The First Lesbian: How Sappho’s Poetry Paved the Way for Modern Queer Literature

Lying in the eastern Aegean, about half a day’s journey from the west coast of Asia Minor, was the rugged Greek island of Lesbos. Known to the Mycenaeans, at least through trade (fragments of their exported pottery turned up habitually in the ground), it received its first great influx of settlers in the eleventh or tenth century B.C., when the Hellenes were displaced from their homes in northern and central Greece.

While Agamemnon, Menelaus and Odysseus were all said to have traveled there in the Homeric epics, the island became better known for its women, and best of all for its female poets.

Readers of the Iliad were assured that Lesbos was an island of beautiful women. When Achilles withdrew from battle, smarting at his maltreatment over Briseis, Agamemnon strove to tempt him back to the field with gifts which included seven Lesbian women chosen for their beauty.

By the second half of the seventh century B.C., the real women of Lesbos had grown used to being judged on their appearance as part of an annual contest. Participants dressed in their most elegant trailing robes and paraded before a panel deemed to be expert in such things.

But not every woman was considered worthy of a prize. Sappho, so people said, was not beautiful at all. She was short, dark and very unattractive. Not one of the writers who described her as such could possibly have seen her, but that did not stop their words from gaining currency down the ages. There was something very appealing in the idea that the woman who grew famous for writing about love was herself unlovely to look at.

The unflattering rumors did Sappho no harm in the long term. In fact, they helped her to become the first woman of Lesbos to be remembered for something other than good looks.

Lesbos had a long-established reputation for poetry when Sappho plucked her first notes. The head and lyre of Orpheus were said to have floated over the seas in very ancient times and served as a kind of divine spark. The musician had formerly lost his wife Eurydice to a snakebite and tragically turned back to look at her as he was trying to lead her free of the Underworld. Some Thracian women then tore his body to pieces in the madness-inducing ecstasy of worshipping Dionysus.

A number of male poets had arisen on Lesbos in Orpheus’ wake, including Terpander, who outperformed the singer-poets of all other lands, and Lesches, poet of the Little Iliad, part of the post-Homeric Epic Cycle. But it was Sappho and her male contemporary Alcaeus who retained the “Aeolian” dialect of Lesbos in their verse and cemented the island’s renown as the cradle of lyric poetry.

Sappho composed in a variety of styles, leaping effortlessly between epigrams, funeral dirges, wedding hymns, epic-like pieces and romantic verses, many of them inspired by the enigma of women she admired. She invented her own poetic form, the Sapphic Stanza, a light but penetrating triplet of eleven-syllable lines rounded off by a final five-syllable flourish. And like the Homeric bards, she performed her verses to a melody, holding in her hands a lyre constructed from a tortoise shell with seven strings derived from the intestines of a sheep.

She lived on the southeast coast of Lesbos at Mytilene, the most powerful city-state in all the Greek East, after being born into a wealthy family either there or in the west, at Eresos, a city largely since swallowed by the sea. Described by Homer as euktimenos (“well laid-out”), Mytilene had two harbours around which most of the houses were clustered, and a set of surrounding walls constructed in Lesbian style from vast polygon-shaped stones.

Beyond these walls and the divine protection offered by Mount Olympus, situated 840 kilometres to the west across the Aegean, there was little in the way of a defensive system. Other cities on the island possessed more robust barricades and towers.

The lack of large-scale buildings reflected the Mytilenaeans’ broad outlook. They were less anxious to defend themselves from attack than to expand their interests abroad. As Alcaeus wrote, cities consist not of stones, beams and buildings, but of people who gather together in unison.

This was a bold assertion given how unsettled life on Mytilene had become. At the time of Sappho’s birth in the mid-seventh century B.C., the city was ruled by the Penthilidae, an aristocratic dynasty with origins in Thessaly, northeast Greece. Members claimed descent from Agamemnon via his son Orestes. Historically, theirs had been a harsh rule, which authorised the flogging and clubbing of citizens in the street.

During Sappho’s early childhood, the Penthilidae were overthrown and a man named Melanchrus was installed as the wealthy new ruler of Mytilene. Some years later, when Sappho was about twenty, Melanchrus was in turn unseated in a coup in which Alcaeus’ brothers played a part.

In many cities of the Greek world, something like a revolution was taking place as populists emerged to usurp their elite rulers.

In Athens, shortly before Sappho’s birth, a former Olympic champion named Cylon attempted to seize the Acropolis. The city was still in the early stages of its development. All freeborn men (but no women) were entitled to attend the Athenian Assembly, where nine archons were habitually elected as civil rulers, and these archons typically came from the oldest and wealthiest families.

In a bid to challenge the domination of the elite, Cylon assembled the forces of his father-in-law, the king of Megara. A priestess advised him to await the arrival of a particular festival to launch his attack, but Cylon believed he knew better, and he led his men to the Acropolis during the Olympics. He was soon thwarted. The Athenians put the majority of the invaders to flight and the archons voted to slaughter the stragglers.

While Cylon and his brothers fled, some of their soldiers sought refuge at a shrine and wrapped a thread around a cult image to claim divine sanctuary. On seeing the thread snap, the archons concluded that the divinities did not support the invaders, and proceeded to break the religious code which dictated that suppliants ought to be spared. A curse was believed to linger over the descendants of the offending archons for centuries afterwards.

While the political situation in Mytilene, Athens and beyond remained febrile, Sappho was able to live a relatively peaceful life in her younger years. Since her earliest childhood she learned to weave, first at the loom, then more freely; the women of Lesbos were keen weavers of floral garlands.

As a poet, she was interested in the idea that the first woman, too, was a weaver. Hesiod had described Athena endowing Pandora with the requisite skills to produce fabrics and dressing her in fine clothes, as if to teach her by example what she could weave for herself. It is likely that Sappho followed Hesiod in characterizing Pandora as the archetypal weaver in one of her lost poems.

Outdoing Pandora, Sappho steadily earned a reputation as “a weaver of tales,” as she once described Eros. She grew up to weave stories, and garlands, and songs about those garlands, so making local women’s handiwork the subject of celebration. Her words preserved their blooms for centuries after they withered away.

Floral garlands were made for weddings as well as religious festivals in ancient Lesbos. Sappho’s dual talents made her welcome at these occasions, where the bride’s bedchamber had to be draped with flowers, the hair of the cult image of Aphrodite dressed with hyacinths and a long hymn composed and performed. Sappho learned from her mother, Kleis, that while a purple headband was a fine adornment for most women, blonde hair was best shown off with fresh flowers.

Women on Lesbos sometimes brightened their locks using thapsos, fustic, a wood-based dye. Just as the Graces made Pandora irresistible by adorning her with gold necklaces, and the Horai, goddesses of the seasons, made Pandora beguiling by placing a floral crown upon her head, so Sappho believed that women made themselves most pleasing to the Graces by weaving beautiful flowers into their tresses and dousing their skin with richly spiced fragrances. It was part of the ritual of mourning on Lesbos for women to shave their heads with sharpened iron. By contrast, dressing the hair was a way of celebrating life.

In garlanding their hair, women made themselves pleasing to Sappho, too, as some of the most erotic of her verses reveal. She wrote to a female lover about the time they had adorned each other with flowers, and on a soft bed, Sappho reminded her, ‘you would quench your desire’.

Of all the many kinds of poem Sappho composed, it was the ones in which she expressed a romantic interest in women that proved the most memorable, especially in later years. Like “sapphism,” the word “lesbianism” would come to be applied exclusively to relations between women only from the late nineteenth century and in the light of Sappho’s verses.

Already in antiquity, a connection developed between Lesbos and subversive sexual practices. While the Greek verb lesbiazein, “to act like a woman of Lesbos,” could be used of oral sex performed on people of both genders, the island came to be associated particularly with women who refused to submit sexually to men.

Homer’s portrait of Lesbos as an island of beautiful women was supplanted by descriptions of “masculine-looking” women liking other women “as if they were men.” This was a subtle way of saying that women on Lesbos had sex with each other using dildos.

The mechanics of their relations were deemed too shameful even for satirists to explain. Still in the second century ad, literary allusions to women learning to “love like a man” remained brisk, coy, red-cheeked.

Artists were characteristically less bashful. One male vase-painter, working a century or so after Sappho’s time, portrayed a naked woman raising one dildo to her lips while inserting another into her vagina in a scene more redolent of male fantasy than reality.

Another vase-painter depicted a woman inspecting a veritable production line of moulded phalluses in varied shapes and sizes. Dildos could be made from just about anything—leather, bread—but in this painting, they are of clay. The woman sprinkles water on the instruments to prevent the terracotta from drying out (a problem familiar to potters in general) or to help them grow.

A reference to a woman receiving something, possibly olisboi (“dildos”), appears in one of the very many barely decipherable fragments of Sappho’s work uncovered from the deserts of Oxyrhynchus, “City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish”, in Egypt. If Sappho ever did make use of a dildo, she was not the only woman to do so on Lesbos, the island of transgressive love.

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The Missing Thread: A Women’s History of the Ancient World by Daisy Dunn is available via Viking.