Ode to Aphrodite (c. 600 BC)
Fragment 1, the only poem to survive complete: the goddess drives her sparrow-drawn chariot down to ask who has wronged the poet
Literature · Poets
Sappho
c. 630 – c. 570 BC · Greek (Lesbos)
Archaic Greek lyric poetry
Sappho of Lesbos was the most admired lyric poet of archaic Greece, writing personal, erotic songs in the Aeolic dialect to be sung to the lyre. Alexandrian scholars gathered her work into nine books, but almost all of it is lost: one poem survives complete and the rest are fragments, some recovered from Egyptian papyrus as recently as 2014. Her name and her island have given English the words "sapphic" and "lesbian".
How to spot them
- ▸The island of Lesbos and the city of Mytilene; the Aeolic dialect; a contemporary of the poet Alcaeus
- ▸Plato's epigram calling her the tenth Muse; only one poem survives complete
- ▸The Sapphic stanza: three eleven-syllable lines followed by a short fifth-syllable line
- ▸Fragments numbered rather than titled; new ones still surfacing from papyrus
- ▸The legend of the leap from the Leucadian cliff for love of the boatman Phaon
Key works
Fragment 31, beginning "He seems to me equal to the gods" (c. 600 BC)
The catalogue of symptoms of desire — tongue broken, fire under the skin, greener than grass — imitated by Catullus in poem 51
Fragment 16, the Anactoria poem (c. 600 BC)
Some say a host of horsemen is the finest sight on earth; the poet says it is whatever you love. Helen is the example
The Brothers Poem (c. 600 BC)
Recovered from papyrus and published in 2014; it names the brothers Charaxos and Larichos
The Tithonus Poem, or Old Age Poem (c. 600 BC)
Fragment 58, completed from a Cologne papyrus in 2004: knees no longer carry her, and Eos carried Tithonus away to no avail
Fragment 105a, the sweet apple reddening on the topmost bough (c. 600 BC)
A wedding-song image of the apple the pickers could not reach — or did not forget, but could not reach
The epithalamia, with the cry of Hymenaon and the order to raise high the roof-beam (c. 600 BC)
Wedding songs, Book 9 of the Alexandrian edition; the roof-beam line later supplied a J. D. Salinger title
Key ideas
- Lyric written in the first person about private feeling, rather than epic narrative about heroes
- Desire described as a physical catalogue of symptoms, a model for later European love poetry
- The personal preference set against public and martial values: love outranks cavalry and ships
Quick-fire facts
- •Born on Lesbos, at Eresos or Mytilene; she appears on painted pottery alongside the poet Alcaeus
- •The Parian Marble records that she was exiled to Sicily
- •Her poems were collected at Alexandria into nine books, arranged largely by metre
- •Plato is credited with the epigram naming her the tenth Muse
- •She mentions a daughter, Cleis, and a brother, Charaxos, said to have squandered a fortune on a courtesan in Egypt
- •The Sapphic stanza is named after her; Horace and Catullus both used it in Latin
- •Ovid's Heroides 15 is written as her letter to Phaon, the source of the Leucadian leap story
- •The 2014 papyrus publication of the Brothers Poem and Kypris Poem was disputed for its unclear ownership history
- •Anne Carson's 2002 translation of the complete fragments is titled If Not, Winter, a phrase from Fragment 22
Drill it — 9 cards
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Sources
- Poetry Foundation — Sappho
- World History Encyclopedia — Sappho of Lesbos