Ancient Greek poet and songstress, Sappho of Lesbos, is best known for her homoerotic verse. Sappho didn’t argue about serious philosophical topics like ethics or the nature of truth; in fact, she didn’t argue about anything. This doesn’t mean her thoughts and reflections should not be taken seriously, or that her standing as a thinker is any less important than her reputation as a lyric poet.
We must be careful to treat Sappho as we have learned to treat the rest of the earliest Greek thinkers—the so-called Presocratics. Not unlike the Presocratics, only a fraction of Sappho’s work survives today, and we rely on surviving fragments, together with testimonia about her work from later thinkers. We must also realize that most of what she wrote, which could be upwards of eight papyrus scrolls, is completely lost. Not unlike the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus, who wrote aphoristically, or an epic poet like Homer who wrote in meter, it is also important to keep in mind that Sappho’s poetry was written to be sung to music. Like Heraclitus and Homer, she used certain words because they were playing a double role—one, in terms of meaning and communication, and another in terms of syllabic fit for a certain melody or tone.
Was Sappho a “philosopher”? That depends on what you mean by “philosopher.” Philosophy was a term developed during the time that early Greek thought was underway. It was a name to describe the activity of “loving wisdom.” We know from later thinkers, both in the Classical period of ancient Greece (ca. 3rd century BCE) and from the Hellenistic period, that Sappho’s poems were well-known and popular. Even the greatest ancient Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, referred to Sappho in their work.
One way of understanding a “love of wisdom” is in terms of the beginning of philosophy, which is often attributed to a contemporary of Sappho’s in the 6th c. BCE, Thales of Miletus. Thales, along with subsequent thinkers prior to Plato, was known for doing physio-logos, or working to understand the meaning of nature. These early philosophers developed rational explanations for natural phenomena previously attributed to “the gods”. They illustrated a love of wisdom by working within the bounds of human reason and experience to explain causation and work toward universal principles. Sappho did not love wisdom in this way, but this is not to say she didn’t love wisdom.
According to some schools of thought, loving wisdom does not entail a specific way of loving wisdom. While formal logic and rigorous method are often employed in philosophy, and are typically traced back to Aristotle, they are not the sufficient conditions for loving wisdom, or even for uncovering truth. Even implied or indirect searching for truth can be philosophical. It can also be erosophical.
The Greek word philia, which is at the heart of the word “philosophy,” is only one of six Greek terms for love. It connotes a love born of friendship. Such a love isn’t fraught with impatience; it isn’t typically personal; as Aristotle shows in the Metaphysics, it likely comes from wonder and curiosity. As philosophers going back to Plato have pointed out, there are other ways to “love” wisdom. For example, the Greek word, eros, meaning a desirous type of love, could be driving someone toward wisdom. In the Symposium, Plato’s Socrates describes eros as coming from a lack and always having an object. We might say it comes from a need rather than a curiosity. According to earlier research on Plato’s use of both terms, philia and eros both require rationality and love, but philia entails more rationality. Desire, which is found to be more prominent in eros than philia is nevertheless still required for philia. We might consider someone interested in wisdom, fueled by a love and intense personal desire for wisdom about someone or something in particular an “erosopher”.
It might come as a surprise that, In the Symposium, Socrates announces the only thing he knows is the art of eros. Didn’t he tell us in the Apology that he knows nothing? In the Symposium passage, there is a play on words between eros and the Greek term for asking questions. In short, Socrates might be suggesting that asking questions is the art of eros, and we know he knew how to ask questions! I consider this the “Socratic” interpretation. Another way to understand the passage is that Socrates understands an analogical, rather than a literal, link between eros and asking questions. As questions seek answers, eros seeks to know someone or something. The wisdom eros seeks, at least in some contexts, is not expressible in language or verifiably true. Loving wisdom about someone or something in particular is eventful, open-ended, and dynamic. I call this the “Sapphic” interpretation.
Sappho was both a philosopher and an erosopher. She was an erosopher because her songs disclose her longing for past loved ones to be present once again. She doesn’t seek analytical wisdom about these beings, or details about their causation or mechanism. Rather, she desires the wisdom that can only come from their presence. She wants to experience other beings, and this is her way of knowing the other, herself, and mortal humans generally. On the other hand, Sappho did seem to have something more reflective worked out about temporality, as a result of her desires for closeness with other humans.
To be more specific, Sappho was a philosopher of time in the same way I have argued we should understand Aristotle as a philosopher of time. Aristotle was primarily concerned with understanding natural beings, and this pursuit brought him to discuss the being of time. Sappho was an erosopher of being, whose repeated insights about the relationship between time and beings amounted to a philosophy of time.
Classicist Eva Stehle has shown the role temporal markers play in the “New Sappho”. For example, in the “Tithonus” poem, Sappho’s meditation on human mortality deploys a contrast between the past and present. Sappho’s use of the Greek terms for “once,” signifying what Stehle calls the “mythic past,” and “now,” or the present moment of Sappho’s singing and recollection, evinces a complex time concept—both irretrievably connected to her perceptions, memories, desires, and emotions and having complete objective power over all humans, even immortals like Tithonus. On the one hand, time is a being itself; it is in control. Time destroys our bodies but also helps us to become mature and wise. On the other hand, time is part of, or a derivative of, Sappho’s cognitive life. Its meaning and substance come from Sappho’s own lament about aging. Sappho gives time life by giving examples of what it is responsible for, and she is able to do this only by way of memory, contrast, and reflection.
Fragment 1, likely the one extant song from Sappho, gives us a further sense of the sophisticated temporality at play in Sappho’s songs. The temporal language noted by Stehle in the “New Sappho” appears here, too. The subject, however, is more recognizably “Sapphic”—it recounts the loss of love and declares the desire for the love to return. In this sense, it contrasts not only the past and present, but also the future. In this poem, we get a better picture not only of the philosopher, but of the erosopher.
On the throne of many hues, Immortal Aphrodite, child of Zeus, weaving wiles: I beg you, do not break my spirit, O Queen, with pain or sorrow but come—if ever before from far away you heard my voice and listened, and leaving your father’s golden home you came, your chariot yoked with lovely sparrows drawing you quickly over the dark earth in a whirling cloud of wings down the sky through midair, suddenly here. Blessed One, with a smile on your deathless face, you ask what have I suffered again and why do I call again and what in my wild heart do I most wish would happen: “Once again who must I persuade to turn back to your love? Sappho, who wrongs you? If now she flees, soon she’ll chase. If rejecting gifts, soon she’ll give. If not loving, soon she’ll love. Even against her will.” Come to me now—release me from these troubles, everything my heart longs To have fulfilled, fulfill, and you Be my ally. (25-26)
Reading Sappho’s song, even in translation, evokes emotions. She objectifies the subjective: lyricizing her own feelings in a way so relatable that they seem universal. In fact, given that extramarital homosexual love was common for both women and men in ancient Greek culture, Sappho’s bold expressions might have given voice to these relationships: to these ways of loving wisdom. Though Sappho was sometimes dismissed or condemned by later thinkers and traditions for loving other women, she was a teacher and a leader in her own time and has endured as such across historical periods. Other women learned from her, prominent men considered her songs “sublime,” and Plato referred to her as the “tenth muse.” Today, Sappho’s lyrics continue to provide a beacon for anyone who has desired to love another, regardless of sex or gender.
In these fragments, Sappho entreats Aphrodite, the Goddess of desirous love to bring her beloved back. Sappho isn’t asking for just any love. It is the age-old story of lovers parted with the hope of reunion. She remembers a past lover whom she continues to desire and whose presence she urgently requests. The lover-beloved relationship is dynamic and iterative. It is of the past and yet remains unfinished, capable of beginning again in the future. Sappho communicates her desires in the moments the song is sung, and Aphrodite affirms the futural possibility for that new beginning, “…If not loving, soon she’ll love…”. Sappho’s memories and desires are rooted in the ways she has become wise about love and of her beloved—she has experienced it but remains unsated. She wants more, more, more; now, now, now. In her song, she toggles between what once was and what she presently wants for the future. There is more to love and more to know.
Sappho’s fragments tell us that time is with us, whether we recognize it or not. It is in the recognition of the relationship between what once was, what is, and what is desired that time becomes inextricable from life, love, and being in another sense. Now, time means something. Sappho expresses that time is at once inescapable but also a manifestation of key cognitive capacities: to reflect (past) and to desire (future). When we think about time for what it is, it helps us define our identity, to decide what we want and don’t want in our lives; in short, it helps us decide how to go on living. Sappho’s songs take up and thus make clear the perennial challenge of the present: to be, to love, to sing, to experience these moments while we have them.
Sappho doesn’t attempt to convince us of anything in particular; her poems seem too personal for any of that. Nevertheless, her poetry discloses her world for us—her feelings and desires, but also her thoughts. It might be difficult and certainly not definitive to try and understand these thoughts, especially when we contrast them with methodical philosophical treatises like Aristotle’s, but this is not to say either that Sappho was not a lover of wisdom, or that we shouldn’t try.
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Chelsea C. Harry
Chelsea C. Harry is Associate Professor and Assistant Chairperson of Philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University. She publishes in ancient Greek and 19th century German philosophy of nature. Her research on Sappho’s philosophy of time is forthcoming with Springer’s series, "Women Philosophers and Scientists," and in the Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy. Photo of author at the island of Lesvos.
