The Greek poet Sappho was hailed as the queen of sapphism (lesbianism, female homosexuality) at the end of the nineteenth century. She has often been reduced to little more than a representation of a sexual being. This distortion eventually over-shadowed her historical reality. The lack of information about her life and the limited survival of only fragments from her work inspired numerous conflicting legends. Although Sappho was often accused of sexual deviance, many Hellenists rallied to her defense. They presented her as a desexualized poet more interested in her art than in anything (or anyone) else. Ironically, the more these philologists defended her virtue, the more novelists and artists portrayed her as a slave to passions of lesbian love. This contemporary interest, however, should not obscure the fact that Sappho was stigmatized by many fin-de-siècle writers and categorized as sexually perverse by many illustrators, who associated her with other notorious promiscuous women from antiquity.