ABSTRACT
Sappho may have been married and had a daughter named Cleis although this is not certain. Sappho was a famous poet in her own day. Her work survives only in fragments but many of these are concerned with love for young girls. Sappho appears to have had a circle of young unmarried aristocratic girls whom she may have taught the arts of beauty, music, poetry, and dance. She repeatedly invoked the goddess of love and sexuality, Aphrodite. Sappho’s surviving fragments centre on the delights of the sensual world. Her name is the source of the phrase ‘sapphic love’ and her birthplace Lesbos lent the term ‘lesbian’ to homosexual women.
