If you want inescapable proof that Sappho was exclusively attracted to women you are going to have a hard time. Archaic Greece is like a black hole in the historical record, quite often the poems of authors like Sappho are the best textual evidence we have because there are just no surviving histories or other texts which would contribute our understanding.

I personally enjoy the introduction to Sappho: A new translation of the complete works by Dr. Diane Rayor and Dr. Andre Lardinois:

It has become commonplace among classical scholars when asked to assess the life of Sappho to refer to the entry on her in Lesbian Peoples: Material for a dictionary, edited by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig. They devote a full page to her but leave it blank. The situation is in fact not so dire, and classicists would be reneging on their duty if they did not at least try to reconstruct the original context of her poetry to the best of their ability. Still, the empty page in Wittig and Zeig’s dictionary serves as a cautionary reminder that little of what we know about Sappho is certain

J. J. Winkler in “Double Conciousness in Sappho’s Lyrics” also notes Wittig and Zeig’s unorthodox entry, remarking that

Their silence is one quite appropriate to Sappho’s lyrics, particularly refreshing in comparison to the relentless trivialization, the homophobic anxieties, and the sheer misogyny that have infected so many ancient and modern responses to her work.

Indeed, many earlier scholarly attempts to interpret away the erotic overtones of Sappho’s poetry have been met with criticism by modern historians as reflections of a general stigma against homosexuality and a dismissiveness towards female sexuality in general. However, there is always more to the story when it cones to unravelling sexuality.

Having established that very little is known about Sappho’s personal life, it is worth questioning why historians have made the suggestions they have about Sappho’s sexuality, and what those are.

As a historian it is important to emphasise that modern identities based on sexual orientation did not exist, there was no concept that being exclusively attracted to a certain gender made one “gay”, “straight”, or any other orientation. By this same token, it is anachronistic to refer to ancient figures as heterosexual or homosexual, because such a concept did not exist. If you asked Sappho what her orientation was she would not have known how one ought to answer that question.

If one brings up homosexuality and heterosexuality in anachronistic contexts, then one must also bring up sexual fluidity, bisexuality, pansexuality, and any other term tossed around to refer to people who are not firmly on one side of the Kinsey Scale, so to speak. With this in mind, speculating on the sexual identity of a figure like Sappho is a losing proposition, and a pointless one. We can not determine her attractions or trace her relationships throughout her life, so how can we attempt to impose such labels onto her?

She certainly did not see herself as homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, etc. She was definitely a Lesbian, from some city on the isle of Lesbos, but she could not have been a lesbian because the term did not yet have that connotation. So with these caveats, we can look at Sappho’s poetry and its reception in Antiquity.

#Homoeroticism and genre in Sappho

When it comes to Sappho’s sexuality there is really no contemporary evidence to work from. The earliest testimonia about her life come from nearly half a millennia after her death, and were written by Hellenistic and Roman authors who were attempting to reconstruct her life just the way we do. I will explore these later on, but to begin with we are going to work our way forward chronologically. Contemporary poets, namely Alkaios, praise her songs but these are not really useful to do anything other than establish her lifetime, around 600 BCE.

Sappho’s poetry itself is one of the best sources we have. Among many different topics, she wrote bridal choruses which were sung to young brides by their female friends. These praised the soon-to-be-married woman and might be erotically charged, but were really more a declaration of a friend’s virtues. They were public and something that everyone could agree on and identify with, rather than a personal declaration of love for the individual. The contemporary Spartan poet Alkman also wrote bridal choruses for girls. As Alkman was a male poet, this is a valuable insight into the functioning of these choruses as a an important genre and an avenue for socialisation, at least in certain regions of Archaic Greece.

Sappho also wrote songs about the gods, something which points to the social status she enjoyed in her community. She wrote poems about marital love, poems about her brothers, even some fragments of epic poetry from Sappho survive. Later in life she wrote poems about the pains of growing old and being unable to dance like the younger women still did. This is just to name a few. What ties all of her poetry together is that they largely revolve around the lives of women, and that they were meant to be performed with music.

The poems which are often analysed as insights into her sexuality are those which concern her personal relationships with various women. Sappho is actually notable for how vividly she paints themes of desire, jealousy, rejection, heartache, and affection. For example, Sappho might use the erotically connotative term eraman rather than the neutral or platonic (in the modern sense of the word) philein.

Sappho’s more personal poems are as fragmented as the rest, and can be difficult to pin down. Whether they were performative, personal, erotic, or any combination or alternative thereof is difficult to say. What is clear is that they deal with love, and that can be hard to define or neatly package if you are coming at it from such a distant perspective. While Sappho’s poetry is undeniably erotic, it is not necessarily homosexual. Which is to say that, we can not really say whether these were friendships with erotic overtones, sexual relationships, or any other shade of nuance. We do not actually know much about women’s lives in Archaic Greece in the first place, let alone how homosexuality was perceived or to what extent homoerotic bonds may have been tolerated.

Even during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, there was debate over Sappho’s sexuality. Some authors noted the apparently homoerotic overtones in her poetry and considered the possibility that she was physically or romantically involved with the women in her songs. The debate remained then as now as to exactly what her relationship to these women was then. In Greek society, women were generally kept away from interacting with men in the public arena of social life, and their primary bonds were with other women and members of their own family.

It is not surprising then that Sappho seems to have socialised primarily with women of similar social status. Many of these women are known by name from her poetry and by reputation by her testimonia. Atthis, Megara, and Telesippa were identified as her “friends” or “companions” indicating that they were social peers. And Sappho had her rivals, Andromeda, possibly the leader of another social circle, and Gorgo. She also had an antagonism with the women of the house of Penthilos, which seems to have been politically motivated. Several fragments of Sappho’s poetry allude to her jealousy of these women and her competition with them for the affection of various individuals, namely Atthis.

By contrast, Anagora, Eunika, and Gongyla were identified as her “students”. Now, the quotation marks are necessary because we are not exactly sure what if anything she taught them. We actually do not have any direct evidence that she was even a teacher in any capacity at all, and the idea of her filling a pedagogical role is an assumption.

One theory is that she may have taught young women to compose songs and choruses, but she may also have been a priestess or a poet who performed at banquets. She certainly seems to have performed poetry for the women within her social circle, as was not uncommon for a lyricist.

Even we made the assumption that this is an accurate assessment, it is still unclear what, if any, distinction Sappho made “friends” and “students”, and how the members of her social circle fit into this. Despite its shakiness, the potential pedagogic aspects of Sappho’s relationships has led some modern historians have made comparisons to the pederastic aspects of male pedagogy.

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