Sappho of Lesbos (c. 630 BC): The Lyric Poet and Her Fragments

Sappho of Lesbos was a Greek lyric poet who lived on the Aegean island of Lesbos around 630–570 BC. Ancient critics placed her among the finest poets of Greece, and she remains the most famous woman writer of the ancient world. Most of her work is lost, but her surviving fragments, some found only in the last 130 years, still shape how Europe thinks about love poetry.

Life: what can be known

Almost every detail of Sappho’s life comes from her own poems or from much later writers, so certainty is rare. She was probably born in Eresos or in Mytilene, the island’s main city, around 630 BC; some scholars prefer a date nearer 612 BC. Her family seems to have belonged to the island’s aristocracy.

Later sources name her brothers as Charaxus, Larichus and Eurygyius, and Herodotus tells a story that Charaxus spent a fortune freeing a courtesan in Egypt. A daughter named Cleis appears in the fragments. The Parian Marble, a Greek chronicle carved in the third century BC, records that she went into exile in Sicily at some point between about 604 and 595 BC, during the political struggles on Lesbos.

Those struggles also involved her contemporary Alcaeus, another poet of Mytilene, and the statesman Pittacus. Sappho’s own death date is unknown; she was probably still alive around 570 BC.

Her poetry

Sappho wrote monody, songs for a single voice accompanied by the lyre, in the Aeolic dialect of Lesbos. Her themes were personal: love and longing, friendship, jealousy, the gods, family, and weddings. She also composed wedding songs, known as epithalamia, for public celebration.

Her poems often address women and girls in her circle. Ancient and modern writers have argued over what that circle was, whether a school, a religious group or simply a community of friends, and the evidence does not settle the question.

Scholars at Alexandria in the third and second centuries BC arranged her work into nine books, largely by metre. The first book alone may have held over 1,300 lines. She gave her name to the Sapphic stanza, a four-line form later used by the Roman poets Catullus and Horace.

How her work survived

Only one poem survives complete: the Ode to Aphrodite, known as Fragment 1, in which the poet asks the goddess to help her win a woman’s love. It was preserved because the critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus quoted it in full as a model of polished style.

Fragment 31, which describes the physical effects of desire on the speaker as she watches a woman beside a man, survives because the treatise On the Sublime, attributed to Longinus, quoted it. Catullus translated and adapted it in his Poem 51. Many other lines survive only as quotations in grammarians and dictionaries.

The great change came with papyrus. From 1896–97 the British scholars Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt began excavating the rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, where thousands of ancient book scraps had survived in the dry sand. These yielded new poems of Sappho, including Fragment 16, which argues that the most beautiful thing on earth is whatever one loves.

New discoveries: Tithonus and the Brothers Poem

In 2004 a papyrus from the University of Cologne allowed scholars to complete the so-called Tithonus or Old Age poem, in which Sappho reflects on growing old by recalling the myth of Tithonus, granted eternal life but not eternal youth.

In 2014 the papyrologist Dirk Obbink announced a further find, a largely complete poem now called the Brothers Poem, together with parts of a poem to Aphrodite. The Brothers Poem mentions Charaxus and Larichus and speaks of waiting for a ship’s safe return.

The text itself is widely accepted as genuine Sappho. However, scholars later showed that the account given of where the papyrus came from was false, and the case became part of a wider scandal over the trade in ancient papyri. The find is therefore valuable for literature but a warning about provenance.

Legend and reputation

Sappho’s fame grew legends. A Hellenistic epigram attributed to Plato calls her the tenth Muse. Athenian comic playwrights mocked her, and a later story claimed that she leapt from the cliffs of Leucas for love of a ferryman named Phaon. Most scholars regard this tale as fiction with no basis in her poems.

Another persistent claim is that her books were burned by church authorities in the Middle Ages. There is no sound evidence for this. Her works probably disappeared slowly, as readers found the dialect difficult and copyists chose other texts.

Because some of her poems express desire for women, the words lesbian (from Lesbos) and sapphic came, from the late nineteenth century, to describe love between women. Her poetry is often compared with the epic tradition of Homer, whose language she sometimes borrows while turning it towards private feeling.

Timeline

• c. 630 BC: Sappho is born on Lesbos (some scholars prefer c. 612 BC).
• c. 604–595 BC: Exile in Sicily, recorded by the Parian Marble.
• c. 570 BC: Probable approximate end of her life.
• 3rd–2nd century BC: Alexandrian scholars edit her poems in nine books.
• 1896–97: Excavations at Oxyrhynchus begin to yield new Sappho papyri.
• 2004: The Tithonus poem is completed with a Cologne papyrus.
• 2014: The Brothers Poem is published.

Why it matters

Sappho is one of the earliest voices in European literature to write in the first person about love and inner feeling, and one of very few women whose words survive from early Greece. Written down soon after the spread of the Greek alphabet, her poems show how fragile the survival of ancient literature has been, and how papyrus finds can still change what we read.