Sappho: Our Oldest Queer Voice in History
She’s the earliest surviving queer voice we have. Before there was even a word for it, there was Sappho. Before there was a march, flag, or legal and political fight for equal rights, there was Sappho. But who was Sappho? She was a woman, living on a Greek island 26 centuries ago, who wrote about desiring other women with a directness that still resonates today. Every queer writer who’s written since exists in Sappho’s shadow.
The word ‘lesbian’ itself comes from Lesbos, the island where Sappho lived. The word she immortalised is her greatest legacy, because almost nothing Sappho wrote survives today. Of around 10,000 lines across 9 books of lyric poetry once kept in the famous Library of Alexandria, we now have only fragments of 650 lines: scraps of papyrus, quotations preserved by later writers who admired her technique, and a handful of near-complete poems that survived largely by accident. What has survived is some of the most intense love poetry ever written.
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A Poet Equal to Homer
Sappho (c. 630-c. 570 BC) was born on the island of Lesbos in the eastern Aegean. The ancients openly regarded her as the equal of Homer. Plato was one of many who praised her as ‘the Tenth Muse’: not as hyperbole, but a statement of her esteemed rank and genius. Sappho’s influence on Greek and Roman poetry was immense: Catullus translated her, Horace imitated her, and her metres became standard forms in Western verse.
Sappho wrote lyric poetry, meant to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. Her subjects were love, desire, beauty, the natural world, and the bonds between women. Her poems address named female beloveds: Anactoria, Atthis, Gongyla, with a physical and emotional directness that leaves no room for reinterpretation. Sappho wrote about desiring women. In 2004, a new Sappho poem was discovered on a fragment of ancient papyrus: the Tithonus poem. It meditates on how none of us can escape the ageing process and the loss of beauty, reflecting on the myth of Trojan prince Tithonus, who requested the gift of immortality… but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Tithonus continued to age, unable to die. The discovery serves as a reminder that echoes of Sappho’s voice may still be waiting to be found, in libraries, in the papier-mâché used to wrap Egyptian mummies, or in the margins of subsequent books. Sappho is still not finished being rediscovered.
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Centuries of Erasure
For centuries, scholars performed extraordinary acrobatics to straight-wash what Sappho’s poems plainly said. She was recast as a schoolmistress running a finishing academy for young women. She was described as a moral instructor whose ‘love’ for her students was simply educational, rather than erotic. She was even blatantly heterosexualised: with persistent efforts to present Sappho and her passionate erotic lesbian poetry as a phase, with claims she ended her days by throwing herself from a cliff after falling in love with a ferryman called Phaon.
None of these efforts to reframe survive engagement with Sappho’s actual writing. Fragment 31, Sappho’s most celebrated surviving poem, describes the physical symptoms of desire as the speaker watches a beloved woman sitting close to a man. The tongue breaks. Fire runs beneath the skin. The ears fill with thunder. Sweat pours. This is not the language of educational learning. It’s the language of a body gripped by lustful desire and unattainable longing.
Sappho described what lesbian desire feels like 26 centuries before anyone had a word for it.
The loss of most of Sappho’s work was not, as once broadly assumed, the result of deliberate book-burning by Christian authorities uneasy with Sappho’s same-sex passionate words. There is only circumstantial evidence that her writing was deliberately targeted in this way. The truth is more mundane and so perhaps more devastating: Sappho’s work, like most ancient literature, was simply lost through neglect, shifting literary taste, and the general attrition of time passing.
Papyrus is fragile. The transition from scroll to the more robust codex between the 1st and 4th Centuries meant those historical works not considered worth copying were simply not preserved. Shifts in literary taste further reduced what little was preserved, and Sappho wrote in an already obscure and archaic Greek called Aeolic dialect. Most fragments of Sappho’s work survive simply by accident: quotations and excerpts preserved by later historians and grammarians collecting rare and provincial terms, who used Sappho’s poetry to illustrate the nuances of this local dialect. All that remains of Sappho’s Fragment 169A, for example, is one lonely word: ἀθρήματα (athrēmata), meaning ‘treasures’, or ‘wedding gifts’.
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Fragment 31
This poem anchors Sappho’s reputation. It opens with a man sitting opposite a woman Sappho has her eye on, calling him ‘equal to the gods’. This praise and admiration, however, has absolutely nothing to do with the man: it’s only because he can sit so close to this woman and survive the proximity. Sappho clearly cannot. She goes on to list a catalogue of physical symptoms that modern physicians would easily compare to a description of a panic attack: the racing heart, fire under skin, ringing ears, cold sweat, and the feeling of being close to death itself.
He seems to me equal to 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
~ Fragment 31, Sappho
This poem is the earliest surviving description of erotic desire clearly experienced as a bodily event. This is not Sappho the teacher expressing desire as a metaphor, an abstraction, or a moral lesson for students. Sappho is treating desire as something that happens to the body itself: the body of a woman, responding to the body of another woman.
Sappho is evidence there’s never been something more human than the physical reaction to a person we have feelings for.
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Why This Matters Today
Sappho matters because she’s proof. Proof we’ve always existed. And written about it.
Not politely tolerated in the margins. Not a tokenistic inclusion we should be grateful for. Queer writing is at the very start of Western literary tradition, with Sappho honoured in her time as one of the greatest poets who ever lived. The historical debate was never over a moral or ethical dilemma over Sappho’s attraction to women. The debate was whether her poetry was as good as, or greater than, Homer.
The word ‘lesbian’ is Sappho’s legacy. Every time it’s used, we reach back 26 centuries to a woman who simply wrote about desire with clarity and confidence that considerable scholarly revisionism failed to stifle. Sappho’s words speak for herself. And we’re still reading her, centuries later. We’re still finding her. The male scholars who did everything they could to censor, to tell a woman what she could or couldn’t write, could or couldn’t feel, have been forgotten.
Sappho’s poems are a symbol of queer resilience. 2,600 years after she penned them.
