Few descriptions of first love can match that given by Benjamin Disraeli, the future Conservative prime minister, in his 1844 novel “Coningsby”: “It entrances the being; it tears the soul. All loves of after-life can never bring its rapture, or its wretchedness; no bliss so absorbing, no pangs of jealousy or despair so crushing and so keen! What tenderness and what devotion . . . what earthquakes of the heart and whirlwinds of the soul are confined in that simple phrase—a schoolboy’s friendship!”  Yes, you did read that correctly. Disraeli is evoking not some torrid teenage love affair but a friendship between two schoolboys at Eton College. In the early Victorian era, respectable Englishmen were quite happy to conceive of their friendships with other young men in terms of passion, bliss, rapture, “whirlwinds of the soul.” Today we tend to describe our affection for our friends in a rather more sober idiom. This raises delicate problems for the historian of Victorian sexuality. Are we entitled to read a raging suppressed homoeroticism into the words of the worthy Mr. Disraeli? Or is the apparent sexual charge of “Coningsby” an illusion—simply a matter of changing English prose style?  At least we have a reasonably good idea of the social context of single-sex boarding schools in early Victorian England. The same is emphatically not true of the world of the ancient Greek poet Sappho. We know that Sappho lived on the Greek island of Lesbos around 600 B.C. We know that she wrote love poems of extraordinary beauty and intensity, many of them addressed to other women. Pretty much everything else about her life, work and sexuality is fiercely disputed. Was Sappho a priestess, a schoolmistress, a wedding planner, the hostess of an upper-class literary salon or (more likely than any of the above) something else entirely? Were her relationships with other women erotic, and, if so, how typical was this of early Greek aristocratic society? Was she a “lesbian” in the modern sense at all?  Part of the problem is that so little of Sappho’s work survives today. Until very recently, we had only three complete poems, plus a couple of hundred fragments ranging between a stanza and a single word in length. But the past few years have seen some breathtaking discoveries from fragmentary Egyptian papyri: a wonderful poem on old age, first published in 2004, and the so-called Brothers Poem, uncovered early in 2014, which sheds precious light on the careers of her brothers Charaxus and Larichus. Philip Freeman’s “Searching for Sappho” is hence particularly timely, as the first book on Sappho for the non-specialist reader to take these new poems into account.  “Searching for Sappho” is an admirable guide to what little we know about the life and works of this remarkable woman. Many readers will turn first to Mr. Freeman’s new translation of all of Sappho’s surviving poems and fragments. They will not be disappointed. The gold standard for translating Sappho was set in 2002 by the Canadian poet Anne Carson in her collection “If Not, Winter.” Here, for example, is Ms. Carson’s version of the first stanza of Sappho’s “Hymn to Aphrodite”:  Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind, Child of Zeus, who twists lures, I beg you Do not break with hard pains, O lady, my heart.  Mr. Freeman’s translation of the same lines (adopting a different textual reading in the first line, “throne” for “mind”) runs as follows:  Deathless Aphrodite on your dazzling throne, child of Zeus, weaver of snares, I pray to you, do not, with anguish and pain, O Lady, break my heart.  I think Ms. Carson still has the edge here, but only by a whisker. She sticks closer to Sappho’s dramatic word order in the last two lines (“break . . . O lady, my heart”), and “spangled” is a better rendering of the difficult Greek word poikilos (literally “dappled, variegated”) than Mr. Freeman’s rather flat “dazzling.” But “weaver of snares” is vastly preferable to Ms. Carson’s over-precious “who twists lures,” and the overall effect is convincingly Sapphic. The only other recent book to include the two newly discovered poems, Diane Rayor ’s 2014 “Sappho: A New Translation,” does not even come close:  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.  The first line is a car crash, caused by sticking too close to the word order of the original Greek and trying to do too much with “poikilos.” In the following line, the participial phrase “weaving wiles” plays havoc with the syntax, forcing Ms. Rayor to introduce an ugly colon before resuming with “I beg you.” If Mr. Freeman’s translation does not quite reach the heights of Anne Carson’s, it is certainly a lot better than this.  Nonetheless, Mr. Freeman is not primarily a literary critic. His chief interest in the poetry is as a window into Sappho’s life and experience. Since Sappho’s poems are, at best, allusive about her personal circumstances, he draws on the whole range of evidence for women’s lives in the ancient Greek world: tombstones, medical texts, the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” Athenian vase paintings. The result is an exquisitely detailed and well-judged account of the female life-cycle in classical antiquity. The early chapters in particular, on childhood, marriage and maternity, are masterpieces of compression and readability.  The trouble with Mr. Freeman’s approach is that it inevitably conflates Sappho’s experience with the normal life-course of ancient Greek women. But Sappho’s world was self-evidently a very unusual one: Most Greek women did not, so far as we know, write blazing homoerotic love poetry. And trying to reconstruct Sappho’s biography from the paltry scraps of poems that survive soon leads to circular reasoning.  Sappho’s family is a case in point. A full 60 pages of Mr. Freeman’s book—and very thoughtful and readable pages they are, too—are dedicated to marriage and motherhood. But did Sappho in fact have a husband at all? A medieval Greek encyclopedia identifies her husband as a certain Cercylas of Andros, but Mr. Freeman rightly dismisses this as a dirty joke from some ancient Greek comedy (the name literally means “Penis from Man Island”). Sappho’s surviving poems make no mention of a husband, and it is a reasonable guess that none of her lost poetry did either, since otherwise his name would have been preserved in the ancient biographical tradition. Hence Mr. Freeman is reduced to a rather tame argument from probability: “It’s almost certain that Sappho was married, since the single life was simply not a viable option, especially for a woman, in the ancient Greek world.”  What about motherhood? Here we have rather more to go on. A short ancient biography of Sappho, preserved on a papyrus dated to around A.D. 200 (eight centuries after Sappho’s death), tells us that “she had a daughter named Cleis, named after her own mother.” A girl called Cleis appears in two fragmentary poems by Sappho, the more informative of which is translated by Mr. Freeman as follows:  I have a beautiful child who is like golden flowers in form, my beloved Cleis, for whom I would not take all of Lydia or lovely . . .  Probably Mr. Freeman is right to assume that Cleis was Sappho’s daughter. But even this is not quite certain. The Greek word for “child” (pais) does not always refer to one’s own child and can indicate the object of pederastic sexual desire: Elsewhere, Sappho describes herself as “overcome with longing for a pais because of slender Aphrodite.” It is, in principle, quite possible that Cleis was Sappho’s lover, not her daughter. Some scholars—not, it is true, very many—have even gone so far as to wonder whether “Cleis” might be a personification of Sappho’s clitoris.  Obviously a lot depends on how much weight we put on the anonymous ancient biography of Sappho. Did its author have access to a poem now lost that clarified the link between Sappho and Cleis? Or was he simply making the same inference as Mr. Freeman, on the same ambiguous evidence? A modern biographer could be forgiven for throwing her hands up in despair.  Most seriously of all, neither Sappho’s own poetry nor anything else in Greek literature gives us any clear picture of what Sappho’s sexual life was really like or how typical it might have been of aristocratic Lesbos in the seventh century B.C. Take one of Sappho’s most famous and intimate love poems, Fragment 31, never better translated than by Josephine Balmer in her patchy 1992 “Sappho: Poems and Fragments”:  It seems to me that man is equal to the gods, that is, whoever sits opposite you and, drawing nearer, savours, as you speak, the sweetness of your voice  and the thrill of your laugh, which have so stirred the heart in my own breast, that whenever I catch sight of you, even if for a moment, then my voice deserts me  and my tongue is struck silent, a delicate fire suddenly races underneath my skin, my eyes see nothing, my ears whistle like the whirling of a top  and sweat pours down me and a trembling creeps over my whole body, I am greener than grass, at such times I seem to be no more than a step away from death;  but all can be endured, since even a pauper . . . [The last three lines are lost]  What exactly does this beautiful poem tell us about Sappho’s sexuality? Should we infer that she was (as the psychoanalyst George Devereux once put it) a neurotic masculine lesbian with a female castration complex? Mr. Freeman, thankfully, does not go that far. But he is nonetheless fairly confident that the poem is erotic in the most explicit, corporeal sense. Since the word “green” was occasionally used in Greek to mean “moist,” Mr. Freeman thinks that the phrase “greener than grass” might refer to sexual arousal. Similarly, Sappho’s near-death experience “could refer to le petit mort . . . a long-standing metaphor for orgasm.”  Well, perhaps. But what is clear is that we cannot use this poem as if it were a diary entry, faithfully recording the individual sexual experiences of the historical Sappho. The object of Sappho’s desire is left carefully unnamed, and the poem’s setting is ambiguous at best (a wedding? a dinner party?). In the first stanza, “that man” is not one particular man but “whoever sits opposite you.” As a description of the physical effects of desire, Sappho’s “It seems to me . . . ” is as powerful and moving as, say, Shakespeare ’s Sonnet 147 (“My love is as a fever . . . ”) and equally useless for reconstructing the poet’s biography.  Mr. Freeman’s book is full of light and life, and readers seeking an accessible introduction to this marvelous poet need look no further. Still, one is left with a nagging feeling that the real context of Sappho’s vivid, haunting love poems to young girls still eludes us. It is easy to laugh at the Victorian men of letters who tried to turn Sappho into the chaste headmistress of a girls’ finishing school; equally easy to laugh at those modern critics who turn her into a particularly right-on lecturer in the Queer Studies department. But if the passage of a mere half-dozen generations is enough to make Benjamin Disraeli’s sexuality a closed book to us, then what chance do we stand with Sappho?  —Mr. Thonemann teaches Greek and Roman history at Wadham College, Oxford.
Peter Thonemann reviews “Searching for Sappho: The Lost Songs and World of the First Woman Poet” by Philip Freeman.