Sappho

Almost everything we know about Sappho's life comes from her own fragments and from much later, unreliable writers. She was born around 630 BC on Lesbos, either at Eresos in the west of the island or at Mytilene, its chief city, into an aristocratic family. The poems mention a daughter, Kleis, and three brothers, among them Charaxos, a merchant trading in Egypt whom she scolds in the so-called Brothers Poem, and Larichos, a young cupbearer.

Lesbos around 600 BC was torn by struggles between noble families, and Sappho's family ended up on the losing side: an ancient chronicle records that she spent some years in exile in Sicily, probably at Syracuse, before returning home. On Lesbos she seems to have led a circle of young women who sang, learned music and prepared for marriage; many poems are addressed to them by name: Anactoria, Atthis, Gongyla.

The famous story that she threw herself from the white cliff of Leucas for love of a ferryman called Phaon is a comic-stage invention of later centuries, and the date of her death is unknown; a late fragment, the Tithonus poem published in 2004, shows her complaining that her knees no longer carry her to the dance, so she lived at least into old age.

Sappho wrote in the Aeolic dialect of Lesbos, which sounds different from the Attic Greek of the classics: σελάννα for the moon, ἔμμεναι for 'to be'. The scholars of Alexandria collected her songs into nine books, arranged by metre. The first book was in the four-line stanza now called the Sapphic stanza, later borrowed by Catullus and Horace in Latin.

Only one poem survives complete, the Ύμνος στην Αφροδίτη (Hymn to Aphrodite, fr. 1), in which the goddess arrives in a chariot drawn by sparrows and asks, amused, who has wronged the poet this time. Fragment 31, Φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν (He seems to me equal to the gods), describes the physical symptoms of jealousy: tongue broken, fire under the skin, ears humming, sweat and trembling. Fragment 16 argues that the most beautiful thing on earth is not armies or ships but 'whatever one loves', and proves it with Helen of Troy. Other pieces are wedding songs, a lament for Adonis, a lullaby-like picture of a mother and daughter, and the image of a sweet apple left high on the branch.

Most of this came back to us in the twentieth century from papyrus scraps found in Egypt; the Brothers Poem appeared only in 2014. Her tone is direct, personal and precise, with none of the epic distance of Homer: she says 'I' and means it.

In Mytilene the central square by the harbour is Πλατεία Σαπφούς, with her statue; at Skala Eresou, her presumed birthplace, another statue faces the beach. Odysseas Elytis, himself of Lesbian descent, published a Modern Greek recomposition of her fragments in 1984 (Σαπφώ), the easiest way for a learner to read her. Fragments 1, 16 and 31 appear in Greek school anthologies of ancient lyric poetry, usually with a translation. The words lesbian and sapphic in many languages come from her island and her name. Her verses are quoted at Greek weddings and in songs, and the phrase 'the tenth Muse', from an epigram attributed to Plato, is still how Greeks introduce her.

• Only one of her poems, the Hymn to Aphrodite, survives from beginning to end; it was copied out by the critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus as a model of smooth style.
• Two 'new' Sappho poems were published in this century: the Tithonus poem in 2004 and the Brothers Poem in 2014, both from papyri.
• Fragment 31 was preserved because the treatise On the Sublime quoted it to show how a great poet selects details; Catullus translated it into Latin.
• In Roman times the city of Mytilene put her portrait on its coins.