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Sappho: Girls
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Sappho is said to have been the daughter of Scamander and Cleïs and to have had three brothers. Attic comedy makes reference, in an apocryphal account, to her marriage to a wealthy merchant. There is a tradition that she was married to a certain Kerkylas of Andros, but that is likely to be a mere witticism, as the name means "prick from the Isle of Man."[2] Some translators have interpreted a poem about a girl named Cleïs as being evidence that she had a daughter by that name. It was a common practice of the time to name daughters after grandmothers, so there is some basis for this interpretation. But the actual Aeolic word pais was more often used to indicate a slave or any young girl, rather than a daughter. In order to avoid misrepresenting the unknowable status of young Cleïs, translator Diane Rayor and others, such as David Campbell, chose to use the more neutral word "child" in their versions of the poem.
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Sappho ran a girl's school back in ancient Greece and had a thing for the girls under her tutelage. This is not the only odd tale from those ancient girl's schools. After all, Achilles, who had been dipped in the River Styx to attain invulnerability (save for his heel), spent some time in just such a girl's school, though the girls there may have had different amusements. Achilles might have been able to pass as a girl if he didn't have much of a beard, but he didn't have any sexual identity problems, as Homer's Odysseus demonstrated in the Iliad.
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In celebrating marriage and wifehood with the epithalamia, Sappho encourages the girls to look forward to marriage as a happy time of life without fear. The school did not... necessarily suggest that the girls give up the love of other women, as shown in Sappho's own ability as a married woman to write about her love for women. Snyder continues:
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Sappho was apparently the leading personality among a circle of women and girls who must have comprised her audience. Whether she was in some formal sense their teacher or mentor remains unclear, but it seems unlikely that they were bound by a common cult of Aphrodite and the Muses, as has been suggested. She was on intimate terms with them and wrote with great simplicity but passionate intensity about her love (and occasionally her hate) for individuals. Her two most famous poems are, first, the address to Aphrodite mentioned above in which she summons the goddess in a style reminiscent of a cult-song and asks to be delivered from unrequited love for a girl; and secondly a declaration of love for a girl, the mere sight of whom moves Sappho intensely while a young man sitting beside her seems godlike in his indifference (Catullus translated this in his poem 51). There are no explicit references to physical relations in the surviving fragments, although the poet Anacreon a generation later seems to be indicating maliciously that the name of the island connotes female homosexuality. The Epithalamia are different in tone, in some ways more formal and less personal, and contain elements from Lesbian folk song; but they too have a deceptive simplicity.
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Sappho evokes aesthetics that trigger desire, such as the charming laughter of young women (fr. 31), the sight of a dress swirling around a girl’s ankles (fr. 22) and a girl’s sexy walk (fr. 16). She ... describes the violent effects of desire itself:
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Certain early twentieth century poets such as Renée Vivien, H.D., and Natalie Clifford Barney rejected the idea that Sappho killed herself because of Phaon. In Barney's Acts d'entr'actes, for example Sappho kills herself because of her love for a girl promised in marriage.[34]
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