LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Sappho: Works
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Now seeing in your mind's eye this scenario of shifting visual scenes and shifting scenes in Sappho's mind as she prays in the dark of the temple chamber, you have a better visual entree into the intricacies of this remarkable poem. You lack the sounds, which are Greek property and have to be learned in a matrix of Greek writings, Homer and the older poets at a minimum, next Herodotus and Plato for a later reflected glory. Or you can read the transliterated text aloud again and again and something of the sound will come back to you, just as you can hear Palestrina's grand choral work without understanding Latin or harmony or counterpoint, so long as you really listen.
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The dates of her life are uncertain, but Sappho flourished from about 610 to 580 BC. She was one of the best lyric poets of ancient Greece. Unfortunately nearly all of her works have been lost. Except for one work, only fragments have survived.
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In terms of its scope, Marguerite Johnson’s Sappho succeeds admirably in illumining its subject. However, while the author’s translations of Sappho’s poems and fragments which illustrate the text read convincingly, gracefully, and indeed compellingly, it would have further enhanced the work’s comprehensiveness and optimised its interest and authority for specialised readers to have included Sappho’s cited works in the original language. This applies particularly to the most recently-discovered fragments, which may not be as widely available as those long familiar.
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Sappho wrote mainly love poems, of which only fragments survive, save a single complete poem, Fragment 1, Hymn to Aphrodite. Given her reputation in the ancient world, since only fragments of her work remain, the world lost a valuable treasure in her work.
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Because Sappho's poems were not written in Attic Greek, which later became the main Greek dialect, they were no longer copied and were lost. Because of this, her works, which once were written down on no less than nine scrolls, are now known only from fragments, and it was quite a sensation when in 2005 the discovery of a new and pretty long fragment, dealing with old age, was announced (more...).
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During the Victorian era, it became the fashion to describe Sappho as the headmistress of a girls' finishing school. As Page DuBois (among many other experts) points out, this attempt at making Sappho understandable and palatable to the genteel classes of Great Britain was based more on conservative sensibilities than evidence. In fact, many argue there are no references to teaching, students, academies, or tutors in any of Sappho's admittedly scant collection of surviving works. Burnett follows others, like C.M. Bowra, in suggesting that Sappho's circle was somewhat akin to the Spartan agelai or the religious sacred band, the thiasos, but Burnett nuances her argument by noting that Sappho's circle was distinct from these contemporary examples because "membership in the circle seems to have been voluntary, irregular and to some degree international."[23] The notion that Sappho was in charge of some sort of academy persists nonetheless.
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