Ancient
Greek poet, from the island of Lesbos. She wrote mainly love poems, of which only fragments survive. The Greeks were so enamoured of her poetry that they raised her to the status of the "tenth Muse
?". Some of her love poems were addressed to women, from which she developed a reputation for
lesbianism; the word lesbian itself derives from her, being the adjective for the island from which she came. (As does another much rarer word for for lesbian, sapphic.) For this reason, her work was disapproved of by the Christian church, which is arguably the main reason most of it has not survived (due to a combination of neglecting to copy it and in some cases purposeful destruction.)