The poet Sappho, one of the greatest poets of world literature, a rare example of a woman whose work has survived in appreciable measure from archaic Greece, was celebrated in antiquity as “the tenth Muse” (Anth. Pal. 9.506). The Garland of Meleager, a Hellenistic anthology, includes some verses of Sappho, which the poet calls “few, but roses.” Sappho has long been praised as a superb poet of Eros, capable of subtle and effective evocations of desire and erotic pleasure, especially devoted to Aphrodite, who sends the joys and pains of love. Aphrodite is seen by some as an alter ego to the poet herself. Sappho appeals to her, as the poems voice yearning for an absent object of desire.¹ She also invokes the Muses, and the Graces. The erotic poems often recall intimacy; express loss, tender yearning, and homoerotic longing; and create in memory a community bound by pleasure and song, exhibiting great elegance of composition and a sensuous luxury.

Much purported biographical information about the poet is unreliable, based on the poems and on later comedy. Even the spelling of her name varies from Psappho in the extant fragments, to Sappho in later antiquity. Her name may allude to her role as “sister” in various contexts.² It is said that Sappho was born on the island of Lesbos, daughter of Scamandronymus (a name that may suggest ties to Asia Minor) and Cleis. References to a husband in later sources may be based on comedy, her husband’s name, “Cercylas of Andros,” meaning “Cock from the Isle of Man.” One fragment (96b, 132) mentions a pais, who could be a daughter (but the word can also mean “slave”). Her brothers are named as Charaxus, Larichus, and Erygius (Suda Σ‎ 107). Sappho is mentioned on the Parian marble, as in exile on Sicily (Marm. Par. 36), probably following the aristocratic power struggles on archaic Lesbos. Herodotus describes a brother’s infatuation with a courtesan (see hetairai), a Thracian slave brought from Samos, Rhodopis (elsewhere called Doricha), resident in Egypt and supposedly so wealthy she had a pyramid constructed in her name (Hist. 2. 135). It was said that Alcaeus approached her sexually, and that she rebuffed him. They appear together on some vases. Sappho alone appears on another, and other representations of female performers with a barbitos or lyre may represent the poet.³

Biographical details, such as suicide for love of the ferryman Phaon, figure in the biographical lore concerning Sappho, relying on Ovid (Her. 15) and repeated by later generations to paint her as a tragic victim of heterosexual frustration.⁴ Catullus’s Lesbia alludes to the Lesbian poet, and Sappho’s verse form, called the Sapphic stanza, was used by other later poets, including Horace.

Debates continue about whether Sappho performed in male symposia as an entertainer, was primarily a choral composer and performer, a teacher, a leader of a religious group, of an initiatory group, a chorus trainer, or the principal figure in a group of companions (hetaireia) who served as entertainers at symposia.⁵ Sappho may have been a public performer in choral performances in her own day and then seen as a symposiastic poet when her works were reperformed in later contexts.⁶ A contemporary of the poet Alcaeus, Sappho may have led performances at the great sanctuary on the island of Lesbos at Messon, a shrine to the gods Zeus, Hera, and Dionysus.

Few substantive fragments survived antiquity. Both choral and monodic poems in the literary Aeolic dialect are attributed to Sappho Choral poems and include epithalamia and a lament for Adonis. Fragment 44, from an Oxyrhynchus papyrus, describes in Homeric terms the arrival of Andromache in Troy, to be married to Hector. Fragment 1, transmitted in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ On Literary Composition (Comp. 23), names the poet and draws on prayer form and the culturally significant flight-and-pursuit motif, present in Homeric battle scenes and in later forensic metaphor. Fragment 2 was published by Medea Norsa in 1937, recovered from an ostracon. It creates a hypnotic, incantatory ritual space. The fragmentary poem 16, against a tripartite foil of cavalry, infantry, and fleets, argues, using the example of Helen, for a definition of the beautiful as “what one loves,” and concludes with the bright smile of the beloved Anactoria. Fragment 31, transmitted in the text of Pseudo-Longinus, describes a scene of bodily disintegration at the sight of a heterosexual couple. Some of this poem’s themes are echoed in the fragmentary and recently discovered “Cypris” poem, which seems to describe a subject pierced and transfixed with erotic suffering at the hands of Aphrodite. Additional lines of fragment 58, discovered in 2004 on a papyrus in Cologne, complain of the inevitability of human aging and contrast the mortal singer in the poem with the mythic figure Tithonus, aged yet deathless.⁷

Fragment 94 recalls an absent beloved, and remembers flowery, tender pleasures and the satisfaction of longing. Fragment 96 brings to life a beloved companion now among Lydian women, radiant like the moon spreading over sea and fields of flowers, and is remembered as herself yearning. Other fragments touch on luxuries, on the Muses, on rivalries among singers. The most recent publications of contested provenance, “The Brothers (or Charaxus) Poem,” the “Cypris Poem,” and other fragments, are said to have come from Egyptian cartonnage or bookbinding, and are now in private possession.⁸

These recently recovered fragments seem to have formed part of the first book of a Hellenistic collection of Sappho’s works, in most cases with the poems arranged alphabetically according to the first word of the poem. These have supplemented readers’ appreciation of the poet, who has been seen variously over many centuries as a comic figure in Athenian Old Comedy, as Alexandria’s muse, as lover of the ferryman Phaon following Ovid (Her. 15), subsequently as poetic model, the first woman poet of the European tradition, and more recently as an exemplar of lesbian desire.

Earlier scholarship, often homophobic, focused on aesthetic, historical, and linguistic questions, side-stepping the matter of Sappho’s sexual preference, arguing that Sappho was a chaste headmistress overseeing a house of the Muses that educated and trained other aristocratic young women in the poetic arts. More recent feminists and historians of sexuality have recognized Sappho as a feminist and lesbian forebear. The more recently discovered fragments expand interpretation of her work as scholars have begun to emphasize the performative and fictional nature of her personae, pointing to a variety of versions of selfhood, including that of lover, but also of iambist, abusing or chastising others, possibly including her own brother in the “Brothers” or “Charaxus Poem,” which celebrates the safe return of a sailor from the sea.⁹ The more recent finds expand reference to family, including brothers, fictive or real, and demonstrate a mediation between spheres, the quotidian and the mythic.¹⁰ Recent interpretations place stress on the fictionality of the agents and objects in the corpus, allowing for an instability of poetic identity. Although some suggestions have been made that Sappho was a professional singer, a hetaira, or courtesan, in the classical sense, others add to the portrait of her role as a concerned sister, and as a poet praying to Hera for safety and return from travel for family members or others.¹¹ Themes of commerce and shipping link the poet, her family, and community to Egypt and the ancient Near East.¹² Other poems (fr. 16, 39, 96, 132) refer to Lydia in Asia Minor, and show her to be part of a cultural complex, facing eastward.

Post-classical reception for centuries focused on Sappho’s pursuit of Phaon and her alleged suicide.¹³ Although John Donne registered her desire for women in his “Sappho to Philaenis,” it was not until the 19th and 20th centuries that Sappho was seen as a poetic advocate of explicit same-sex desire. Readers in the 19th and 20th centuries began to resuscitate the homoerotic persona, and paved the way for such translators and imitators as Renee Vivien.¹⁴ Reception includes musical compositions.¹⁵ Because of its associations with her, the island of Lesbos became a favoured site of lesbian tourism in the 20th and 21st centuries, even though upheavals in Western Asia in the early 21st century have made it a vulnerable sanctuary and transit point for migrants and refugees.