Describe how Plato, Sappho, and/or Catullus conceive of love (and/or friendship). You can choose to only discuss one of the three works or compare two or three of them. You can also choose to compare their views on love with The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, or Lysistrata. You can also choose to focus more specifically on either the lover or the beloved if you like.
Sappho’s poetry reveals the raw emotion and struggles of love expressed through pain, jealousy, and intense fire (passion) between the lover and the loved. Her eloquence lies in the truth and hardships of love, not just the beauty and romanticism typically alluded to in other poems. Love, for her, was a story experienced by the same sexes as well as between the sexes. Sappho’s poems introduced to her contemporaries an understanding of all relationships and the term we use today, lesbian.
Poem 94 illustrates the heartbreaking separation between two people as she begins by writing “I simply want to be dead. Weeping she left me.” Her partner, in tears, expresses how badly things have come between the both of them, leading to Sappho’s change in tone as she expresses the good and beautiful times they shared with images of woven garlands and flowers. Sappho focuses more on herself rather than her beloved in an attempt to express her deep sorrow and suffering to her lover and the reader. By expressing her emotional vulnerability, Sappho empowers women with independence. This same strength was seen in Lysistrata’s plot to end a war, using women as the negotiating tools by withholding sexual favors to evoke a truce. Her crazy scheme not only proved to be successful, but it revealed the power and influence that women share.
Your description of Sappho was great. It made me look at some of her work in a different light. I definitely agree with you that her work is very intense and can be seen as an empowering tool for women
I think Sappho is a woman of violent emotions. I don’t know if she is being affected, overly sentimental. But she seems to be very sensitive on the reciprocality of love.
I also thought that Sappho’s language was lovely and conveyed a lot of emotion despite the absence of parts of her work (unfortunately). However, I disagree that she and her lover had to break up in Poem 94 because things had gone bad between them. Her lover said, “Sappho, I swear, against my will I leave you” (641). It seems more like something outside their relationship made it impossible for them to stay together — perhaps Sappho’s lover got married or they got caught and someone got mad that they were romantically involved.