lesbian [M18th] Sappho was a Greek lyric poet of the early 7th century bc who lived on the Greek island of Lesbos (often now found in the Greek spelling Lesvos). Despite the fact that we know very little of her life, and that there is an unsupported tradition that she killed herself for love of a young man, the fragments of her poems also express her affection and admiration for women, and so people came to associate her with female homosexuality. In the mid 18th century she inspired two descriptive terms, lesbian, from her island home of Lesbos, and sapphic.