Sappho

A poet from Lesbos

Sappho was a lyric poet from Lesbos in the seventh century BC. Lyric poems were composed to be sung with music. The island is the one secure location. The surviving evidence cannot fix a more exact birthplace.

Later ancient writers also remembered her. The geographer Strabo names Sappho in his list of notable people from Mytilene, a city on Lesbos. He makes her a contemporary of Alcaeus, another of those notable people. He praises her as beyond comparison among the women poets anyone remembered. His account shows how Sappho was remembered in the ancient world. But it was written later, and it is not a biography from her own time.

How her poems survive

Her poetry survives only in damaged ancient copies on papyrus, the paper of the ancient world. Each surviving piece of a poem is called a fragment. Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 2076, named after the Egyptian town where it was found, is a roll from the late first or early second century AD. It holds material from Book 2 of her poems. Gaps in it can be filled from another ancient copy, Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 1232.

New papyrus finds have added to the surviving text. Editors have joined readings where ancient copies overlap. The breaks are still part of what can be read.

Why Aphrodite speaks Sappho’s name

In the poem known as Sappho 1, the goddess Aphrodite leaves the house of Zeus in a chariot drawn by sparrows and comes down to the speaker. She arrives smiling. She asks what has happened and whom she should persuade. When the goddess speaks to the person calling her, she uses the name Sappho.

The poem ends with Sappho asking Aphrodite to come back and stand beside her as an ally. The goddess’s journey is part of a plea. The speaker recalls it because she wants the goddess to make it again.

This is the first kind of evidence about myth in Sappho’s surviving work: a god enters a song in the first person and speaks the poet’s name. It is a voice inside a performed poem, not a separate record of the poet’s life.

How Helen becomes a personal example

Fragment 16 begins with horsemen, foot soldiers and ships. Against them, the poem sets whatever a person loves. Helen provides the example. She leaves her husband, child and parents, and sails to Troy. Within a few lines, the poem turns from her choice to the absent Anactoria.

A damaged passage lies inside that argument. Some translations put Aphrodite there, but the poem as it survives does not secure every word about what caused Helen to leave. The damage sets a limit. Helen shows the poem’s point about love, but Aphrodite cannot be given a fully certain part in causing her departure.

The story of Troy takes only the space the argument needs. Sappho does not tell the war or Helen’s life in Troy. Myth enters as a short example, and then the poem turns to the absent Anactoria.

A wedding at Troy

Fragment 44 chooses a part of the Trojan story from before the city’s destruction. A herald announces that Andromache is arriving with costly objects. The people of Troy meet the party. The streets fill with pipes, cymbals, sacred song, perfume and prayers to Apollo. The fragment stops as Hector and Andromache are sung of as like the gods.

The surviving scene is a wedding. Its movement, sound and public ceremony are still present in the broken lines. Its subject is the wedding before the ruin that follows in the Trojan story. The poem keeps the moment when the city welcomes the bride.

The end of Fragment 44 survives on Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 2076. After the broken wedding song, the roll carries a colophon, a closing note naming Sappho, Lyrics, Book 2.

Tithonus and the ageing body

The Tithonus song uses myth in a different way. Its speaker sets her own ageing body beside the love of Dawn for the beautiful young Tithonus. Dawn carries him to the edge of the world. Yet grey old age takes him, even though his wife is immortal. The song cuts the story down to the one fact it needs: life beside a goddess does not stop the body from ageing.

Each poem chooses the moment of myth its song needs. Fragment 44 keeps the arrival for the wedding. The Tithonus song keeps the failure of life beside an immortal goddess to protect youth. Around those choices, damage to the papyrus limits what can be restored.