Sappho's Ancient Perception of Love

Sappho was a one of the best-known female Greek lyrists of all time. She was an aristocrat who married a rich merchant and had one daughter, Cleis. Having enough wealth to live life comfortably allowed Sappho time to develop beautiful poems and sing them as she played the lyre. Sappho was the head of a thiasos, a school for teaching girls skills such as music, singing, and dancing. One theme prevalent in almost every set of fragments that we have today, written by her, is that of love. She speaks of love often and used simple grammar with powerful emotion to display her feelings, mostly regarding women. Scholars have argued over how the love in her poems is supposed to be perceived, however, if one should analyze some of her poetry it is easy to form one’s own educated guess as to her intentions.

Some could say that the love expressed in her poems was more of a motherly kind of love. It is easy to compare the despair and longing displayed in the poems Sappho would write, as she saw one of her pupils leave the island after marriage, to that of a mother watching her beloved daughter leaving home as a grown woman for the first time. Others argue that this love is more erotic and sexual; these scholars have taken the approach that Sappho was possibly homosexual or bisexual, but they have little evidence to support these claims. There are more than a couple sites on the internet that have even bothered to break love down into 9 different kinds; Affection, Sexual, Platonic, Romantic, Passionate, Puppy, Friendship, Infatuation, and Committed. These types of love even have guidelines posted underneath them so you can analyze your love or that of someone else. Lets try this for Sappho concerning the young women that she wrote of.

She was obviously affectionate towards the women mentally because it is obvious from her poems that she cared for them very much, but it is unknown if she was physically affectionate or intimate. Her love seems to include all the aspects of platonic love except her love seems more extreme, yet more fleeting. Some could say that Sappho was a romantic because of her unending stream of love for so many different men and women. She probably was not a committed lover because from her fragments it would seem as if she loved many people and multiple people at once as well. She does seem infatuated with the women she sings about because they are leaving to be married and she begs them not to leave and even asks Aphrodite, the goddess of love, to bring them back once they are gone. As far as puppy, passionate, and sexual love go, there is little evidence to prove that she was physically engaged in relations with any of the women spoken of.

Sappho seemed to form her own unique definition of love. She did not seem to view love as a cut and dry entity that was merely black or white lacking any gray area. Sappho was the gray area of love in many ways; she represented a vicious love that bound her to many without commitment for just one, but many. Her love was consuming, yet spread far and wide. It was an expressive way of loving in which she could express herself in the form of raw emotion. It was a paradox in its own time and remains one today, which seems to be the reason people still can’t seem to make an agreement upon it to this day. Her love was; highly passionate yet parental as well, not loyal to one person, sympathetic, and seemingly fleeting.

Sappho’s characterizations of love may even help one to uncover some of the mystery as to how love was viewed in Greek Society around 600 B.C. One may assume that