Sappho

Sappho was a Greek lyric poet from the island of Lesbos in the eastern Aegean, active around 600 BCE. Her songs, written to be sung to the lyre, spoke in a personal voice about desire, jealousy, family and the gods, and ancient critics ranked her among the greatest of all lyric poets, calling her the "tenth Muse". Only about 650 lines survive, mostly in fragments, yet she remains one of the most influential poets of antiquity and a lasting symbol of love between women.

Almost nothing about Sappho's life is certain. Her own poems are the only contemporary evidence, and later biographers, writing centuries afterwards, treated them as autobiography and mixed in local traditions and jokes from Athenian comedy. Ancient writers placed her in the same generation as the poet Alcaeus and the ruler Pittacus of Lesbos, which places her at the end of the 7th and start of the 6th centuries BCE. Modern estimates of her birth range from about 650 to about 630 BCE, and one scholar thinks she was still active around 570 BCE. She came from Eresos or Mytilene, the island's two leading towns.

Her family seems to have been wealthy and aristocratic. Ancient sources name three brothers, two of whom, Charaxos and Larichos, appear in the so-called Brothers Poem identified in 2014. The historian Herodotus tells that Charaxos paid a large sum to free an Egyptian courtesan and that Sappho wrote a poem scolding him. She may have had a daughter called Cleïs, mentioned in two fragments, though not all scholars read the word as "daughter".

According to a single ancient source, an inscribed chronicle from Paros, Sappho went into exile in Sicily at some point between 604 and 595 BCE, probably because her family was caught up in the power struggles among the island's elite. A much later and famous story said that she leapt to her death from the cliffs of Leucas for love of a ferryman named Phaon. Modern scholars regard this as fiction, perhaps invented by comic playwrights, and it was later used to present her as heterosexual.

Sappho may have composed around 10,000 lines, which scholars in Alexandria later gathered into an edition of at least eight books arranged by metre. Only the Ode to Aphrodite survives complete. The rest comes from quotations in other ancient writers and from papyrus scraps, many recovered from an ancient rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt from the late 19th century onwards. Her work was probably lost in the early Middle Ages less through church censorship, as Renaissance legend claimed, than because her Aeolic dialect seemed old-fashioned and few readers wanted it copied.

She was among the first Greek poets to write in a personal "I" rather than as a mouthpiece for the Muse. Her language is clear and direct and her images vivid, and she wrote wedding songs, hymns and family poems as well as the love lyrics for which she was best known. Whether she performed for girls' choruses, friends, or drinking parties is still debated.

The words "lesbian" and "sapphic" come from her island and her name. Athenian comedy portrayed her as promiscuous with men, and early modern translators often turned the women she addressed into men. Today most scholars accept that her poems express desire between women, though some argue that modern categories of sexuality cannot simply be applied to an archaic Greek poet.

In antiquity Plato echoed her in the Phaedrus, and a story, possibly untrue, has Solon asking to learn one of her songs before he died. The Roman poet Catullus adapted her verse and metre, and Ovid wrote a poem in her voice. Medieval and Renaissance writers including Giovanni Boccaccio celebrated her as a learned woman, and from the Romantic era onward she shaped ideas of what lyric poetry should be.

Our -700 map shows the Aegean world shortly before her birth, and the -500 map shows the same region a few decades after her death. See also our page on ancient Greece.