Sappho (ca 630 B.C.), the earliest woman writer whose work survives, is central in the history of lyric poetry. She wrote a number of poems about her separation from a woman companion, including the following fragment that also has the Trojan War as its backdrop.
From
Sappho: A Garland: The Poems and Fragments of Sappho. Trans. Jim
Powell. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1993, p. 28:
Some say
thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers,
others call a fleet the most beautiful of
sights the dark earth offers, but I saw it's what-
ever you love best.
And it's
easy to make this understood by everyone,
for she who surpassed all human
kind in beauty, Helen, abandoning her
husband-that best of
men-went
sailing off to the shores of Troy
and never spent a thought on her child or loving
parents: when the goddess seduced her wits and
left her to wander,
she forgot
them all, she could not remember;
anything but longing, and lightly straying
aside, lost her way. But that reminds me
now: Anactória, she's not here, and I'd rather see her
lovely
step, her sparkling glance and her face than gaze on
all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and
glittering armor.
