Sappho was an ancient Greek woman who wrote passionate poetry about female love on the island of Lesbos. It is from that island and that poetry that is derived the term lesbian and it has long been assumed that Sappho was herself a practicing lesbian. But as with much of history that informs contemporary conventional wisdom there may be far less truth in that belief that it would appear. Very little is actually known about Sappho, but there does appear to be enough evidence to strongly contest the idea that her name should be associated with erotic love between women. Only some very few fragments of Sappho’s poetry still exists and it is the power of her descriptions of the physical beauty and the love she experiences for the women in that poetry that have created a legend that may be closer to pure myth.
What is known is that Sappho was a teacher. To be more exact, she was closer to a headmistress for a boarding school of the type that rich elitist Easterners used to send girls like Paris Hilton to. It is to the eternal detriment of all us that boarding schools in Switzerland have apparently fallen out of favor among the super rich. Six-hundred years before Christ walked the Earth, Sappho spent her days less in the writing of poetry than in teaching young Greek girls how to prepare for life as a wife and mother. Not exactly the kind of stuff one associates with hardcore lesbianism, yes? Of course, there is always the possibility that Sappho was only using the pretext of teaching women how to marry and raise kids as a way to get close to them. Kind of like men take jobs as Catholic priests today. There is also the portrait of Sappho in later Greek comedy that shows her to be a skirt-chasing lover of young girls. Of course, it must be remembered that Greek comedy was highly centered on the basis of satire and this portrait of Sappho was meant to be taken entirely within a satiric framework.
Finally, there is something else that tends to undermine the argument that Sappho should have been the inspiration for the modern day concept of Sapphic love. She not only was married, but she had a daughter. Her husband’s name is given as Cerkylas, but since that Greek name interprets roughly to mean a small penis the verisimilitude of that particular fact is up for grabs. Sappho’s daughter name was Cleis and that is not disputed. As if having a husband and daughter is not enough to suggest that perhaps Sappho should not be the patron saint of lesbians worldwide, one of the most infamous parts of her history revolves around her death. According to the legend Sappho killed herself over an unhappy love affair with a seaman named Phaon. For someone styled as the world’s first lesbian, which is something she definitely was not even if she was actually one herself, she sure had a lot of relationship with breeders.
