Her notoriety as the original source of the term “lesbian”* aside, she was one of the greatest lyric poets who ever lived, a prime aesthetic influence on the Golden Age of Greece, her beauty extending into other cultures for centuries after her death. She was among the first “modern” poets in that she was one of the first to bring her subject matter into the realm of individual personal experience and its subjective, emotional states of being. She was also history’s first great woman poet, considered by some to be, in fact, the founder of women’s literature.

To refer to Sappho as a poet is somewhat misleading however, since she was actually a lyrist; she usually sang her poems while accompanying herself on the lyre, much like any current musical artist does. She even invented a 21 string lyre which bore her name, as well as the sapphic stanza, a much imitated verse form which was but one of her technical styles.

Another aspect of Sappho which is rather similar to the state of the modern woman is that she lived in an age where the Hellenistic “female ideal” was tall, fair, and blue eyed; she was small with a dark complexion. She was nevertheless quite beautiful to look at, but like so many modern girls, suffered something of a complex from not fitting the “ideal”. She is, by some accounts, reputed to have had purple hair! Her dark tresses were so blue-black in that Eastern Mediterranean manner that it shone with violet hues when struck by the sun.

Although she is the source of the descriptions “lesbian” and “sapphic”, she was married and had a daughter, Cleis, as well as various male and female lovers. In her era of Grecian culture, such sexual proclivities were not condemned as they are in relatively recent, laughably “civilized” times.

Psappho, her natal family and husband were all high-born aristocrats who were banished at one point for about a year (spending this time in Syracuse, where the residents were so honored by her presence they erected a statue to her) due to political conflict with the new governmental form, democracy, that was sweeping Greece in those days. She was so famous and revered on Lesbos, a very prosperous wine-making and cultural capitol, that coins were minted with her image on them.

The poetess herself was the head of some kind of “Academy for Young Women” whose exact nature cannot be accurately indentified by historians. In the early Christian era it became the “respectable” thing to characterize it as a sort of finishing school for young ladies in preparation for marriage. It is much more likely, and many historians concur, that it was a cult, or thaisos, of Aphrodite and was also devoted to the service and study of the Muses. Much of Sappho’s poetry was written to be sung by girl’s choruses, of which she was apparently the music director, at this academy. Much of it also involved her love affairs with various young ladies. There were also a number of wedding songs which the girls would sing to one another as one of them was to be married, which must have lent a small portion of creedence to the aforementioned Christian version of the school.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to compile accurate renderings of Sappho’s many hundreds of poems/songs. For one thing, translation from Aeolian Greek into modern English is a speculative venture at best, though a good translator can come pretty close. But, more tragically, great Psappho was pillaged and destroyed by the Roman Catholic Church several times in the middle ages, just as the many varieties of living pagan culture were burned at the stake, murdered, tortured, and otherwise erased from the face of the earth during this dark time. The first occasion was about 380 C.E., when the Bishop of Constantine ordered all works by and about Psappho to be eradicated. More was lost in 391 when a mob of Christian zealots attempted to destroy the library at Alexandria. Still more went into the dust in April 1024, when Venetian Crusaders destroyed the city of Constantinople. Pope Gregory VII finished this “cleansing” in 1073 with a roaring bonfire of pagan manuscripts in Rome. After many years the great woman eventually came to be seen as a mythic figure who never really even existed.

About 300 B.C. the works of Sappho had been collected into 9 volumes, probably in deference to the Muses, by reverent Greek scholars. Her popularity with avid readers extended well into Alexandrian Egypt and the various domains of the Roman Empire. From the time of her near-complete destruction until recently, the only bits of her work that we had were fragments, some culled around 1900 from papyrus manuscripts which had been cut into strips and used to wrap Egyptian mummies, but also from numerous quotations by various classical Greek and Roman poets. But what magnificent fragments! These included only one complete poem, but the fragments are gemlike in their luminous beauty, true literary treasures. Recent history has proved fruitful in uncovering quite a bit more of her work. These manuscripts were used in taxidermy to stuff animals adorning Egyptian tombs, one even stuffed into the mouth of a mummified corpse, even some nearly complete works. It is hoped that more comprehensive collections might be yet unearthed in Egypt and Turkey, as her enduring popularity in ancient times was immense and she was no doubt to be found in many libraries over those centuries.

The reasons given by the church for her destruction generally refer to her abundantly un-Christian nature as well as to her lush praise of sex between women. I would venture that her obvious paganism had more to do with it than her love of fellow women though. For example:

Sounds like a clutch of Wiccans in the forest, does it not? Or take her “Hymn To Aphrodite”; it doesn’t exactly fit into the hymnal you might find at a Christian church:

Of course a number of liberties in translation are taken here, including the abandonment of strict Sapphic stanza form for the sake of clarity, but you get the idea. Plato declared Psappho to be “the 10th Muse” some centuries after her time in the flesh. (She was widely known by this appellation even while alive!)

Since Sappho was very much a servant of the Muses as well as a devotee of Aphrodite, a description of who and what the Muses are is in order here. Since any well informed goth sensibility should be aware of who Dead Can Dance, for example, are referring to in “The Summoning of the Muse“, or who the Muse of Faith and the Muse is. Indeed, a music loving goth should know what is the source of the term “music“, should they not.

The Muses are the nine goddesses of arts and sciences from Greek theology. They are the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. They live on Mount Helicon and are the attendants of Apollo, who is, among other things, the god of music and poetry. They sing in chorus at all the feasts of the gods on Mount Olympus and spend a lot of time just chillin’ and partying with Apollo. In ancient times, poets, singers, musicians, dancers, actors, dramatists, astronomers, historians, etc. would call on the Muse of the particular discipline they were venturing into with prayer and sometimes sacrificial offerings before beginning the venture. The idea of this was well known to later European scholars of the classics, and thus carried over into usage among Euro-artists of all kinds, especially poets and painters, as a sort of symbolic homage to the great ones of the past. Over the last couple centuries or so it has been fashionable for male artists to refer to a female model/lover/wife etc. who is their prime inspiration as their “muse”. The Greek Muses each have an area of influence over which they preside and symbols to go along with it. Their names, fields, and symbols are as follows:

Name	Art or Science	Symbol
Calliope	Epic poetry	Tablet and stylus
Clio	History	Laurel wreath, scroll
Euterpe	Lyric poetry	Flute
Thalia	Comedy, pastoral poetry	Comic mask, shepherd’s staff
Melpomene	Tragedy	Tragic mask; sword
Terpsichore	Dancing	Lyre
Erato	Love poetry	Lyre
Polyhymnia	Sacred song	Veil
Urania	Astronomy	Sphere

Perhaps it is via the aegis of these same Muses that, across the dust of the centuries, up out of the flames of time phoenix-like on wings of pure spirit, even through the lips of the mummified dead, lovely Psappho breathes beauty and passion to those hearts who would hear her.