As we discussed in class, there are a lot of myths circling Sappho’s identity. The only evidence we have of her life comes from the fragmented remains of her poetry, which leads to wildly diverging interpretations by classicists and historians. Most readers today acknowledge that Sappho’s poetry portrays homosexuality or bisexuality, but in the 18th century, the overwhelming scholarship on Sappho saw her as heterosexual. In 1711, the English poet Ambrose Phillips translated the Ode to Aphrodite with the object of Sappho’s desire as male, a translation which continued until the 1900s (DeJean, 1989, pg. 319). The German classical philologist Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker later claimed that Sappho’s feelings towards women were “entirely idealistic and non-sensual” (Most, 1995, pg. 26). Until the 20th century, there was little to no scholarship which acknowledged the homoerotic feelings in Sappho’s work.
This shift in how we think of Sappho’s sexuality shows that those who interpret Sappho’s work are as much influenced by their own preconceptions and cultural biases as they are by the work itself. When there is so little source material, and the nature of the source material makes it difficult to interpret, we are tempted to fill in the gaps with what we want to see. The myths that are then created are adopted and built upon until they become almost incontrovertible public knowledge.
One prevailing suggestion for Sappho’s role in her community is that of the headmistress of an academy for girls. Sappho is thought to have led a thiasos, a school for the education of girls before marriage. The idea that Sappho was a schoolteacher was first proposed by the German classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff in order to detract from claims of her homosexuality by “explain[ing] away her passion for her ‘girls’” (Parker, 1993, pg. 313). Since then, the image of Sappho the headmistress has been largely adopted by both the scholarly world and the general public. Recently, however, the idea has been criticised by historians and classicists for a lack of evidence. None of Sappho’s own poetry mentions a school she led or was a part of, and as classicist Denys Page writes, there is no evidence of a formal or professional relationship between the girls she describes in her poems (Page, 1959, pg. 139-140). Philologist Holt N. Parker proposes that Sappho’s community was not a school, but rather a “group of women tied by family, class, politics, and erotic love”, comparable to her contemporary Alcaeus’ society of friends and associates for whom he performed poems (Parker, 1993, pg. 349).
Despite objections to the idea of Sappho as the headmistress of a school for girls, many groups have adopted the image for their own purposes. In the early 1900s, the openly lesbian writer Natalie Barney travelled to Lesbos to set up a “what she hoped to be a lesbian school for poetry and love” like the one which Sappho was thought to have led on the island (Wickes, 1975). Although it never came to fruition, she founded a similar school in Paris which attracted influential female writers for over sixty years.
In the 1970s, a group of lesbian women founded the Pagoda in St. Augustine, Florida. Described as a “lesbian paradise”, the Pagoda operated for fifteen years with twelve cottages and hundreds of visitors each year (Kershaw, 2009). Since then, the group has relocated to northeast Alabama to a community it calls Alpine, which still exists today. The group meets for potluck dinners during which they sing and recite poetry, like in historical depictions of thiasoi. According to the New York Times, Alpine is one of around 100 small lesbian-only communities in the United States. Not all of these are directly inspired by Sappho, of course, but their existence shows a continual interest in lesbian women-only communities dating back to interpretations of Sappho as the head of such a group.
Most of what we believe to be true about Sappho’s life isn’t based in concrete evidence, although it is often treated as if it were. It’s interesting to me how these “facts” about Sappho’s life, like her role as the head of a community for girls, have been used at different times as both as justification for the heterosexualizing of her poetry and inspiration for feminist queer communities. For better or for worse, the way we interpret Sappho’s poetry and consider her life seems to reflect more about ourselves and the time we live in than her work itself.
Read more about Alpine: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/fashion/01womyn.html
Read more about Natalie Barney: https://www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/3870/a-natalie-barney-garland-george-wickes
Bibliography
- Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
- Most, Glenn W. “Reflecting Sappho.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 40 (1995): 15-38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43646574.
- Parker, Holt N. “Sappho Schoolmistress.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 123 (1993): 309-51. doi:10.2307/284334.
- Page, Denys, Sappho and Alcaeus: An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Lesbian Poetry. (Oxford, 1959)
- Kershaw, Sarah. “My Sister’s Keeper”. New York Times. Published January 30, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/fashion/01womyn.html
The Evolution of Sexuality 