When we think of ancient Greece, a myriad of male names come to mind: Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Epicurus, etc. Whether in politics, philosophy, mathematics or literature, the truth is that few female names stand out. And it’s not just in Greece, it’s throughout our history. Among all these masculine names, there is one that shines with its own light: Safo de Lesbos.
Toad of Mytilene, Toad of Lesbos or sometimes only Safo . . . Different variations for a woman. A woman whose poetry we know is fragmented, silenced by time.
We know only a few facts about his life; everything we know is nothing but assumptions from his verses.
Safo’s poetry is an exclusively feminine poetry, where everything related to the masculine is prohibited, strength, hardness, the attitudes most associated with men have no place in her verses.
We keep only a small part of his entire production, but Safo’s poetry is so important that it gives name to a type of verse and verse: the sadistic stanza and the sadistic stanza.
Homosexuality, femininity, poetry and silence? His poetry is still silenced today, both in time and in the classroom. There is little talk about Safo and his poems are not recited.
Silence has marked the poetry of this woman whose life remains in mystery, idyllic and hypothetical, for very little is known about her.
“In anger, nothing better than silence. ” Sappho?
We are aware of the great importance of Safo already in ancient Greece, because it was included in the list of the nine lyrical poets, list of poets considered canonical, these authors worthy of study and whose work must be imitated. Her influence was such that Plato even listed her as the tenth muse.
Safo lived most of his life on the Greek island of Lesbos between the 7th and 6th centuries BC. They also say he spent little time in Sicily.
She belonged to the aristocracy and founded a school or a circle of women known as the “House of the Muses”. Other women belonging to the aristocracy attended this school, where they prepared for marriage, but also learned poetry, made crowns, etc.
Have some researchers identified any religious components in? The House of the Muses?Related to the cult of the goddess Afrodita. La Safo’s poetry is closely related to this goddess, and so the poem Ode aphrodite was born.
This school can be compared, in a way, to the Platonic Academy, but exclusively for women, who in addition to wedding odes compose other kinds of poems, study dance, art, etc.
Unlike other nuclei that prepared young women for marriage, at Safo School, motherhood was not so celebrated, but love.
Women were not only relegated to procreation, but sought to approach beauty, pleasure and love, all this is reflected in their poetry, something that contrasts with male poetry, centered on heroes and wars.
Safo’s poetry is characterized by perfection, being intimate and sentimental, in clear contrast to epic male poetry. In a militarized society, Safo saves love, the feminine, moves away from politics and envelops us with great sensuality.
If in his poetry “politics has no place”, it is thought that he had a certain political involvement, supporting the aristocracy against democracy (understood in the context of the time, not in the present). It was this rebellious attitude that supposedly sent her into exile in Sicily.
In his verses we see that Safo had relations with some of his students, it is said that he also had sex with men and even had a daughter, contrary to what would happen centuries later, at that time homosexual relations were not so doomed. .
Safo can be seen as a revolutionary, for she walked away from what epic poetry dictated at the time and was true to herself, with intimate, erotic and sensitive poetry.
Safo de Lesbos modified the Wind Verse and was the forerunner of what is now known as Sadist Verse. The sefic stanza consists of four verses: three sefic decasyllables and an adonic pentasyllab.
According to the DRAE, the sylaptic verse is: “In Greek and Latin poetry, a verse composed of eleven syllables spread over five feet”. Safo not only revolutionized the subject of poetry, but also innovated its form.
With the rise of Christianity and, above all, in the Middle Ages, many of Safo’s verses were lost, burned or forbade.
Despite the silence imposed, Sappus survived and some later authors, such as Petrarch, Byron or Leopardi, did not let their figure fall into oblivion. It is no coincidence that Catulo chose Lesbians as the name of his beloved, in clear reference to the island of Lesbos.
We know several muses in his poetry, but especially Atthi, to whom he dedicated several verses. The poem Farewell to Atthi recounts Safo’s suffering when Atthi is sent to marry a man, this love is reciprocal, and the two feel pain during separation.
The love of Safo is not unreal, it is not a contemplation like many male authors, but it is related to the person himself.
In the Oda Aphrodite, Safo proposes a new revolution: does he speak of jealousy, of desire, of sadness?This kind of feeling was not covered in ancient Greece and was relegated to the divine. For the Greeks, the explanation for these feelings never came from the countryside. “
However, Safo goes further and fuses the earth with the divine, in the poem he begs Aphrodite to help her, because she is in love with a woman who ignores her, repents and asks for help.
When we talk about lesbian love or sadistic love, we mean Safo of Lesbos. Hence the meaning of “love between two women”. Love was at the heart of his poetry and also the reason for his silence.
This love was a pure, individual and elevated feeling, worthy of the most cultivated poetry. Contrary to what will be understood in the following centuries, the sadistic love was not low, it was neither vulgar nor purely sexual, but refined. House of the Muses?
Such a tender figure, so simple in his language, capable of mixing the earth with the divine, could not have a sudden end, so his death was mythologized and certainly told in a way away from reality.
Ovid and many other Greek and Latin poets have published a false legend about Safo’s death: It was said that Safo was in love with Faon and, in his desperate passion, had committed suicide by throwing himself into the sea from a rock in Leecade.
This mythical and romantic image contrasts with one of the last poems he was able to reconstruct from Safo himself, a poem in which he talks about old age and the passage of time, in which he reflects on the youth of his students and the aging of children. his own body.
Without a doubt, Safo is a figure who, far from being silenced, deserves to be recited, celebrated and vindicated as a woman who, in ancient times, managed to live as she wanted, enjoy the love, poetry and companionship of her students.
“Your beautiful sparrows have descended from the sky, in the air stirred by the rapid flapping of your wings. ?Safo?”