Sappho

Greek lyric poet

• Born: c. 630 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Eresus, Lesbos, Asia Minor (now in Greece)
• Died: c. 580 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Mytilene, Lesbos, Asia Minor (now in Greece)

Regarded by ancient commentators as the equal of Homer, the lyric poet Sappho expressed the human emotions with honesty, courage, and skill.

Early Life

Sappho (SAF-oh) was born about 630 in Eresus on the island of Lesbos, just off the western coast of Turkey. Her father was probably a rich wine merchant named Scamandronymus, and her mother was called Cleis, as was Sappho’s daughter. The poet had three brothers: Charaxus and Larichus, who served in aristocratic positions in Mytilene, and Eurygyius, of whom no information is available. Charaxus, the oldest brother, reportedly fell in love with and ransomed the courtesan Doricha, which displeased Sappho. Conversely, she often praised her other brother, Larichus, whose name, passed down in Mytilenian families, was the same as that of the father of a friend of Alexander the Great.

About 600, when the commoner Pittacus of Mytilene gained political power in Lesbos, Sappho reportedly went into exile in Sicily for a short time. She was already well-known. She married Cercylas, a wealthy man from Andros, with whom she had her daughter, Cleis.

Although much of the information available regarding the Aeolian culture of seventh century Lesbos derives only from the poetry of Sappho and her contemporary Alcaeus, scholars have described the society as more sensual and free than those of the neighboring Dorians, Ionians, Spartans, and Athenians. Political unrest, freedom for women, and enjoyment of the senses appear to have characterized the aristocratic circle with which Sappho mingled.

Life’s Work

Sappho’s poetry, her principal life’s work, consisted of nine books, which the grammarians of Alexandria arranged according to meter. The earliest surviving texts date from the third century b.c.e. Because the first book contained 1,320 lines, it can be surmised that Sappho left approximately twelve thousand lines, seven hundred of which have survived, pieced together from several sources. Only one complete poem remains, quoted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the rest ranging in completeness from several full lines to one word. Many of the lines lack beginning, middle, or end because they have survived on mummy wrapping in Egyptian tombs, the papyrus having been ripped crosswise of the roll, lengthwise of the poem. The long rolls of papyrus, made from the stalks of a water plant, also survived in battered condition in the dry Egyptian climate in garbage dumps and as stuffing in the mouths of mummified crocodiles.

Other lines remain because ancient grammarians used them to illustrate a point of grammar or comment on a text; literary critics quoted them to praise Sappho’s style or talk about her metrics; and historians, orators, and philosophers used brief quotes from her work to illustrate their points. One fragment was recorded on a piece of broken pottery dating from the third century b.c.e. Important discoveries of eighth century manuscripts near Crocodilopolis were made in 1879, and two Englishmen made comparable finds in 1897 in an ancient Egyptian garbage dump. One nineteenth century German scholar who rescued Sappho’s poetry from its battered condition lost his eyesight, and one of the English scholars temporarily lost his sanity during the arduous process of transcription.

The surviving poetry consists primarily of passionate, simple, love poems addressed in the vernacular to young women. “Ode to Aphrodite,” the only remaining complete poem, pleads with the goddess to make the object of the poet’s passion return her love with equal intensity, which Aphrodite promises to do. Sappho’s equally famous poem, “Seizure,” is usually interpreted as an objective description of the poet’s extreme jealousy when she sees her beloved conversing with a man. She writes that her heart beats rapidly and “a thin flame runs under/ [her] skin”; she cannot speak or see anything and hears only her “own ears/ drumming”; she sweats, trembles, and turns “paler than/ dry grass.” Her jealousy can also burst into anger, as when she warns herself

Sappho, when some foolExplodes ragein your breasthold back thatyapping tongue!

Or she can restrain her emotions, stating quietly, “Pain penetrates/ Me drop/ by drop.” The intensity of Sappho’s passion becomes clear in the brief metaphor “As a whirlwind/ swoops on an oak/ Love shakes my heart.” In a quieter mood, she can reveal another facet of her feelings:

Really, Gorgo,My dispositionis not at allspiteful: I havea childlike heart.

Sappho’s subject matter helps explain the low survival rate of her poetry. Her reputation reached such greatness during the Golden Age of Greece that Solon of Athens reputedly remarked that he wished only to learn a certain poem by Sappho before he died, and Plato referred to her as the “Tenth Muse.” The writers of the urbane and sophisticated Middle and New Comedy of Greece in the fourth and third centuries b.c.e., however, six of whom wrote plays they titled “Sappho,” ridiculed Sappho’s simplicity and openness, depicting her as an immoral, licentious courtesan. Although the Romans Theocritus, Horace, and Catullus praised and imitated her, Ovid referred to her both as a licentious woman lusting after a young man and as one who taught her audience how to love girls, characteristics that the Christian church did not value.

Consequently, in 180 c.e. the ascetic Tatian attacked her as being whorish and love-crazy. Gregory of Nazianzus, bishop of Constantinople, in about 380, ordered that Sappho’s writings be burned, and eleven years later Christian fanatics partially destroyed the classical library in Alexandria, which would certainly have contained her work. In 1073, Pope Gregory VII ordered another public burning of her writings in Rome and Constantinople. The Venetian knights who pillaged Constantinople in April, 1204, further vanquished her extant poetry. Thus, no single collection of her work survived the Middle Ages.

During the Renaissance, however, when Italian scholars recovered Peri hypsous (first century c.e.; On the Sublime, 1652), attributed to Cassius Longinus, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s treatise on style, they found “Hymn to Aphrodite” and “Seizure.” At this point, scholars began to collect all the remaining words, lines, and stanzas by Sappho.

During the nineteenth century, English and German scholars began to idealize Sappho and her work. Many of them viewed her as a moral, chaste woman, either a priestess of a special society of girls who devoted themselves to worship of Aphrodite and the Muses, or as the principal of a type of girls’ finishing school. Although they sometimes acknowledged the intensity of her passion for her “pupils,” they denied that it resulted in physical expression, a sentiment that persisted in the work of Maurice Bowra in 1936 and that Denys L. Page began to challenge in 1955. Succeeding critical works have increasingly accepted and explored the existence of Sappho’s physical love for her young female companions. Although Sappho’s expressed lesbian feelings or practice have little bearing on her skill as a poet, the stance almost doomed her work to extinction in a predominantly Christian society, in which sexual values differed significantly from those accepted in the ancient world, especially in seventh century Lesbos.

Significance

The poetry of Sappho provides its reader with a direct experience of intense, stark emotions. Its unadorned honesty allows readers from various cultures and time periods a glimpse of the culture in which she lived, but, more important, into the human heart at its most vulnerable. Sappho loves and hates, feels jealousy and anger, and is able to transmit her emotions so immediately that the reader must respond to her stimuli.

Sappho defends the private sphere and shows the power of love within the individual heart. She has caused succeeding cultures to express their values in relation to her openness. To examine the history of Western civilization in reaction to Sappho’s work is to stand back and observe as succeeding generations gaze into the mirror that she provides. Many have smashed the mirror, unable to confront the naked human heart. Some have seen themselves as they would like to be, and a few have learned more fully what it means to be feeling, passionate human beings.

Bibliography

Bowra, C. Maurice. Greek Lyric Poetry: From Alcman to Simonides. 2d ed. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1961. A classic review of seven Greek lyric poets stressing their historical development and critiquing important works. Offers groundbreaking theories of the poets as a group and as individual writers. Views Sappho as the leader of a society of girls that excluded men and worshipped the Muses and Aphrodite.

Burnett, Anne Pippin. Three Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. Rejects theories of ancient Greek lyrics as either passionate outpourings or occasional verse. Describes Sappho’s aristocratic circle and critiques six major poems.

Jenkyns, Richard. Three Classical Poets: Sappho, Catullus, and Juvenal. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982. Stresses the relativistic view that no one theory can elucidate ancient poetry. Detailed analysis of Sappho’s principal poems and fragments, concluding that she is a major poet.

Rayer, Diane, trans. Sappho’s Lyre: Archaeic Lyric and Women Poets of Ancient Greece. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. The introduction and notes to this analogy of works of Sappho and her contemporaries provide historical and literary contexts for the ancient poetry. Written for the reader who does not know Greek.

Reynolds, Margaret, ed. The Sappho Companion. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Analogy contains narratives of the way societies in different times have accepted or rejected Sappho’s works. Includes an introduction as well as translations of the fragments of the poems, a bibliography, and an index.

Sappho. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Translated by Anne Carson. New York: Knopf, 2002. Presents all of Sappho’s fragments in English accompanied by the Greek text.