Sex & The Book / When eros becomes obsession. Jealousy, abandonment and lesbian love in Sappho's verses

On the island of Lesbos, around 610 BC C., Sappho, the legendary poetess of Eros, was born. Of course, a long time has passed and there are many more or less reliable stories concerning his life that have come down to us. We know for sure that she was still a child orphan of her father and that she married a very rich man in Mytilene with whom she had a daughter, Cleide, to whom she dedicated wonderful verses. Due to the political clashes that shook Lesbos in those years, he spent a period in exile in Sicily, before returning to Mytilene after 590. According to a legend reported by various sources and immortalized by Ovid in his Heroides, Sappho would have committed suicide by launching herself from the cliff of Lafkada for the love of Phaon, a beautiful boatman who would have refused her. To historians it has always seemed an unreliable story.

It seems to me similar to the gods that man who sits in front of you
and close listen to you that you speak softly
and laugh a laugh that arouses desire.
This vision really made my heart jump in my chest:
as soon as I look at you for a brief moment, nothing is more possible for me to say,
but my tongue breaks and immediately a thin fire runs under my skin and with my eyes I see nothing
and the ears roar
and the sweat spreads over me and a tremor seizes me all over
and I am greener than grass and not far from death I seem to myself.
But everything can be endured, since ...

In Mytilene Sappho was engaged in a particular activity: she dedicated herself to the direction of a female community in which groups of girls were educated in beauty, refinement, art, elegance - in short, all those values ​​required in society. to an aristocratic woman. It was inevitable that sapphic loves, passions, preferences and jealousies were born within such a microcosm all female. And this is the Eros that the poetess, with delicate yearning, describes to us in her compositions, of which we unfortunately only have a part and often in fragments.

The poem you have read is fragment 31, also renamed Ode of jealousy. The scene is the following: Sappho observes a girl chatting amiably with a man, a man so handsome that he looks like a god, and he doesn't take it well at all. The girl in question probably belongs to the female community directed by the poet herself and is about to abandon her to marry the disturbing intruder. Here then is that Sappho witnesses the flirtation and it is not clear if the terrible suffering that makes her flesh tremble, breaks her tongue, makes her sweat and turn pale, is due to jealousy or to the simple sexual excitement that the vision of the beautiful nymphet ignites in she. What is certain is that the suffering of love does not spare her, on the contrary, it is so strong that it makes her believe she is even close to death. But everything can be endured, since ... behold, why? The fragment stops at the most beautiful.

If Sappho possessed the secret to endure jealousy and the pain of abandonment, we would have liked to know it. And then we just have to hypothesize. In a network of complex feelings, ambiguity and widespread eroticism such as the one that held the commune of Lesbos, the ignition of desire is a moment, a glance is enough, and perhaps passion can find fulfillment even only in itself, in contemplating a smile, the pure beauty of the coveted body. It is clear that you have to be a poet to make it enough.

by Giuliana Altamura

Opening photo taken from the film Viola di Mare, © Medusa Film, which tells of the love of two young women in nineteenth-century Sicily

Here you can read the previous appointment with the column, Sex & The Book / The farewell between two lovers, the end of passion and the death of eros according to Marguerite Duras

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