Sappho (ca. 615-555 B.C.E.)

Of women intellectuals in the ancient world, Sappho (or Psappho, in her own Aeolian dialect) is certainly best known. Her poetry was famed in her own time, and for centuries after she was regarded as the equal of Homer, even as the Tenth Muse. In 1850 Philip Smith wrote in the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology: “It is almost superfluous to refer to the numerous passages in which the ancient writers have expressed their unbounded admiration of the poetry of Sappho.... It may safely be affirmed that the loss of Sappho's poems is the greatest over which we have to mourn in the whole range of Greek literature.” Rae Dalven, in her introduction to her collection of contemporary Greek women poets, offers tribute to Sappho's inspiration: “By means of her rhythmic lyricism, her faith in the poetic idea, and the free expression of her emotions, Sappho broke through the patriarchal structure of society and the moral authority of the male” (17). Her influence has been felt for more than two millennia and remains powerful today.

Little is known with certainty of the life of Sappho, whose birth and death dates have been set variously by scholars at about 612 (or 630) to 555 (or 570) B.C.E. TO paraphrase Mary Barnard, the biographical tradition is full of contradictions: it is held that Sappho was bom on the island of Lesbos in the city of Mytilene, or perhaps in Eresus; that she married a man named Kerkylas, or that this name is a crude pun and that she never married; that she had a daughter named Cleis, or that Cleis was not really her daughter; that she was a prostitute, or that she was not; that she committed suicide throwing herself off a cliff for love of Phaon, a ferryman, or that she did no such thing; that she taught a school for girls on Lesbos, or that she did not; that the women named in her poems, such as Atthis and Anaktoria, were her students, or that they were simply her friends, or that they were her lovers, or that they were not; that her flight from Lesbos to Sicily was a political banishment, or that it was not.

Sappho's poetry was collected in nine volumes in Hellenistic Alexandria, around the second century B.C.E. They appear to have been preserved in Europe through at least the early middle ages, despite public condemnations, burnings, and orders that they be destroyed wherever found—for example by St. Gregory, Bishop of Constantinople, about the year 380 and by Pope Gregory VII in 1073. The persistence of quotations from her poems in later works suggests that not all copies were destroyed, but today only one complete poem and numerous fragments are known to have survived, culled in part from the works of later grammarians and historians, in part from papyri found in Egypt, many in shreds used for wrapping the dead in tombs.

There are numerous editions of the surviving fragments, in Greek or in translation, often along with compilations of testimonia or biographical references and commentaries on Sappho in ancient Greek and Latin literature. Modem English versions are available either in literal translation or in verse. David A. Campbell's Greek Lyric, vol. 1 (1982), provides the most complete compilation of poems and fragments, in Greek and literal English translation, together with biographical references.

Most of the English verse translations, from Swinburne in the nineteenth century to the present, are elaborate reconstructions that often owe more to the poetic imagination and predilections of the translator than to the Sapphic remnants. Some are compelling poetry in their own right and many seek to be faithful to the spirit of Sappho's own words, but most present significant distortions, particularly by the introduction of ethnocentric substitutions (e.g., “God” for “Zeus”) and patriarchal or misogynistic interpolations (e.g., the portrayal of Helen, in selection 1.C. below). Jane McIntosh Snyder, however, in Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho (1997), provides an excellent collection of 192 poems and fragments in her own “relatively literal” verse translation, with both Greek text and transliteration in the Roman alphabet, to give a sense of the original lyric sound.

Sappho is generally thought of today as a lyric poet who wrote primarily about the private love between individuals, in particular between women. J. B. Bury in the Cambridge Ancient History in 1926 contrasted her work with that of her friend and colleague, Alcaeus: “Politics, war, his own exile, sea voyages were the leading themes of Alcaeus..., while Sappho confined her muse within a narrower circle of feminine interests” (1926: 4, 494-95). Yet Sappho's fame rested on her wisdom as well as on her eloquence. Plato in the Phaedrus reported that Socrates classed her with Anacreon among the “ancient sages, men and women.”

The difficulties of translating the fragmentary remains of Sappho's poetry often leave us in doubt concerning their political context. A fragment cited by Hephaestion in the Handbook on Metres (second century) is translated by David A. Campbell as a somewhat petulant personal remark: “... having never yet found you more annoying, Irana” (Campbell, GL 91). But Mary Barnard, agreeing with J. M. Edmonds in interpreting Page 9 →the name to refer to Irene, goddess of peace, sets the fragment in the context of Sappho’s experience of political exile: “As for the exiles: I think they had never found you, Peace, more difficult to endurci” (Barnard, # 90).

Sappho is thought to have been exiled twice from Lesbos for opposition to the populist tyrants Myrsilus and Pittacus of Mytilene, her home. Whether this makes her a partisan of liberty or merely an ally of Alcaeus in aristocratic conspiracies against democratic rule remains in dispute. There are few echoes of these events in the surviving fragments of Sappho’s poetry—little more than a hostile reference to “ladies of the house of Penthilus,” into which Pittacus had married. But the poems and fragments below give intimations of a wider-ranging political outlook that rejects military values, merges the sensual/erotic with the political, and asserts the freedom and primacy of love in human society.

Few modem treatments of Sappho have been without some commentary on her love relationships with women. Some deny their physical eroticism, claiming to maintain academic distance or defend (from a homophobic perspective) Sappho’s “virtuous character.” Others insist upon it as an issue of critical scholarship, historical accuracy, or contemporary lesbian politics. That the debate has persisted for more than a thousand years and retains its intensity today is sufficient testimony to the depth and importance of the political implications attached to Sappho’s homoerotic poetry. The fragments available today remain open to conflicting interpretations, of which two of the most probing analyses are provided by Joan DeJean in Fictions of Sappho (1989) and Jane McIntosh Snyder, in Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho (1997).

Sappho was sometimes described as small and dark, as in the Oxyrhynchus papyrus of the late second or early third century (Campbell, 3). Ovid’s poem “Sappho to Phaon,” which may have been partly based on poems of her own now lost, suggests she may have been black:

Brown as I am, an Aethiopian dame

Inspired young Perseus with a generous flame:

Turtles and doves of different hue unite,

And glossy jet is paired with shining white.

(trans. Alexander Pope, 1707: in Bamstone, 1965: 181)

This tradition, as well as the association of Sappho with same-sex desire between women, may have had reverberations in the works of twentieth-century African American writers, as in the case of Pauline E. Hopkins in the portrayal of Sappho Clark in Contending Forces (see Somerville, 1997).

The description of Sappho in the Oxyrhynchus papyrus as “quite ugly, being dark in complexion and of very small stature” has been linked with other hints that Sappho felt herself an outsider, visibly different from the people of the Aeolian and Ionian cultures in which she was situated. Jack Winkler, for example, has argued that Sappho’s expressions of intense longing for the love of beautiful women reflected an underlying sense of alienation in her life.

In contrast with this view, Judy Grahn draws on the tradition of literature, history, and criticism that places Sappho in a matrilineal culture with a long matriarchal history, in which Lesbos figures as a protected island with a female-centered history. Grahn’s vision of Sappho rejects the image of a privatized voice forced to conceal its meaning in hidden phrases, isolated in a hostile world, for that of a consciously public voice, addressed to a welcoming audience, and met with praise and even accolades in her own lifetime and for centuries after. For Grahn, the power of Sappho’s public voice was so great that her memory and words were preserved for millennia, overcoming repeated efforts to eradicate them and surviving to be heard over the clamor of silencing misconstructions (The Highest Apple, 1985; see fragment GL 105, below).

The selections included in this volume are generally given in literal translation from the Greek. Two verse translations of the first selection (GL 16) are included to illustrate the diverse representations of Sappho’s work in contemporary literature. The first, by Guy Davenport, provides a graphic image of the gaps in even the better preserved fragments; the second, by Willis Bamstone, is an example of significant interpolations by Sappho’s translators.

In interpreting the selections provided here, it may be helpful to recall that in Sappho’s time, Lydia was one of four major kingdoms in Asia Minor, particularly famed for its wealth and military glory; Sardis was its capital. The first two selections (GL 16, 132) are the most directly “political” in challenging the appeal of military and imperial values. The third (GL 1) reflects the centrality of the goddess Aphrodite in Sappho’s poetry and the boldness of her summons to Aphrodite to be her “fellow-fighter,” her ally, as Jane Snyder suggests, in winning a love founded in “reciprocity and exchange, not rejection or alienation” (Snyder, 14). Selections 4 through 10 exemplify Sappho’s woman-centered love poems. Selections 11—17 reflect other significant values and concepts: the independence and greatness of another female model, Artemis; the importance of forth-right speech in a good cause; the dependence of beauty on the good; the need to link wealth with virtue; the value of education in the search for immortality; the challenge of reaching “the highest apple”; and Sappho’s confidence in continuity with the future.

The selections below are, except as noted, literal Page 10 →translations by David A. Campbell in Greek Lyric, vol. 1, 1982. The poems and fragments are identified by Campbell's numeration, for example, “GL 16."

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