Sappho illustrates her perspective of love using the beauties of army soldiers and actual love. To Sappho, as seen in lines 1-4, she writes that although soldiers are the most beautiful things of the earth, there are greater beauties like real love. She uses Helen as an example, of how Helen left everything behind from her parents to her children and everything else, just to go be with the man she loves in Troy. Sappho uses this example as it shows a great deal of the power of love, according to her, and that people may go through greater measures because of love. Also, Sappho is able to relate to Helen as she misses Anaktoria, (presumably a girlfriend according to subscript notes), and how Sappho would rather see Anaktoria again rather than soldiers and chariots. In using this comparison, it shows that real love/desire towards someone triumphs beauty among other things (even army soldiers in this case).
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I agree with you about how Sappho illustrates the beauty of love by comparing them with army. But, I personally thought that Sappho did not think that army was beautiful thing on the earth at all when I read her poem. What I thought was that Sappho was trying to refute the idea of men, or the majority, that were the mainstream of her time. She is insisting that the most beautiful thing on the earth is not the manly army but what you truly love.