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lesbos. Methuen. Sappho’s work was acclaimed by historians as “masculine” as her work referred to feelings of passion and love towards women, assuming that rather than being a queer woman, she was writing from the male perspective.

It is suspected that her work was ordered to be destroyed by the medieval church as a way to “suppress lesbian poetry.” (Joshua J. Mark) However historians combat this claim through the argument that the majority of her work may have been lost through lack of translation.

Sappho probably wrote around 10,000 lines of poetry; today, only about 650 survive. She is best known for her lyric poetry, written to be accompanied by music. The Suda also attributes to Sappho epigrams, elegiacs, and iambics; three of these epigrams are extant, but are in fact later Hellenistic poems inspired by Sappho, as are the iambic and elegiac poems attributed to her in the Suda.

Today, it is generally accepted that Sappho's poetry portrays homoerotic feelings: as Sandra Boehringer puts it, her works "clearly celebrate eros between women". Toward the end of the twentieth century, though, some scholars began to reject the question of whether or not 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", André Lardinois stated that it is "nonsensical" to ask whether Sappho was a lesbian, and Page duBois calls the question a "particularly obfuscating debate".

Little is known about Sappho's life for certain. She was from the island of Lesbos and was probably born around 630 BCE. Tradition names her mother as Cleïs, though ancient scholars may simply have guessed this name, assuming that Sappho's daughter Cleïs was named after her. Sappho's father's name is less certain. Ten names are known for Sappho's father from the ancient testimonia; this proliferation of possible names suggests that he was not explicitly named in any of Sappho's poetry.