Sappho
Sappho (Σαπφώ, Sapphṓ; Sappho; /ˈsæfoʊ/), a Greek lyric poet from the island of Lesbos, is celebrated for her contributions to Greek poetry and her influence on lyrical traditions. Born around 610 BCE, Sappho's biographical details are sparse, largely reconstructed from her poetry and later sources. She lived during a culturally rich period in the Archaic Greek era and is often associated with the city of Mytilene. Sappho's poetry, known for its emotional depth and lyrical beauty, primarily explores themes of love, desire, and the personal experiences of women in her circle. Unlike the epic poetry of Homer, Sappho's work was personal and intimate, performed for small groups and focused on the complexities of human relationships and emotions. Ancient sources suggest she came from a wealthy family; ancient testimonia provide contradictory accounts of Sappho's life, including her marital status and sexual orientation. Her poetry suggests deep emotional relationships with women, leading to her longstanding association with lesbianism. Sappho's poetry is renowned for its exploration of love and passion, often directed towards women; it also touches on themes of marriage, nature, and the daily lives of the people of Lesbos.
Sappho is known for her mastery of the lyric form, employing precise language, vivid imagery, and innovative use of meter. The Sapphic stanza, characterized by its distinctive meter, is named after her. Only a small fraction of her estimated output survives, mostly in fragmentary form. The most complete poem is the Ode to Aphrodite, which provides insight into her poetic style and themes. In her own time and the centuries that followed, Sappho was highly regarded for her poetic skill; Plato famously referred to her as the tenth Muse, and her work was widely read and admired throughout the ancient world. Beyond literature, Sappho's life and work have become emblematic of the creative and emotional lives of women, influencing a wide range of art, literature, and feminist thought. Much of what is known about Sappho comes from her own poetry and later ancient commentators such as Strabo, Herodotus, and Ovid. The reliability of these sources varies, and much of Sappho's biography is speculative or mythologized. Sappho's poems were originally written on papyrus and later transcribed by scholars in Alexandria; the discovery of new papyri fragments continues to add to the corpus of her work, albeit incrementally. She writes in Aeolic vernacular and follows the Aeolic poetic tradition, with elements of Homer in some of her works. She uses concise, direct, and vivid phrasing, and she dispassionately describes her emotions, revealing their intensity.
Legends about Sappho abound, many having been repeated for centuries. She is said, for example, to have been married to Cercylas, a wealthy man from the island of Andros. But many scholars challenge this claim, finding evidence in the Greek words of the bawdry of later Comic poets. Most modern critics also consider it legend that Sappho leaped from the Leucadian rock to certain death in the sea because of her unrequited love of Phaon, a younger sailor. She had at least two brothers, Larichus and Charaxus, and may have had a third. A fragment from Sappho that is dedicated to Charaxus has survived; one of her poems mentions a daughter named Cleis or Claïs. The tradition that she fled the island or was banished and went to Sicily may be true, but she lived most of her life in her hometown of Mytilene on Lesbos.
The Sapphic stanza consists of four lines; the first three lines have the same structure, containing 11 syllables typically divided into two trochees, a dactyl, and two more trochees. The fourth line, known as the Adonic line, is shorter, consisting of five syllables, typically a dactyl followed by a trochee. This form was used by Sappho in her lyric poetry and was later adopted by other poets, both in ancient times and in more modern eras. The structure of a Sapphic stanza can be represented as follows, where "–" represents a long syllable, "u" represents a short syllable, and "|" marks the division between feet. The "x" in the representation of the Sapphic stanza structure indicates a syllable that can be either long or short, providing some flexibility within the metrical pattern. This allows for variations in the rhythm across different lines and poems while maintaining the overall structure characteristic of the Sapphic stanza.
First three lines:
– u – x | – u – x | – u u – | – u – x
– u – x | – u – x | – u u – | – u – x
– u – x | – u – x | – u u – | – u – x
Fourth line (Adonic):
– u u – u
An example of the Sapphic stanza from one of Sappho's fragments, translated into English while attempting to maintain the original meter as closely as possible, is as follows:
"Like the very gods in my sight is he who
sits where he can look in your eyes, who listens
close to you, to hear the soft voice, its sweetness,
laugh so enchanting."
Sappho's work contains only a few apparent allusions to the political disturbances of the time, which are so frequently reflected in the verse of her contemporary Alcaeus. Her themes are invariably personal - primarily concerned with her thiasos, the female community that met under her leadership. Sappho herself attacks in her poems other thiasoi directed by other women. The goal of the Sapphic thiasos is the education of young women, especially for marriage; Aphrodite is the group’s tutelary divinity and inspiration. Sappho is the intimate and servant of the goddess and her intermediary with the girls; in the ode to Aphrodite, the poet invokes the goddess to appear, as she has in the past, and to be her ally in persuading a girl she desires to love her.
Frequent images in Sappho’s poetry include flowers, bright garlands, naturalistic outdoor scenes, altars smoking with incense, perfumed unguents to sprinkle on the body and bathe the hair - all typical elements of the goddess' rituals. In the thiasos, girls were educated and initiated into grace and elegance for seduction and love. Singing, dancing, and poetry played a central role in this educational process and other cultural occasions. As was true for other gender-segregated Greek communities, including the Spartan, the practice of homoeroticism within the thiasos played a role in the context of initiation and education.
In Sappho’s poetry love is passion, an inescapable power that moves at the will of the goddess; it is desire and sensual emotion. It is nostalgia and memory of affections that are now distant, but shared by the community of the thiasos. There is a personal poetic dimension, which is also collective because all the girls of the group recognize themselves in it. An important part of Sappho’s poetic oeuvre is occupied by epithalamia, or nuptial songs. It is not known how her poems were published and circulated in her own lifetime and for the following three or four centuries. In the era of Alexandrian scholarship (3rd and 2nd centuries BCE), what survived of her work was collected and published in a standard edition of nine books of lyrical verse, divided according to metre, but it did not endure beyond the early Middle Ages. By the 8th or 9th century CE Sappho was represented only by quotations in other authors; only the Ode to Aphrodite, 28 lines long, is complete. The next longest fragment is 16 lines long. Since 1898 CE these fragments have been greatly increased by papyrus finds, though, in the opinion of some scholars, nothing equal in quality to the two longer poems.