Celebrating Queer Women Literature!

Sappho (/ˈsæfoʊ/; Attic Greek Σαπφώ [sapːʰɔ̌ː], Aeolic Greek Ψάπφω, Psappho [psápːʰɔː]) was a Greek lyric poet, born on the island of Lesbos. The Alexandrians included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life. The bulk of her poetry, which was well-known and greatly admired through much of antiquity, has been lost; however, her immense reputation has endured through surviving fragments. She is one of the first female lyrical poets, if not the first.
In antiquity, Sappho was commonly regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets. The Milan Papyrus, recovered from a dismantled mummy casing and published in 2001, has revealed the high esteem in which the poet Posidippus of Pella, an important composer of epigrams (3rd century BC), held Sappho’s “divine songs”.
An epigram in the Anthologia Palatina (9.506) ascribed to Plato states:
Some say the Muses are nine: how careless! Look, there’s Sappho too, from Lesbos, the tenth.
Claudius Aelianus wrote in Miscellany (Ποικίλη ἱστορία) that Plato called Sappho wise. A story is recounted in the Florilegium (3.29.58) of Stobaeus:
Solon of Athens heard his nephew sing a song of Sappho’s over the wine and, since he liked the song so much, he asked the boy to teach it to him. When someone asked him why, he said: “So that I may learn it, then die.”
A few centuries later, Horace wrote in his Odes that Sappho’s lyrics are worthy of sacred admiration. One of Sappho’s poems (Fragment 31) was famously translated by the 1st-century BC Roman poet Catullus in his “Ille mi par esse deo videtur“ ("He seems to me to be equal to a god”) (Catullus 51).
Sexuality and Community
Sappho’s poetry centers on passion and love for various people and both sexes. The word lesbian derives from the name of the island of her birth, Lesbos (literally meaning “native of Lesbos”), while her name is also the origin of the word sapphic; neither word was applied to female homosexuality until the 19th century. The narrators of many of her poems speak of infatuations and love (sometimes requited, sometimes not) for various females, but descriptions of physical acts between women are few and subject to debate. Whether these poems are meant to be autobiographical is not known, although elements of other parts of Sappho’s life do make appearances in her work, and it would be compatible with her style to have these intimate encounters expressed poetically, as well. Her homoerotica should be placed in the context of the 7th century (BC). The poems of Alcaeus and later Pindar record similar romantic bonds between the members of a given circle.During the Victorian era, it became fashionable to describe Sappho as the headmistress of a girls’ finishing school. As Page DuBois (among many other experts) points out, this attempt at making Sappho understandable and palatable to the genteel classes of Great Britain was based more on conservative sensibilities than evidence. There are no references to teaching, students, academies, or tutors in any of Sappho’s scant collection of surviving works. The notion that Sappho was in charge of some sort of academy persists nonetheless. [source]