The Erotic Reception of Sappho

In a contemporary world where desire is grounded in the visual, consumable, and a performance for external affirmation, it is tempting to imagine a new world. Could we perhaps find this in pre-modern articulations of eroticism? In the writings of Sappho of Lesbos, we encounter radically different ways of imagining the erotic: deeply interior, fragmented, embodied and atmospheric. Shown through her lyric fragments 94 and 96, Sappho gives us an image of love that is reciprocal rather than hierarchical, intimate rather than performative. Two thousand years ago, Sappho already imagined a future where desire could be felt, rather than performed. 

Though Sappho’s writings have been widely reclaimed in queer discourse, representations of Sappho today often rely on anachronistic readings that obscure both the nuanced affective dynamics of her poetry and the historical ambiguity surrounding her erotic subjectivity. 

Ancient audiences did not interpret Sappho’s verses as confessions of same-sex identity. The terms lesbian and sapphism - coined in the nineteenth century - retroject modern taxonomies of sexuality onto a cultural context where such categories did not exist. As Boehringer  (2015) notes, Sappho was not moralised for her erotic verse until the Roman imperial period, and even then, her verses were not condemned for their homoerotic subtext. Indeed, early uses of the term lesbian in the Greek Classical and Roman Imperial period, denoted only practices of sexualised performance and oral sex by women on men, with no firm connection to Sappho herself (Hallett, 1979, p. 451). Later Classical period writers were more troubled by her exceptional position as a female poet, underhandedly positioning her as a “tenth muse”, as Plato names her, rather than a mortal equal to male lyricists. While contemporary queer communities have celebrated Sappho as an ancestral figure, this can obscure the nuance of her erotic world.

To understand Sappho’s erotics, we must consider the form through which it is voiced: lyric poetry. In Archaic Greece, eros was not a fixed expression of sexuality but an ephemeral, affective force - and lyric was its ideal medium. Unlike the grand, public mode of epic, lyric poetry thrived in intimate performative settings, sung with the lyre, in ritual or symposium. Du Bois notes that Sappho’s lyric project carved out a personal erotic voice in a world where poetic representation had been the domain of male heroic tradition (Du Bois, 1995). Lyric further refused to differentiate desire by gender - a fact that makes it radically queer in form. As Boehringer (2015) notes, “nothing within the ensemble of melic poetry from the Archaic period expresses a difference in the nature of desire that arises between two women, between a woman and a man, or between two men”. Eros simply is - a “desire [that] gnaws” at a “slender breast” (Fragment 96), sometimes communal, sometimes solitary, but never tied to a fixed erotic taxonomy. 

Today, erotic expression too is, in ways, a performance - but one shaped by visibility and commodification. As Mulvey’s (1975) foundational analysis of the “male gaze” suggests, women are consistently positioned as objects of visual pleasure - subjects to be looked at, rather than individuals who desire. Erotic capital, further, becomes a contemporary form of social currency, one that prioritises surface, marketability, and legibility over interior feeling (Hakim, 2011). On dating apps and social media of today, desire is commodified into profiles, swipes, and curated aesthetics - an eroticism, perhaps, not of presence, but of performance.

Sappho’s erotic poetics resist this economy. Instead, they invoke sound (“found in your singing her deepest delight”, Fragment 96), touch (“garlands… you have cast round your delicate neck”, Fragment 94), and atmosphere. She offers grief so intimate it collapses the distinction between longing and existential despair - “I wish I were dead” (Fragment 94). Here, queer affect that resists closure, reflecting what de Lauretis calls the lesbian “space-off” - an erotic, emotional zone that exists outside of dominant heterosexual scripts (de Lauretis, 1987). Thus, ‘sapphic’ desire is not designed for an external gaze but expressed as something vehemently inward - achingly raw, never ornamental. Her erotic world is not simply about being seen, but about feeling deeply. 

Yet this economy of desire is not entirely new. Foucault (1980) saw ancient Greek sexuality as likewise structured by visibility and hierarchy, but by centering erastes-eromenos  between a younger and older partner, he reduced desire to an exchange of power, overlooking the possibility of female erotic subjectivity. Feminist theorists de Lauretis and Benjamin have challenged this phallic economy, proposing instead an intersubjective model of relation - “where two subjects meet”.

It is here that Sappho’s lyric voice feels radical. Her fragments reimagine eroticism as mutual, tender, and embodied. In Fragment 94, “garlands of flowers… placed around your soft neck” express an erotics of adornment and care; in 96, a woman “like a goddess revealed in splendour… found in your singing her deepest delight.” These are scenes of reciprocity, not conquest.

Against the grain of phallic dominance and linear pursuit, Sappho proposes a model rooted in mutuality, memory, and the entanglement of selves. Her language dissolves boundaries between “I” and “you,” between desire and its satisfaction, between past presence and present absence - opening a space for female desire that is neither mimetic nor defined by lack, but by plenitude and intimacy. By refusing to anchor eroticism in identity or spectacle, Sappho’s fragments subvert the visual economies and taxonomies that shape modern sexual discourse. 

In a world where sexuality is about display, Sappho’s fragments offer a hopeful alternative. Sappho’s poetry is a living testament to the possibility of desire as fleeting yet whole, tender and enduring presence, a fragmentary corpus of ancient desire which may continue to shape how we imagine and iconise lesbian love. A voice from antiquity still whispering to hearts today. 

Author bio

Elisha Sellick is a third year student of English Literature and Classics at the University of Edinburgh. Her work explores the intersections of ancient thought, queer theory, and contemporary culture, tracing how fragments of antiquity still speak to the intimate politics of desire today. She wrote this essay for the course Introduction to Queer Studies. Huge thanks to the course organiser Dr Merlyn Seller and tutor Moss Pepe for their insight and encouragement, and to the ever-growing field of queer and gender theory for inspiring the ideas explored here. 

References

Boehringer, Sandra, et al. “The Age of Love: Gender and Erotic Reciprocity in Archaic Greece.” Clio: Women, Gender, History, vol. 2015/2, no. 42, 2015, pp. 25-52. CAIRN.INFO, shs.cairn.info/journal-clio-women-gender-history-2015-2-page-25?lang=en.

de Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender. Indiana University Press, 1987.

du Bois, P. Sappho Is Burning. University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, Vintage Books, 1980.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume 2, The Use of Pleasure. Translated by Robert Hurley, Vintage Books, 1985.

Hakim, Catherine. Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital. Allen Lane, 2011.

Hallett, Judith P. “Sappho and Her Social Context: Sense and Sensuality.” Signs, vol. 4, no. 3, 1979, pp. 447–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173393.

Skinner, Marilyn B. “Woman and Language in Archaic Greece, or, Why Is Sappho a Woman?” Feminist Theory and the Classics, edited by Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin, 1st ed., Routledge, 1993, pp. 20–37. Taylor and Francis Group, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315831862-9/woman-language-archaic-greece-sappho-woman-marilyn-skinner.

Sappho. "Fragment 94." Love Shook My Senses: Lesbian Love Poems, edited by Gillian Spraggs, The Women’s Press, 1998.

Sappho. "Fragment 96." Love Shook My Senses: Lesbian Love Poems, edited by Gillian Spraggs, The Women’s Press, 1998.