Born: 630 BC (circa), Greece
Died: 570 BC (circa)
Country most active: Greece
Also known as: Σαπφώ, Ψάπφω
Guide to the classics: Sappho, a poet in fragments
Marguerite Johnson, University of Newcastle
For those who have read the fragmented remains of the Greek poet, Sappho the loss of most of her poetic corpus is something to regret. With a mere two complete poems extant from nine books of verse, much is left to the imagination in the reconstruction of the output (and life) of this most mysterious of ancient poets.
In a world dominated by male voices whose view of life, the universe and everything was the loudest and most respected, Sappho’s songs were regarded as extraordinary. So revered was she that the ancients called her the Tenth Muse, and her songs were passed down over centuries, inspiring generations of poets, none of whom managed to replicate her command of metre and sensual artistry.
How Sappho managed to acquire the educational acumen to compose her masterpieces has sometimes baffled both ancient and modern scholars. Women lived quiet and controlled lives in ancient Mediterranean cultures with limited, if any, access to formal education. If there were any perceived need to teach a girl basic skills in reading, writing and arithmetic, it was only to equip her to run a household once she was married-off.
Even if a girl demonstrated extraordinary artistic skills, there was usually no avenue to express them, as the aspirations of women were limited to marriage and motherhood. Females who displayed a talent were normally suppressed and regarded with suspicion. Why? Because men were the artists, intellects and leaders. Ergo, for a woman to possess such qualities meant she also possessed a masculinity that set her apart from nature.
So, where did Sappho come from? What strange land or culture gave her birth and permitted her extraordinary skills to flourish? While we know little that is certain of her life, we do know Sappho was born in the city of Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesbos, off the coast of Turkey in the late 7th Century BC. Mytilene appears to have been an enlightened society compared to other communities in Archaic Greece. Sappho’s works clearly indicate that women – at least from her privileged social standing – had access to a formal education that included training in choral composition, musical accomplishment and performance.
Her estimated birth date places her sometime after the composition and transmission of the works of the Homeric poets, which told the stories of the Trojan War and are preserved in the epics known as the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Love of women
But Sappho was no epic poet, rather she composed lyrics: short, sweet verses on a variety of topics from hymns to the gods, marriage songs, and mini-tales of myth and legend. She also sung of desire, passion and love – mostly directed towards women – for which she is best known. And it is for such poems that Sappho has come down to us as history’s first lesbian.
Was Sappho a lesbian? An answer depends on how one is defined. If love of women, even in a non-sexual sense, and an exclusive focus on the needs and lives of women define a woman as a lesbian, then – yes – Sappho was a lesbian. However, if a lesbian is defined more narrowly as a woman who has sex with another woman, then evidence to define Sappho as one is harder to establish.
Of course, these two binaries are inherently artificial and without nuance. They are also ignorant of social constructionism, which insists on understanding an individual in her or his historical environment, its values, and its cultural specificities. And, in the society of Archaic Mytilene, Sappho was not defined as a lesbian. After all, the word “lesbian” was not invented until the Victorian age.
Sappho’s contemporaries were not responsible for her synonymy with women-loving. That began with the Greeks and Romans of later centuries, who tended to interpret her skill as stemming from a perverted form of masculinity, which sometimes found expression in representations of her through the lens of a hyper-sexuality. Sappho’s reputation for sexual proclivity initially linked her to passionate relations with men, which later morphed into a stronger association with women.
The Sappho mystique is further confounded by later testimonies such as the 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia called the Suda (or the Stronghold), which chronicled the history of the ancient Mediterranean. In one of two entries on Sappho, readers are informed that she was in love with a ferryman by the name of Phaon whose rejection of her caused her to leap to her death from the Leucadian Cliff.
This apocryphal history, which emerged in antiquity, went on to inspire artists, poets and playwrights for hundreds of years, despite the strange origins of Phaon as a figure of myth and legend. In the second entry on Sappho in the Suda, it is stated that Sappho was married, had a daughter by the name of Cleis, and was also a lover of women.
Turning to the fragments and scant number of complete poems from Sappho’s canon, there are references to her daughter, and to her close female companions – even her brothers – although the extant verses do not sing of a husband. In Fragment 132, for example, Sappho sings of Cleis:
I have a beautiful child whose face is like
golden flowers, my beloved Cleis …
Beauty, caresses and whispers
Sappho, following the poetic traditions of Archaic Greece, tended towards floral and natural imagery to depict feminine beauty and youth. Elsewhere, she evokes images of garlands, scents and even apples to convey feminine sensuality. Hers was largely a world of beauty, caresses, whispers and desires; songs sung in honour of the goddess Aphrodite, and tales of mythical love.
In Fragment 16, arguably Sappho’s most sublime poem, fortunately well preserved albeit a little tattered, her definition of beauty anticipates the maxim of the philosopher, Protagoras that “man is the measure of all things”:
Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry,
and others of ships, is the most beautiful
thing on the dark earth, but I say it is
whatever a person loves.
It is perfectly easy to make this
understood by everyone: for she who far
surpassed mankind in beauty,
Helen, left her most noble husband
and went sailing off to Troy with no thought at all
for her child or dear parents,
but [love?] led her astray …
lightly …
[and she]
has reminded me
now of Anactoria
who is not here;
I would rather see her
lovely walk and the bright sparkle of her
face than the Lydians’ chariots and armed
infantry …
Sappho’s definition of beauty – that which a person loves – privileges the individual over the community. She extends her dictum with the example of the mythical figure of Helen of Troy, renowned in antiquity as the most beautiful woman in the world. As testimony to Sappho’s unique interpretation of the story, she removes the standard figures of blame for Helen’s role in the Trojan War – Paris, the Trojan prince who abducted her or, in other versions, Aphrodite who forced her to go with him – and gives agency to Helen herself. In Sappho’s world, where love is all, it is Helen who decides to leave her husband and elope with Paris. Consequences be damned!
Sappho’s thoughts on love and desire extend to a personal reverie on a woman by the name of Anactoria. Sappho reveals that Anactoria is gone and is missed. She compares her, indirectly, to Helen and then evokes her beauty, namely her gait and her sparkling face. Sappho’s lyrics are sensual, gentle, intense. But they are also powerful, as she rejects the world of masculine warfare in preference for beauty and desire.
‘A tremor shakes me’
In another well-preserved piece, Fragment 31, Sappho evokes the sensations she experiences as a result of being seated opposite a beautiful woman:
He seems to me equal in good fortune to the
whatever man, who sits on the opposite side to you
and listens nearby to your
sweet replies
and desire-inducing laugh: indeed that
gets my heart pounding in my breast.
For just gazing at you for a second, it is impossible
for me even to talk;
my tongue is broken, all at once a soft
flame has stolen beneath my flesh,
my eyes see nothing at all,
my ears ring,
sweat pours down me, a tremor
shakes me, I am more greenish than
grass, and I believe I am at
the very point of death.
The power of the fragment, and indeed the meaning, are substantially derived from the Greek pronouns that denote three players in Sappho’s drama: Sappho, the man, and the woman.
The man is god-like because he can be in the presence of the woman and remain unaffected. Sappho, in contrast, is a physical, mental and emotional wreck. The fragmented condition of the piece includes a few words that indicate at least one more stanza followed.
Such was the power of Sappho’s poem that it went on to inspire various intellectuals and poets who followed her. The Roman poet, Catullus was so enamoured of Sappho’s work that he reworked Fragment 31, which he would have known in its complete form, into his own version that even rendered the original Sapphic hendecasyllabic metre into Latin [Poem 51].
Translating Sappho is no mean feat. Most of the work is in poor condition, pieced together by papyrologists to make readable texts for scholars to work from. Confronted with the Aeolic Greek of the poet, printed neatly on a page, the translator is immediately drawn into emendations, conjectures, broken lines, missing words, incomplete words, hypothetical punctuation and, in short, a philological headache.
And, after persisting, the translator is always dissatisfied. It is impossible to capture the poet’s genius in another language, especially if the translator is simultaneously striving for a metrical equivalent. Catullus, too, was a poetic genius – an artist with complete control over style, metrics and meaning – yet he was humble enough not to replicate Sappho’s words but to imitate them, to compose a response to them, to make them his own as a homage to the Tenth Muse.
New discoveries
But despite the hurdles and the intellectual heartache, there are rewards in recent discoveries that continue to add more words, more lines, more stanzas and sometimes even new poems to the canon. In 2004, the discovery of piece of papyrus that completed an existing fragment – thereby making a new poem by Sappho – received international media coverage. The process of repair resulted in Poem 58, which deals with the themes of youth and old age.
Sappho mourns the passing of her youth, and reminds her audience of the myth of Tithonos, one of the few mortals to be loved by a goddess. Struck by the beauty of the young man, the goddess Eos asks Zeus to permit her to take the young man to live with her eternity. But Eos forgets to ask that Tithonos be granted a second gift: eternal youth. And so, she is left with a lover she quickly finds hideous and repellent, and Tithonos is left alone, trapped in a never-ending cycle of ageing.
More and more of Sappho is emerging. In 2013, more new fragments were discovered that have assisted in reconstructing existing pieces, and bringing to light four previously unknown pieces. One relatively complete poem, Brothers Song is the most significant of the find because of its hitherto unknown status.
The piece is also important because it further develops the image of the poet as an artist whose themes extended beyond the sensual and romantic. While previously extant fragments and details in works such as the Suda reference Sappho’s brothers, the poem provides more insight into Sappho’s familial world. While the first three stanzas are missing, there are five complete ones, the subject of which is a speaker’s concerns for the safe return of her two brothers, Charaxos and Larichos from a maritime trading venture.
The discoveries of this century are testimony to the fascinating and random nature of such finds. Rather than being hidden away in obscure manuscripts in dusty archives or included in elaborate scrolls, the fragments have sometimes come from less salubrious environments.
For example, much of Sappho’s work, along with pieces from poets and writers ranging from Homer, the Greek playwrights, Plato and Saint Paul came from Oxyrhynchus – an ancient garbage dump in Egypt.
And while other pieces were preserved as quotations in more respectable formats, such as books on grammar, composition and philosophy, the 2004 poem originally came from the cartonnage of an Egyptian mummy.
Indeed, cartonnage – a plaster-like material made from material scraps, including papyri that was wrapped around mummified bodies and then decorated – has yielded rich results, Sappho’s fragments being just one example. Hopefully more garbage will be excavated to reveal more of Sappho’s poetic diamonds.
For a recent, reliable edition of Sappho’s works, see Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works, translated from the ancient Greek by Diane J. Rayor, with an introduction and notes by André Lardinois (Cambridge University Press).
Marguerite Johnson, Professor of Classics, University of Newcastle
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
This biography was originally published in the World History Encyclopedia and was written by Joshua J. Mark. It is shared in line with the Encyclopedia’s policies under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Sappho of Lesbos (l. c. 620-570 BCE) was a lyric poet whose work was so popular in ancient Greece that she was honored in statuary, coinage, and pottery centuries after her death. Little remains of her work, and these fragments suggest she was gay. Her name inspired the terms ‘sapphic’ and ‘lesbian’, both referencing female same-sex relationships.
It is possible that she was not gay and the Sappho (pronounced SA-fow) who appears in her works addressing an unnamed female lover is a persona. This does not seem likely, however, as ancient writers, who had access to more of her works than survive today, praised her poetry but criticized her for behaving as a “masculine woman”. Very little is known of her life, and of the nine volumes of her work which were widely read in antiquity only 650 lines survive. What is known about her comes from three sources:
The Suda (10th century CE)
References by ancient writers
Her poetry
Later legends claim her works were purposefully destroyed by the medieval church to suppress lesbian love poetry, and although there is evidence that Pope Gregory VII ordered her works burned c. 1073 CE, long before that time many had been lost simply because they were not translated and copied. Sappho wrote in the Aeolic Greek dialect which was difficult for Latin writers, well versed in Attic and Homeric Greek, to translate. They were aware that once there had been a highly-praised female poet from the works of others, and they preserved those poems of Sappho’s which others had copied, but they did not translate new ones simply because they did not know her dialect.
Her reputation as one of the greatest poets of her time was preserved by others writing about her life who quoted from her works.
Still, her reputation as one of the greatest poets of Greek literature was preserved by others writing about her life who quoted from her works. Some biographies must have been written during her lifetime or shortly after because the outline of her life was known by later writers but, aside from inscriptions such as the Parian Marble (a history of certain events in Greece between 1582-299 BCE) it is not known what these works were.
She was highly praised by Plato (l. 428/427 – 348/347 BCE), who also addressed same-sex relationships in his works and, according to some scholars, drew on Sappho for his own vision of romantic love. In the present day, she is understood as a great gay poet and inspiration to many both within and outside of the LGBTQ community.
Sappho’s Life
Sappho was born on the island of Lesbos, Greece, to an aristocratic family. While scholars regularly claim that her wealth allowed her to live a life of her own choosing, this cannot be supported. Most women in ancient Greece married according to the traditions and customs of their city-states, and Sappho’s wealth would not have made her immune to the expectations of her family and society. Most likely, she was able to live as she pleased because of the high esteem in which women were held on Lesbos and Sappho’s own unique personality. The historian Wendy Slatkin writes:
Considering the severe restrictions on women’s lives, their inability to move freely in society, conduct business, or acquire any type of non-domestic training, it is not surprising to find that no names of important [female] artists have come down to us from the classical era. Only the poet Sappho received high praise from the Greeks; Plato referred to her as the twelfth Muse. Significantly, she came not from Athens or Sparta but from Lesbos, an island whose culture incorporated a high regard for women. (42)
Slatkin’s reference to Plato calling Sappho “the twelfth muse” (usually given by scholars as “the tenth muse”) alludes to his alleged praise of her as belonging in the company of the Nine Muses who inspired art, music, dance, and poetry. There is no evidence Plato actually made this statement, and it is thought to be a creation of later writers, attributed to Plato. Even so, the fact that this phrase exists highlights Sappho’s enduring reputation as a poet.
She is said to have operated a school for girls on Lesbos, but this seems to be a later invention of the 19th century CE which confused her with her protégée Damophila who ran a girl’s school in Pamphylia. Still, it is probable she did run a girl’s school and passed that legacy down to her student. Wealthy parents are said to have sent their daughters to study eloquence with Sappho to elevate them as prospects for marriage.
Most details of her life have been lost, but it is known she was raised learning to play the lyre and came to compose songs, may have been married to a man at some point who died, may have had a daughter named Cleis (named after Sappho’s mother), had three brothers, Erigyius, Charaxus, and Larichus, the latter two addressed in her poetry. She came from a well-to-do family who were most likely vintners or involved in wine export from Lesbos and is said to have been exiled twice to Sicily because of her political views. She was famous enough to have statues raised and ceramics fashioned in her honor, and, later, coins minted with her name and image on them. Historian Vicki Leon comments:
Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos, proudly issued Sappho coins; some have been found that date to the third century A.D. – nine hundred years after the poet’s death. Sappho (or, rather, her fame) cornered the ancient equivalent of the T-shirt concession too: her portrait and name appear on vases, bronzes, and, later, much Roman art. (151)
A romantic interest in women is evident from her poetry but most scholars advise against reading her works biographically.
She is described in ancient texts as being short in stature and dark in complexion. A romantic interest in women is evident from her poetry but most scholars advise against reading her works biographically. In the same way that poets through the ages have written works expressing a persona not their own, so too could Sappho have composed her poems.
The intimacy and depth of feeling would seem to suggest that Sappho was lesbian but that does not mean she was. Homer’s description of Greek warfare and the dust and blood before Troy does not mean he was a participant in the battle; only that he was a great poet. As there was no distinction between homosexual and heterosexual relationships in ancient Greece (or elsewhere, as the terms are a modern-day invention), it is likely that Sappho addressed a wide range of topics and had no reason to exclude her characters’ sexual orientation any more than she would any aspect of an individual. The scholar Sir Richard Livingstone comments:
Greek simplicity recalls us to the central interests of the human heart. Greek truthfulness is a challenge to see the world as it is and shun the emptiness of mere music, the falsities of rhetoric or sentiment, the incompleteness of writers who, instead of seeing life as a whole, ignore or emphasize a part of it as their own sympathies dictate. (286)
While it is possible, then, that Sappho was a lesbian, it is equally possible that she wrote on many subjects but that her works expressing lesbian love are the ones that have survived most intact. These were possibly her most popular as they addressed romantic love, a subject as popular among audiences in ancient Greece as it is today.
Sappho’s Sexuality
It is generally accepted that Sappho was a gay poet whose work became so popular that, by the late 6th century BCE, the meaning of the term lesbian has changed from “one from Lesbos” to “a woman who prefers her own sex”. The Greek lyric poet Anacreon (l. c. 582 – c. 485 BCE), writing after Sappho, alludes to women of Lesbos as lesbians in the modern-day sense of the term. In the following verse, the speaker warns a suitor away from a girl who has no interest in men:
Not that girl – she’s the other kind,
One from Lesbos. Disdainfully,
Nose turned up at my silver hair,
She makes eyes at the ladies. (Salisbury, 316)
In Plato’s dialogue of the Phaedrus, Socrates praises both Sappho and Anacreon as authorities on love referring to them as “Sappho the lovely and Anacreon the wise” (235c). Scholar E. E. Pender notes, “the reason why Plato pays tribute to Sappho and Anacreon is that they have captured and expressed so vividly the shock of love” (1). That Sappho herself, not a persona, is expressing romantic feelings for a woman is supported by later writers who reference Lesbos as Anacreon does after Sappho’s fame was established.
Even so, and although she is regularly referenced as a gay poet in the modern day, there is no definitive text positively identifying her as such. Claiming she was gay based on her lyrics is the same as someone today claiming Bruce Springsteen was a blue-collar worker based on his songs. The best one can say is that she was most likely gay and became famous for articulating the experience of love anyone, of whatever sexual orientation, had felt.
Scholars Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant note that “Many of [Sappho’s] poems describe a world that men never saw: the deep love women could feel for one another in a society that kept the sexes apart” (2). Along these lines, Sappho’s ability to so perfectly express lesbian love in her work argues for lesbian sexual orientation though, again, this cannot be claimed with certainty.
Sappho’s Poetry
Her surviving works are deeply personal reflections on desire, love, and loss. Livingstone writes:
In life, human beings return from a distracting variety of interests to a few simple things; or, if they do not return, run the risk of losing their souls. In literature, which is the shadow of life, they need to do the same. (259)
Sappho seems to have understood this clearly and focused her work on the most basic and most enduring human emotions. Scholar Suzanne MacAlister comments:
Sappho is the first extant Greek poet to write expressly about the feeling generated by love. The best example of this is found in what is perhaps Sappho’s most famous fragment – phainetai moi – which also stands apart from surviving love poetry written by men in that it talks about the physical manifestation of emotion. The physical manifestation of love in Sappho’s lyrics is not expressed as sexual. There is next to nothing in any of her fragments that mentions any sexual act between women. (Aldrich & Wotherspoon, 392)
Sappho, instead, focuses on what the speaker in the poem is feeling, the rush of excitement at falling in love. The original titles of her works, except her Ode to Aphrodite, have been lost and today the fragments are known either by numbers (which vary according to translations) or the first line, as in Phainetai Moi (“He seems to me”) in which the speaker expresses her feelings while watching a couple, perhaps at a banquet, and addresses these feelings toward the woman:
He seems to me to be the equal to the gods –
Whoever sits opposite you
And listens to you
Talking sweetly
And laughing desirably, which makes
The heart in my breast fly.
For whenever I look upon you for an instant
I can no longer find a single word,
But my tongue is broken, and instantly
Delicate fire runs beneath my skin,
And I see nothing with my eyes, my
Heart pounds
A cold sweat covers me, trembling
Grabs my all, I am paler than grass,
And I think I am little short
Of dying.
But everything can be ventured.
(Plant, 14-15)
The last line is also given as “everything can be endured”, changing the meaning of the poem from the speaker wanting to pursue a relationship (ventured) to her having to endure her feelings without being able to express them to the beloved.
The simplicity of construction in her work concentrates the reader’s attention on the emotional moment itself and, like all great poetry, creates an experience which is easily recognizable. Another famous example of this is her poem, “I Have Not Had One Word from Her” also sometimes titled Parting. The poem is thought to have been written by Sappho to her lover who was a courtesan and may have been forced to part from her due to her occupation when she was hired by a client and had to move:
I have not had one word from her
Frankly I wish I were dead
When she left, she wept
a great deal: she said to me, “This parting must be
endured, Sappho. I go unwillingly.”
I said, “Go, and be happy
but remember (you know
well) whom you leave shackled by love
If you forget me, think
of our gifts to Aphrodite
and all the loveliness that we shared
all the violet tiaras,
braided rosebuds, dill and
crocus twined around your young neck
myrrh poured on your head
and on soft mats girls with
all that they most wished for beside them
while no voices chanted
choruses without ours,
no woodlot bloomed in spring without song.”
(Barnard Translation, Sappho, 1)
The intimacy of this poem is characteristic of all Sappho’s surviving work. She was not only a brilliantly honest poet, however, but also a virtuoso of technique. She invented a completely new meter for poetry, now known as Sapphic Meter or the Sapphic Stanza which consists of three lines of eleven beats and a concluding line of five. The following poem, known by its first line but also as Please, is an example of this (although the present translation does not preserve the steady eleven beats of the first three lines of each stanza):
Come back to me, Gongyla, here tonight,
You, my rose, with your Lydian lyre.
There hovers forever around you delight:
A beauty desired.
Even your garment plunders my eyes.
I am enchanted: I who once
Complained to the Cyprus-born goddess,
Whom I now beseech
Never to let this lose me grace
But rather bring you back to me:
Amongst all mortal women the one
I most wish to see.
(Roche Translation, Sappho, 1)
Not all of her poetry praised her beloved, however, as fragment 32 makes clear: “I never found any woman more annoying, Irana, than you…” (Plant, 18). Most, though, are intimate confessions of love, including her Ode to Aphrodite, the only complete poem extant, in which she begs the goddess of love to help her win the affections of a young woman.
Her poetry would have been sung to the accompaniment of the lyre (which is how lyric poetry gets its name) and performed publicly at events and private dinners. A famous story related by Stobaeus (l. 5th century CE), who collected such ancient anecdotes, writes:
Solon of Athens heard his nephew sing a song of Sappho’s over the wine and, since he liked the song so much, he asked the boy to teach it to him. When someone asked him why, he said: ‘So that I may learn it, then die’.” (Florilegium 3.29.58)
Whether the story is true is not as important as what it says about Sappho’s poetry. Solon was considered one of the wisest men who ever lived and was counted among the Seven Sages of Greece. He was known for teaching the precept “moderation in everything” and so for him to react so emotionally in this anecdote to Sappho’s song is significant in that one so famous for his wisdom could be so deeply moved that he would desire nothing more after learning the song.
Conclusion
The manner of Sappho’s death is unknown. The Greek comedy playwright Menander (l. c. 341-329 BCE) started the legend that she committed suicide by leaping from the Leucadian cliffs over the unrequited love of a beautiful ferryman named Phaon:
…they say that Sappho was the first,
hunting down the proud Phaon,
to throw herself, in her goading desire, from the rock
that shines from afar. (Fragment 258 K, of Leukadia)
This seems highly unlikely and has been rejected by historians in the present day and as far back as the Greek writer Strabo (l. c. 64 BCE – 24 CE). The Leucadian cliff (also known as Cape Leukas on the island of Lefkada) was a famous “lover’s leap” following a story in which Aphrodite flung herself into the sea while mourning the dead Adonis. Menander could have been simply making fun of romantic love by having a woman known for her lesbian love poetry kill herself over a man.
Interestingly, Artemisia I of Caria (c. 480 BCE), another strong woman of note, was also said to have committed suicide by throwing herself into the sea and, according to some sources, from the same spot. Artemisia’s suicide story has also been discredited. Sappho seems to have lived into old age and died of natural causes but this, like most of the events of her life, is far from certain.
What is clear is that she was a poet of immense talent whose work made her famous. Her poetry was so popular, according to Leon, that,
Not only was her work sung, taught, and quoted – but the very phrases she coined, from ‘love, that loosener of limbs’ to ‘more golden than gold’, entered the Greek language and were used so much they eventually became clichés. (150)
She was a much sought-after performer and her compositions continued to be sung and admired long after her death. Sappho understood her poetry as her legacy as one of her most oft-quoted fragments suggests: “Someone, I tell you, will remember us, even in another time” (Fragment 77, Plant, 24). She referred to her poetry as her “immortal daughters” and so they continue to be as readers 2,000 years after their creation continue to respond to them with the same enthusiasm they inspired when they were first written.
The following is excerpted from Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women, written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company.
Sappho, (flourished about 600 B.C.) a Greek poet, native of Lesbos, where she was head of a great poetic school, for poetry in that age and place was cultivated as assiduously and apparently as successfully by women as by men. In antiquity her fame rivalled that of Homer, and she was styled “the tenth Muse” and “the flower of the Graces.” Almost nothing is known of her life, and the legend of her unrequited love for Phaon and of her casting herself down from a promontory into the sea, has no confirmation. Sappho is for us chiefly a name, a theme for the fervent rhetoric evoked by impassioned contemplation of the few exquisite fragments of her poems that time has spared, a type of the highest achievement of woman in literature. Prof. John Arthur Platt says: “Her poems were arranged in nine books, on what principle is uncertain; she is said to have sung them to the Mixo-Lydian mode, which she herself invented. The perfection and finish of every line, the correspondence of sense and sound, the incomparable command over all the most delicate resources of verse, and the exquisite symmetry of the complete odes which are extant, raise her into the very first rank of technical poetry at once, while her painting of passion has never been surpassed since, and approached only by Catullus, and by Dante in the Vita Nuova.” Another writer, H. B. Cotterill, says: “Sappho’s poetry has the exquisite natural grace and the delicate but distinct outlines of the finest Greek sculpture—such sculpture as we see on the frieze of the Parthenon or on some beautiful Athenian stele. Both in thought and in language it offers the very greatest contrast imaginable to what is often regarded as the true poetical method of expressing deep emotion. It affects one not by the display of vehement passion, but by impressing on one’s mind a picture which haunts the memory and ever afterwards has the power of stirring one’s feelings as if it were a real experience.
IW note: Sappho’s work spoke of love and desire between women; for this reason, the words sapphic and lesbian derive from her name and that of her home.
The following is excerpted from “400 Outstanding Women of the World and the Costumology of Their Time” by Minna Moscherosch Schmidt, published in 1933.
She was known as “the tenth Muse” by the choicest spirits of antiquity, and universally acclaimed as the first woman poet of the world. Sappho was born in the island of Lesbos in the Aegean sea. Her school of poetry and nausic was known as “the Seat of the Muses.” Here, her friends, young girls whom she gathered about her in tender love, studied under her guidance all that related to poetry and music. From this school there issued youthful poetesses, fourteen of whose names have been preserved to us, the most famous being Erinna of Telos, and Damophila of Pamphylia. She wrote her lyric poetry in the Aeolic dialect and in a metre which is now known by her name, the Sapphic.
Her lyrics were arranged by her in nine books. Of these poems, two Odes, alone, have survived in their entirety. Besides these, three epigrams and some other fragments exist which are sufficient to show her consummate art. Depth and power of feeling, tenderness and grace, the supreme simplicity and sincerity with which she expresses the greatest human emotions are all combined with the melody of her language and the harmony of her versification.
Of the Roman poets, Camilus was her closest imitator, while Horace’s imitations of her style and metre are well-known. In a famous Ode, Horace relates, among other things, how Sappho continued to charm by her songs, even the shades of the youths of Hades. Sappho was held in great honor, during her lifetime, by her fellow citizens of Mitylene, who engraved her head upon their silver and copper coinage, an honor reserved only for the most famous men. The Athenians had, in their Prytaneum a statue of Sappho, much praised by Cicero. The greatest writers of antiquity have written about Sappho with admiration, so also have the moderns. Swinburne, the great English poet, says of her: “Her verve is the supreme success, the final achievement, of the poetic art.” Portraits of Sappho are to be found in most of the Museums of the world, whether on coins (though none of these are earlier than the Christian era) or on vase paintings. The Tanagra of the Louvre and the bust in the Naples Museum are well known.
The following is excerpted from A Cyclopædia of Female Biography, published 1857 by Groomsbridge and Sons and edited by Henry Gardiner Adams.
SAPPHO, A celebrated Greek poetess, was a native of Mitylene, in the Isle of Lesbos, and flourished about B. C. 610. She married Cercala, a rich inhabitant of Andros, by whom she had a daughter named Cleis; and it was not, probably, till after she became a widow that she rendered herself distinguished by her poetry. Her verses were chiefly of the lyric kind, and love was the general subject, which she treated with so much warmth, and with such beauty of poetical expression, as to have acquired the title of the “Tenth Muse.” Her compositions were held in the highest esteem by her contemporaries, Roman as well as Greek, and no female name has risen higher in the catalogue of poets. Her morals have been as much depreciated, as her genius has been extolled. She is represented by Ovid as far from handsome; and as she was probably no longer young when she fell in love with the beautiful Phaon, his neglect is not surprising. Unable to bear her disappointment, she went to the famous precipice of Leucate, since popularly called the Lover’s Leap, and throwing herself into the sea, terminated at once her life and her love.
Sappho formed an academy of females who excelled in music; and it was doubtless this academy which drew on her the hatred of the women of Mitylene. She is said to have been short in stature, and swarthy in her complexion. Ovid confirms this description in his Heroides, in the celebrated epistle from Sappho to The Mitylenes esteemed her so highly, and were so sensible of the glory they received from her having been born among them, that they paid her sovereign honours after her death, and stamped their money with her image. The Romans also erected a monument to her memory. “It must be granted,” says Rapin, “from what is left us of Sappho, that Longinus had great reason to extol the admirable genius of this woman; for there is in what remains of her something delicate, harmonious, and impassioned to the last degree. Catullus endeavoured to imitate Sappho, but fell infinitely short of her; and so have ail others who have written upon love.”
Besides the structure of verse called Sapphic, she invented the Æolic measure, composed elegies, epigrams, and nine books of lyric poetry, of which all that remain are, an ode to Venus, an ode to one of her lovers, and some small fragments.