Greek poet, born in Lesbos, Greece. The most celebrated female poet of antiquity, she wrote lyrics unsurpassed for depth of feeling, passion, and grace. Only two of her odes are extant in full, but many fragments have been found in Egypt. She is said to have plunged into the sea from the Leucadian rock because Phaon did not return her love, but this event seems to have no historical foundation. Tradition also represents her poetry as a celebration of lesbian love, but this too has been disputed. She wrote in a great many metres, one of which, the Sapphic, is named after her. She influenced many later writers, among them Catullus, Ovid, and Swinburne.
Sappho (Attic Greek Σαπφώ [sapːʰɔː], Aeolic Greek Ψάπφω [psapːʰɔː]) was an Ancient Greek lyric poet, born in Eresos on the island of Lesbos.
Life
No contemporary historical sources exist for Sappho's life—only her poetry. While it is natural to suppose some commonality of experience between Sappho's poetic persona and the historical Sappho, scholars have rejected a biographical reading of the poetry and have cast grave doubts on the reliability of the later biographical traditions from which all more detailed accounts derive.
Sappho is believed to have been the daughter of Scamander and Cleïs and to have had three brothers.
Sappho was born into an aristocratic family, which is reflected in the sophistication of her language and the sometimes rarified environments which her verses record. More specifically, Sappho speaks of her friends and happy times among the ladies of Sardis, capital of Lydia, once the home of Croesus and near the gold-rich lands of King Midas. For many years, Sappho and other members of the aristocracy, including fellow poet Alcaeus, were exiled. Upon hearing that the famous Sappho would be coming to their city, the people of Syracuse built a statue of her as a form of welcome. Whether these poems are meant to be autobiographical is not known, although elements of other parts of Sappho's life do make appearances in her work, and it would be compatible with her style to have these intimate encounters expressed poetically, as well.
During the Victorian era, it became the fashion to describe Sappho as the head-mistress of a girls' finishing school. As Page DuBois (among many other experts) points out, this attempt at making Sappho understandable and palatable to the genteel classes of Great Britain was based more on conservative sensibilities than evidence. In fact, there are no references to teaching, students, academies, or tutors in any of Sappho's admittedly scant collection of surviving works. Nonetheless, the notion that Sappho was in charge of some sort of academy persists.
Contributions to the lyric tradition
Plato called Sappho The Tenth Muse, and the rest of the ancient critics agreed. Older critics sometimes alleged that she led an aesthetic movement away from typical themes of gods to the themes of individual human experiences and emotions, but it is now considered more likely that her work belongs in a long tradition of lyric poetry, and is simply among the first lyric poetry to have been recorded in writing.
During Sappho's lifetime, and in much of Greek poetry thereafter, rhythmic patterns of sound were designed by alternating stresses within and between lines. Sappho's poetry is impossible to be rendered with a sound analogous to the original in an English translation but many have tried.
Like all early lyric poetry, Sappho's works were composed to be either sung or recited to music, in particular to the accompaniment of the lyre. The word which is generally understood to refer to the plectrum is olisbos, but its derivation is uncertain and other meanings have been proposed, thus the uncertainty of it being the specific invention of Sappho.
Transmission and loss of Sappho's works
Although Sappho's work endured well into Roman times, with changing interests, styles, and aesthetics her work was copied less and less, especially after the academies stopped requiring her study. Sappho's Aeolic dialect, a difficult one, and by Roman times, arcane and ancient as well, posed considerable obstacles to her continued popularity.
Once the major academies of the Byzantine Empire dropped her works from their standard curricula, very few copies of her works were made by scribes.
Modern legends, with origins that are difficult to trace, have made Sappho's literary legacy the victim of purposeful obliteration by scandalized church leaders, often by means of book-burning. Indeed, Gregory of Nazianzus, who along with Pope Gregory VII features as the villain in many of these stories, was a reader and admirer of Sappho's poetry. For example, modern scholars have noted the echoes of Sappho fr. 2 in his poem On Human Nature, which copies from Sappho the quasi-sacred grove (alsos), the wind-shaken branches, and the striking word for "deep sleep" (koma).
It appears likely that Sappho's poetry was decimated by the same forces of cultural change that obliterated, without prejudice, the remains of all the canonical archaic Greek poets. Indeed, as one would expect from ancient critical estimations, which regard Sappho and Pindar as the greatest practitioners of monodic lyric and choral poetry (respectively), more of Sappho's work has survived through quotation than any of the others, with the exception of Pindar (whose works alone survive in a manuscript tradition).
Although the manuscript tradition broke off, some copies of her work have been discovered in Egyptian papyri from an earlier period. From the time of the European Renaissance, the interest in Sappho's writing has grown, seeing waves of fairly widespread popularity as new generations rediscover her work. Since few people are able to understand ancient languages, each age has translated Sappho in its own idiomatic way. Poetry, such as Sappho's, that relies on meter is difficult to reproduce in English, especially American English, which has a much more even pronunciation and emphasis than ancient Greek. As a result, many early translators used rhyme and worked Sappho's ideas into English poetic forms.
In the 1960s Mary Barnard reintroduced Sappho to the reading public with a new approach to translation that eschewed the cumbersome use of rhyming stanzas or forms of poetry, such as the sonnet, which were grossly unsuited to Sappho's style. Barnard's translations featured spare, fresh language that better reflected the clarity of Sappho's lines. Her work signalled a new appreciation and hunger for Sappho's poetry. Subsequent translators have tended to work in a similar manner, seeking to allow the essence of Sappho's spirit to be visible through the translated verses.
Works
Ancient sources state that Sappho produced nine volumes of poetry, but only a small proportion of her work survives. The rest of what we know of Sappho comes through citations in other ancient writers, often made to illustrate grammar, vocabulary, or meter.
The 'new Sappho'
The most recent addition to the corpus is a virtually complete poem on old age.
Sappho: myth and legend
In ancient and medieval times she was famous for (according to legend) throwing herself off a cliff due to unrequited love for a male sailor named Phaon.
The 3rd Century philosopher Maximus of Tyre wrote that Sappho was "small and dark" and that her relationships to her female friends were similar to those of Socrates:
A major new literary discovery, the Milan Papyrus, recovered from a dismantled mummy casing and published in 2001, has revealed the high esteem in which the poet Posidippus of Pella, an important composer of epigrams (3rd century BC), held Sappho's 'divine songs'.
An epigram in the Anthologia Palatina (9.506) ascribed to Plato states:
Aelian wrote in Miscellany (Ποικίλη ιστορία) that Plato called Sappho wise. Horace writes in his Odes that Sappho's lyrics are worthy of sacred admiration. One of Sappho's poems was famously translated by the 1st century BC Roman poet Catullus in his "Ille mi par esse deo videtur" (Catullus 51).
References in modern literature
Lord Byron wrote the following lines about her in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Stanza XXXIX:
Charles Baudelaire writes about Sappho in Les Fleurs du mal.
The Greek poet Odysseas Elytis (20th century AD from Lesbos) admired her in one of his Mikra Epsilon:
Lawrence Durrell wrote a play in verse titled Sappho, set in 7th Century BCE Lesbos.
Algernon Swinburne wrote a poem concerning Sappho, Sapphics, and another, Anactoria, concerning her and her lover Anactoria, which makes Sappho into a rather hyperbolic sadomasochist.
Sappho is the name of the homosexual sister of protagonist Van Albert in L.
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