Introduction

Sappho's is the only woman poet's work of any length that survives from ancient Greece. Her work looks back to Homeric epic, engages with the poetry of her contemporaries, archaic Greek lyricists, and survives not only through the memory and acknowledgment of other ancient writers, but also through the fragments of her verses that were preserved in the Egyptian sands. Her place in world literature is assured not only by her great poetic gifts, but also by the connections we can draw between her words and the wider Mediterranean and beyond, into a long history of allusion and homage. Her work touches on European beginnings of literariness, on Asian contacts and influences, and sets same-sex female desire at the very origins of Mediterranean civilization. Although there are controversies about her person, about the degree to which we can discern an “author” in the fragments that have survived, the work itself sets a high standard for the poetics that follow, in terms of form, intensity, and the play between intimacies and ritual. The ancient literary theorist Longinus justifiably calls her work “sublime.”

It's difficult to convey the complexity of the ancient Greek fragment, embedded in this letter to an imaginary audience. The sounds in Greek echo and repeat and rhyme internally, creating a tight weave of great intensity. For example, in the Greek, the ending of the word ego, “I,” rhymes with that of “yearning,” potho, so that the voice in the poem, the speaker, the singer of these brief and fragmentary lines, in some sense becomes yearning itself. This skill at compression is one of the great gifts of Sappho's poetry, among those which lead the ancient literary theorist Longinus, author of a treatise on “the sublime,” to praise Sappho, and to preserve one of her most influential poems, of which more later. Sappho was not just an erotic poet; she also wrote poems for ritual occasions, to be performed by choruses, hymns to the gods, songs for wedding celebrations. But one crucial element of her legacy in the history of world literature is her ability to capture the paradoxical, contradictory nature of desire, and to recollect and recreate the experience of yearning in verse, even in the tiny fragment cited by the last pagan emperor of Rome.

We can imagine the person Sappho, and others, including dramatists, novelists, and scholars, have done so, and attributed a biography, a life, loves, a marriage, a suicide to the figure imagined. But it might be best rather to imagine a network, a set of associations that lead out from a set of poems, that allow readers, and listeners, audiences ancient and modern, to connect with these verses, through appreciation of their beauty, imagination of their creator, or tracking of their influences through many centuries. In what follows, I will try to lay out some of the threads of this network, but without assuming that this can ever be an exhaustive study of the figure of Sappho.

The Life of Sappho

Sappho seems to have spent most of her life on the eastern Mediterranean island of Lesbos, near the coast of what is now Turkey. Much of what we think we know of Sappho's life comes from later sources in antiquity, and their reliability is questionable, since some of their information comes hundreds of years after the time of her life. Some of it may be drawn from the poetry itself, a notoriously suspect source, since ancient authors would extrapolate from what they read into the situations obliquely represented in some of her most famous poems. Although new poems have surfaced in recent years, in papyrus fragments, of which more later, they do not offer much more information about the facts of her life. Some of what we already think we know has been confirmed to a degree by recent findings, for example a poem that addresses a brother, a brother who had already been known through mention of him in the work of Herodotus, a fifth-century bce historical writer. Yet we cannot be sure, of course, of the realities of the situation depicted even in the poem recently found on a papyrus. Such are the difficulties of crafting a biography for archaic poets and others; the temptation to draw a full portrait of the sort modern writers have is often irresistible, and it is especially strong in the case of Sappho, whose life as a female, and same-sex lover, makes her such a rarity in the history of premodern world literature. Some scholars have argued that her biography is irrelevant to the literary qualities of her poetry, which continued to be highly respected, especially in Greek antiquity, so that the details of her history, her family, marital entanglements, relationships with others need not be pinned down in order to appreciate her poetry.

I will simply note here some of what is reported about her, urging a skeptical attitude on the part of the reader concerning more dubious aspects of the biography. Sappho is said to be the daughter of a man named Scamandronymus. His name suggests a river in Asia Minor, that is, Western Asia, so this may either indicate that he lived in, came from, or was from a family that had not always inhabited the island of Lesbos. Her mother was named Kleis, although this too has been called into question, since one of the poems of Sappho speaks of a girl, some say a daughter, some a slave, named Kleis. The fragment (131), from a handbook on poetic meters, says that she has a beautiful pais, that is, “a girl,” or a slave, and that she wouldn't trade all of Lydia, a country in Asia Minor, for this adored person.

According to these later sources, Sappho was born at a date that we can calculate, using other reference points, at about 612 bce, that is “before the common era,” that is, before the Western calendar's year one. She had three brothers, one of whom is mentioned by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, and whose name also appears in that recently discovered papyrus fragment that had lain unnoticed in a German library. This brother appears to have been troublesome to the family, to have squandered his money on a slave/hetaera (a paid companion, resembling a geisha), and to have returned penniless to Lesbos after buying the freedom of Rhodopis, the rose-faced girl, in Egypt. Some reports concerning Sappho in antiquity call her a lover of women. And an ancient source claims that she was short, dark, and most unpleasant to look at. Much of this information comes to us very late, from 800 years after her lifetime. She may have been involved in aristocratic power struggles in the Lesbian city of Mytilene, and spent time in exile on the island of Sicily. The Roman orator Cicero mentions a statue depicting her there.

Another part of the network of information with Sappho at its heart describes a desperate love affair with a ferryman, Phaon. She desired him, it is said, but he did not reciprocate her desire, and in despair she threw herself from “the white rock,” and died. The classical scholar Gregory Nagy has written eloquently about the significance of this mythic episode, which he links to very ancient ideas about the death of the sun, its falling into the sea every evening, and being reborn every morning (Nagy 1996). Aphrodite, goddess of eros, of sexual desire, was associated with the evening and morning stars. Nagy connects the mythic pattern with very ancient Indo-European, prehistoric patterns of worship that have left their traces in Vedic Sanskrit culture as well as in the poetry of Sappho. The literariness of Sappho thus implies a worldliness, currents that connect her with the cultural legacies of prehistoric peoples, nomads who may have inhabited Central Asia and wandered early in human history into Europe and South Asia, and that came in her case to produce a narrative concerning her erotic life. The story of Phaon served as a background for subsequent heterosexualization of Sappho. Although she had been known as a lover of women in the archaic and classical Greek worlds (seventh to third centuries bce), generations that followed, some of them affected by cultural disapproval of eroticism in general, or homoerotic attachments in particular, began to emphasize her love for Phaon, the ferryman, and her suicide. Thus the life, the figure of Sappho, could be considered to be almost imaginary, imagined, an absent center around which a network of associations grows up over many centuries. The tradition attributes poems to the woman, but it is difficult to disentangle the poems from the legacy of narratives concerning her life.

Homer

One salient strand in the network of literariness at the heart of which we find the name Sappho is the name Homer. Homer, a name which in Greek means “hostage,” became the site where which the ancient Greeks collected crucial narratives concerning their past. The writing down of some of these narratives assured their survival in the traditions of Western literature, as the first European poems, but in fact, like most artifacts from the ancient Mediterranean, their reference extends to Asia and Africa, perhaps more even than to mainland Greece itself. Homer himself was said to have been born on one of the Greek islands near the coast of western Asia. The extant poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, focus on events that occurred at Troy, in Asia, and on the voyage of return of one of the Greek warriors who fought in the Trojan War, Odysseus. We know of other narrative strands from this tradition, which preserved these stories orally, because they are summarized or referred to in other ancient texts, but these are the poems that have come to represent “Homer” for later generations. Although there may be countless references to these other narratives, to the coming of the Amazons to help the Trojans, for example, we lack the poems themselves in which these episodes are told. All becomes a crucial matrix not only for classical Greek tragedy, but also for the poets of Sappho's generation, who inherited the epic poems of Homer, found the complexities of Bronze Age warrior culture there, models of aristocratic ethics and behavior, and a vast number of poetic resources as well.

We might call Sappho's relationship to the Homeric poems intertextuality, if there were in fact texts to be considered. But we have very little of the epics later referred to as Homeric poems, and we have very few fragments of Sappho's verse. Yet there are moments in which we find the Sapphic verses alluding to aspects of the Troy narratives, or obliquely responding to the warrior ethos that governs much of the Homeric universe. For example, one of Sappho's fragments (number 44 in the conventional listing of the poems) concerns the wedding of Hector and Andromache. Hector was a favored offspring of the king of Troy, Priam, one of 50 sons and 50 daughters. Andromache was a prize; she came to Troy after her family had been annihilated by the Greek army, and its great hero Achilles. In a famous scene in the Iliad, Hector leaves the battlefield and visits his wife and infant son Astyanax. The legend goes that after Achilles killed Hector, the child was thrown and killed, down from the battlements of Troy, and Andromache became the slave of Achilles' son Neoptolemus (and the subject of a later Greek tragedy by Euripides). In the Iliad, Hector speaks of his fear that Andromache will become a slave of the Greeks, her “day of freedom” taken from her. Sappho's poem, quite fragmentary, refers to happier times, the day of their wedding: Andromache comes to wed, and is called “delicate, graceful” and “quick-glancing.” In the poem there are bracelets, elaborate robes, trinkets, drinking-cups, and ivory, as Andromache comes, and maidens greet her, along with charioteers, music, maidens singing in a chorus, echoes in the sky, myrrh and frankincense mingling, older women crying out, and a song to Apollo in praise of the god-like Hector and Andromache. Sappho's joyous wedding song, though, must be heard against the backdrop of the epic story, the defeat of Troy in the war to come, the death of Hector and their son, and the enslavement of the bride.

Sappho's embeddedness in this literary tradition inherited from the epic narratives, the poems of Homer sung in aristocratic courts, can be seen in her allusions to the language of the battlefield in the Iliad. Fragment 31, preserved in the treatise on the sublime attributed to Longinus, is spoken in the voice of the poet, who expresses psychic and physical distress at the sight of a beloved woman laughing with a man seated near her. The poet describes a trembling heart, speechlessness, a broken tongue, fire beneath the skin. In language that recalls Homer's descriptions of warriors in distress in battle, the first-person singular in this poem, the “I”, says that she cannot see, that her ears buzz, that sweat pours from her, or that she experiences cold, that she trembles, that she is “greener than grass” at this sight. She is just a little short of death. This poem has had great influence in the history of poetry, in part through its account of these physical symptoms, and their paradoxical nature, the simultaneous freezing and burning at the sight of the beloved. These impossibilities, heat and frost taking over the body at once, a poem in words that recount speechlessness, become characteristic of erotic intensity and suffering in the work of later poets. The intensity of the battlefield has been transferred to the universe of erotic desire.

This literary transfer is most evident in fragment 1, found in a text called “On Literary Composition,” written itself by a later author, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who lived in Rome in the first century bce. He cites Sappho's poem as an example of “polished and exuberant composition.” In a poem structured in some ways like a hymn, a ritual prayer to the goddess Aphrodite, goddess of sexual desire, among other domains of existence, the voice in the poem, the poet, Sappho, addresses the goddess Aphrodite, naming her, praising her, begging her not to “tame” her. She asks Aphrodite to come, as she had in the past, leaving Zeus' golden house on Olympus, flying down to earth in a chariot drawn by sparrows, and addressing Sappho with a smile on her face, asking what was troubling her, what she wanted. Aphrodite speaks, in the poem, in this scene remembered from a past visit: “Whom again do I persuade / to take you back into her love? Who, / Sappho, is doing you wrong? If she runs off, soon she'll be chasing. / If she refuses to accept gifts, she'll give them. / If she doesn't love, soon she will love, / even unwillingly” (Daley 2011). The voice in the poem recalls these past favors, given by this goddess of love (and of war), and begs the goddess to come again. And most significantly, especially given the literary matrix of the Homeric poems, especially the Iliad, where so much of the action takes place on the battlefield, the voice in this poem requests: su d'auta / summakhos esso, that is, “you yourself / fight on my side [be my summakhos].” Summakhos means “fellow-fighter,” “martial ally,” “battle-mate,” the one who fights alongside. Sappho takes the martial context of Homeric epic, and turns it to the domain of eros.

This poem seems to undermine scholars who have argued, in the context of the history of sexuality, for a more reciprocal, gentler environment for female same-sex eros in the ancient Greek world. In this poem, the goddess will force the object of desire not only to comply with the desires of Sappho, but to pursue her. The metaphor of pursuit and flight, crucial to the battlefield but also to the language of male homoerotic courtship in this culture, appears here in this the first poem of the Sapphic corpus that comes down to us.

Archaic Lyric Poetry

Another of the many strands of literariness in which the fragments of Sappho are entangled is the group of archaic lyric poets of her day. Some of the poets in the centuries after the supposed composition of the Homeric epics (the eighth century bce) wrote in verse forms used for insults, for reflections on warrior life. The most significant parallel to the work of Sappho is that of the poet Alcaeus (Alkaios in Greek). A contemporary of Sappho, he lived like her on the island of Lesbos, is alleged to have become entangled in the complicated internal political struggles of the island, in which aristocrats competed with each other for hegemony, and tyrants, usurping monarchs, sometimes replaced traditional aristocratic governance. Alkaios wrote of these struggles, of the city-state as analogous to a ship at sea tossed by waves, threatened with capsizing. He describes an archaic great hall gleaming with bronze weapons, and exile from the city. One of the most fascinating aspects of the set of fragments attributed to Alcaeus concerns the radically different attitude he exhibits toward the legendary beauty, Helen “of Troy,” that is, the daughter of Zeus and Leda, conceived as Zeus raped Leda in the form of a swan. She gave birth to two eggs, one containing the twins Castor and Pollux, the other Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra and her sister Helen, who married Agamemnon's brother Menelaus. According to legend, many suitors pursued Helen, and swore to avenge her husband if any man tried to abduct her. Paris, also called Alexander, one of Priam's 50 sons, arrived at the home of Menelaus and stole Helen away to Troy. The Greeks assembled and sailed to Asia, besieged Troy, won their famed victory, destroyed the city, and took Helen back.

Attitudes toward Helen herself varied. She appears in the Iliad as the unwilling subject of Aphrodite, who leads her back to the bed of Paris. In the Odyssey, when she claims to have supported the Greeks all along, when a captive in Troy, her husband Menelaus reminds her of how she stood beside the “Trojan” horse, the huge figure of a horse the Greeks left behind as they pretended to abandon the battlefield before the battlements at Troy. She, her husband recalls, imitated the voices of the wives and women of the Greek warriors, testing the horse to see if it contained the Greeks hidden inside, as it did. Odysseus, inside, forced them not to respond to Helen's cries. Even in Homer, her reputation is ambiguous at best.

At the hands of Alcaeus, and more and more as literary works refer to Helen, she becomes a dangerous if not malevolent actor, the destroyer, cause of a terrible war. Alcaeus describes her as a doer of evil deeds, and compares her to the lovely Thetis, mother of Achilles in his fragment 42, which ends with the indictment: the Trojans and their city died for the sake of Helen. In the fragment later editors numbered 283, found in papyri from ancient Egypt, Alcaeus denounces her more forcefully. He calls her “maddened,” ekmaneisa, using the language later deployed to depict the ecstatic female worshipers of the god Dionysus. She was driven mad by her Trojan lover, left her child and her husband's bed. And the fragment ends with “dark-eyed” warriors trampled in the slaughter. Helen is guilty, crazed by her deceiver lover, abandoning family and home, and responsible for the deaths of the many Trojan warriors and ultimately for that of Achilles himself, killed on the battlefield by her lover Paris.

Then the fragment turns fragmentary and indecipherable again.

This poem is remarkable not only for its mastery of sound, so apparent in the ancient Greek, but also in its structure, as it returns to the horsemen and infantrymen listed at its beginning, having visited Helen, exemplary of the power of eros, or its goddess Aphrodite, perhaps, to turn even the most renowned beauty ever away from familial duty. Helen can serve as the witness of what is “the most beautiful thing,” being herself surpassingly beautiful. Sappho, too, against the backdrop of the epic, invoked by these warriors, and by the mention of the black earth, said again and again to hold the dead and buried Greeks and Trojans, chooses not the anonymous array of fighters, but her own beloved, an individual, the girl, or woman, Anactoria.

Sappho's Works

The ancients knew nine books of Sappho's verse, of which most has been lost, like much of ancient writing. She was called “the tenth Muse,” and her works were collected according to their meters by Alexandrian scholars. Many of these were performed by a solo singer; others were hymns to the gods, wedding songs, called epithalamia, and some of the extant works were composed for choral performance. Such poems are linked to other such early Greek poets as Alcman, who wrote partheneia, or “maiden-songs,” to be performed by a female chorus in the city of Sparta, sung and danced on ritual or festival occasions (Calame 1997). Sappho's poetry invokes a network of female deities, including Hera, Aphrodite, the Graces, and the Muses. She may have been the subject of comedies written in the classical Athenian period, mocked for her erudition or her Lesbian desire for her own gender, but as noted earlier, her work was greatly admired by many, including Longinus.

As noted above, recently new fragments attributed to Sappho have surfaced in papyrus collections, giving further support to the recognition of Sappho as one of the greatest of ancient poets. These poems sometimes supplement fragments already known to readers, or confirm such information as Herodotus' naming of her brothers in his Histories. One of the most evocative of these poems (fr. 58) has the poet herself deploring her graying hair, her loss of agility, and acknowledging the inevitability of old age and death, recalling the tale of Tithonus, the mortal taken up by the goddess of the Dawn, Eos, who won immortality for him from Zeus, but failed to ask for eternal youth. “For a human being, it's not possible to be ageless.”

Fragment 96 recalls a woman who has left the singer behind, stands out among the women of Lydia, in Asia Minor, land of the war chariots of fragment 16, and as the moon rises over flowers, feels her heart gnawed by pain. There is voluptuous pleasure recalled in yearning, and a sense of loss that results in magnificent verse in recollection. These are the poems that establish Sappho as one of the greatest erotic lyricists of all world literature.

Sappho's Literary Legacy

Most of Sappho's verses, highly esteemed in antiquity, have been lost over the centuries, some only very recently discovered on fragments of ancient papyrus dug up from the sands of Egypt. The representation of Sappho was transformed radically by the Roman poet Ovid, who in his Heroides spoke in her voice of her unrequited love for the man, Phaon, and of her imminent suicide. The understanding of Sappho in the post-Renaissance world was for a long time focused on her death, on the romance of her yearning for this man, and on the ways in which she stood for passionate and doomed eros rather than for “lesbianism.” Sappho was seen not just as an exemplary female poet, but also and perhaps especially as a tragic figure. Visual artists represented Sappho, often with the male object of her unrequited love, Phaon, as in the work of the neoclassical painter David, who painted them together in 1809.

The poem now listed as fragment 31, preserved in the work of the ancient literary theorist Longinus, was long known, admired, and translated again and again in the centuries that followed the classical Greek era. Poets were dazzled and influenced by the poem's portrait of a lover gazing at her beloved and at a rival, and by the embodiment of erotic distress in the form of trembling, blindness, loss of hearing, heat and cold, nearness to death. Yopie Prins has written of the profound effects of reading Sappho on poets of the Victorian age (Prins 1999).

The American poet Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), who published as H.D., was, among others, profoundly influenced by Sappho's fragments. As a young woman she met William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, to whom she was briefly engaged. After moving to London, she came to know the imagist poets, and Pound championed her work. She had affairs with both women and men, and married the poet Richard Aldington; but her most enduring relationship was with Annie Winifred Ellerman, the English novelist known as “Bryher.” Bryher, like H.D., married and had male lovers, but the two saw themselves as Lesbian lesbians as well; Bryher's memoir is entitled The Heart to Artemis. H.D.'s sensuous life was unconventional, full, complex, and polymorphous, marked by attachments to lovers of both genders, and by erotic suffering, it seems. H.D. was analyzed by Sigmund Freud, and later wrote of the experience in her Tribute to Freud. And while attracted to Japanese poetry, and the haiku, H.D. along with the other imagists early on began to derive inspiration from classical Greek poetry, and especially the archaic lyrics of Sappho.

H.D. may have lacked the ecstatic identification with the ancient Lesbian poet that some feminists, lesbians, and women poets have felt over the centuries, but her poetics, her sense of Sappho as tortured, ironic, and not broken, persist in her verse and prose.

The American feminist and lesbian poet Judy Grahn published a set of essays called The Highest Apple, in 1985, invoking Sappho in her title. Part III of this text is entitled “To Surface with Lesbian Gods.” She lists the many gods of Sappho's world, and continually refers to her present as she reads Sappho's fragments, writing of the lost old gods, and their possible reclamation in modern lesbian poetry.

These beautiful, anguished, Sapphic poems, difficult to find in English, were translated by Frank Graziano, Maria Rosa Fort, and Suzanne Levine (Graziano 1987).

Cristina Peri Rossi, a Uruguayan writer born in 1941, was also exiled, and lives in Spain. Her novel Ship of Fools satirizes dictatorships, embraces feminism, and addresses pederasty. The book Evohé: poemas eroticos, published in Montevideo in 1971, takes its title, as she says, from “the onomatopoeic cry of the bacchantes during the feasts and rites paying homage to Bacchus, the god of revelry and wine” (Peri Rossi 1991 1971). She uses the term, however, as “an amorous cry: the book proclaims love between two as a form of the Absolute as opposed to the orgy of multiple partners” (7). She also notes that when first published, Evohé “provoked a considerable scandal. Conditions at the time – just before the military dictatorship – were not favorable to poetry or to erotica. Later, EVOHE was banned entirely, along with the rest of my books” (8). Peri Rossi sets a fragment of Sappho as the epigrammatic prelude to her book: “‘Once again Eros, loosener of limbs, tortures me, sweet and bitter, invincible creature” (9). These poems of Peri Rossi were translated by Diana P. Decker. Marked by humor, defiance, and lesbian eros, Peri Rossi's verses constitute a brilliant, bravado “translation” of Sappho into another world.

These two women writers, poets of Latin America living in Europe, exemplify not only a complex trans-Atlanticism, but also a moving negotiation of the difficulties of same-sex love in contemporary societies, and the conscious and deliberate deployment of the rich literary legacy of the archaic Greek lyric poet Sappho, excavated, rediscovered, inherited from the ancient Mediterranean.

SEE ALSO: Introduction to World Literature Third Millennium bce to 600 ce; Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: Poems of Many Turnings; Bridge Essay: From Epic to Lyric; Bridge Essay: Looking for Love, Finding Trouble: Reading Ancient World Literature, Passionately; Bridge Essay: Epic and Community: Heroism, Myth, and Memory across Cultures; Bridge Essay: Modern Poetry as a Global Phenomenon