who, for the Romans, represented the epitome of the perfect wife. According to Roman legend, Lucretia is said to have been renowned for her perfect chastity and utter devotion to her husband Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus. Then the prince Sextus Tarquinius brutally raped her while threatening to kill her. After he left, she killed herself with a knife, because death was the penalty for adultery and she firmly believed that, even though she had been raped, no woman who has been penetrated by any man other than her husband should be allowed to live.

It is only later that Martial realizes what he perceives as the horrifying truth: that Bassa is not, in fact, a contemporary Lucretia, but rather that she is having affairs with other women. Finally, notice his sheer perplexity at the realization that adultery is possible without a man. He calls it “a portent worthy of a Theban riddle,” alluding to the Greek myth of Oidipous and the riddle of the Sphinx. For him, this whole notion is a paradox.

Through this comparison, Martial also directly connects Bassa, who has a Roman name and is therefore seemingly a Roman woman, with Greece, which, for him, is the ultimate source of her perversion.

ABOVE: Tarquin and Lucretia, painted in 1571 by the Italian Renaissance painter Titian, depicting Sextus Tarquinius’s notorious rape of Lucretia, a married woman

Peter’s vision of women who had sex with other women being tortured in hell in the Apocalypse of Peter

Martial’s invectives against Philaenis and Bassa may be bitter, but the Apocalypse of Peter, a Christian apocalyptic work that was originally written in the Greek language sometime in the first half of the second century CE goes much further in its condemnation of women who have sex with other women.

Although the work claims to have been written by the apostle Peter, modern scholars universally reject this attribution as a literary artifice and regard the work as anonymous. The work describes a vision Peter allegedly experienced in which the risen Jesus gives him a guided tour of heaven and hell. In this vision, Peter sees various sinners being brutally tortured in hell in all kinds of gruesome and horrific ways for all of eternity with absolutely no rest or hope of salvation.

In verse 32, he describes seeing men who took the penetrated role in sex with other men and women who had sex with other women being perpetually thrown off a cliff and being forced to march back up the cliff in order to be thrown off again. His description reads as follows in the original Greek:

“ἄλλοι ἄνδρες καὶ γυναῖκες ἀπὸ κρημνοῦ μεγάλου καταστρεφόμενοι ἤρχοντο κάτω καὶ πάλιν ἠλαύνοντο ὑπὸ τῶν ἐπικειμένων ἀναβῆναι ἄνω ἐπὶ τοῦ κρημνοῦ καὶ κατεστρέφοντο ἐκεῖθεν κάτω, καὶ ἡσυχίαν οὐκ εἶχον ἀπὸ ταύτης τῆς κολάσεως· οὗτοι δὲ ἦσαν οἱ μιάναντες τὰ σώματα ἑαυτῶν ὡς γυναῖκες ἀναστρεφόμενοι, αἱ δὲ μετ᾽ αὐτῶν γυναῖκες αὗται ἦσαν αἱ συγκοιμηθεῖσαι ἀλλήλαις ὡς ἂν ἀνὴρ πρὸς γυναῖκα.”

This means, in my own translation:

“Other men and women were thrown down off a big cliff, went down, were driven to march back up the cliff by the overseers, and were thrown back down, and they did not have rest from this punishment. And these men were the ones who defiled their own bodies by acting like women and the women with them were those who had sex with each other like a man does with a woman.”

ABOVE: Illustration from the Hortus Deliciarum, a medieval illustrated manuscript compiled by the Alsatian nun Herrad of Landsberg c. 1180 CE, showing various kinds of sinners being tortured in the unquenchable fires of hell in all sorts of horrific ways, much like they are described in the Apocalypse of Peter

Loukianos of Samosata’s Dialogues of the Courtesans and Erotes

The Syrian satirist and rhetorician Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE) is the author of over eighty surviving works, all of them written in the Greek language. Among these, he wrote a work titled Dialogues of the Courtesans, which is a collection of satirical dialogues featuring various courtesans as speakers.

In one of the dialogues, titled “The Lesbians,” a young and naïve kithara-player named Leaina describes to a man named Klonarion how a person who she thought was a woman named Megilla managed to seduce her. She describes the encounter to him as follows, as translated by A.L.H.:

“You see, Megilla and Demonassa, the Corinthian, sweating and very hot, pulled off her false hair—I had never suspected her of wearing a wig. And I saw her head was smooth-shaven as that of a young athlete. I was quite scared to see this. But Megilla spoke up and said to me:”

“‘Tell me, O Leaina, have you ever seen a better looking young man?’”

“‘But I see no young man here, Megilla!’ I told her.”

“‘Now, now! Don’t you effeminate me!’ she reproved. ‘You must understand my name is Megillos. Demonassa is my wife.’”

“Her words seemed so funny to me, Klonarion. I started to giggle. And I said:”

“‘Can it be, Megillos, that you are a man and lived among us under the disguise of a woman, just like Achilles, who stayed among the girls hidden by his purple robe? And is it true that you possess a man’s organs, and that you do to Demonassa what any husband does to his wife?’”

“‘That Leaina,’ she replied, ‘is not entirely so. You will soon see how we shall couple up in a fashion that is much more voluptuous.’”

“‘In that case,’ I said, ‘you are not a hermaphrodite. They, I have been told, have both a man’s and woman’s organs.’”

“‘No,’ she said, ‘I am quite like a man.’”

“‘Ismenodora, the Boiotian flute player, has told me about a Theban woman who was changed into a man. A certain good soothsayer by the name of Teiresias——Did any accident like that happen to you by chance?’”

“‘No, Leaina,’ she said. ‘I was born with a body entirely like that of all women, but I have the tastes and desires of a man.’”

“‘And do those desires of yours suffice you?’ I asked, smiling.”

“‘Let me have my own way with you, Leaina, if you don’t believe me,’ she answered, ‘and you will soon see that I have nothing to envy men for. I have something that resembles a man’s estate. Come on, let me do what I want to do and you will soon understand.’”

“She pleaded so hard that I let her have her way. And you must understand that she made me a gift of a splendid necklace and several tunics of the finest linen. Then I embraced her and held her in my arms, as if she were a man. And she kissed me all over the body, and she set out to do what she had promised, panting excitedly from the great pleasure and desire that possessed her.”

As I discuss in this blog post I wrote in August 2020, in this dialogue, Megillos seems to be much closer to what most twenty-first-century readers would consider a transgender man than a lesbian, since he presents as masculine when he is in private, he uses a masculine name, he insists that he is a man, and he insists that other people refer to him as a man.

Nonetheless, this dialogue seems to display an attitude of voyeuristic curiosity about female-bodied people who have sex with other female-bodied people. Loukianos does not portray Megillos’s seduction of Leaina as something that his readers should be disgusted by or something they should necessarily accept as normal, but rather as something bizarre and strange that should amuse and titillate them.

ABOVE: Illustration of Megillos and Demonassa from A.L.H.’s 1928 edition of Loukianos’s Dialogues of the Courtesans

Another dialogue attributed to Loukianos is the Erotes. There is some dispute over whether Loukianos is really the author, but the authorship of the work does not really matter for our purposes. The work portrays two male speakers arguing over whether men’s erotic attraction to women or men’s erotic attraction to adolescent boys is better.

Charikles, the speaker who argues that erotic attraction to women is better, objects that, if it is permitted for men to have sex with adolescent boys, this will open the door for the most ridiculous and outlandish possibility: allowing women to have sex with women. He declares, in Andrew Kallimachos’s translation:

“That is why, if a woman can satisfy the lover of boys, let him abstain from the latter, or else, if males can conjoin with males, then in the future allow women to love each other. Come, men of the new age, you legislators of strange thrills; after having blazed unfamiliar trails for men’s pleasures, grant women the same licence: let them comingle as do the males; let a woman, girded with those obscene implements, monstrous toys of sterility, lie with another woman, just as a man with another man. Let those filthy lesbians – a word that only rarely reaches our ears since modesty forbids it – triumph freely. Let our schools for girls be nothing but the domain of Philainis, dishonored by androgynous loves. And yet would it not be better to see a woman play the man than to see men take on the role of women?”

Thus, in the works attributed to Loukianos, we see two distinct male attitudes toward female-bodied people having sex with other female-bodied people: one which sees it as an idea that is amusing and titillating for male audiences and one which sees it as a ridiculous absurdity.

Reception of Sappho’s sexuality in the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries CE

The apparently changing attitude toward women’s homoeroticism seems to have had some impact on the reception of Sappho’s poems during the Roman Era, with admirers of her work being at pains to defend her from the accusation of having had sexual relations with other women. Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1800 fr. 1, a papyrus fragment from Egypt dating to the late second or early third century CE, gives a mini-biography of Sappho, which mentions:

“κ[α]τηγόρηται δ᾿ ὑπ᾿ ἐν[ί]ω[ν] ὡς ἄτακτος οὖ[σα] τὸν τρόπον καὶ γυναικε[ράσ]τρια.”

This means:

“She has been accused by some of having been irregular in her manner and a woman-lover.”

The Latin grammarian Pomponius Porphyrion, a commentator on the works of Horace who may have flourished in around the late second century CE, comments on Horace’s Epistles 1.19.28 (on page 362 of Holder’s edition of the commentary):

“‘mascula’ autem ‘Saffo’, vel quia in poetico studio est <incluta>, in quo saepius viri, vel quia tribas diffamatur fuisse.”

This means:

“[Horace says] ‘masculine Sappho,’ either because she is famous for her poetic zeal, in which men are [famous] more often, or because she is defamed as a tribade.”

That being said, there were still some Greeks in the Roman Empire who thought that Sappho did indeed have sex with women and thought there was nothing wrong with this. In a truly fascinating passage, the Greek rhetorician Maximos of Tyre, who flourished in around the late second century CE at the time when Sappho’s sexuality was apparently so controversial, defends Sappho in his Orations 18.9 by comparing her to Socrates. He says, as translated by David A. Campbell for the Loeb Classical Library (with some edits of my own to make spellings more closely match the Greek):

“What else could one call the love of the Lesbian woman than the Socratic art of love? For they seem to me to have practiced love after their own fashion, she the love of women, he of men. For they said they loved many, and were captivated by all things beautiful. What Alkibiades and Charmides and Phaidros were to him, Gyrinna and Atthis and Anaktoria were to her; what the rival craftsmen Prodikos and Gorgias and Thrasymachos and Protagoras were to Socrates, Gorgo and Andromeda were to Sappho. Sometimes she censures them, at other times she cross-examines them, and she uses irony just like Socrates.”

Here Maximos is making in complete seriousness the argument that Charikles in the Erotes only makes in jest. He implicitly argues: We all know that Socrates was sexually interested in young men and no one thinks there’s anything wrong with that, so we shouldn’t find anything wrong with Sappho or other women being interested in women.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a Roman marble portrait bust of Sappho, probably based on a Greek original dating to the fifth century BCE

Greek-language women’s homoerotic binding spells from Egypt

Clearly, among upper-class men living in the Roman Empire in the second century CE, women’s homoeroticism was a subject of voyeuristic fascination, disgust, and controversy. Fascinatingly, though, a few sources produced by women who were erotically attracted to other women in this period have actually survived.

The sources in question are not works of high literature like the poems of Sappho or Erinna, but rather erotic binding spells written in the Greek language that have been found in Egypt. These were first brought to my attention in December 2020 by the medievalist Dr. Erik Wade through a thread he wrote on Twitter.

A pair of lead curse tablets dating to the second century CE (Suppl.Mag. 37), which were held together face-to-face with four nails, bear a set of curses commanding the corpse-daimon or ghost of a dead man named “Horion, son of Serapous,” to make a woman named Nike erotically desire the apparent spellcaster, a woman named Paitous.

Tablet A reads as follows, as translated by the classicist Christopher A. Faraone in his paper “Four Missing Persons, a Misunderstood Mummy, and Further Adventures in Greek Magical Texts,” published in 2021 in the scholarly journal Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 61, on page 151:

“Horion, son of Sarapous, make and force Nike, the daughter of Apollonous, to be erotically attracted to Paitous, whom Tmesios bore.”

Underneath this curse is a small profile drawing of a mummy lying on its back wrapped in bandages with a footboard. Scholars have generally interpreted this as representing the dead man Horion, whose ghost is being commanded to cause Nike to erotically desire Paitous, but Faraone argues (on pages 150–152 of the already-cited paper) that it actually represents Nike, the intended victim of the curse.

Tablet B reads, as translated by Faraone, also on page 151:

“Make Nike, the daughter of Apollonous, be erotically attracted to Paitous, whom Tmesios bore, for five months.”

It is not clear why in this particular case the erotic binding spell should only last for five months. Perhaps Paitous was only looking for a five-month fling, not a long-lasting relationship.

As Wade points out in his Twitter thread, Nike and her mother Apollonous both have Greek names, while Paitous and her mother Tmesios both have Egyptian names. Although by the second century CE names were no longer necessarily indicative of ancestry or cultural affiliation, they do suggest the possibility that Nike and her family may have been part of the culturally Greek upper-class, while Paitous and her family may have been more closely affiliated with the less prestigious native Egyptian culture, possibly making Paitous’s desired relationship with Nike interethnic and/or interclass.

ABOVE: Photograph from Erik Wade’s Twitter thread showing Paitous’s curse tablets

Paitous’s curse tablets are not the only known instance of women in Roman Egypt casting spells to make other women erotically desire them. A papyrus fragment dating to the second century CE bears the text of an incantation in the Greek language in which the spellcaster, a woman named Heraïs, invokes the power of the Egyptian god Anubis, the Greek god Hermes, and all the other deities of the underworld to make a being called Evangelos cause a woman named Serapias to erotically desire her immediately.

The name Evangelos means “Good Messenger” and is most likely the name of a corpse-daimon or underworld spirit of some kind. The spell repeatedly commands Evangelos to act swiftly, presumably because Heraïs desperately wants to have Serapias and she cannot stand to wait.

This papyrus is included in the edited collection known as the Greek Magical Papyri as PGM XXXII.1–19. It reads as follows, as translated by Edward N. O’Neil and printed in the book The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, edited by Hans Dieter Betz, on page 266, with some very slight edits of my own:

“I adjure you, Evangelos, by Anubis and Hermes and all the rest down below [i.e., the other deities of the underworld]; attract and bind / Serapias whom Helene bore, to this Heraïs, whom Thermoutharin bore, now, now; quickly, quickly. By her soul and heart / attract Serapias herself, whom [Helene] bore from her own womb, MAEI OTE ELBŌSATOK ALAOUBĒTŌ ŌEIO . . . AEN. Attract and [bind / the soul and heart of Serapias], whom [Helene bore, to this] Heraïs [whom] Thermoutharin [bore] from her womb [now, now; quickly, quickly].”

The longest and most elaborate surviving spell text from Roman Egypt in which a woman spellcaster orders a supernatural being to make another woman erotically desire her is a lead curse tablet dating to the third or fourth century CE bearing a very long inscription in the Greek language. In this inscription, the apparent spellcaster, a woman named Sophia, daughter of Isara, adjures a corpse-daimon or ghost to inflame a woman named Gorgonia, the daughter of Nilogenia, with an insane, uncontrollable lust for her.

The inscription is very long and very repetitive, so I won’t quote the whole translation, but here is the part where Sophia gives her first commands to the corpse-daimon, as rendered in the translation that Wade screenshots in his Twitter thread:

“By means of this | corpse-daimon inflame the heart, the liver, the spirit of Gorgonia, whom Nilogenia bore, with love and affection for Sophia, whom Isara bore. Constrain Gorgonia, whom Nilogenia bore, to cast herself into the bathhouse for the sake of Sophia, whom Isara bore; and you, become a bath-woman. Burn, set on fire, inflame her soul, heart, liver, spirit with love for Sophia, whom Isara bore.”

“Drive | Gorgonia, whom Nilogenia bore, drive her, torment her body night and day, force her to rush forth from every place and every house, loving Sophia, whom Isara bore, she, surrendered like a slave, giving herself and all her possessions to her, because this is the will of the great god, IARTANA OUOUSIŌ IPSENTHANCHŌCHAINCHOUEŌCH AEĒIOYŌ IARTANA OUSIOUSIOU IPSOENPEUTHADEI | ANNOUCHEŌ AEĒIOYŌ.”

These spells reveal that, in Roman Egypt during the second and third centuries CE, some women were actively trying to seduce other women to whom they felt erotically attracted. Additionally, the spells of Heraïs and Sophia both display specialized knowledge of ritual formulas and divine names. This indicates that either the women who used them were experts at magic rituals themselves or they had people who were experts at such rituals write the spells for them.

If Heraïs and Sophia really had experts write their spells for them, this would mean that some women living in Roman Egypt in the second and third centuries CE felt comfortable going to a magical expert to ask them to write a spell to make another woman erotically desire them. This would suggest that women’s erotic attraction to other women was relatively socially accepted at least among some circles of experts in magic rituals in Roman Egypt during this time period.

ABOVE: Photograph from Erik Wade’s Twitter thread showing Sophia’s curse tablet

The triumph of Christianity

Ultimately, this tolerant attitude was not the one that would become dominant in the later centuries of Roman history. Instead, over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries CE, Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. With the rise of Christianity, the apostle Paul’s view that all sexual relations between persons of the same gender are immoral and depraved became widely accepted as objective truth.

Nonetheless, it is clear that in later times, even though female same-gender attraction became seen as taboo and sinful, it clearly didn’t go away by any means. Anthony Kaldellis relates in his book A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History’s Most Orthodox Empire (on page 17) that The Life of Saint Basileios the Younger, a Byzantine Roman hagiography of the fictional saint Basileios the Younger who supposedly lived in Constantinople in the early tenth century CE, describes a vision in which the soul of an elderly servant named Theodora ascends to heaven after her death by passing through a series of tollbooths staffed by demonic customs officials, who interrogate her about any possible sins she might have committed in life.

At one of these tollbooths, a demon asks Theodora (in Kaldellis’s translation) “whether perhaps, when she was young and shared a bed with a young girl of the same age, she ever committed the feminine sin of sex with a woman.”

It was apparently such a common problem for cloistered nuns to feel sexual attraction to each other that some nunneries had to implement rules forbidding nuns from even looking at each other’s faces for fear that, if they so much as see another nun’s face, they might feel some sexual attraction stirring. In the same book I referenced earlier, on page 19, Kaldellis translates a passage from the Rule for the Monastery of Saint John the Baptist of “Phoberos” 58:

“Satan often tempts a woman to desire a woman. For this reason, pious abbesses of nunneries instruct the nuns under them not to look at each other’s faces plainly or by chance, lest through gazing upon each other they should slip and slide into passion and harm. Instead, they are to lower their heads, look at the ground, and in this way to speak to each other, virgin-to-virgin.”

Thus, women’s homoeroticism seems to have gone from being more-or-less open and accepted in the time of Sappho and Alkman in the Greek Archaic Period to being so absolutely prohibited in the Byzantine Period that some nuns were being warned not to even look at each other’s faces for fear of the mere possibility that they might feel some attraction.

(NOTE: This post is adapted from an answer I originally wrote in response to a question in r/AskHistorians. I have also posted a version of this article on Quora as an answer to the question “How were lesbians regarded in ancient Greece and Rome?”)