Who is Sappho and Why Do We Care?
“He seems to me equal to the gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing - oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me
no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead - or almost
I seem to me.
But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty…”
Sappho, Fragment 31, Anne Carson’s translation
Who is Sappho and why do we care? The purpose of this piece is less to educate you on Sappho but to allow you to question the agenda behind the critical approaches that help to inform you on Sappho.
I want to speak about the ideas that come to the surface when we utter the name ‘Sappho’ and some of the issues I find with how we assess Sappho’s literary tradition and cultural legacy. I will then address the reasons I believe Sappho to have left her mark on culture, with some reference to literary works I believe to be heavily influenced by her poetic legacy. The intention here is to make you question why it is we think we know who Sappho is, and why it is that we – in the most general sense – seem to care so much. These are not easy questions, and if they do indeed have an answer at all there will not be one answer, but many.
We have to recognise that the role of the spectator means that each individual will interpret the literature differently as a result of many factors – whether that be our period in history, our gender, our sexual orientation, our space of mind when encountering the Sapphic fragments. I hope that by the end of this piece you are moved to think more about who you consider Sappho to be, the routes of learning and engaging with the Sapphic legacy that have got you to your current stage of understanding, and why it is that you care about who she is to you in the first place.
Was there ever even a Sappho? We simply do not and cannot know for sure. Sappho, then, has become a cultural icon – Sappho is not an individual identity, but rather, a symbol. Sappho – not a person, a poetess, a lover – but the fragmentary poetry attributed to the name is emblematic of our cultural progress towards self-expression, individuality, humankind’s inherent multiplicity, sexuality, development, loveless-ness, longing and memory.
When we speak of Sappho we reiterate the human desire for temporal markers of shifts in the collective consciousness. To speak of Sappho is to define when we believe the advent of the poetic ‘I’ began. A stylistic poetic feature that we, as contemporary consumers of literary culture, frequently take for granted. It is in the persona of Sappho’s poetic ‘I’ that, theory would have us believe, poetry first started to draw attention to the expression of one’s private world.
I say that literary theory would have us believe that Sappho heralded the beginning of a new age of poetry because we simply do not have enough evidence to support or counter that argument. What we do know, however, is that the personhood of Sappho was believed to have lived on the isle of Lesbos in Mytilene, geographically located near Asia Minor.
What we also know is historiography from antiquity, to somewhat understate it, had a tendency to rewrite history; to remove elements of history from the public forum; to disregard elements of the cultural world as insignificant when it came to reflecting on their lived world and inscribing specific aspects of culture into the memory of the collective consciousness. It is important that we acknowledge that history, as it has come down to us, cannot possibly give us an accurate reflection of the multi-faceted world it writes, nor can it appropriately engage with the multiplicity, diversity and variety of expression of the peoples who inhabited its temporal, spatial and literary world.
Just as easily as we could speculate that Sappho’s lyric poetry was unique, for she is one of a handful of women poets from antiquity still extant in the 21st Century, one could argue that the discovery of Sappho’s poetry would indicate a literary tradition within female spheres – an Attic ecriture feminine if you will. It wouldn’t even be farfetched to propose that Sappho and her contemporaries, as a result of their geographical proximity to Asia Minor, were most likely influenced by the poetry of Asia Minor.
We’d be able to support such an argument by using Mesopotamian mythology as a case study. Recognising that, although literary theory has a Eurocentric tendency to consider Ancient Greece as the embryo of Western culture, Ancient Greece was clearly influenced by what we would now regard as the Middle East. Whilst the classic tradition would have us believe that to turn to the ‘start’ would mean to look to Greece, Ancient Near Eastern studies suggest that it is in the Ancient Near East that we seem to find evidence of the earliest cultivation of the natural world, the earliest recorded writings and the most essential beginnings of the development of civilisation. Most people (myself being one until relatively recently) remain unaware of the dynasties of Early Kemet, who are well and truly the originators of our modern civilisations.
The reason I mention all of this is because we must recognise that our perceptions of history – literary, political, historical – are all based on theories and writings of a set of people who would have undoubtedly had their own agenda for producing those texts. For the writers from antiquity, whose works on Sappho were written hundreds of years after her alleged existence, they tend to focus on Sappho’s poetry not for its content but for its literary and grammatical style. For old academics and scholars writing of antiquity, whether consciously or subconsciously, there is evidence of a Eurocentric attitude taken towards antiquity. What this means is that the methods of critical theory applied when we consider everything we have come to believe about antiquity is heavily rooted in a need to use our present day as a means to make sense of the past rather than considering the past solely within the confines of the material and literary culture we have of those societies.
If some of our earliest classical scholars were to be graded on the works they have produced now, I suspect a key criticism of their writing would be that they needed to avoid making anachronistic statements. Our failure to critique the past as impartial bystanders means that we must accept that, not only are many of our assumptions incorrect, but we have run the risk of promoting an inherently flawed perspective of antiquity for the sake of mapping the cultures of Ancient Greece onto a timeline that progresses towards and culminates in our current era of Western/Eurocentric culture and thought.
Now, you may be wandering, have I gone off on a tangent? Do I remember that I am talking about Sappho? Will I ever get back to the point? Well, the point is to recognise that when we speak of Sappho: the unknown poet, the poetic persona, the poetry itself and all that encompasses Sappho the Abstract throughout history, we speak of an entity inherently characterised by a definitive absence. That absence permeates throughout everything that is associated with Sappho. We know very little of her life – was she a teacher? Was she a lesbian? Why exactly was she exiled? We know nothing of the fictional lovers in her poetry – was there ever an Attis? What of Anactoria? Was the Sapphic persona polyamorous or did she just happen to fall in love often? Even the very nature of how Sappho’s poetry has come down to us – in fragments – is characterised by absence.
Anne Carson’s edition of Sappho’s fragments is so wonderful for making the absence inherent in Sappho’s work a thing of poignant reflection. To read the fragments is to recognise that we are reading something that has come down to us incomplete. Mentions of a sweet-voiced girl, Lady Dawn and danger – reference once-complete poems that we have no way of being able to reconstruct. The Sapphic persona herself is inherently characterised by absence and incompletion. Articulating the memory of former lovers, addressing those past lovers who are painfully absent from the persona’s literary present.
To read Sappho is to learn more about how little we know. How much poetry, history, and culture is absent from our current consciousness. There is a quote of Plato’s that states: ‘I know that I know nothing.’ A statement that rings very true for anyone who attempts to research Sappho. All that encompasses Sappho is defined by its ambiguity. And I believe that it is because of this ambiguity, and our need to give definitive answers – to fill the blanks left in Sapphic absence – the human desire for an idealistic and unrealistic closure – that we have come to care so much about who Sappho is and how she fits into our contemporary culture.
That there is so much empty space in the name of Sappho has come to be an indispensable tool for culture and how different groups situate ourselves within our cultural worlds. Sappho’s poetry allows the personal world of the poetic ‘I’ and the legendary world of mythological archetypes – mainly Helen – to coalesce to produce a universal sense of love, loveless-ness, memory and longing. When we read Sappho’s poetry it is interesting to see that, though she is believed to have written these words over 2,000 years ago – or sung them (but that is another topic for another day) – the emotions the persona expresses are timeless. I think it is useful to see, too, how Sappho has influenced culture since then, and so I will give a few examples. Before I do, though, I do just want to state that it is possible for someone to influence another’s works or ideas, without the person being influenced recognising that. For example, whilst most of us (I hope) believe that the earth revolves around the sun – and can prove it with scientific evidence – fewer of us are probably aware that Nicolaus Copernicus was the astronomer who put forth the theory in 1543.
We need to acknowledge that culture is constantly inspired and influenced by that which has come before, and so it is possible to hold opinions, beliefs, feelings that we recognise as our own, or a product of our lived experience, without recognising that our lived experience is inherently influenced by past cultures who in turn are influenced by that which came before them. Essentially, we do not live within a vacuum, and I imagine it would be both incredibly painful and boring if we did.
It seems for some, ‘Sappho’ came to convey the depth of their academic background. Ovid’s Heroides XV is a product of his education, a sign that he spent time studying poetry and rhetoric. His utilisation of the character of Sappho fits in with the Ancient Roman stereotypes of a female whose love goes unreciprocated. There is no indication in Sapphic lyric that unrequited love for a man may drive the Sapphic persona to suicide, though there is – quite declaratively – in regards to the lost love of a woman.
When we get to Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, we see Sappho and Lesbos taking on Baudelaire’s poetic agenda.Indeed, the island and the entity come to represent blasphemous, indulgent and excessively decadent pleasure when situated within the context of Christian receptions of Sappho. It appears to me that the reason why Sappho is heralded as a lesbian icon now (and indeed within the lesbian societies of the 19th/20th Century) is because scholars heavily influenced by their Christian beliefs sought to isolate, exacerbate and condemn the idea of female to female love. That Sappho’s female to female expressions of love are largely ignored in writings from antiquity would suggest to me, as DuBois states, that the ancient world didn’t necessarily see anything wrong with ‘lesbian’ activity. Lesbian sexual intercourse could not produce children and so it is most likely, to put it quite bluntly, that nobody cared.
Sarah Walters’ Tipping The Velvet, written in 1998 but based in the 19th Century, describes a lesbian group of friends as ‘Sapphic’, indulging in these fancy, gay parties and allowing Hedonism to run rife. There is a fixation in media with equating Sappho to unrestrained sexual pleasure, though it somewhat misses the point of Sapphic poetry. Whilst the Sapphic persona does indeed speak on the pleasures to be found upon the breast of another woman, we forget that the Sapphic present speaks of those pleasures retrospectively, pining for a love that is no longer her reality. Tipping the Velvet’s most explicit reference to Sappho refers directly to the decadence of aristocratic females participating in lesbian love, and the plotline of the novel can be viewed as thematically Sapphic.
Nan King is taken on a journey of self-discovery that sees her participating in both heteronormative and homosexual love. She teeters across the borders of masculine activity and female passivity; suffers great anguish at the hands of a beloved; participates in a paederastic relationship reminiscent of sensationalised ideas of Sappho having been a teacher who indulged sexually with her female students. Nan King reaches great highs, revelling in the subculture of the homosexual bourgeoise that we desperately want to believe parallels that of Sappho in Mytilene. She suffers the same cognitive dissonance and psychological downturn as Sappho in being betrayed and rejected by her beloved.
The idea of a lesbian lover abandoning her beloved to marry a man situates itself within the rhetoric of those who argue that woman to woman sexual activity would have been practised in Sappho’s time up until a young girl was wedded. In fact, the character of Nan King, from leaving behind a boyfriend to follow a female dancer she is besotted with, donning the stage guise of a young man, becoming a sex worker as a man, engaging in paederasty and living life as a man, whilst also frequently engaging in sexual intercourse with other women as a woman – is inherently Sapphic in its exploration of sexuality, pleasure and pain. Sarah Walters presents in narrative form the ideas that the Sapphic fragments promote. Clearly influenced by Sappho, she narrates a tale that blurs the lines of sexual orientation, of activity and passivity, of object and subject of affection and encourages us to ask ourselves why it is we consider these things so important to categorise. My reception of Tipping the Velvet is similar to my reception of Sapphic lyric in that it causes me to question: why does society care so much about sexual orientation?
Radclyffe Hall, too, addresses similar Sapphic themes in The Well of Loneliness – often referred to as the ‘lesbian bible’. What I find to be Sapphic about Hall’s novel is its fictional insistence on portraying love and longing authentically. Hall frequently alludes to the role Christianity plays in the negative associations one may make with lesbianism; the dual nature of wanting and disliking; the excessive highs of love and the painful lows of loveless-ness. In fact, the aspect of Hall’s novel which I believe to most greatly be influenced by Sappho is that the narrative present of Stephen’s is one that is marked by absence, by loss, by intangible memories. In the same way that the Sapphic fragments do not seek to romanticise the experience of love, Hall ends her novel on a note that is definitively one of longing, of pain and incompletion:“Rockets of pain, burning rockets of pain – their pain, her pain, all welded together into one great consuming agony.” It becomes clear that Sappho became a lesbian cultural icon for lesbians inhabiting a Christian world because, as Stephen in The Well of Loneliness begs to God for “the right to our existence,” the homoerotic fragments of Sappho worked to acknowledge the existence of female bodies capable of loving, desiring and losing other female bodies.
I would argue that most of what we now consider to be clichés in how we articulate the art of love could all be traced to the Sapphic fragments if we wanted to. Ideas of physiognomic catastrophe, erotic ecstasy, suicidal longing for a past love, desire, hatred, pleasure, anguish and everything in between find themselves in the fragmented poetry we compile under the name of Sappho. The poetry is a small representation of what it means to participate in the human world of emotions, whether they be joyous or unbearable. It is in the absence that permeates through Sappho the Abstract that Sappho finds completion, for ‘Sappho’ comes to represent all that our consciousness would want it to.
At the start I asked “who is Sappho and why do we care?” for a reason. As is conveyed in the poetry, humans are constantly seeking answers to our questions, desperate for a closure that is at odds with our experience of living. When I began my studies into Sappho, I was so sure of what I thought I already knew, and the more I studied, the more I came to accept that ‘I know that I know nothing’. The negative space that Sappho leaves behind is a space that we have been desperate to fill for thousands of years. It is the pothos written into the Sapphic fragments and the pothos our reception of ‘Sappho’ nurtures within us that ensures that Sappho the Abstract remains a key foundation of culture.
So, who really is Sappho? We will have to accept that we can never and will never be sure as to who or what Sappho really was.
Why do we care? We care so much because the ambiguity of Sappho the Abstract allows us to work the history and poetry that surrounds Sappho to fit our own agendas. That there is poetry without explanation, random words scattered across the page, allows each reader of Sappho to come to the lyric with their own preconceived notions of who Sappho is and what she represents, and to situate Sappho within our personal understanding of and relation to culture as we uniquely see fit.
Written by Adwoa Owusu-Barnieh
Adwoa is a writer and a poet, as well as Opinions Editor for The Everyday Magazine. She graduated from the University of Birmingham with a BA in Classical Literature & Civilisations
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