Sappho, the poet of Lesbos

The story

A voice from Lesbos

Lesbos is an island in the Aegean, very close to the coast of present-day Turkey. Around 600 BC it was a rich place, with lively cities, merchants, ships and noble families competing for power. Sappho lived here. According to modern sources she was born at Eresos, a small town on the island, around 630 BC, but she spent most of her life at Mytilene, the most important city of Lesbos. That is why our site gives Mytilene as the place and about 600 as the date: they are approximations, because we know very little about her life for certain.

The biographical details have reached us from authors who lived long after her, and not all of them are reliable. She seems to have belonged to a noble family, with three brothers and a daughter named Cleis. On Lesbos aristocratic families fought one another for power, and hers was drawn in too. For this reason, according to an ancient report, Sappho spent a period of exile in Sicily, perhaps about ten years, before returning home.

The circle of girls

Back on Lesbos, Sappho led a thiasos: a group of young women of good family who met to study poetry, music and dance, and to honour the goddess Aphrodite. It was not a school like ours, but a community where the girls prepared for adult life and for marriage. Sappho wrote songs for ceremonies, and songs in which she spoke of friends who were leaving, of memories, glances and jealousies. Her poems grew out of everyday life.

Poems to sing with the lyre

For the early Greeks lyric poetry was not made to be read silently, but to be sung, with the accompaniment of the lyre (hence the name “lyric”). Sappho wrote in the dialect of Lesbos, Aeolic, in very simple language. Her style is direct: she speaks of emotions like a person feeling them right now. A famous example is the poem in which she describes the heart pounding, the tongue freezing and the sweating in front of the person she loves: a list of symptoms that any reader still recognises.

A stanza called the “Sapphic” is linked to her poetry, made of three long lines and one short one. The metre takes its name from her because she used it a great deal, although the ancients thought it had been invented by another poet from Lesbos, Alcaeus.

How much is left

The ancient scholars of the Library of Alexandria collected her works in eight or nine books. It is estimated that altogether they contained about 10,000 lines. Today we have about 650, mostly fragments: pieces of poems, sometimes a few lines, sometimes only a few words. The only poem to have come down whole is the “Hymn to Aphrodite”, in which the poet asks the goddess for help with an unreturned love. Others are incomplete.

Why was so much lost? Ancient books were copied by hand, and when a poem stopped being of interest nobody copied it any more. We know many of Sappho's lines because other authors quoted them, and others are found by scholars on papyri, sheets made from an Egyptian plant. Some come from the excavations at Oxyrhynchus, in Egypt, where papyri were preserved in the dry climate. New fragments have been presented in recent years too: in 2014 a scholar announced two nearly complete poems, one of which speaks of her brothers. There is still debate about how those papyri were recovered, but the research goes on.

Sappho and the legend

The ancients already admired her enormously. An epigram attributed to Plato calls her “the tenth” after the nine Muses, and that is where the image of the “tenth Muse” comes from. The geographer Strabo called her “a marvellous creature”. According to an anecdote, the Athenian lawgiver Solon once heard one of her poems sung and said he only wished to learn it by heart, and then die.

Legends grew up around her, however. The most famous says that, because of an unreturned love for a young man named Phaon, she threw herself from the cliff of Leucas. The story already appears in the theatre of Menander (4th–3rd century BC) and then in Ovid, centuries later, and scholars regard it as a legend, partly created to belittle the poet. Even in antiquity, after all, some observed that a few of her lines speak of a woman who is by now old, and so who did not die young. In the 19th century, finally, her love poems for her companions led to the use of the word “sapphic” for love between women: a modern use, which says more about our time than about her life.