Sappho: Poems and Fragments Sappho

Ancient reputation

In antiquity, Sappho's poetry was highly admired, and several ancient sources refer to her as the "tenth Muse".[155] The earliest surviving poem to do so is a third-century BC epigram by Dioscorides,[156][157] but poems are preserved in the Greek Anthology by Antipater of Sidon[158][159] and attributed to Plato[160][161] on the same theme. She was sometimes referred to as "The Poetess", just as Homer was "The Poet".[162] The scholars of Alexandria included her in the canon of nine lyric poets.[163] According to Aelian, the Athenian lawmaker and poet Solon asked to be taught a song by Sappho "so that I may learn it and then die".[164] This story may well be apocryphal, especially as Ammianus Marcellinus tells a similar story about Socrates and a song of Stesichorus, but it is indicative of how highly Sappho's poetry was considered in the ancient world.[165]

Sappho's poetry also influenced other ancient authors. Plato cites Sappho in his Phaedrus, and Socrates' second speech on love in that dialogue appears to echo Sappho's descriptions of the physical effects of desire in fragment 31.[166] Many Hellenistic poets alluded to or adapted Sappho's works.[167] The Locrian poet Nossis was described by Marilyn B. Skinner as an imitator of Sappho, and Kathryn Gutzwiller argues that Nossis explicitly positioned herself as an inheritor of Sappho's position as a female poet.[168] Several of Theocritus' poems allude to Sappho, including Idyll 28, which imitates both her language and meter.[169] Poems such as Erinna's Distaff and Callimachus' Lock of Berenice are Sapphic in theme, being concerned with separation – Erinna from her childhood friend; the lock of Berenice's hair from Berenice herself.[170]

In the first century BC, the Roman poet Catullus established the themes and metres of Sappho's poetry as a part of Latin literature, adopting the Sapphic stanza, believed in antiquity to have been invented by Sappho,[171] giving his lover in his poetry the name "Lesbia" in reference to Sappho,[172] and adapting and translating Sappho's 31st fragment in his poem 51.[173][174] Fragment 31 is widely referenced in Latin literature: as well as by Catullus, it is alluded to by authors including Lucretius in de rerum natura, Plautus in Miles Gloriosus, and Virgil in book 12 of the Aeneid.[175] Latin poets also referenced other fragments: the section on Eppia in Juvenal's sixth satire references fragment 16,[176] a poem in Sapphic stanzas from Statius' Silvae may reference the Ode to Aphrodite,[177] and Horace's Ode 3.27 alludes to fragment 94.[178]

Other ancient poets wrote about Sappho's life. She was a popular character in ancient Athenian comedy,[137] and at least six separate comedies called Sappho are known.[179][p] The earliest known ancient comedy to take Sappho as its main subject was the early-fifth or late-fourth century BC Sappho by Ameipsias, though nothing is known of it apart from its name.[182] As these comedies survive only in fragments, it is uncertain exactly how they portrayed Sappho, but she was likely characterised as a promiscuous woman. In Diphilos' play, she was the lover of the poets Anacreon and Hipponax.[183] Sappho was also a favourite subject in the visual arts. She was the most commonly depicted poet on sixth and fifth-century Attic red-figure vase paintings[171] – though unlike male poets such as Anacreon and Alcaeus, in the four surviving vases in which she is identified by an inscription she is never shown singing.[184] She was also shown on coins from Mytilene and Eresos from the first to third centuries AD, and reportedly depicted in a sculpture by Silanion at Syracuse, statues in Pergamon and Constantinople, and a painting by the Hellenistic artist Leon.[185]

From the fourth century BC, ancient works portray Sappho as a tragic heroine, driven to suicide by her unrequited love for Phaon.[141] A fragment of a play by Menander says that Sappho threw herself off of the cliff at Leucas out of her love for him.[186] Ovid's Heroides 15 is written as a letter from Sappho to Phaon, and when it was first rediscovered in the 15th century was thought to be a translation of an authentic letter of Sappho's.[187] Sappho's suicide was also depicted in classical art, for instance on the first-century BC Porta Maggiore Basilica in Rome.[186]

While Sappho's poetry was admired in the ancient world, her character was not always so well considered. In the Roman period, critics found her lustful and perhaps even homosexual.[188] Horace called her "mascula Sappho" ("masculine Sappho") in his Epistles, which the later Porphyrio commented was "either because she is famous for her poetry, in which men more often excel, or because she is maligned for having been a tribad".[189] By the third century AD, the difference between Sappho's literary reputation as a poet and her moral reputation as a woman had become so significant that the suggestion that there were in fact two Sapphos began to develop.[190] In his Historical Miscellanies, Aelian wrote that there was "another Sappho, a courtesan, not a poetess".[191]

Modern reception

By the medieval period, Sappho's works had been lost, though she was still quoted in later authors. Her work became more accessible in the 16th century through printed editions of those authors who had quoted her. In 1508 Aldus Manutius printed an edition of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, which contained Sappho 1, the Ode to Aphrodite, and the first printed edition of Longinus' On the Sublime, complete with his quotation of Sappho 31, appeared in 1554. In 1566, the French printer Robert Estienne produced an edition of the Greek lyric poets that contained around 40 fragments attributed to Sappho.[192]

In 1652, the first English translation of a poem by Sappho was published, in John Hall's translation of On the Sublime. In 1681 Anne Le Fèvre's French edition of Sappho made her work even more widely known.[193] Theodor Bergk's 1854 edition became the standard edition of Sappho in the second half of the 19th century;[194] in the first part of the 20th century, the papyrus discoveries of new poems by Sappho led to editions and translations by Edwin Marion Cox and John Maxwell Edmonds, and culminated in the 1955 publication of Edgar Lobel's and Denys Page's Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta.[195]

Like the ancients, modern critics have tended to consider Sappho's poetry "extraordinary".[196] As early as the ninth century, Sappho was referred to as a talented female poet,[171] and in works such as Boccaccio's De Claris Mulieribus and Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies she gained a reputation as a learned lady.[197] Even after Sappho's works had been lost, the Sapphic stanza continued to be used in medieval lyric poetry,[171] and with the rediscovery of her work in the Renaissance, she began to increasingly influence European poetry. In the 16th century, members of La Pléiade, a circle of French poets, were influenced by her to experiment with Sapphic stanzas and with writing love-poetry with a first-person female voice.[171]

    Thy soul Grown delicate with satieties, Atthis.                         O Atthis, I long for thy lips. I long for thy narrow breasts, Thou restless, ungathered.

— Ezra Pound, "ἰμέρρω":[198] adaptation of Sappho 96

From the Romantic era, Sappho's work – especially her Ode to Aphrodite – has been a key influence of conceptions of what lyric poetry should be.[199] Poets such as Alfred Lord Tennyson in the 19th century, and A. E. Housman in the 20th century, have been influenced by her poetry. Tennyson based poems including "Eleanore" and "Fatima" on Sappho's fragment 31,[200] while three of Housman's works are adaptations of the Midnight Poem, long thought to be by Sappho though the authorship is now disputed.[201] At the beginning of the 20th century, the Imagists – especially Ezra Pound, H. D., and Richard Aldington – were influenced by Sappho's fragments; a number of Pound's poems in his early collection Lustra were adaptations of Sapphic poems, while H. D.'s poetry frequently echoed Sappho stylistically and thematically, and in some cases, such as "Fragment 40", more specifically invoke Sappho's writing.[202]

Western classical composers have also been inspired by Sappho. The story of Sappho and Phaon began to appear in opera in the late 18th century, for example in Simon Mayr's Saffo; in the 19th century Charles Gounod's Sapho and Giovanni Pacini's Saffo portrayed a Sappho involved in political revolts. In the 20th century, Peggy Glanville-Hicks' opera Sappho was based on the play by Lawrence Durrell.[171] Instrumental works inspired by Sappho include Chant sapphique by Camille Saint-Saëns,[171] and the percussion piece Psappha by Iannis Xenakis.[203] Composers have also set Sappho's own poetry to music: for example Xenakis' Aïs, which uses text from fragment 95, and Charaxos, Eos and Tithonos (2014) by Theodore Antoniou, based on the 2014 discoveries.[203]

It was not long after the rediscovery of Sappho that her sexuality once again became the focus of critical attention. In the early 17th century, John Donne wrote "Sapho to Philaenis", returning to the idea of Sappho as a hypersexual lover of women.[204] The modern debate on Sappho's sexuality began in the 19th century, with Welcker publishing, in 1816, an article defending Sappho from charges of prostitution and lesbianism, arguing that she was chaste[171] – a position that was later taken up by Wilamowitz at the end of the 19th and Henry Thornton Wharton at the beginning of the 20th centuries.[205] In the 19th century Sappho was co-opted by Charles Baudelaire in France and later Algernon Charles Swinburne in England for the Decadent Movement. The critic Douglas Bush characterised Swinburne's sadomasochistic Sappho as "one of the daughters of de Sade", the French author known for his violent pornographic books.[206] By the late 19th century, lesbian writers such as Michael Field[q] and Amy Levy became interested in Sappho for her sexuality,[207] and by the turn of the 20th century she was considered a "patron saint of lesbians".[208]

From the beginning of the 19th century, women poets such as Felicia Hemans (The Last Song of Sappho) and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (Sketch the First. Sappho, and in Ideal Likenesses) took Sappho as one of their progenitors. Sappho also began to be regarded as a role model for campaigners for women's rights, beginning with works such as Caroline Norton's The Picture of Sappho.[171] Later in that century, she became a model for the so-called New Woman – independent and educated women who desired social and sexual autonomy –[209] and by the 1960s, the feminist Sappho was – along with the hypersexual, often but not exclusively lesbian Sappho – one of the two most important cultural perceptions of her.[210]

The discoveries of new poems by Sappho in 2004 and 2014 excited both scholarly and media attention.[40] The announcement of the Tithonus poem was the subject of international news coverage, and was described by Marilyn Skinner as "the trouvaille of a lifetime".[80] The publication of the Brothers Poem a decade later saw further news coverage and discussion on social media, while M. L. West described the 2014 discoveries as "the greatest for 92 years".[211]