Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Today's Saturday Classic is on Greek poet Sappho.
Speaker 1: We kick it off by talking about our then forthcoming
Speaker 1: trip to Paris. That trip did happen and it was
Speaker 1: a great success. We've taken other trip since then, and
Speaker 1: our next one is coming up to Morocco November four
Speaker 1: through fifteenth, twenty twenty five. If you would like to
Speaker 1: join us, you can find out more about the trip
Speaker 1: at Defined Destinations dot com. It is the trip called
Speaker 1: a Taste of Morocco. Right now, single rooms are sold out,
Speaker 1: but there's a wait list and there are still double
Speaker 1: rooms available. If you would be traveling by yourself but
Speaker 1: you're open to the idea of sharing a room with somebody,
Speaker 1: you can get in touch with Defined Destinations to talk
Speaker 1: about that possibility. That is not why we picked the
Speaker 1: episode for Today's Saturday Classic, though. We have an upcoming
Speaker 1: episode on someone who was described as the Sappho of
Speaker 1: her time, so we wanted to rerun our episode on Sapo,
Speaker 1: which gets into how the connotations around Sappho's name have
Speaker 1: evolved over the centuries. One thing we do want to
Speaker 1: note we talk in this episode about how various transcribers
Speaker 1: and translators have tried to minimize the homoerotic themes in
Speaker 1: Sappho's work. For licensing reasons, we needed to use translations
Speaker 1: that are in the public domain today, which means older
Speaker 1: translations were the ones that were available for us to read. So,
Speaker 1: for example, we read from a translation of Ode to Aphrodite,
Speaker 1: which reads as though Sapho is praying to Aphrodite about
Speaker 1: a man that she loves, but in most of today's translations,
Speaker 1: Sappho's unrequited love is for a woman. This episode came
Speaker 1: out on March thirteenth, twenty nineteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey everyone.
Speaker 1: Before we get started today, we wanted to let you
Speaker 1: know that there are only a few spots left on
Speaker 1: our upcoming trip to Paris. Yes, which startles and delights me.
Speaker 1: I thought no one would want to come with us,
Speaker 1: and it turns out everybody does. Yay. So Yes, we
Speaker 1: are going to Paris June second through ninth, twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: If you come to our website, which is missed inhistory
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Speaker 1: under the little menu icon if you're on a mobile device,
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Speaker 1: going to have a splendid time. We're both extremely excited.
Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson
Speaker 1: and I'm Holly Frye. The poet Sappho is the first
Speaker 1: known woman writer in the European literary tradition, and she
Speaker 1: is described as the greatest female poet of ancient Greece,
Speaker 1: or the greatest Greek lyric poet period, regardless of gender,
Speaker 1: or even the greatest female poet of all time. There's
Speaker 1: a nineteen twenty six addition to her work where C. R. Haines,
Speaker 1: who edited that edition, put it this way quote, with
Speaker 1: the possible exception of Shakespeare, Homer is still the supreme poet,
Speaker 1: and Sappho, without any exception, the poetess par excellence. Except
Speaker 1: those last two words were in Greek, so I got
Speaker 1: to figure out how to translate them, which was a challenge.
Speaker 1: Sappho's reputation as one of the world's finest poets has
Speaker 1: persisted for more than twenty five hundred years, and that's
Speaker 1: fascinating because the overwhelming majority of her work has not.
Speaker 1: And then also fascinating is that the words sapphic and lesbian,
Speaker 1: which is derived from the island of Lesbos, where Sappho lived,
Speaker 1: they've become synonymous with same sex relationships among women. But
Speaker 1: we actually know very very little about Sappho's life or
Speaker 1: her relationships, and two thousand years ago those terms had
Speaker 1: really different meanings from what they do now. So we
Speaker 1: are going to get into all of this today. Sappho
Speaker 1: is also a frequent listener request, and over the past
Speaker 1: few years we've gotten requests from Helen Cillian, pat Esther,
Speaker 1: and one person who didn't have a name on their emails.
Speaker 1: And then as a heads up, we talk about people's
Speaker 1: relationships often enough on the show, we don't usually need
Speaker 1: to mention a specific sex act. That is not the
Speaker 1: case today, so use discretion if it seems like that
Speaker 1: sort of territory might be an issue for you or
Speaker 1: people that you listen with. Now, I feel like we
Speaker 1: need to do a show called Sexy History, a whole
Speaker 1: other thing different, and we wouldn't need those warnings now so,
Speaker 1: the most referenced source of information about Sappho's life is
Speaker 1: a tenth century Byzantine compendium called the sh and the
Speaker 1: Suda is sort of a lexicon or encyclopedia of the
Speaker 1: ancient Mediterranean. It has two Sappho entries, and we'll get
Speaker 1: into why that is a little bit later. Sapo's name
Speaker 1: also comes up in lots of other entries in the Suda,
Speaker 1: including ones for her relatives, places she lived, people she knew,
Speaker 1: and definitions of various literary terms. She's also mentioned in
Speaker 1: lots of other historical writing that has survived until today,
Speaker 1: although usually those references are shorter and less detailed than
Speaker 1: what's in the Suda. This all makes it very tricky
Speaker 1: to piece together Sappho's biography. The Pseudo was compiled more
Speaker 1: than a thousand years after Sappo actually lived, and then
Speaker 1: on top of that, it's not exactly reliable all the time.
Speaker 1: It's cobbled together from all kinds of different sources, and
Speaker 1: some of its entries pick up information that is clearly
Speaker 1: not factual. In terms of the entries on Sappho, it's
Speaker 1: just not clear how much of the information came from
Speaker 1: historical sources. How much from what people just knew who
Speaker 1: in quotation marks about Sappho in the tenth century, and
Speaker 1: how much of it was gleaned from things that are
Speaker 1: mentioned in her poetry. It's always tricky to try to
Speaker 1: use poems as a source for the poet's biographical details,
Speaker 1: but it's even more of a challenge here because by
Speaker 1: the tenth century a lot of Sappho's work had already
Speaker 1: been lost, so we don't know the full context of
Speaker 1: those lines that we have. According to the Suda, Sapho
Speaker 1: was born in the forty second Olympiad, which was between
Speaker 1: six twelve and six oh nine BCE, but the wording
Speaker 1: of it could also be translated as flourished and not born,
Speaker 1: which would mean that those years were the height of
Speaker 1: her career and not her birth. The Pseudoist's eight different
Speaker 1: men as Sepho's potential father, Herodotus, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: lived about two hundred years after Sappho did, and he
Speaker 1: wrote that her father was named scam Andronomus, and that's
Speaker 1: one of the eight men that the pseudalistid as a possibility.
Speaker 1: Hundreds of years later, Sepho's mother may have been named
Speaker 1: Claus and we have to say may have been, because
Speaker 1: a couple of Sappho's fragments mentioned a daughter named Claus,
Speaker 1: and it was traditional for daughters to be named after
Speaker 1: their grandmother. But even that is pretty murky because the
Speaker 1: word that's used for daughter could also just mean child,
Speaker 1: and in some cases it could actually be translated as slave.
Speaker 1: So this Claus, who may or may not have been
Speaker 1: named after Sappho's mother, may or may not have been
Speaker 1: her child. This is like the most provisional discussion of
Speaker 1: hyderia ever. I feel like if you've heard the words
Speaker 1: possibly and may have been, you've heard most of Sappho's biography.
Speaker 1: We do know she lived on the island of Lesbos
Speaker 1: and the Aegean c and that's just across the water
Speaker 1: from what's now Turkey. At the time that was Sartis,
Speaker 1: which was the capital of Lydia. Sapho's place of birth
Speaker 1: on the island was probably the town of Eiresis or
Speaker 1: the capital of Middelini. She most likely lived most of
Speaker 1: her life in Middelini, although it is possible that she
Speaker 1: and her family either moved or fled to Sicily for
Speaker 1: a time, either because of general political upheaval on Lesbos,
Speaker 1: or because of their own political affiliations. She may have
Speaker 1: had three brothers. The Suda names them as Laricos, Carasos,
Speaker 1: and Eurygios, and two of those names appear in a
Speaker 1: poem that was on Earthed in twenty fourteen, which we
Speaker 1: talked about in one of our Unearthed episodes that year,
Speaker 1: and that poem has been nicknamed the Brother's Poem because
Speaker 1: it contains these two names. From here, the pseudo wanders
Speaker 1: into some more questionable territory. It says that Sappho's husband
Speaker 1: was Kirklius of Andros, but Kirklius is very close to
Speaker 1: a slang term for the word Penis, and Andros was
Speaker 1: a real place, but was also the word for man,
Speaker 1: So the Suda's name for Sappho's husband is sort of
Speaker 1: like saying he was Dick Johnson of Man Island. So
Speaker 1: this is more likely to be a crude joke than
Speaker 1: her husband's actual name. I want to make a sitcom
Speaker 1: now about Dick Johnson on Man Island. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: the Suda names three of Sappho's friends Athis, Tellisippa, and Magara,
Speaker 1: using a word to describe them that could mean companion,
Speaker 1: but it could also mean cortison, and the Suda says
Speaker 1: her relationship with them led her to be accused of
Speaker 1: a friendship or a love that was shameful. From there,
Speaker 1: the Suda goes into some more mundane territory, naming a
Speaker 1: few of Sappho's students, saying that she wrote nine volumes
Speaker 1: of poetry and crediting her with inventing the plectrum, which
Speaker 1: is like a pick for plucking the strings on a liar.
Speaker 1: It also describes her poetry as including epigrams, elegaics, iambics,
Speaker 1: and monodies. Her surviving work also includes a lot of epithalamia,
Speaker 1: and these are poems that were celebrating a marriage, which
Speaker 1: she was probably commissioned to write. In addition to the
Speaker 1: Suda's mention of students, a number of classical sources describe
Speaker 1: Sappho as a teacher, but none of these us mention
Speaker 1: what or where she taught. In spite of that lack
Speaker 1: of detail, a lot of articles that exist today definitively
Speaker 1: say that Sappho ran a theosos, which is sometimes described
Speaker 1: as a sort of finishing school for women waiting to
Speaker 1: get married, and it's also sometimes described as a religious
Speaker 1: community dedicated to Aphrodite, and sometimes as a group of
Speaker 1: temple courtisons. But really there's no substantiation to any of
Speaker 1: this or for the idea of a theosos as an
Speaker 1: actual established school of some sort. None of Sappho's surviving
Speaker 1: writing mentions a theosos at all. You will see a
Speaker 1: lot of just incredibly definitive saying with one hundred percent confidence,
Speaker 1: statements that are like, Cepho ran this theosos that taught
Speaker 1: these young women how to be wives and mothers, and
Speaker 1: maybe it's not no documentation of that. And then there
Speaker 1: is the story of Sapho and Feon, and the basic
Speaker 1: gist of this story is that Sappho fell in love
Speaker 1: with a ferryman named Faon, and when he rejected her,
Speaker 1: she threw herself off a cliff. That story makes up
Speaker 1: the bulk of the Suda's second Sappho entry, which says
Speaker 1: that this supposedly different Sapho was also from Middelini, also
Speaker 1: played a harp and may have written lyric poetry as well.
Speaker 1: This story about the ferryman is repeated over and over
Speaker 1: and over. It's depicted in numerous works of art and literature,
Speaker 1: including in Avid's herodies or epistles of the heroines. But
Speaker 1: Faon was a mythical figure, and it seems like this
Speaker 1: idea that the real Sapho threw herself over a cliff
Speaker 1: for him dates back to a comedy by Menander written
Speaker 1: about two hundred years after Sappho died, and in the
Speaker 1: thousands of years since then, the fact that at least
Speaker 1: one of Sappho's fragments mentions Faon has been used to
Speaker 1: try to substantiate this fictional story as though it were fact.
Speaker 1: So when it comes to Sappho's biography, we have a
Speaker 1: whole lot of contradictions and questionable and in some cases
Speaker 1: her poetry has been used to try to substantiate those claims.
Speaker 1: So we are going to take a look at her
Speaker 1: poems in some more detail after we take a quick
Speaker 1: sponsor break. Sapo was a lyric poet, meaning that she
Speaker 1: composed poems that were meant to be sung accompanied on
Speaker 1: a liar. In Ancient Greece, lyric poetry tended to be
Speaker 1: short and very personal, often sung from one person to
Speaker 1: another or written in the voice of one person addressing another.
Speaker 1: Many of Sappho's poems that have survived until today either
Speaker 1: our or are believe to be love poems. It's hard
Speaker 1: to tell sometimes because what survives can be incredibly short. Homer,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, wrote epic poetry, and this was
Speaker 1: much longer, with a narrative that told the story of
Speaker 1: the heroic deeds of the characters in the poem. And
Speaker 1: we should also note that it's very possis that the
Speaker 1: work attributed to Homer was really written by several people
Speaker 1: and not just one regardless, though in the ancient Western
Speaker 1: world he was called just the poet and Sappho was
Speaker 1: the poetess. Lyric poetry really flourished in ancient Greece between
Speaker 1: about six hundred and four fifty BCE, so that was
Speaker 1: when Sappho lived. It wasn't newly invented during that time.
Speaker 1: This was more a revival of an earlier poetic form.
Speaker 1: And then two people were considered to be the most
Speaker 1: notable lyric poets of this period. They were Sappho and Alcius,
Speaker 1: both of whom were from Lesbos and may have known
Speaker 1: each other and even written to each other. Sappho wrote
Speaker 1: her poems in Aolic Greek, which is sometimes also called
Speaker 1: Lesbian Greek, and in that dialect her name was more
Speaker 1: like Shappa than the Sappho that we know today. In
Speaker 1: about the third century BCE, Sapho's poetry was compiled into
Speaker 1: an eight or nine volume collection in Alexandria, Egypt. The
Speaker 1: volumes were arranged by the meter used for each poem,
Speaker 1: which set it apart for most other compilations, which tended
Speaker 1: to be organized instead by subject or seam. There were
Speaker 1: as many as ten thousand lines of poetry in this compilation,
Speaker 1: but it's possible that Sappho wrote much more than that,
Speaker 1: especially since many of her works were commissioned for special
Speaker 1: occasions like weddings, and they might not have been preserved
Speaker 1: after they were performed. Today, Sappho is known most for
Speaker 1: one particular poetic form, and that's the Sapphic, which is
Speaker 1: also called Sapphic meter or Sapphix stanzas. We don't really
Speaker 1: know whether Sapho developed this form herself or refined a
Speaker 1: form that already existed, but she was so skilled at
Speaker 1: writing in this form that it ultimately carried her name.
Speaker 1: The Sapphik used four line stanzas, with three longer lines
Speaker 1: followed by one shorter line, and then within those lines.
Speaker 1: The meter came from Lesbian Greek's pattern of long and
Speaker 1: short syllables. When people are translating Sappho's work today, sometimes
Speaker 1: they approximate the meter u using the characteristics of whatever
Speaker 1: language they're working in. So, for example, in English, there's
Speaker 1: a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, with the stressed
Speaker 1: syllables standing in for the long syllables in Greek, and
Speaker 1: the unstressed syllables taking the place of the short ones.
Speaker 1: These tend to be very personal, passionate, and emotional poems,
Speaker 1: and they're simultaneously very simple and elegant. During Sappho's lifetime,
Speaker 1: poetry was also believed to be magical, so poetry was
Speaker 1: thought to be able to influence or shape reality. So
Speaker 1: Sappho's poetry was considered to be beautiful and melodic and powerful.
Speaker 1: But we have unfortunately very little of this poetry today,
Speaker 1: and even less of it in the form of complete poems.
Speaker 1: The vast majority of what we have is just short fragments,
Speaker 1: and some of these fragments are from damaged pieces of
Speaker 1: writing material or pieces of clay pots. Others are quotations
Speaker 1: from other people's surviving work. For example, Cassius Longinus quoted
Speaker 1: forcedas by Sappho in On the Sublime, which was published
Speaker 1: around one hundred CE today, out of those ten thousand
Speaker 1: or so lines that we think that Sappho wrote, we
Speaker 1: have roughly six hundred and fifty lines of poetry remaining.
Speaker 1: That is spread out across about two hundred and fifty fragments.
Speaker 1: And of those six hundred and fifty lines, fewer than
Speaker 1: a third of them are even complete lines of poetry.
Speaker 1: A lot of them are partial lines. Six of the
Speaker 1: fragments are longer and more substantive, but still not entirely intact,
Speaker 1: and one of those longer fragments is the Brother's poem
Speaker 1: that we mentioned earlier, which is missing only its first
Speaker 1: few stanzas only one of Sappho's poems is believed to
Speaker 1: be complete today, and that is the Ode to Aphrodite.
Speaker 1: Different collections of Sappho's poetry use different numbering systems to
Speaker 1: keep up with all of these fragments, but most of
Speaker 1: the time Ode to Aphrodite, sometimes translated as Him or
Speaker 1: Prayer to Aphrodite, is number one. Here's the beginning of
Speaker 1: Ode to Aphrodite, translated by T. W. Higginson in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy one quote beautiful throned immortal Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus beguiler,
Speaker 1: I implore THEE weigh me not down with weariness and anguish.
Speaker 1: Oh Thou most holy, come to me now, if ever thou,
Speaker 1: in kindness hearkenest my words. And in the poem, Aphrodite
Speaker 1: does come and says, who has harmed thee? Oh, my
Speaker 1: poor Sappho. Though now he flies erelong, he shall pursue thee,
Speaker 1: fearing thy gifts. He too, in turn, shall bring them loveless.
Speaker 1: Today tomorrow he shall woo thee, though thou should spurn him.
Speaker 1: Another of the longer fragments is the one that was
Speaker 1: quoted in On the Sublime, which we mentioned earlier, and
Speaker 1: it describes the speaker's response to sitting across from a
Speaker 1: woman that the poem is addressing. This is usually interpreted
Speaker 1: as Sappho herself describing her own response to the woman
Speaker 1: that she's facing, but that's not really clear here. It
Speaker 1: is as translated by John Addington's Simmons in eighteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: Peer of the Gods, he seemeth to me the blissful
Speaker 1: man who sits and gazes at THEE before him close
Speaker 1: besides these sits, and in silence hears THEE silverly speaking,
Speaker 1: laughing love's low laughter. Oh this, this only stirs the
Speaker 1: troubled heart in my breast to tremble. For should I
Speaker 1: but see thee a little moment? Straight? Is my voice hushed? Yeay,
Speaker 1: my tongue is broken, and through and through me neath
Speaker 1: the flesh impalpable, fire runs tingling nothing see mine eyes
Speaker 1: and our noise of roaring waves in my ear sounds.
Speaker 1: Sweat runs down in rivers. A tremor seizes all my limbs,
Speaker 1: and paler than grass in autumn, caught by pains of
Speaker 1: menacing death, eye falter lost in the love trance. But
Speaker 1: almost all the fragments are not nearly so long as this.
Speaker 1: Here is an example, Sweet mother, I cannot weave my
Speaker 1: broken as I am by longing for a boy at
Speaker 1: soft aphrodite's will. One that we think from a wedding
Speaker 1: poem goes neither honey nor bee for me. I don't
Speaker 1: know why I love that. I do too, neither of
Speaker 1: the above. Another fragment just says shot with a thousand hues,
Speaker 1: and one reads and I flutter like a child after
Speaker 1: her mother, and one fragment is simply the words you
Speaker 1: burn me. Sappho's fragments can be really evocative, and then
Speaker 1: combined with her pretty mysterious biography, they can just be beguiling.
Speaker 1: But the fact that they're so fragmented and scattered makes
Speaker 1: her work really difficult to study. We have a sense
Speaker 1: that she wrote lots of love poems, and that she
Speaker 1: wrote lots of poems for people's weddings. Her work seems
Speaker 1: to carry a lot of affection as well, including physical
Speaker 1: affection for men and women, but we don't necessarily have
Speaker 1: the greatest sense of what the whole body of her
Speaker 1: work is like. There's some guesswork going on, especially since
Speaker 1: some of the fragments are so short that were not
Speaker 1: even one hundred percent short that Sappho really wrote them.
Speaker 1: And we'll get into why there's so little of Sappho's
Speaker 1: work left today to study after we have another sponsor break.
Speaker 1: As far as we know, during her lifetime and at
Speaker 1: least for a while afterwards, Sapo was deeply respected and
Speaker 1: admired as a poet and a person. Plato, who lived
Speaker 1: roughly two hundred years after she did, wrote quote some
Speaker 1: say the muses are nine, but how carelessly look at
Speaker 1: the tenth Sapho from Lesbus. It doesn't seem as though
Speaker 1: her contemporaries really questioned her character in any way. I mean,
Speaker 1: after all, she was getting a lot of commissions to
Speaker 1: write poetry for people's weddings, and that doesn't seem like
Speaker 1: it would be happening if she were socially reviled. But
Speaker 1: in the century since then have interpreted Sappho in vastly
Speaker 1: different ways. In the words of Holt and Parker quote,
Speaker 1: every age creates its own Sappho, and many of these
Speaker 1: creations have imagined Sapho as being, at least in the
Speaker 1: morality of the time, deviant or depraved. Some of these
Speaker 1: shifts are thanks to her being from the island of Lesbos.
Speaker 1: While she was living, Lesbus was considered to be a
Speaker 1: place full of passion and poetry and sensuality, although also
Speaker 1: with a lot of political turmoil and infighting, which is
Speaker 1: why Sappho and her family may have fled at some point.
Speaker 1: Possibly see R. Haines, who we quoted at the top
Speaker 1: of the show, described it this way quote. The Aeolians
Speaker 1: of Lesbos were a vigorous and gifted race, brave in war,
Speaker 1: enterprising and trade, vehement and politics, eminent in poetry and music.
Speaker 1: But within a few centuries after her death, prevailing opinion
Speaker 1: of the island of Lesbus had shifted. That tendency toward
Speaker 1: passion and wealth moved more into perceived hedonism and excess.
Speaker 1: Lesbus went from being thought of as a place of
Speaker 1: beauty and refinement to one of licentiousness and corruption. The
Speaker 1: Greek word lesbiasen, meaning acting like someone from Lesbus, became
Speaker 1: associated with impurity and one specific sex act, that being fallatio.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just about the island, though eventually this also
Speaker 1: extended to Sappho herself. Greek comedy tended to be in
Speaker 1: one way or another satirical, although the exact nature and
Speaker 1: the primary targets of the satire shifted over time in
Speaker 1: the sort of history of Greek comedy, and starting a
Speaker 1: couple of centuries after she died, Sappho became the target
Speaker 1: of this satire. Her name was used for characters in
Speaker 1: several Greek comedies, and those characters were usually depicted as
Speaker 1: wanton and lustful and just excessively sexual with young men.
Speaker 1: Society's understanding of relationships and gender roles shifts over time,
Speaker 1: so it's certain that romantic and physical relationships were viewed
Speaker 1: very differently on Lesbis in the seventh century BCE than
Speaker 1: they are in various cultures today. But we know virtually
Speaker 1: nothing about the details, and many of the authors who
Speaker 1: have speculated about it have tried to draw conclusions based
Speaker 1: on ancient Sparta, But our understanding of Spartan society is
Speaker 1: also limited, and it was a completely different society from Lesbus,
Speaker 1: located in a different part of Greece, and it flourished
Speaker 1: starting two hundred years or so after Sappho's death. However,
Speaker 1: we do know that same sex relationships became increasingly taboo
Speaker 1: in parts of Europe in the centuries after Sappho lived,
Speaker 1: so we don't really know how they were regarded while
Speaker 1: she was living and where she was living, but we
Speaker 1: do know that it became more and more taboo afterward,
Speaker 1: and as that happened, the idea that Sappho was deviant
Speaker 1: because of her lust for young men morphed into the
Speaker 1: idea that she was devs because of her lust for
Speaker 1: young women. The first reference to this that we know
Speaker 1: about was written in the second or third century CE.
Speaker 1: In the sixteenth century, humanist scholars claimed that Christian Church
Speaker 1: officials had burned Sappho's work for this reason at least twice.
Speaker 1: That Bishop Gregory Nesienzin of Constantinople had done so in
Speaker 1: three eighty, followed by Pope Gregory the Seventh in ten
Speaker 1: seventy three, but it's not clear whether these burnings actually happened,
Speaker 1: especially since Bishop Gregory himself was known to quote from Sappho. Yes,
Speaker 1: there's some conjecture that over the centuries two different Gregory's
Speaker 1: were conflated together into this one person who supposedly did
Speaker 1: this burning. Even if her work was burned by the
Speaker 1: Church because of perceptions about Sappho's morality, that would not
Speaker 1: account for so much of its loss. There were also
Speaker 1: floods and accidental fires, and the aging of the material
Speaker 1: that the poetry was recorded on, and fewer and they
Speaker 1: were people speaking Aeolian Greek, meaning that there was less
Speaker 1: and less demand for new copies of her work to
Speaker 1: be printed or written or copied. Sappho didn't fade into
Speaker 1: total obscurity, though we mentioned in our Christine de Pisan
Speaker 1: episode that she's named in the Book of the City
Speaker 1: of Ladies, which was written in fourteen oh five. By
Speaker 1: the sixteenth century, though, what most people knew about Sappho
Speaker 1: really came from Avid's heroities rather than from anything about
Speaker 1: her actual biography or her work. By the eighteenth century,
Speaker 1: even less of Sappho's poetry was known to the world
Speaker 1: than the six hundred and fifty lines we have today.
Speaker 1: In the words sapphok and lesbian had taken on entirely
Speaker 1: different meanings than what they'd initially meant, which was basically
Speaker 1: related to Sapho or related to the island of Lesbis.
Speaker 1: Lesbian was first used in writing to describe a woman
Speaker 1: who is physically or romantically involved with another woman in
Speaker 1: seventeen thirty two, and saffok was used in association with
Speaker 1: same sex, desire and relationships among women a few years later.
Speaker 1: The first appearance of the word sapphik in writing was
Speaker 1: in a seventeen sixty one translation of Plato, which read quote,
Speaker 1: their affections tend rather to their own sex, and of
Speaker 1: this kind are the Sapphic lovers. So by the Romantic
Speaker 1: era in Europe, both Sappho and the island of Lesbus
Speaker 1: had become inextricably connected to the idea of homosexuality among women,
Speaker 1: which was also culturally very taboo and in some cases outlawed.
Speaker 1: But in spite of that, in the nineteenth century, Sappho's
Speaker 1: poetry experienced a surge and popularity. The Romantics found the
Speaker 1: emotional depth of her poems and the fragments really appealing.
Speaker 1: She started appearing in poems by people like Byron and Bodelaire,
Speaker 1: although not necessarily in what we would call a favorable light. Then,
Speaker 1: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a collection
Speaker 1: of manuscripts was unearthed near the Egyptians city of Oxyrinchus,
Speaker 1: drastically increasing the number of known Sappho fragments and giving
Speaker 1: people way more of them to study and read. Running
Speaker 1: alongside this increasing popularity was an attempt to reform Sappho's
Speaker 1: image into something that wasn't contrary to nineteenth century morality.
Speaker 1: In eighteen sixteen, Frederick Gottlin Welker published Sappho Freed from
Speaker 1: a Prevailing Prejudice, which tried to reinterpret her poetry in
Speaker 1: a way that minimized the homo eroticism of her work,
Speaker 1: and this did start to shift people's opinions about Sappho.
Speaker 1: But then in eighteen ninety five, Pierre Luis published Chansson
Speaker 1: de Biltice, which was supposedly a collection of newly discovered
Speaker 1: poems written by one of Sappho's female students, who was
Speaker 1: named and the French pronunciation Bigtis. These were really a
Speaker 1: work of poetic fiction. Though these poems were very erotic
Speaker 1: and sensual, and although people really quickly figured out that
Speaker 1: they were not really written by one of Sappho's students,
Speaker 1: it it did reinforce the connection between Sapho and homosexual
Speaker 1: relationships among women that Welker had been trying to minimize
Speaker 1: in his earlier work, and that led to another effort
Speaker 1: to try to reimagine Sappho's identity in nineteen thirteen, led
Speaker 1: by Ulrich von Velamowitz. His Sapho and Somonodes drew from
Speaker 1: Welker's eighteen sixteen work, and it depicted Sappho as a
Speaker 1: spinsterish school marm. This work also really reinforced the idea
Speaker 1: that Safo was a teacher at a formal school with
Speaker 1: young women as her pupils, and this depiction is based
Speaker 1: on his reinterpreting her poetry, not on historical research today
Speaker 1: Sappho seems really intrinsically connected to the idea of lesbian,
Speaker 1: which can describe a person's sexual orientation as well as
Speaker 1: their political or social identity, and that connection was really
Speaker 1: reinforced during the early years of the gay rights movement
Speaker 1: in the United States, when it was still known as
Speaker 1: the homophile movement. In nineteen fifty five, lesbian couples formed
Speaker 1: the Daughters of Belitas that's spelled the same way as Billets,
Speaker 1: which Tracy said earlier pronounced differently. They included activists Phyllis
Speaker 1: Lyon and del Martin, who later became the first same
Speaker 1: sex couple to get married in San Francisco, and it
Speaker 1: began allowing same sex marriages in two thousand and four.
Speaker 1: And this was part social club, part support group, part
Speaker 1: education and advocacy organization. They named themselves the Daughters of
Speaker 1: Belitus after that eighteen ninety five Chanson de Bilitice collection,
Speaker 1: and by this point everyone knew in quotation marks that
Speaker 1: the historic Sappho was a lesbian, So the name Belitus
Speaker 1: let the organization connect itself to Sappho and signal to
Speaker 1: potential members what the organization was for without needing to
Speaker 1: publicly express who and what the organization was for. Because
Speaker 1: of the social climate and in some cases the law,
Speaker 1: just publicly declaring that this was an organization for lesbians
Speaker 1: was not possible. In nineteen fifty five, the Daughters of
Speaker 1: Belitas created a newsletter called The Latter, which developed a
Speaker 1: national readership, and the organization itself became the first national
Speaker 1: lesbian organization in the United States. And as time went on,
Speaker 1: Sappho became increasingly present in the pages of The Latter,
Speaker 1: which also had a poetry column called Saphistries. All of
Speaker 1: this continued to reinforce that connection between Sappho and the
Speaker 1: lesbian community. So that is Sappho. We know literally almost
Speaker 1: nothing about her, And this whole story reminds me a
Speaker 1: lot of Jenny Lynde, who was supposed to be just
Speaker 1: the world's most incredible opera singer, but of whom we
Speaker 1: have no recordings. Yeah, so take people we don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think there's always that thing, right. We talked about
Speaker 1: how there are many attempts to reinterpret and shift her
Speaker 1: identity over time, and so it is like that trick
Speaker 1: when you only have these tiny bits and fragments that
Speaker 1: people can want a thing. So badly that they will
Speaker 1: interpret it in whichever way mays them the most comfortable
Speaker 1: with the material, or like aligns with their ideas of
Speaker 1: this historical figure that we really have just the vaguest
Speaker 1: smattering of information about. Yeah, well, and there's so many
Speaker 1: of the things that we in theory know about her
Speaker 1: are like, Okay, are these three brothers? Are those three
Speaker 1: brothers her brothers and she mentioned them in her poetry?
Speaker 1: Or have those names been picked to stand for her
Speaker 1: brothers because those are names that appeared in her poetry.
Speaker 1: It's sort of a chicken and egg situation where like
Speaker 1: we don't really know which thing led to which, or
Speaker 1: are they someone else's brothers? Right? Nothing to do with
Speaker 1: her at all? Because it was a commission? Right? Was
Speaker 1: this poem written in a someone else's voice, not Sappho's
Speaker 1: personal expressions? Anyway, I love her and I think she's fascinating,
Speaker 1: even though I know literally tiny amounts about any of it.
Speaker 1: There you go. Thanks so much for joining us on
Speaker 1: this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note,
Speaker 1: our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and
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