Sappho

Sappho (650-590? bc), Greek lyric 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 (Lesbos), probably in Mitylene. Although her life is little documented, it appears that she was of noble family and was a contemporary of the lyric poets Alcaeus, reputed to be her lover, and Stesichorus. She is said to have been married to a wealthy man from the island of Andros and to have had a daughter named Cleïs. Another legend holds that because of unrequited love for the young boatman Phaon she leapt to her death from a steep rock on Levkás (an island of the west coast of Greece).

The fragmentary remains of Sappho's poems indicate that she taught her art to a group of young women, to whom she was devotedly attached and whose bridal odes she composed when they left her to be married. The poet Anacreon (mid-6th century bc, a generation after Sappho), commenting upon the group, claimed Sappho felt sexual love for women from which arose the modern terms, “lesbianism“ and “sapphism” to describe female homosexuality.

Sappho wrote nine books of odes, epithalamia or wedding songs, elegies, and hymns, but the surviving fragments are few. They include the Ode to Aphrodite, quoted by the scholar Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the 1st century bc. New fragments of her poems were discovered on papyrus in the 20th century.

Sappho's poems are marked by exquisite beauty of diction, perfect simplicity of form, and intensity of emotion. She invented the verse form known as Sapphics, a four-line stanza in which the first three lines are each 11 syllables long and the fourth is 5 syllables long. Many later Greek poets were influenced by Sappho, particularly Theocritus.