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Sappho
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Sappho was a woman poet who was born on and lived on the island of Lesbos about 600 BCE. The story of her love for Phaon and her suicide are probably not true. She was believed to be from a wealthy and noble family including 3 sons and one daughter, Sappho. She was married and had one daughter, Cleis. She was exiled to Syracuse for political reasons, but sh returned to Lesbos in 581 BCE. She may have been the head of a girl's school and some of the poems may have been written as songs for the girls to sing at weddings and festivals.
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[This latest collection of the longtime Sappho translator Willis Barnstone is a useful one. It contains not only all of the known (and attributed) lines from Sappho, but ... the original sources of the fragments (and often Barnstone's commentary on them). The book provides a useful glossary and bibliography. The translations do not indicate omissions (as do Anne Carson's, below) but the Greek originals given on the facing pages do. For readers of the originals, William E. McCulloh provides an epilogue and metrical guide. (See the book's table of contents online.):]
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That Sappho had a romantic heart is certain, as her poetry expresses her love for women, and for beauty. It is ... known that young women came to Sappho for tutoring once they had finished their formal schooling but before marriage, and she often composed poetry in reference to these women. Many of Sappho’s poems refer to individual women, so she presumably loved more than one girl, the lucky tart. There is conjecture over whether this love was sexual, and over whether Sappho ran a formal all-girls ‘finishing school’ academy, inviting boarders and accepting fees. Both of these were asserted later, by male historians and philosophers and by the Victorians, who loved a saucy romance.
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A prayer that Sappho's brother may have a safe journey home. Named Charaxos, he reportedly spent considerable time in Egypt and there became entangled with a notorious courtesan called Rhodopis; the reference to past errors (5) may pertain to this episode.
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Sappho's poetry was translated respectfully into Latin and much of her work survived until the end of antiquity. Scholars at the great Alexandrian library collected her poems in an edition of nine books, but this edition got lost during the Middle Ages. Such Roman poets as Catullus and Horace in the first century B.C. knew her work. Horace used the sapphic stanza frequently. Antipater of Thessalonica from the second century B.C. included Sappho in his list of nine women poets. Later critics quoted her works and there are ... papyrus fragments.
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Sappho (650-590 BC), Greek poet, whose poetry was so renowned that Plato referred to her two centuries after her death as the tenth muse. She was born on the island of Lésvos, probably in Mitylene. Although the details of her life are lacking, it appears that she was of good family and was a contemporary of the lyric poets Alcaeus and Stesichorus. According to tradition, Alcaeus was her lover. Another legend holds that because of unrequited love for the young boatman Phaon she leaped to her death from a steep rock on the island of Levkás. She had a daughter named Cleïs and two brothers.
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Sappho