Bloom's Literature

Sappho
Probably the daughter of a woman named Cleis, Sappho was born on the Mediterranean island of Lesbos, perhaps in the town of
Eresus. She almost certainly spent time in the island's principal town of Mytilene. She had brothers, one of whom, named
Charaxus, she chided for becoming involved with an Egyptian courtesan. As an adult, she married and bore a daughter named
Cleis. According to some, Sappho's husband and the father of Cleis was a man named Cercylas from Andros. As the scholar
Margaret Reynolds tells us, however, this name means "Prick from the Island of Man," and so Cercylas may be the invention of
later ribald tellers and dramatizers of the Sappho story.

It also seems that Sappho spent some time as an exile on the island of Sicily. This suggests that she played an actively subversive
role in the politics of her homeland. It is likely, too, that she was a teacher and numbered among her students young women with
literary aspirations. Several of their names and those of other female associates and of a rival are preserved in her verse:
Andromeda (the rival), Atthis, Erinna, Climene, Dica, Gorgo, Mika (girls she admired or celebrated), and others. The names of
contemporary male figures also appear.

Because a considerable number of Sappho's surviving love lyrics address women, literary tradition has appropriately conscripted
her into the role of an archetypal lesbian—a name, of course, derived from that of the island of her birth. Stories about her death,
though perhaps true, seem more consistent with the ongoing fictive embroidery that has for centuries been stitched onto the much
simpler fabric of what can confidently be said about the historic Sappho. She committed suicide, so the story goes, when she cast
herself from the white cliffs of an island in the Ionian Sea. Then called Leucadia or Leucas, the island is today labeled as St.
Maura. Sappho's self-destruction is said to have resulted from her despair at her unrequited passion for Phaon—a name also
applied to the demigod Adonis and to an aged ferryman whose youth Aphrodite restored. All this suggests at least a conflation of
real and mythical stories.

As if this high degree of uncertainty were insufficient, more follows. It is unclear that Sappho herself could have written down any
of her own works. Her composition stands on the very cusp of her native island's development of a script for representing her
Aeolic dialect of the Greek language. Fragmentary remains of some of her verse, however, seem to suggest at least a nascent
tradition of writing. Almost surely, like the preliterate poets and bards who preceded her, she sang her compositions while
accompanying herself on a stringed instrument such as a lyre or harp. Probably her disciples then memorized her work, performed
it, and taught it to others. The same method of dissemination had characterized the epics of Homer composed 200 years before
Sappho's time.

Nothing that Sappho wrote has come down to us directly. Nonetheless, by 150 years after her death, an active trade had
developed in manuscripts, and much from Sappho was successfully transferred from the oral formulaic tradition to the written one.
In ancient times, members of the Academic sect of philosophy are thought to have edited her then-surviving poems into nine
volumes. Owing partly to a change in literary taste, partly to the marginalization of the Aeolic in which she composed, and partly to
Christian disapproval of Sappho's pagan, lesbian, and bisexual material, many of these works were lost. As tastes shifted and her
language became obsolete, fewer copies of her poems were made. Some old copies were torn into strips and recycled for the
funeral trade as mummy wrappings. Others were destroyed—the victims of Christian zeal. Zealots were probably responsible for
burning Pharaoh Ptolemy I's 600-year-old library of classical manuscripts at Alexandria in 391 CE, as Willis Barnstone tells us.
Pope Gregory VII ordered Sappho's works burned both in Rome and in Constantinople in 1073, with the result that many
irreplaceable manuscripts were committed to the flames. What, if anything, was left in Constantinople probably fell victim to
crusader pillaging in 1204 and Ottoman destruction in 1453.

Nonetheless, some fragments of Sappho's verse were preserved in quotations made from her works by other writers. That some
of these fragments have survived to be transmitted to us at all we owe to the most improbable and fortuitous circumstances. In the
late 19th century, archeological excavations in an ancient trash heap near the Egyptian town anciently known as Oxyrhynchus and
today called Behnasa unearthed an enormous treasure trove of papyrus fragments—many of them apparently torn into strips for
mummy wrappings—dating from the second to the fifth centuries CE Amid the tens of thousands of bits of rubbish, a previously
unknown poem by Sappho appeared and was painstakingly pieced together. Some 60-plus volumes of edited material later, the
work of organizing and deciphering the still-daunting collection of remnants goes forward. Thus, the possibility of finding more
Sapphic documents exists. At present, 213 fragments of her work are known.

Thanks to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in what scholars categorize as Fragment 1 of Sappho's work, we do seem to have a single
ode to the goddess Aphrodite preserved in its entirety. Thanks to Longinus, who quoted Sappho in his famous essay, Longinus,
On the Sublime, a substantial remnant survives in Fragment 31. Beyond that, we know Sappho's work as directly as we can
principally from snippets of verse.

We also know her work, however, from the reputation that it enjoyed among the ancients who celebrated it, imitated it, and did
homage to Sappho's memory. They regarded her, in Plato's phrase, as a 10th Muse, and statues were erected to her memory.
Across 2,600 years, her voice calls out to us, and, often unknowingly, we hear its echoes in the popular songs of love longing that
continually sound in our ears. Sappho also feelingly explores such issues as the emotional consequences for the odd woman out in
a love triangle involving two women and a man. Her great and continuing contribution to the vocabulary of lyric poetry is a
language of desire.

That, however, is not her only contribution. In Greek, her poems are breathtakingly mellifluous. Her craftsmanship in melding
sense and sound knows few equals in the Western tradition. The best translations of her work succeed in echoing something of
her mastery. She also was an innovator of poetic form, developing, for instance, the sapphic stanza. Socrates and Plato admired
her, and Ovid, Catullus, and Horace imitated her in Latin.

Some of Sappho's poems are epistolary— actual verse letters. Most of her love lyrics are addressed to women, though perhaps a
few also address men. Other fragmentary poems invoke the gods and the Muses or contain prayers to Hera or Aphrodite. Others
vent Sappho's spleen at the success of a rival, Andromeda. Still others are epithalamia—wedding hymns—celebrating either the
unions of her contemporaries, some of them girls she admired, or imagined historical weddings such as that of Fragment 68, which
describes the wedding of the long-dead Trojan prince Hector with Andromache.

In another verse (Fragment 102), a speaker complains to her mother that she cannot work her loom because the goddess of love
has so smitten her with desire for "a slender boy." Still another rehearses a conversation begun by an apparently smitten young
man, a poet named Alkaios, who tries to disguise his desire for "violet-haired" Sappho, who smells to him like honey. Her
straightforward response makes clear that she knows what he wants and that he would do better to speak directly.

The poet and translator Paul Roche is among the best at conveying the music and delicacy of Sappho's verse in English. In his
slender volume entitled The Love Songs of Sappho, he includes verses, numbered 55 and 152, snatched from almost certain
oblivion.

Fragment 55 is an epistolary poem addressed "To a Soldier's Wife in Sardis: Anactoria." At one level, it praises the effects of
military spectacles such as cavalry columns and flotillas of vessels. It contrasts that martial display, however, with a sight that
Sappho prefers—the person one loves. Her perspective is that of a woman in love, as Helen was when she deserted her husband
and children and home for love of the Trojan prince, Paris.

The poem's addressee, Anactoria, is presumably the soldier's wife who would much rather see her love than all the parades
imaginable. But Anactoria is also beloved by Sappho, and in a graceful turn, the poem moves from implying Anactoria's feelings
for her husband to asserting Sappho's feeling for Anactoria. The poet imagines her friend's walk, her style, the vivacity of her facial
expression, all of which Sappho had rather see than "Lydian horse / and glitter of mail."

In fragment 152, "Ah, if my breasts could still give suck," by contrast, the reader or listener perceives the voice of a woman past
childbearing. She declares that, were she still capable of bearing a child, she would unhesitatingly take another husband. In a
touching acceptance of the facts of her situation, however, she comments upon her wrinkled appearance and on the way the god
of love avoids her, no longer bringing her "His beautiful pain."

Today, Sappho studies are a thriving industry. The slender remains of the body of her work invite ever-new readings and
interpretations. New images of her, moreover, continually emerge as each succeeding epoch reinterprets her significance in a new
context. She and her work remain objects of ardent critical attention. Consulting the works in the bibliography below will afford
readers a suggestion of the range and degree of interest that Sappho in her various scholarly and popular reincarnations has
generated.

Further Information

Barnstone, Willis, trans. Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho. [Bilingual edition.] Boston: Shambala, 2005.

Greene, Ellen. Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

——— et al. Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Reynolds, Margaret. The Sappho Companion. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Roche, Paul, trans. The Love Songs of Sappho. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1998.

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