Sappho composed in the rare Aeolic dialect of ancient Greek. Aeolis or Aeolia—from which the word Aeolic—lay off the northern coast of Asia Minor—modern Turkey. It looked toward the ancient wealthy kingdom of Lydia—mentioned by Sappho in her poetry—and extended northward toward the site of Troy and the Hellespont. This largely coastal area included several offshore islands, Sappho’s Lesbos foremost among them. Lesbian Greek, which is to say the Greek spoken on the Island of Lesbos, was the version of Aeolic spoken by Sappho and her contemporary on Lesbos, the poet Alcaeus.
The region south of Aeolia along the central coast of Asia Minor was Ionia, the locale of Old Ionic Greek, also known as Homeric Greek. And south of Ionia was Doria, home of the little preserved Doric Greek dialect.
Lesbos, said the late-nineteenth century English poet and literary critic John Addington Symonds, was
the centre of Aeolian culture, was the island of overmastering passions; the personality of the Greek race burned there with a fierce and steady flame of concentrated feeling. The energies which the Ionians divided between pleasure, politics, trade, legislation, science, and the arts, and which the Dorians turned to war and statecraft and social economy, were restrained by the Aeolians within the sphere of individual emotions, ready to burst forth volcanically. Nowhere in any age of Greek history, or in any part of Hellas, did the love of physical beauty, the sensibility to radiant scenes of nature, the consuming fervor of personal feeling, assume such grand proportions and receive such illustrious expression as they did in Lesbos.
Lesbos boasted Mytilene as its capital. The city, in all its prosperity and strength, became virtually synonymous with Lesbos itself. It was fabled in antiquity both for Sappho’s presence and the vigorous trade and military power that eventually made it the most influential of the Asiatic Greek cities.
Situated north of Lesbos at the mouth of the Hellespont was Troy—the famed cite of the Trojan War as recounted in Homer’s Iliad. The distance between Lesbos and Troy was navigable by coastal reckoning. We learn from the Iliad that Achilles, the poem’s protagonist, singlehandedly conquered Lesbos, thus giving its subjection to Greece a basis in mythology. The women of Lesbos were fabled for their beauty and sophistication, and for their sexual resourcefulness. Beauty contests were a yearly occurrence. The Iliad shows an acute awareness of the beauty of Lesbian women. Achilles’ concubine Briseis is of Lesbian origin. It is from her theft by the Greek commander Agamemnon that the Iliad’s dreadful events unfold, including Achilles’ withdrawal from battle and the consequent deaths of his own companions in the thousands. When Agamemnon seeks to reconcile Achilles and bring him back into the fold and fray, it is with an offer, among much else, of nine Lesbian women, one of them the returned Briseis herself.
Byron enthused over
The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece
Where burning Sappho loved and sung . . .
But the only isle of Greece on which Sappho loved and sung, and apart from which it is difficult to imagine Sappho at all—is Lesbos.