1 - The Sappho Tradition

Summary

For Western culture, and particularly for women, the Greek lyric poet Sappho, has come down as the original poet of female desire as well as the original figure of same-sex female erotics. Sappho was renowned throughout the ancient world for the unique power and expressiveness of her lyricism. The three primary modes of representing Sappho during the early modern period, incorporating the garbled tradition of "the two Sapphos", were repeatedly elaborated and sometimes conflated. Sappho was represented: as the first example of female poetic excellence; as an early exemplar of the "unnatural" or monstrous sexuality of the tribade; and as a mythologized figure who acts the suicidal abandoned woman in the Ovidian tale of Sappho and Phaon. Apart from the appeal of Sappho's poems to classicists and poets challenging themselves via translation and the use of Aeolian meter, Sappho's representation as an originary poetic figure has captured the imagination of many generations.