Sappho
by Todd Richmond
365Gay.com Features Editor

"What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful."

Sappho is the "Alpha Dyke". The first recorded lesbian. She was born on the Island of Lesbos on February 27 sometime in the 6th century. Although historians are certain of the date, the year remains somewhat a mystery, although most believe it to have been between 600 and 650 BC.

This was the Pre-classical period of Greece, an exciting new time, and Sappho was involved with all the changes that occurred. For example, the Greek alphabet had just been invented, coin money was minted for the first time, the political system had changed radically, and the arts were vigorously renewed.

Artists began to explore words, beauty and love.

Sappho was small and dark featured. Her writing is huge and bright.

She was widely acclaimed for the astonishing beauty and originality of her lyric poetry which she brilliantly perfected. Poetry in her day was usually accompanied by music and dance. Sappho was so accomplished at composing in all three modes, that she acquired the reputation for being the Divine Inspiration of the Muses. Plato called her the "tenth Muse."

She was held in high esteem and copied even 500 years after her death. However, for the past two thousand years, her work has been fragmented and distorted.

In the first Century Strabo said, "Never within human memory has there been a woman to compare with her as poet."

Yet, in the 4th Century the Christian church attacked her for her lesbian writing. The Bisphop of Constantinople ordered all of Sappho's writings to be burned. More of her work was destroyed when Constantinople was pillaged during the Crusades in the 1200's. And, in 1703 her work was publicly burned in Rome and Constantinople by order of the Pope.

Although many of her works were lost, much survived.

We know little about her life. She was married, had a daughter, and surrounded herself with young women. It is to these "maidens" that her love poems are directed.

In trying to downplay her the fact she was a lesbian scholars have confused many of the issues of her life. The story of Sappho commonly alluded to is that she was passionately in love with a beautiful youth named Phaon, and failing to obtain a return of affection she threw herself from the promontory of Leucadia into the sea, under a superstition that those who should take that "Lover's-leap" would, if not destroyed, be cured of their love.

The fact is we know virtually nothing about Phaon. Was this a man or a woman? Is it pure myth to cover up her sexuality? We don't know.

Sappho's poems are marked by exquisite beauty of diction, perfect simplicity of form, and intensity of emotion. She invented the verse form known as Sapphics, a four-line stanza in which the first three lines are each 11 syllables long and the fourth is 5 syllables long.

"I have no complaint.
Prospoerity that the golden Muses
gave me was no delusion:
dead, I won't be forgotten."
Sappho