Unrequited Love In Sappho's Aphrodite

The practical lawmaking Solon and Cleisthenes implemented in Athens further impressed the concept of public and personal responsibility, the former’s slogan of eunomia (“good laws”) promoting moderation and balance of interests and Cleisthenes’ role in organizing people and their localities into clear identities away from the aristocratic clans. The latter made the boundaries between the aristokratia’s estates and the localities made of the village and a shrine, so that one district had political advantages over the other. The units turned into tribes of ten for each of the three geographical territories or trittys (hill/mountains, the plains, the coast) formed under the tyrant Peisistratos, so there were now, which both undermined the previous’
Sappho’s known lyric poetry, or poetry meant to have music accompaniment, shows a theme correlated to hoplite warfare with love as its partner. For the speaker in one of her poems, an invocation to Aphrodite, the spiritual accompaniment of Aphrodite is necessary for them to bear the hurt of unrequited love, this being close to the transcendent erotic love Socrates and Plato advocate for. Two types of love the Greeks believed seemed to exist in this poem, the eros (“passion”) the speaker feels for the unnamed woman, and philia, or “affectionate love” that comes from the experience of hardship shared between persons that they feel for Aphrodite. the speaker calls the goddess to “stand” by her, like a hoplite soldier would stand with his fellow solider. Aphrodite, like a brother in arms, went to the speaker when they called before as they say, “if once before now far away you heard, when I called upon you, left your father’s dwelling and descended”. Aphrodite’s divine station albeit places her above the mortal speaker. Still, there is the implication here is that the rules of love and war are not too different that a cursory glance shows. Philia is the love that permeates the Athenian democracy’s ideology as