SUBJECT FILE NO. IJM-0050
CLASSIFICATION: HISTORICAL ARCHIVE
Sappho
Sappho
Lyric Poet
SECTION I -- SUBJECT PROFILE
| Name | Sappho |
|---|---|
| English | Sappho |
| Nationality | Greece |
| Lifespan | c.630 BC–c.570 BC |
| Gender | Female |
| Century | BC |
| Field | Literature |
| Title | Lyric Poet |
SECTION II -- OVERVIEW
Sappho was born around 630 BC on the island of Lesbos, in the Aegean, at a moment when the Greek world was passing out of the age of Homeric epic and into a new lyric sensibility that took the individual human heart as its subject.Almost everything we know about her life is uncertain, filtered through fragments of her own verse and the gossip of later biographers.
She appears to have come from an aristocratic family of the city of Mytilene, to have had three brothers, one of whom, Charaxus, squandered a fortune on an Egyptian courtesan she bitingly mocked in her poems, and to have had a daughter named Kleis, whom she addressed with tender pride.The first turning point came in her youth, when political turmoil on Lesbos drove her and her family into exile in Sicily, an experience that seems to have widened her horizons and sharpened her sense of the preciousness of home.
When she returned to Mytilene she became the center of a thiasos, a circle of young women drawn from the best families, who gathered around her to learn music, dance, and poetry in service of the goddess Aphrodite.For these companions, many of whom would leave her circle to be married, she composed the songs that would survive her: hymns to the goddess, wedding choruses, fierce and tender poems of love and separation.
Her second turning point was the decision to sing in the first person singular, in her own voice, about her own longings.In an age when poetry had meant Homer's thundering plural 'we,' her 'I' opened a new room in Western literature.
Ancient editors collected her work into nine books of lyric verse, and she was honored across the Mediterranean: Plato called her 'the Tenth Muse,' and the city of Mytilene stamped her face on its coins.Legend makes her end tragic, claiming she leapt from a cliff for love of the ferryman Phaon, but this is almost certainly a later invention.
The real tragedy was the slow destruction of her work: of perhaps ten thousand lines, fewer than seven hundred survive today, in fragments recovered from medieval quotations and the tattered papyrus wrappings of Egyptian mummies.Yet that handful of lines has been enough to make her, more than any other ancient poet, the patron saint of lyric poetry in every European language.
SECTION III -- CHRONOLOGY
SECTION IV -- NOTABLE STATEMENTS
“Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time.”
“He seems to me equal to the gods, the man who sits opposite you and listens close.”
SECTION V -- FIELD NOTES
[A]A poet saved by mummy wrappings
Of the roughly ten thousand lines Sappho is thought to have composed, fewer than seven hundred survive. Many of those came not from medieval manuscripts but from scraps of papyrus reused as mummy wrappings or rubbish in Egypt, recovered and painstakingly pieced together by modern scholars.
SECTION VI -- LEGACY & IMPACT
Sappho founded the tradition of personal lyric poetry in a first-person voice that every later European lyric poet, from Catullus to Baudelaire, has inherited. The words 'lesbian' and 'sapphic' derive from her island and her name, and her surviving fragments remain among the most admired poetry of the ancient world.
SECTION VII -- MAJOR WORKS
- [01]Ode to Aphrodite (Fragment 1)
- [02]Fragment 31 (He seems to me like a god)
- [03]Fragment 16 (Some say cavalry is fairest)
- [04]Nine books of lyric poetry (mostly lost)
- [05]Wedding songs (epithalamia)
