Ancient Greece · c. 630–570 BC
Sappho: the poet who gave love between women its name
Dear reader,
The ancient Greeks called her the tenth Muse. Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos around 600 BC and wrote nine books of poetry. Almost all of it is gone. What we have are fragments: a few lines on a scrap of papyrus used to wrap a mummy, a stanza quoted by a grammarian centuries later, a single complete poem.
And yet she gave the world two words. Sapphic and lesbian both come from her and her island, because what survives of her writing is, unmistakably, desire between women.
In her most famous fragment she watches a woman she loves laughing with a man. She describes what it does to her body: her tongue breaks, a thin fire runs under her skin, her eyes see nothing, her ears hum. It may be the most precise description of jealousy ever written, and it is twenty-six centuries old.
There is something we love about the fact that her work reaches us broken. A message that survived anyway, torn at the edges, missing half its words, still perfectly clear about the one thing that mattered.
That is what a carrier pigeon was for. Not the long letter. The few lines that could not wait.
Boté shows love in every form, between men and between women. Sappho was saying so long before any of us.
With love, from the messenger,
Boté