Sappho

Sappho was born on Lesbos, a large island in the northeastern Aegean close to the coast of Asia Minor, most likely in the town of Eresos in the second half of the seventh century BCE ^[1]. Ancient sources place her birth around 650 to 630 BCE, and much of her career unfolded in Mytilene, the island's chief city, which is why later writers often call her a Mytilenean ^[2]. Nothing about her life can be fixed with certainty, because no contemporary documents survive. What scholars know comes from her own verses, from remarks by later Greek and Roman authors, and from a handful of ancient biographical notices of uneven reliability ^[3].

Those notices give her father a name, most often Scamandronymus, and her mother the name Cleis, though the traditions disagree with one another ^[1]. Her family appears to have belonged to the aristocracy of Lesbos, a world of competing noble houses, political feuds, and lavish weddings. Sappho mentions brothers in her poems: Charaxus, a merchant who traded wine to Egypt and became entangled with a courtesan named Doricha, and Larichus, who is said to have poured wine in the town hall of Mytilene, an honor reserved for young men of good birth ^[4]. A papyrus published in 2014, containing the so-called Brothers Poem, confirmed the poet's anxiety over Charaxus and his sea voyages, a detail Herodotus had reported centuries earlier ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Sappho in her own time would have met a professional maker of songs. Greek lyric poetry of this era was composed for performance, sung to the lyre at weddings, festivals, and private gatherings, and Sappho wrote in the Aeolic dialect spoken on Lesbos ^[2]. She worked alongside a slightly older contemporary, the poet Alcaeus, also from Mytilene, and the two are often paired in ancient art and criticism as the twin voices of Lesbian song ^[1].

The political turbulence of Lesbos touched her directly. Ancient tradition holds that she spent a period of exile in Sicily, probably in the 590s BCE, when factional strife drove several aristocratic families from the island; the Parian Marble, a Hellenistic chronicle, records her flight to Syracuse ^[3]. The people of Syracuse later valued the connection enough that a statue of her stood in their town hall, according to Cicero, until the Roman governor Verres carried it off ^[3].

Much about her social world remains debated. Her poems name a circle of young women, among them Atthis, Anactoria, and Gongyla, addressed with striking tenderness and sometimes with open longing ^[5]. Nineteenth century scholars imagined her as the head of a formal school or a cult association devoted to Aphrodite, while more recent work treats such reconstructions cautiously, noting how little evidence supports any single model ^[5]. What the fragments themselves show is a community of women bound by music, ritual, and affection, observed by a poet of unusual psychological precision.

Any honest account of Sappho achievements must begin with scale: the scholars of Alexandria collected her work into around nine books, ordered partly by meter, which together may have held some ten thousand lines ^[2]. The first book alone contained poems in the stanza form that still bears her name, the Sapphic stanza, three long lines followed by a short fourth. Horace later adapted the form into Latin, and poets have imitated it ever since ^[1].

Of that vast output almost everything is lost. One poem survives complete, the Ode to Aphrodite, in which the poet summons the goddess to aid her in love; it was preserved because a later critic quoted it in full ^[2]. A second famous piece, fragment 31, describes the physical symptoms of desire, racing heart, failing voice, fire under the skin, as the speaker watches a beloved woman talk with a man. The Roman poet Catullus translated it, and the ancient treatise On the Sublime praised its accuracy in rendering the experience of passion ^[6]. New material still emerges from the sands of Egypt: papyrus finds in 2004 and 2014 restored substantial parts of the Tithonus Poem, a meditation on old age, and the Brothers Poem ^[4].

Her reputation in antiquity was extraordinary. An epigram attributed to Plato calls her the tenth Muse, coins of Mytilene carried her portrait, and Aristotle noted that the people of Lesbos honored her although she was a woman ^[3]. In a literary culture dominated by men, she is the only archaic Greek woman whose poetry survives in any quantity, a fact that alone secures her place among the most consequential figures in ancient literature ^[5].

The personal details in a Sappho biography rest on thin and tangled evidence. The Suda, a Byzantine encyclopedia, says she married a wealthy man from the island of Andros named Cercylas, though many scholars suspect the name is a joke invented by Athenian comic playwrights, since it can be read as a crude pun ^[3]. Her poems mention a girl named Cleis, described in one fragment as looking like golden flowers, whom ancient readers and most modern ones take to be her daughter, named for the poet's mother ^[1].

The question that has followed her for more than two millennia concerns the nature of her attachments to women. The fragments express desire for female companions in language as intense as any in Greek poetry, and by the Hellenistic and Roman periods her homoeroticism was already a subject of comment, sometimes sympathetic and sometimes hostile ^[5]. Later ages responded according to their own anxieties: some Christian writers condemned her, Victorian editors explained the poems away as expressions of chaste friendship, and translators occasionally changed pronouns ^[6]. Modern scholarship generally accepts that the poems voice erotic feeling between women while cautioning that the speaker of a song is not automatically the historical author ^[5]. Whatever the biographical truth, her name and her island gave English the words sapphic and lesbian.

Sappho seems to have returned from exile and lived out her career on Lesbos, composing into her later decades. The Tithonus Poem, substantially recovered in 2004, has the aging poet address her hair turned white and knees that will no longer dance, consoling herself with the myth of Tithonus, the mortal granted endless life without endless youth ^[4]. It is the closest thing we possess to her own statement about growing old.

Her death is wrapped in legend. A story repeated by the comic playwright Menander and made famous by Ovid's Heroides claims that she threw herself from the white cliff of Leucas, on the island now called Lefkada, out of hopeless love for a young ferryman named Phaon ^[3]. Almost no modern scholar treats the tale as history; Phaon was a mythical figure associated with Aphrodite, and the leap from the Leucadian rock was a proverbial cure for lovesickness long before her name was attached to it ^[5]. Tradition nonetheless ties her final years and death, placed around the middle of the sixth century BCE, to that western island ^[3]. If she lived into the era the ancient chronologies suggest, she would have died an old woman, still famous across the Greek world.

The survival of Sappho's poetry is itself a story of near total loss. Her collected works circulated for a thousand years, but changing tastes, the decline of Aeolic dialect studies, and the fragility of papyrus meant that by the Middle Ages the books had vanished ^[2]. What remains reached us by two routes: quotations embedded in the works of grammarians and critics, and scraps of papyrus recovered from Egyptian rubbish mounds, above all at Oxyrhynchus, beginning in the late nineteenth century ^[6].

Even in ruins, her influence has been immense. Catullus and Horace carried her meters and motifs into Latin; Renaissance poets rediscovered her through the Ode to Aphrodite; and writers from Baudelaire and Swinburne to H.D. and Anne Carson have translated, imitated, or argued with her ^[6]. Carson's 2002 version, If Not, Winter, made the gaps in the papyri part of the reading experience, printing brackets where the text breaks off ^[7].

Among the most durable Sappho facts is her adoption as a founding figure for lesbian identity and, more broadly, for women's writing. Since the late nineteenth century her name has served communities seeking a past, and scholarly work by classicists such as Denys Page, Margaret Williamson, and Page duBois has kept the debates over her life and art unusually alive ^[5]. Twenty six centuries after her songs were first performed on Lesbos, a poet of whom we possess mostly fragments remains one of the most read, translated, and contested voices of the ancient world ^[1].