The word lesbian is an allusion to Sappho, originating from the name of the island of Lesbos, where she was born.[o][136] However, though in modern culture Sappho is seen as a lesbian,[136] she has not always been considered so. In classical Athenian comedy (from the Old Comedy of the fifth century to Menander in the late fourth and early third centuries BC), Sappho was caricatured as a promiscuous heterosexual woman,[137] and the earliest surviving sources to explicitly discuss Sappho's homoeroticism come from the Hellenistic period. The earliest of these is a fragmentary biography written on papyrus in the late third or early second century BC,[138] which states that Sappho was "accused by some of being irregular in her ways and a woman-lover".[139] Denys Page comments that the phrase "by some" implies that even the full corpus of Sappho's poetry did not provide conclusive evidence of whether she described herself as having sex with women.[140] These ancient authors do not appear to have believed that Sappho did, in fact, have sexual relationships with other women, and as late as the 10th century the Suda records that Sappho was "slanderously accused" of having sexual relationships with her "female pupils".[141]
Among modern scholars, Sappho's sexuality is still debated – André Lardinois has described it as the "Great Sappho Question".[142] Early translators of Sappho sometimes heterosexualised her poetry.[143] Ambrose Philips' 1711 translation of the Ode to Aphrodite portrayed the object of Sappho's desire as male, a reading that was followed by virtually every other translator of the poem until the 20th century,[144] while in 1781 Alessandro Verri interpreted fragment 31 as being about Sappho's love for Phaon.[145] Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker argued that Sappho's feelings for other women were "entirely idealistic and non-sensual",[146] while Karl Otfried Müller wrote that fragment 31 described "nothing but a friendly affection":[147] Glenn Most comments that "one wonders what language Sappho would have used to describe her feelings if they had been ones of sexual excitement", if this theory were correct.[147] By 1970, the psychoanalyst George Devereux argued that the same poem contained "proof positive of [Sappho's] lesbianism".[148]
Today, it is generally accepted that Sappho's poetry portrays homoerotic feelings:[149][150] as Sandra Boehringer puts it, her works "clearly celebrate eros between women".[151] Toward the end of the 20th century, though, some scholars began to reject the question of whether Sappho was a lesbian – Glenn Most wrote that Sappho herself "would have had no idea what people mean when they call her nowadays a homosexual",[147] André Lardinois stated that it is "nonsensical" to ask whether Sappho was a lesbian,[152] and Page duBois calls the question a "particularly obfuscating debate".[153] Some scholars believe that though Sappho would not have understood modern conceptions of sexuality, lesbianism has always existed and she was fundamentally a lesbian. Others, influenced by Michel Foucault's work on the history of sexuality, believe that it is incoherent to project the concept of lesbianism onto an ancient figure like Sappho.[150] Melissa Mueller argues that Sappho's poetry can be read as queer even if the question of her lesbianism is undecidable.[154]
