ABSTRACT
One of the most famous poets of antiquity, Sappho was born on the Ionian island of Lesbos and lived in the city of Mytilene during the late 7th and 6th centuries BC. Some fragments of poetry remain of other female poets such as Corinna, but Sappho is main female voice from ancient Greece. Her songs provide us a window into the world women inhabited in Greece’s largely sex-segregated society. Sappho shows us an actively desiring Helen, who abandons her husband, parents and daughter to be with her beloved Paris. Some say a host of horses, some say an army of infantry, and some say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing on the black earth. Sappho selects, combines, and exaggerates bodily reactions to sexual desire, yet she leaves the speaker’s intellectual capacity intact and unaffected, whereas in other poems the lover’s intellect is shattered or otherwise rendered ineffective.
