Sappho and Ruth

It is natural to begin a study of sex variant women with Sappho, Greek lyric poet of the early sixth century B.C., whose name and that of her native island, Lesbos, have supplied our popular vocabulary with its terms for female homosexuality. Plato, who lived only two centuries later and probably knew her work almost completely, pronounced her the Tenth Muse, and, happily, the high quality of her verse led classical writers to quote it freely. For what with the hazards of time and later prejudice, the twelve thousand lines she is believed to have written are now lost save for these quoted excerpts and some fragments on papyri salvaged during modern excavations in Egypt. The few hundred surviving lines consist largely of lyrics addressed to girls, among them the famous “Ode” which has been pronounced the most economical description of passion to be found in literature. These verses will be considered presently.

An amazing quantity has been written about Sappho, translating and re-translating her poetry, eulogizing her poetic genius, and arguing hotly about her emotional life. An exhaustive bibliography would fill yet another volume. The ultimate source upon which all the rest is based may be consulted in the Loeb Classical Library’s Lyra Graeca,[1] where J. M. Edmonds gives (with translations) the text of all that is known of her poems, taking into account the latest archaeological findings, as well as every significant allusion to Sappho in classical literature from Plato to Suidas—some seventy references by more than forty authors. A more popular volume is that from the Peter Pauper Press (1948)[2] in which an anonymous compiler has assembled for each of Sappho’s poems and fragments the two or three soundest prose translations along with metrical versions by well-known English poets.

As is universally the case with persons so far removed in time, few details of the poet’s life are established beyond question. The most comprehensive biographical effort to date is Arthur Weigall’s Sappho of Lesbos, Her Life and Times (1932),[3] to which its author brings a wide knowledge of classical languages, history and geography. Although perhaps too conjectural in parts to satisfy the rigid scholar, this can be recommended for its careful documentation and its impartiality with regard to Sappho’s emotional temperament.

The best-authenticated facts seem to be that the poet was a small dark woman sometimes referred to as “ill-favored,” but endowed with sufficient grace and personal charm to inspire in several fellow countrymen and poets a passion which she did not reciprocate. She was of distinguished family and lived in a time of acute political strife. She suffered exile twice during her early years: once from Mitylene to the interior of the island of Lesbos, the second time to Sicily. Weigall believes she was already well-known as a poet before her Sicilian sojourn, and suggests that she may have spent her several years on the island in Sybaris, where she acquired something of that city’s brilliant sophistication. He places in this period also her marriage, probably of short duration, and the birth of her daughter Kleis to whom she was devoted throughout her life. After her return to Mitylene in her middle twenties she seems to have had constantly about her an ever-changing circle of younger women to whom she taught the verse-writing, music, and dancing which constituted a well-born girl’s preparation for marriage. Some of these pupils or protégées may have lived in her house; it is known they came from neighboring islands and mainland to be taught by her.

The incident most often connected with her name is her leap to death from the cliffs of Leucadia for unrequited love of a young ferryman, Phaon. Certain references in her work and that of others, however, indicate that she died peacefully at home at a relatively advanced age. In fact, modern scholars are inclined to pronounce the whole Phaon anecdote legendary; but since it persisted for a couple of millennia, Weigall attempts to demonstrate at least its possible truth. The tenacity with which the story has survived is undoubtedly due to Ovid’s incorporating it in his Heroides or Epistles of Heroines (15: “Sappho to Phaon”),[4] since, thanks to his romantic qualities, he was the most popular of all classical authors for several centuries after the Revival of Learning. Ovid’s epistle, though sympathetically written, represents Sappho as an aging and heartbroken woman deserted by her handsome young lover and still consumed by passion for him “as by a grass fire.” Ridiculed by friends, reproached by her brother for such despondency while she still has a living daughter, desperate over her waning charms, she can think only of suicide; and all this plaint she pours out in a letter to the man who has left her without even a farewell. The lament shows less restraint than any of Sappho’s known verse, for fervent though that often is, it never lacks dignity. There is always the chance, of course, that Ovid had access to poems now wholly lost and never mentioned elsewhere; it is certain that during the centuries immediately following her death Sappho was the subject of some dramatic works (possibly satiric) of which we now know only the author’s names, but which Ovid may have known.

Wherever responsibility lies, there was certainly a legend subsequent to Ovid’s day that two Sapphos had flourished in Lesbos, one the great poet and the other a courtesan of undisciplined habits. Weigall believes this tale was motivated by rumors of heterosexual irregularities, and was invented by her well-wishers to clear her name of their shadow. But one must consider also that during the period of this myth’s crystallization homosexuality in either sex was no longer tolerated as it had been (within limits) in the earlier Greek period. In Rome its practice among women was associated only with courtesans; thus it may equally well have been rumors of lesbian irregularity which gave rise to the conviction that she must have been a courtesan.

When one turns from personal conjecture about Sappho to the text of her work, one is left with no possible doubt about her variant tastes. Consider, for instance, the “Ode” mentioned above:

Few of her other poems equal this in intensity, and the textual evidences that its object was a woman (the gender of the name Brocheo being for a time in doubt) are meager enough so that during the years when homosexuality was a heinous offense scholars could translate it as addressed to a man without too great a strain on intellectual integrity. Discovery of the Oxyrinchus papyri, however, (so called from the Egyptian town where they were disinterred), added so much variant material to that already preserved in quotations that it rendered honest doubt of her variance impossible. In the many poems and fragments addressed to girls her ardor is evoked oftenest by maidenhood, its moving aspect not virginity so much as physical grace and delicacy and a certain light freedom of spirit. In one fragment, indeed, she describes herself as “eternally maiden” at heart.

There is no comparable evidence with regard to her feeling for men. Once, to be sure, in attempting to hearten a girl on the eve of her wedding, she says: “That night was sweet enough to me, neither have you, dear maid, anything to fear ...”[6] Again she writes to a man: “But if you love me, choose yourself a younger wife; for I cannot submit to live with one that is younger than I.”[7] And finally: “If my paps could still give suck and my womb were able to bear children, then would I come to another marriage bed with unfaltering feet; but nay, age now maketh a thousand wrinkles to go upon my flesh, and Love is in no haste to fly to me with his gift of pain ...”[8] (The complaint: “Sweet mother, I truly cannot weave my web; for I am overwhelmed through Aphrodite with love of a slender youth,” cannot be counted as significant, for it was rendered by one translator even before the Oxyrinchus discoveries as ending: “a slender maiden.”)[9] These are the total count of verses referring to heterosexual love, and there is nothing in them to match the “delicate fire” of the “Hymn to Aphrodite” imploring the goddess to soften the heart of a girl; or of the “Ode” quoted above; of the verses to Anactoria and Gongyla and the five poems to Atthis; or of the numerous fragments that glow with vivid delight in the beauty and love of girls. Significant too is the poem addressed to these girls in her old age. She laments her fading charms more bitterly even than in Ovid’s fictitious epistle, and ends:

Thus on internal evidence it appears that despite marriage and motherhood, opportunities for a second match, and much writing of conventional hymeneal verses, her lifelong preference was for women. Nor does the meager quantity of surviving verse disqualify such an assumption. A great part of it consists of quotations chosen by forty classical authorities on poetic style, who can scarcely be suspected of mass preference for variant subject matter. The remainder (barring one seventh century manuscript) comes from papyri which had been used to reinforce mummy-casings.[11] Altogether, no sounder random sampling could well be devised.

We have seen that during the later classical period Sappho was suspected of having been a courtesan, which in those times may also have implied lesbian activity. Just when lesbianism became the main charge against her has not been determined. To be sure, a heavy weight of disrepute fell upon her with the establishment of the Christian church, and led to the burning of her work more than once. This was ordered first about 380 A.D. by Gregory Nazianzen as the result of an earlier church father having pronounced her a gynaion pornikon erotomanes—lewd nymphomaniac—but the phrase does not necessarily imply lesbian excess. Subsequently Scaliger states that her books were burned in 1073 at both Rome and Constantinople, without specifying the reason.[12] As this date falls shortly after that on which the church had reimposed strict celibacy upon its clergy, it may be that society had been made sensitive to homosexual activity among celibates and turned its suspicion upon her also. But this last surmise defies proof.

The lesbian controversy became bitter only in the nineteenth century when homosexuality was a heated issue both in the English-speaking countries and on the continent, and Sappho’s champions felt impelled to prove her innocence. The sole outcome of the voluminous quarrel is certainty that the issue can never be finally resolved without the unearthing of fresh evidence. There is no specific mention of active lesbianism in her verse. By way of implication there are two or three references to her girls as her own or each other’s hetaerae, which, since it was the common term for courtesan, might be taken to connote physical intimacy. She also mentions more than once the “pure and beautiful things” they all did together, an emphasis which Weigall feels may imply that in her day rumor ran otherwise. But her defenders judge these and a few more tenuous allusions insufficient to support the charge against her. More definite is Maximus of Tyre’s statement, made without animus, that three girls (whom he names) were to Sappho what Alcibiades and others were to Socrates;[13] then there is the epithet mascula Sappho used by Horace,[14] and last, a reference in Ovid’s “Epistle” to “a hundred others [feminine] whom I have loved not without evil imputation.” Certain translators of Ovid, however, omit the not, thus completely reversing the sense of the phrase; thus neither reading carries any real weight.[15]

It was not until 1909 that so considerable an author as Rainer Maria Rilke ventured to exalt Sappho’s loves (without discussing their nature) as nearer the ‘divine intention’ than heterosexual passion, which he pronounced a ‘temporal interruption’ in the evolution of ideal human relations. Taking Ovid’s “Epistle” as a virtual translation from some vanished poem of Sappho’s, Rilke suggests that the original was a lament not for some actual lover, but for the nonexistent man who could satisfy her after her less sensual experience with girls.[16]

With this century’s increasing tolerance of all sorts of sexual freedom, prejudice has softened to a relatively untroubled acceptance of Sappho’s probable lesbianism, and to an effort to understand, rather than defend, such behavior. Weigall suggests that one description of her “tiny little body” implies underdevelopment and unfitness for easy childbearing, circumstances which psychiatrists consider likely to induce avoidance of heterosexual relations and motherhood. And Freudians might stress her devotion to her eldest brother, Charaxus. In two surviving poems she attacks him so harshly for marrying a beautiful Alexandrian courtesan, whose freedom he had purchased at great cost, that her vitriolic lines to him and the epithet “black she-dog” for his wife suggest acute jealousy as well as contempt.[17]

All this conjecture, like last century’s battles, proves little save the impossibility of objective judgment until new evidence appears. In accordance with the temper of our own time, we may leave it that Sappho was certainly variant, and, quite probably, what modern authorities term bisexual. She experienced marriage and motherhood, and may even have enjoyed other heterosexual relationships, but passion for her own sex inspired most of her poems, to judge from the surviving fragments. Furthermore these poems have been called by some critics the greatest love lyrics ever penned.

* * *

Though the work of Sappho provides a natural introduction, chronological precedence must be granted to the biblical Book of Ruth, written perhaps a few centuries earlier and describing events that antedated King David by three generations. This great short story, long acclaimed as a masterpiece of narrative art, is the first of a thin line of delicate portrayals, by authors seemingly blind to their full significance, of an attachment which, however innocent, is nevertheless still basically variant.

Certainly as an “anonymous but exact description of love” there are few passages in literature to rival Ruth’s appeal to Naomi beginning “Entreat me not to leave thee ...” To quote it is surely unnecessary, but let anyone who learned it in childhood, who has never subsequently considered it in the light of primitive tribal custom, reread it for the force of Ruth’s willingness to abandon not only her native soil and her own family but even her God and her hope of burial with her ancestors. The emotional significance of this passage is reinforced by three others in the story. Ruth and Orpah had been married “about ten years” at the time of their widowhood and of Naomi’s decision to return to Israel, so that Ruth was then at least in her twenties, and her devotion cannot be counted the clinging of a bereaved adolescent to her bridegroom’s mother. Orpah, moreover, remained in Moab without more than formal protest, and with apparently every prospect of finding a second husband there.

Then when Boaz welcomed Ruth among his gleaners because “it hath fully been shewed me, all that thou hast done unto thy mother-in-law,” the girl replied, “Let me find grace in thy sight, my lord, for that thou ... hast spoken to the heart of thy handmaiden.”[18] And, finally, when by carrying out implicitly Naomi’s clever scheme Ruth was taken as a wife and bore Boaz a son, “The women said to Naomi ... he shall be unto thee a restorer of life and a nourisher of thine old age; for thy daughter-in-law, which loveth thee, which is better to thee than seven sons, hath borne him.”[19]

Viewed without prejudice, this is a masterly portrait of a somewhat passive young woman, twice playing the heterosexual role with success, but dominated by another love at least as compelling as that for the men she successively married. H. M. and Nora K. Chadwick in their Growth of Literature point out that “it gives the impression of being written primarily for feminine circles,”[20] and by comparison with many treatments of the variant theme it might well also have been written by a woman.

* * *

After Sappho’s poetry and this one Hebrew prose masterpiece, little that is pertinent to our subject remains from the half dozen centuries preceding the Christian era. That male homosexuality was, within limits, an approved pattern in Greek life, and that it occurred in Rome whether approved or not, especially under the later emperors, are now accepted facts. About its prevalence among women less is known. From Plato and Euripides to Ovid, women as individual personalities did not often figure in well-known classical writing, and of women writers, though Mary Beard enumerates references to an impressive number,[21] most traces have vanished. A few fragments, however, and a few allusions to works never recovered, indicate that female variance existed.

Plutarch, for instance, tells us that Spartan girls under Lycurgan law received the same athletic training as boys and were encouraged in the same emotional expression.[22] Havelock Ellis (without citing his source) mentions Miletus along with Lesbos as favorable to female homosexuality.[23] The Greek Anthology includes some variant epigrams of Nossis from the lower Italian town of Locris, an imitator of Sappho, “one dear to the muses and equal to her.” From the same source we have Asclepiades’ epigram on the beautiful Dorcion who wore boy’s garments and “with the chlamys clearly revealing her naked thigh would flash the fire of love from her eyes,”[24] but this may have been merely a device to attract male attention since the costume described here was that of the ephebi—male homosexuals. Elsewhere both Ovid and Appolodorus recount that Caenis of Thessaly, having given herself to Poseidon, begged that in return she be changed into a man.[25] These last two, indicating nothing more specific than transvestism and dissatisfaction with a female role, are not too significant. Equally outside our scope because in the category of erotica, but written and illustrated by women, are lost manuals on erotic techniques of all sorts written respectively by Elephantis and Philaenis. The illustrations from the latter’s work are said to have been widely copied in the bedroom art of contemporary sophisticates.[26]

Weigall suggests that two of Sappho’s protégées, like her, celebrated love for women in their verses.[27] One is the Gyrinno to whom she was particularly attached, who died at nineteen. Weigall identifies her fairly plausibly with Erinna, a known poet from the island of Telos near Rhodes, whose work was highly regarded in her day, although only one poem of hers is known by name and all but a few lines are lost. These lines, however, lament the death of a loved girl, Baucis. The other poet, more certainly identified, is Damophyla of Pamphilia, who is known to have stayed with Sappho and to have written love poems and hymns to Artemis in imitation of her great model’s verse.

Mythology in Classical Authors

Secondary evidence that interest in female variance continued through the period is found in the myths as recounted by Greek and Latin writers at the beginning of the Christian era, though details of these stories are probably more characteristic of the writers’ own times than of earlier centuries. One finds as much variety in different authors’ treatment as is found between Malory’s and Tennyson’s versions of the Arthurian legends. From any great compilation such as the Mythology of All Nations or Fraser’s Golden Bough one learns that in all the interrelated Mediterranean mythologies there was at least one goddess among whose attributes were one or more of the following: virginity, aversion to male sexual approach, some masculinity in dress or interests (such as warfare or the hunt), intense fondness for maiden devotees, and a strict requirement of maidenhood in the latter. One finds also persistent legends of Amazons, exclusively female groups who suffered men only for procreative ends and made active war against the other sex[28] (cf. a random news note, April 1951, of a precisely similar legend from an island off the coast of Japan).[29] It is impossible to date the origin of these myths or to secure historical substantiation of the mores they reflect. But anthropologists assure us that female homosexuality is known in most primitive societies (e.g., there is a North American Indian legend of physical intimacy between two women which resulted in an amorphous birth),[30] and it seems likely that variant detail was current in early oral tradition but was omitted by writers to whom such phenomena was antipathetic, or eliminated by later censorship.

A comparison of the later classical writers supports this view. In Book XI of Vergil’s Aeneid one of the vivid personalities is Camilla, leader of a cavalry troop which figures brilliantly in the military action and of whose members many, if not at all, were women. Of her favorite comrade-in-arms, Camilla says only that she was like a sister to her. The goddess Diana is described as loving Camilla long and intensely, and, when the latter is slain by a sly and unheroic man, Diana lends her own bow and arrows to another protégé, Opis, so that this demigoddess may avenge the favorite’s death. But there is no mention of intimacy between the goddess and either Opis or Camilla.

Similarly the conscientious chronicler Apollodorus reports between Artemis and her nymph, Callisto, a great fondness terminated by the girl’s lapse from virginity;[31] and Iphigenia, whom Artemis rescued from the altar upon which her father was about to sacrifice her, was equally cherished.[32] Of Athene and her boon companion, Pallas, he tells us that in their girlhood they were so equally matched in the practice of arms that Zeus felt obliged one day to interpose his aegis between them lest his daughter be slain. As a result, Athene’s thrust killed Pallas, whereupon, overcome by grief, Athene herself fashioned a wooden statue of her friend, wrapped it in the aegis, set it up beside that of Zeus, and honored it as she did his image. Hence her later epithet, Pallas-Athene.[33] Apollodorus later illustrates Athene’s antipathy to the male by the Hephaestus story.[34] But with all these suggestive incidents he never mentions active variance in the goddess.

Ovid, on the other hand, offers two reports of variance. That it was not a personal obsession with him is proved by his treatment of those devotees of Diana, Atalanta and Daphne. Though the latter was so averse to the male that she prayed to be free of the beauty which made gods and men pursue her and was transmuted into a laurel tree,[35] no woman enters her story. The same is true of Atalanta,[36] “maidenly for a boy, boyish for a maiden,” her plainly dressed hair “caught up in one knot,” and a bow and quiver part of her usual costume. The story is well-known of her evading marriage by challenging all suitors to a footrace in which defeat meant death, but in the end she finally succumbed to the youth who secured Venus’s aid against her.

Concerning Callisto, however, of whom Apollodorus’s account is so bare, Ovid is much more specific.[37] Jove, smitten with the charms of the young huntress, knows that the sure means of approaching her is to assume his daughter Diana’s form. Thus disguised he says, “Dear maid, best loved of all my followers, where hast thou been hunting today?” and then “he kissed her lips, not modestly nor as a maiden kisses.” With neither protest nor surprise Callisto begins to recount her doings, and not until “he broke in upon her story with an embrace and by this outrage betrayed himself” does she recognize that her lover is not the goddess. When the results of Jove’s attentions become evident—amusingly enough Diana, the virgin, is the last to recognize the signs—the girl, though blameless, is expelled forever from the goddess’s train.

Then there is Ovid’s idyl of Iphis and Ianthe.[38] Iphis’s mother, while carrying her child, is warned by the father that if she bears a girl it will be subjected to death by exposure. Consequently she manages to conceal the child’s sex and raise it as a boy, giving it the name Iphis “which was of common gender.” From infancy, Iphis is the inseparable companion of a neighbor’s child, Ianthe, and by the time the two reach marriageable age, a little over thirteen, they are passionately in love. The two fathers have long since arranged a marriage. Iphis and her mother exhaust every pretext for delaying the ceremony, to the sorrow and anger of everyone else, for even Ianthe does not know her beloved’s true sex. Iphis spends long days lamenting the cruelty of Nature, which “surely never before has cursed a living creature with a love so monstrous.” Conscience bids her “do only what is lawful” and confine her love strictly “within a woman’s right.” She and her mother pray frantically to Isis for aid, to the end that when the wedding day can finally no longer be postponed Iphis is transformed at the altar into a boy, her voice deepening, her color darkening, and her body growing in muscular firmness. (As treated later by Antonius Liberalis[39] the heroine of this same plot is the mother, and the suspense centers wholly about her escaping her husband’s wrath, the daughter being of only incidental interest.)

In yet another of the Metamorphoses Ovid describes the birth of Hermaphroditus,[40] thus indicating that he was much interested in all variant phenomena, but from the quoted passage concerning Iphis’s pangs of conscience about expressing her love, it would seem that his approval of overt lesbianism was not unqualified.

Later Classical Literature

All the remaining variant tales in Latin literature deal with courtesans. Probably the best known is Juvenal’s scathing sixth Satire,[41] generally thought to have been directed against the empress Messalina, who figures in the text as Saufeia. It describes orgiastic rites in honor of the Bona Dea during which women of the highest social rank vie with prostitutes in erotic skill and endurance, with Saufeia bearing off the palm. The performance ends with a frantic search for men, since lesbianism alone cannot satisfy the participants.

With a much lighter touch Martial in the course of his Epigrams describes unflatteringly two women who on his evidence would modernly be classed as hermaphrodites. One, Bassa,[42] has gained an irreproachable reputation by admitting no men to her house as either lovers or servants, but the initiated know that with her feminine domestic staff she practices every license. The other, Philaenis, the erotic writer mentioned earlier, exceeds men in her prowess with women, and also takes the active part in sodomy with boys.[43] Although Dioscorides has denied in his epitaph in the Greek Anthology[44] that she wrote the “obscene book” attributed to her, Martial’s repeated references throughout the Epigrams suggest that enough smoke hung over her in his day to justify the suspicion of fire. The specific sexual exercise implied by both Juvenal and Martial is tribadism, and there is mention in Juvenal as elsewhere of the olisbos employed by women less well equipped for a male role than Bassa and Philaenis. Both authors purported to describe actual persons and conditions immediately preceding the Christian era.

A couple of centuries later we find fictional contributions from the minor Greek authors, Lucian and Alciphron, both of whom claimed to be writing about a period nearer that of Plato. Though doubtless they had at hand more literature from the century in question than has been available since, a glance at historical fiction from medieval romance to modern novel will remind us that the life pictured is probably much nearer to that of their own time.

Lucian, in his Dialogues of Hetaerae,[45] presents a tale told to her lover by a flute-girl hired as entertainer by two wealthy lesbians, one a Corinthian. After the banquet the hostesses persuade Leana to stay and share their bed, sleeping between them. The Corinthian removes a feminine wig to display close-cropped hair, and vaunts her ability to give amatory satisfaction. Physically she is entirely feminine, but she protests that “in my feelings and passions I am altogether a man.” Leana admits to have received proof of this, but when pressed for detail by her lover she says, “Now you want to know too much. It was rather nasty business. No, by the Goddess! I won’t tell you any more.” She has already gone far enough, however, to imply tribadism and to hint at cunnilingus.

In a later Dialogue, a lover accuses his mistress of having slept the previous night with another man. He says that stealing to her chamber to surprise her, he hoped the companion he found there was only her maid, but his exploring hand discovered a cropped head. She replies that it was her girl friend whose hair has been cut because of illness and who hides her disfigurement by day with a wig. The gentleman apparently takes no exception to this explanation, though whether the lover was maid or girl friend, the implication is obvious. Lucian’s own attitude may or may not be that of the male lover of women in his Amores.[46] In the course of a long debate with a pederast on the relative merits of the two modes of sexual experience, the champion of heterosexual love says: “If it is becoming for men to have intercourse with men, then for the future let women have it with women ... girding themselves with their infamous instruments of lust ... in a word, let our wanton tribades reign unchecked.”

As to Alciphron, in his Letters from Town and Country (2:12)[47] he describes a day-long picnic to which a courtesan has invited her friends at her lover’s villa. After a meal of oysters and lettuce, “the sort Aphrodite is said to love,” the guests pair off, a few with their male lovers, the rest with women partners “of random choice,” and drift away into surrounding thickets. Whether the feminine coupling is from preference or faute de mieux is not made exactly clear. The author neither expresses nor implies any judgment on the activity portrayed.

That gleanings should be so comparatively meager from a full millennium is scarcely surprising in the light of later history. After the collapse of Roman power, repeated waves of barbarian invasion, famine, and plague reduced both social organization and literature to only what could be salvaged in the growing Christian monasteries. As the spoken language drifted into dialects of unlettered vernacular, churchmen clung to Latin as the medium of communication, but they withheld classical belles-lettres from laymen for many centuries and undoubtedly winnowed and expurgated it. Deeply ingrained in Christian morality were several factors making for obliteration of anything sympathetic to female variance. One was general asceticism, a natural reaction from Roman excesses during the later Empire. Another was the animus against all homosexuality which Christianity inherited from Hebrew mores. A third was the intolerance toward women in any sexual role, largely chargeable to the strong anti-feminine bias of St. Paul.

From the surviving classical records of variance the policy of later censors is easy to deduce. Ovid’s tales stop short of objectionable detail and in any event include only mythical characters. Juvenal and Martial are vitriolic or contemptuous, Lucian and Alciphron are talking of courtesans. Sappho survives only in such fragments as were embedded in otherwise valued treatises. Any sympathetic treatments of lesbian love have been eradicated.

Even in the few scattering survivals, however, we find a great variety of persons: goddess, empress, great literary artist, wealthy sophisticate, courtesan, and bucolic adolescent. Their experience ranges from depraved exhibitionism through proud assumption of masculinity or unashamed feminine passion, to naïve and troubled innocence (or in the case of Ruth to devotion unconscious of its own deeper significance.) All of these types of personality and experience recur often in later literature, in such guises that it is sometimes difficult to be sure whether they are grounded in observation of universal human behavior, or in admiring imitation of ancient models.