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Sappho
Her shining ankles clad in fairest fashion
In broidered leather from the realm of Lydia,
So came the Goddess.
The poet Sappho lived in the sixth century B.C. on the island of Lesbos, which is situated in the Northeastern Aegean. We do not know the exact date of her birth or death, but it has been suggested that she was alive from about 610 B.C. to 570 B.C. Her family is known to have been wealthy merchants; Lesbos in the sixth century B.C. was very prosperous. That she lived a life of luxury, and loved beautiful clothes and ornaments is clear from several allusions in the fragments. In addition, it is known that women of Lesbos at this time were exceptionally liberated and moved freely in social and religious circles. Lesbos was the center of a flourishing school of lyric poetry. Some of the other poets of Lesbos of this period were Terpander and Alcaeus, and there were several other women poets.
Turn to me, dear one, turn thy face,
And unveil for me in thine eyes, their grace.
In the ancient world she was considered to be on an equal footing with Homer, acclaimed as the 'tenth muse'. Her poetry was collected three hundred years after her death at Alexandria in nine books. Some of her poems were known to be hundreds of lines long.
Today, only a few scraps of her poetry survive, only three of them consisting of more than one verse (the longest being seven verses of four lines), a handful of four line and two line fragments, and the rest just phrases or short quotes. Most of the fragments are second- or thirdhand quotes from other texts. Some small fragments were found (in the early twentieth century) wrapped around mummies in Egypt; essentially recycled papyrus. These have been identified only because of Sappho's distinctive literary style.
Sappho's books were burned by Christians in the year 380 A.D. at the instigation of Pope Gregory Nazianzen. Another book burning in the year 1073 A.D. by Pope Gregory VII may have wiped out any remaining trace of her works. It should be remembered that in antiquity books were copied by hand and comparatively rare. There may have only been a few copies of her complete works. The bonfires of the Church destroyed many things, but among the most tragic of their victims were the poems of Sappho.
The reason that the Church wanted Sappho's works eradicated is not certain, but it probably had something to do with the subject matter of her poems. From the surviving fragments, we know Sappho wrote splendid hymns in praise of the Pagan Goddesses, particularly Aphrodite, and love poetry of great sophistication, passion and deep understanding of the human heart. This at least is apparent even from the few fragments we have. Such subjects were anathema to the bigots of the Dark Ages.
The matter of her sexual orientation did not become controversial until much later, during the nineteenth and twentieth century. It was not an issue for her contemporaries; it was not even an issue in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, when her poetry started to emerge from obscurity.
It should be emphasized that we have few clues about her sexual orientation. Moreover, we are still unclear what same-sex romantic or erotic love between women may have implied in Sappho's culture. What we do know is that there was not widespread fear and persecution of homosexuals in antiquity. Even during the middle ages, same-sex unions occurred and were not disapproved of by the Church. This is not why Sappho's poems were burned. If anything, it was her (possibly exaggerated) reputation for promiscuity which brought her reproach in the early Christian era.
 It was only during the Victorian era that Sappho's sexual preference per se, rather than her poetry, became a focus of interest. Since there is no actual explicit 'lesbian' sexual content in her poems, in the late 19th Century the French Decadent novelist Pierre Louys decided to invent some. Louys claimed that he had discovered the poems of an ancient Lesbian poetess named 'Bilitis', a contemporary of Sappho. Louys published free-verse 'translations' of her works complete with scholarly apparatus. The Bilitis poems provided all the juicy details that were missing from the Sappho corpus (or at least as much as Louys could imply in a book published at the time). Conspicuously missing were the original texts of Bilitis' poems, which is understandable, since our spotty information on the Aoelic dialect which Bilitis would have spoken would make them hard to forge.
The Bilitis hoax (which, although purely a male fantasy, has literary merits in its own right) took Europe by storm. In time, Bilitis became confused with Sappho in popular culture to the point where it is impossible to tell the two apart. Today the adjective 'Sapphic' conjures up images of illicit lesbian sex, rather than its original meaning of a specific classical Greek poetic form. Bilitis was made into an atrocious soft-euro-porn movie in the 1970's starring the nymphet Sylvia Crystal, with cinematography by the fashion photographer David Hamilton (albeit with little connection to the Louys book other than some voice-overs).The truth of the matter is that Sappho was probably bisexual, not lesbian in the sense of the word today, i.e. exclusively attracted to women. Moreover, nobody made a big deal about it for nearly 2,500 years after she was dead.
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