Temple of Love

"This was part of Sappho's art, to give herself so completely in lust and sweat and satisfaction, to allow herself to be contented and dependent on her lover. ... She hadn't yet learned that this art was a double-edged blade - one that would cut her again and again. It would lend heat to her passion and poetry, and it would eventually break her."

Sappho, the lyric poet whose life and lovers give us our current understanding of the word "Lesbian," was hailed as the Tenth Muse on her island home of Lesvos and all throughout Classical Greece. Her poems of passion and longing were directed at the men ... and women ... whom she adored and sometimes envied.

Like most girls of Lesvos, Sappho lived a life among women. After her earliest education, though, she rejects the traditional married life and gives herself in service to the temple of Aphrodite to become a priestess of love, beauty, and sexual ecstasy. Cloistered among the sacred courtesans, she opens her heart and body to love. But when Pittakos the tyrant and Alcaeus the poet vie with each other to be first in her heart, will she lose herself and all that she holds dear?

Laurelei Black, who is herself a priestess of Aphrodite, offers a unique and often erotic look into the passionate, tumultuous, and inspirational life of Sappho through the lens of service to the Goddess of Love.

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Written and Edited by Laurelei Black