For the last thousand years, it appears that many male scholars and historians have worked busily to revise the history of many aspects of the world, including Sappho's place of glory. Men tried to wipe away her record, but enough of her poems live on. Over the last 2,500 years, men have tried to claim that Sappho's lyrics were written by a man. Unbelievable amounts of scholarship and argument have been undertaken in attempts to prove that Sappho was not lesbian in her sexual orientation-or if she was, her love of women was never actually consummated. This went so far as a legend being promulgated that she swore off women and fell in love with a ferryman named Phaeon, and when he spurned her, she jumped off a cliff to her death. As if! History is selective. The old saying is "to the victor go the spoils," and it's clear that those in power write the history books. Sappho quite simply had to be written out. Her poems were subversive, they encouraged something other than a heterosexual and male-dominating model, and they placed a woman in a position of equality with - or perhaps even superiority to - Homer.