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What is Sapphic Love? · Lambda: the LGBT in Antiquity Podcast

• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Hello everybody, and welcome to the International Lesbian Day Special of Lambda, the LGBT and Antiquity Podcast, your home for all things LGBT in the ancient world.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Dominica Raven.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: What is Sapphic love?
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're going to discuss Sapphic love.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: When we consider Sappho of Lesbos, there is one particular type of love that comes into everyone's mind.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho is a woman whose very name is a synonym for female homoerocism.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: It was such a ubiquitous part of the ancient experience that in time other poets and historians and the equivalent of bar jokes and graffiti would make reference to the woman who stood me up as a lesbian.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: But this is just one type of love reflected in the works of Sappho.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho reflects on the relationship between two women all the time in the fragments that survive, but Sappho also reflects on the relationship between herself and her brother.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho discusses the relationship between herself and her daughter Cleus, and once in a while, Sappho does reflect on the beauty of a male figure.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Let's take a few minutes today and explore each type of Sapphoc love.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever we discuss Sappho, it's always important to bear in mind that we know literally nothing about Sappho herself.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: There is a rich and very consistent poetic image that we get all throughout her work.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho uses herself in the first person a lot, and it very much does seem like many of these can be interpreted as a poetic first person.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, there's always reason to question whether the poetic first person is disassociated from the first person themselves.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: The way somebody represents themselves in poetry may or may not be an accurate reflection of the actual historic figure, but Sappho does refer to herself and her desires almost always for other women in the surviving poetry.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: However, there's also reason to suspect that in some contexts we don't actually know who the speaker I really is.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: For a few quick examples, Sappho was hired, as all poets were in antiquity, to compose poetry for different rituals and festivals.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: This includes weddings where choruses of young women would sing praises to the bride and the groom.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea that in some of these praises, that I in the first person could be directing affection of beauty of a woman or a man from the perspective of these ritual environments.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: But Sappho also wrote a little mini-epic called an Epilion, which does not survive except for a handful of lines.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Most of these mini-epics do detail famous marriages between different figures.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: For an example, Catullus 63, which we've discussed at length, which describes the marriage of Attis and Chibalae, and Catullus 64, which describes the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, the apparents of Achilles.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: In Sappho's mini-epic, Sappho details the marriage of Hector, the Prince of Troy, and Andromache.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that one of these fragments could actually be some narrative like Hector or Andromache speaking about the beauty of one another, and it may not always be obvious, even in the original Greek meters.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: The point of all this is that we do need to be careful because it is never really clear who I actually refers to.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Tying all this together, the hymn to Aphrodite involves Sappho summoning Aphrodite by calling to mind another time that the goddess spoke to Sappho directly.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho recalls the words Aphrodite once spoke, and in those words, Aphrodite recalls the words of Sappho from another previous occasion.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: So who is exactly speaking at any point in this poem is only knowable because we actually have the entire poem instead of just a line or two.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Doing the same for our fragmentary poems might be next to impossible.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start with family love.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho has several poems addressed to her brother Caraxas.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: He went abroad making it as far as Egypt and had an affair with a woman named Doritcha.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: There are a few papyri fragments which seem to say Doritcha commands you not to come, and another fragment of the same poem where Sappho seems to imply that Karaxas must atone for some unspecified past mistake.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: We only have a few fragments where Sappho directly references Doritcha, but later authors such as Athenaeus claim Sappho attacked her in her poems as if Doritza was a gold digger.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Though we don't know what kind of relationship Sappho had with Caraxa's girlfriend, we do know that she had genuine concern for her brother.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: One of the more recent fragments uncovered of Sappho addresses her own concerns for her brother's safety and desires to see him again.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: She calls upon Hera to guide his ship back to Lesb and provide fair weather for all his travels.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Above all, Sappho's love for her brother comes down to concern for his poor decision making and reckless voyaging.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: In another poem, Sappho calls upon Aphrodite and the Nareed nymphs to bring back her brother and allow him to again atone for some unspecified mistake which brought grief to his family.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: So again we get this clear image that Sappho has these very intense feelings of her brother, even if she wasn't always pleased with him.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho had a daughter named Cleus, whose father was lost to history.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: The best references to Cleus come from the fragments.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: The first half of one poem is actually a critique of Cleus' a choice in adornment.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: In Sappho's mother's day, all girls wanting to look beautiful was a simple purple headband.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: In Sappho's own youth it was the flowered wreaths that decorated their hair.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: But kids these days seem to want metal headbands manufactured in foreign parts.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho says that she is of modest means and is unable to purchase such a headband for her beloved Cleus.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: The flower motif is carried further in a quotation of a poem by Hephaestan of Alexandria.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: As an example of a poetic device where the meter has a clashing caesura, he quotes an otherwise unknown line of Sappho, fragment 132, where Sappho says Cleus looks like a golden flower, and that she would not trade all of Lydia for her daughter.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: As we can see, Sappho's love for her daughter is a very powerful one.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's discuss Sappho's relationship with men.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: In Sappho's mini epic about Hector and Andromache, she describes Hector in pretty standard phrases, calling him godlike in appearance.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho describes another bridegroom as like Achilles in one fragment, and another compares the bridegroom with mighty Ares.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: These are actually very formulaic praises of masculinity in antiquity.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Poets and authors would often reflect upon male beauty by comparing it to the heroes of old or by the gods themselves.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Homer himself habitually calls his heroes the peer of Ares, or he looked like Ares, or he looked like an immortal god, and admires them for their physical strength.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: But more often Sappho reflects on a particular type of masculinity.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: She has one of her most famous lines, Delicate Adonis is dying.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: This description is significant because it may actually be the first literary description of the burial of Adonis, one of Aphrodite's many lovers.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: What stands out is that Sappho makes a reference to a hero's funeral, but the way she describes his masculinity.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Heroes are not delicate because this adjective delicate connects someone to feminine standards of beauty.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: For Adonis to be delicate implies he is feminine in this context.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, Sappho uses the word habitually to describe other women of Lesbos and described some women as more delicate than roses.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: In another fragment, some unclear speaker says, I cannot weave my web, for I am undone with desire for a boy.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Though we can't exactly say who is speaking, whether it was Sappho or a chorus at a festival, or some narrative speaker, Sappho is describing affection for youthful love, not exactly clear images of masculinity.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: One final example wholly reverses heteronormative expectations entirely.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: A young man who is very much admired for his figure, and is extravagantly dressed and widely considered conventionally handsome, is commanded by Sappho to stand before me, spread abroad the grace that is in your eyes.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: In poetry and especially epics, it is the women who are measured for their grace.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Men behold women who are meant to stand before them.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Women tend to catch glimpses of men under the protection of their veils.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: So in this line, Sappho has actually flipped the script entirely.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: So when Sappho does discuss masculine beauty, it often becomes an image of something less than heteronormative.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: She admires the beauty, especially of androgynous figures like Adonis and completely reverses societal expectations.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: You might even say that Sappho's attraction for masculinity is entirely shaped with youthful figures whose delicate grace and beauty challenge anything somebody would expect to find in admiration for a traditional male form.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho's eye is drawn to a particular type of feminine-like masculinity.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Finally, let's talk about what we're here to discuss Sappho's Sapphic Loves.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: I could give you a detailed rundown of the many, many appearances of Sappho's love of women, but instead, let's let her own words speak for themselves.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Some say a troop of cavalry or a fleet of ships is the most beautiful sight on earth, but I say it is whoever a person loves.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: The beauty of Helen, who surpassed all women in beauty, reminds me of Anactoria, who is no longer with me.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: I would rather see her lovely walk, the electric sparkle in her face, than all the forces of Lydia amassed.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: I bid you sing of Gongela, where desire once again flies around you for that lovely girl, for her dress excited you when you first saw it.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: I rejoice that Aphrodite granted the prayer for such happiness.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Maidens, all night long, sing of the love between you and the one who wears a violet dress.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: I wish I were dead.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: She is leaving me with tears, and she said, Alas, Sopho, I leave you against my will.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: But I replied, Farewell, my dear, and remember me how I loved you.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Remember the good times we had when we put wreaths of violets and roses and crocos.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Together at my side you wore beautiful flowers around your neck, and on our soft beds we satisfied your longing.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Eros shook my heart like wind falling on oaks in the mountains.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: You came, and I was longing for you.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: You cooled my heart, which was burning with desire.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Golden throned Aphrodite, I beseech you, do not overpower my heart with love's pains, but come before me as you once did before, in your little chariot, drawn by swift sparrows, wearing their wings with a smile on your face.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: You asked me, who am I to persuade to love you this time?
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Who has wronged you, Sappho?
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: If she runs away, instead she will pursue you.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: If she refuses your gifts, instead she will give gifts to you.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: If she does not love you, instead she will love you.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Come, Aphrodite, deliver me from love's anxieties and fulfill the longing in my heart.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: And finally my personal favorite.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: When I hear your sweet voice and gentle laughter, truly it sets my heart ablaze when I look at you even for a moment.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Then it isn't possible to speak because my tongue has snapped.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: There's a fire in my body and I can't see straight.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Sweat pours from me as subtle trembling seizes my whole being.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: I am green as grass, I'm not far from death.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: But all that can be endured for you.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Sarfo's love for other women is critical, and if you'll notice, it often has a melancholic, even tragic undertone.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: This is a world where a woman's desire and affection were of no great concern to anybody else.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: One day the patafamilius would make a business deal with another family, and his daughter would go.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: She would rarely even return to her family's house.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: She had a new house and family to look after.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Her love for another woman, or another man for that matter, did not factor into marriage at all.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: So the initiatory homosexuality was expected to be a temporary phase, a sexual awakening in the path to maturity, not the way one's own internal desires led them to live their lives.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: But that's only one type of love represented in the works of Sappho.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: When Sappho speaks of her brother or her daughter, it's an intense amount of concern, care, and a deep love which can only really be described as a passion for their well-being.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho desires above all else to see everyone in her life, her family, her friends, the objects of her affection, and people who will never return her affection.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: She wants to see all of them happy and affirmed, even if it means pain for Sappho herself.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: But Sappho's representation of men is also telling.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: She can certainly appreciate the beauty of men, but rarely seems to dwell on attributes that make them conventionally masculine.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Rather, Sappho sees something feminine in men that she admires.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Taken in this light, the conventional distinction of Sapphic love reflecting a more expansive concept is an apt observation.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho could be thought of as a bisexual, who favored other women.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, she did have a child, after all.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: But when Sappho did express interest in the beauty of men, it is for their effeminate virtues and features, rather than conventional masculinity.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: Beyond this, lesbians in the ancient world, and even Sappho herself, were called masculine and mannish, so any attempt to understand the sexuality of Sappho must also contend with her gender expression and that of her partners.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: So what is Sapphic love?
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think the use of Sapphic love to describe cis women, trans women, bisexual, pansexual, and loosely feminine aligned non-binary people is the proper answer.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: But whatever we do to riddle this out, it does remain a riddle.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: There is one key point I want to drive at across all the different types of sapphic love we've described today.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho's love is powerful regardless of whether it's for her daughter, her brother, her lover.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho's love is intense and powerful enough to transcend gender and sexuality.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Have a good International Lesbian Day.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: Remember how special lesbian relationships are.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Remember how powerful Sapphic love is.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: Notes and comments.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: The fragment where Doritcha commands Karaxos not to return is badly damaged, with only a few of the words actually readable.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: The interpretation that his girlfriend is actually preventing Sappho from reuniting with her brother is found in Axirengus papyri fragment 202.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: A later author named Athenaeus, who wrote a philosophical discourse called The Scholars at Dinner, at Book 13, section 596, suggests that Sappho claimed Doritcha was a gold-digger.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: The poem where Sappho calls upon Hera to protect her brother is found in a recent find called The Brother's Song.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: This fragment was uncovered in 2014 as part of a very exciting series of finds collectively referred to as the Newest Sappho.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: However, the find was somewhat tainted by the unscrupulous acts of Dirk Abnik, the 21st century's most notorious papyrus thief, who stole the fragments for personal profit.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho praying to Aphrodite and the nymphs for safe passage for her brother is in fragment number 5, another papyrus fragment, P.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Oxyrhus 2289.6.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho's critique of Cleus adornment is from fragment 98, a papyrus fragment from the 3rd century BC.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: The fragment likening Cleus to golden flowers is from Hephaestion's Handbook on Poetic Meter, Book 15, Section 18.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: Hymeus Orations, Book 9, Section 16, describes a bridegroom as the equal of Achilles in a fragment attributed to Sappho.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: Comparing the gridegroom to Ares is also from Hephaestion's Book on Meter.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: Book 7, section 1.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: Delicate Adonis' dying is from Hephaestion's Handbook on Meter, Book 10, Section 4.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: The women of Lesbos are delicate in a quote from the Palatine Anthology, Book 9, verse 189.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho describes a woman as a delicate rose in Fragment 156.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: The line about being overcome with desire for a boy is fragment 102, preserved in Hephaistian Handbook on Meter.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Book 10, section 5.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho reverses expectations in Athenaeus, Scholars at Dinner.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Book 13, Section 564.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: The context of the line seems to be mockery, but we don't have any more info on this fragment, so we don't really know whether Sappho was mocking the gracefulness of the man or admiring it.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: Some say a host of cavalry is fragment 16, also found in an Oxyrhus papyri, number 1231, fragment 1.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: The flitting dress is from fragment number 22, found in Oxyrhus papyri, 1231, number 12 through 15.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: Sappho calling on the maidens to ponder the love between themselves and Aphrodite is from Oxyrhus Papyri, 1231, fragment number 56.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: That haunting line of Sappho's farewell to her girlfriend is from a 6th century papyrus fragment.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Fragment 47 equates Eros to the wind in the mountains, is preserved in a quotation from Maximus of Tyre's Orations, book 18, number 9.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: You came and I was longing for you, is fragment number 48, preserved in quotation in a letter from Julian the Apostate.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: The hymn to Aphrodite is Sappho's fragment number one, preserved in its entirety by Dionysius of Halicanassus on literary composition, section 23.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: The beautifully haunting fragment where Sappho describes her longing is preserved in a discourse by Longinus on Sublimity, Book 10, verse 1 through 3.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: He is amazed by the sheer variety and contrasting sensory experiences.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think this remains the most excellent lesbian poem, perhaps of all time.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: Sopho is called Manish by Horace in Epistle I and by Dionysius Latinus.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Have a good international lesbian day, everyone.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you next week.