Along with this close personal relationship, several of the Aphrodite fragments implicitly reference a community of devotees. While the speaker often addresses Aphrodite in the context of her love for a woman, her love for Aphrodite is often just as important. It even goes so far as drawing a parallel between “Sappho” and Aphrodite, their two voices mingling in the poem. It develops a striking intimacy between the poet, who refers to herself by name, and the goddess. “Fragment 1,” the only Sappho poem to survive in its entirety, is another address to the goddess Aphrodite. “Fragment 2” is exclusively devoted to the goddess Aphrodite and reads as a kind of incantation summoning the goddess to the speaker(s). Some of her lyrics were likely used in religious ceremonies, where they may have been performed by a chorus of women. Sappho was likely a member of the cult of Aphrodite, a group of women devoted to the worship of the goddess.
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