
Sappho (c. 600 B.C.) by Charles-Auguste Mengin (1877). Believed to be fair use.
Because some of her love poems were addressed to women, she has long been considered to have had homosexual inclinations. The word lesbian itself is derived from the name of the island of Lesbos from which she came. (Her
name is also the origin of its much rarer synonym sapphic.) The narrators of many of her poems do in fact speak of infatuations and love (sometimes requited, sometimes not) for various women, but descriptions of actual physical acts between women are few and subject to debate. Whether these poems are meant to be autobiographical is not known, although elements of other parts of Sappho's life do make appearances in her work, and it would be compatible with her style to have these intimate encounters expressed poetically, as well. Her homoerotica should be placed in the seventh century context. The poems of Alcaeus and later Pindar record similar romantic bonds between the members of a given circle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho
Thank You, My Dear
Thank you, my dear
You came, and you did
well to come: I needed
you. You have made
love blaze up in
my breast, bless you!
Bless you as often
as the hours have
been endless to me
while you were gone.
Translated from the Greek by Mary Barnard