Evidence suggests that she had several brothers, married a wealthy man named Cercylas, and had a daughter named Cleis. She spent most of her adult life in the city of Mytilene on Lesbos where she ran an academy for unmarried young women.
Sappho's school devoted itself to the cult of Aphrodite and Eros, and Sappho earned great prominence as a dedicated teacher and poet. A legend from Ovid suggests that she threw herself from a cliff when her heart was broken by Phaon, a young sailor, and died at an early age.
Other historians posit that she died of old age around B. The history of her poems is as speculative as that of her biography. She was known in antiquity as a great poet: Plato called her "the tenth Muse" and her likeness appeared on coins.
Indeed Rossetti apparently had to reprimand Swinburne for his sliding down the banisters of their house naked with his boyfriend also equally nude and thereby disturbing Rossetti's painting. Swinburne's explorations into sexually deviant spaces continue in his poetry. In "Anactoria" Swinburne explores homosexual tragic love. Here, he speaks through the persona of Sappho, the Classical lesbian poetess hailed by Plato as the Tenth Muse Wikipedia.
Sappho is contemplative, a woman and speaks about tragic love, however she is unlike any other Pre-Raphaelite woman we have thus far encountered. In "Anactoria", Sappho explores the by-now familiar Swinburnian preoccupation with physical love and consumption. Preoccupation may, perhaps be an understatement; she obsesses about her love, a love that she presents as poisonous and destructive.
She begins with the assertion:. My life is bitter with thy love; thine eyes Blind me, thy tresses burn me, thy sharp sighs Divide my flesh and spirit with soft sound, And my blood strengthens, and my veins abound. I pray thee sigh not, speak not, draw not breath; Let life burn down, and dream it is not death. For Sappho, the experience of love equates to that of dying.
So, where did Sappho come from? What strange land or culture gave her birth and permitted her extraordinary skills to flourish? While we know little that is certain of her life, we do know Sappho was born in the city of Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesbos, off the coast of Turkey in the late 7th Century BC.
Mytilene appears to have been an enlightened society compared to other communities in Archaic Greece. Her estimated birth date places her sometime after the composition and transmission of the works of the Homeric poets , which told the stories of the Trojan War and are preserved in the epics known as the Iliad and the Odyssey. Read more: Guide to the classics: Homer's Iliad.
But Sappho was no epic poet, rather she composed lyrics: short, sweet verses on a variety of topics from hymns to the gods, marriage songs, and mini-tales of myth and legend. She also sung of desire, passion and love — mostly directed towards women — for which she is best known. Was Sappho a lesbian? An answer depends on how one is defined.
If love of women, even in a non-sexual sense, and an exclusive focus on the needs and lives of women define a woman as a lesbian, then — yes — Sappho was a lesbian. However, if a lesbian is defined more narrowly as a woman who has sex with another woman, then evidence to define Sappho as one is harder to establish. Of course, these two binaries are inherently artificial and without nuance. They are also ignorant of social constructionism, which insists on understanding an individual in her or his historical environment, its values, and its cultural specificities.
And, in the society of Archaic Mytilene, Sappho was not defined as a lesbian. That began with the Greeks and Romans of later centuries, who tended to interpret her skill as stemming from a perverted form of masculinity, which sometimes found expression in representations of her through the lens of a hyper-sexuality. The Sappho mystique is further confounded by later testimonies such as the 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia called the Suda or the Stronghold , which chronicled the history of the ancient Mediterranean.
In one of two entries on Sappho, readers are informed that she was in love with a ferryman by the name of Phaon whose rejection of her caused her to leap to her death from the Leucadian Cliff. Teach This Poem. Follow Us. Find Poets. Poetry Near You. Jobs for Poets. Read Stanza. Privacy Policy. Press Center.
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