Sappho

Born around 630 to 612 BC, Sappho was one of the great Greek lyrists and is one of the few known female poets of the ancient world. Lesbos was a cultural center then, and Sappho spent a lot of time there, but also travelled a lot within Greece. Sappho composed her own music and refined the prevailing lyric meter to a point that it is now known as sapphic meter.

Her style was very sensual and melodic, the target of her affections was female, often one of the women sent to her for education in the arts. She nurtured these women, wrote poems of love and adoration to them, and when they left the island to be married, she composed their wedding songs. That Sappho's poetry was not condemned in her time for its homoerotic content suggests that perhaps love between women was not persecuted then. Especially in the last century, Sappho has become so synonymous with woman-love that two of the most popular words to describe female homosexuality - lesbian and sapphic have derived from her.