Which Greek poet do you think invented lyric poetry? If you guessed Homer, you would be wrong.
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Hello and welcome to Ancient History Encyclopedia, my name is Kelly and today we are going to be having a
look at the life and surviving works of the female Greek poet and musician, Sappho of
Lesbos. Sappho was so famous that she was often simply referred to as “The Poetess” without
mentioning her name and an audience would know exactly who was meant! The easiest way
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Sappho of Lesbos was considered as one of the greatest poets of her time. Ancient scholars
included her among the illustrious Nine Lyric Poets - a list of the most important and influential
poets of her age who mirrored the Nine Muses. According to many ancient sources, she was just as
highly regarded as highly as Homer and just as influential, for the invention and development
of lyric poetry. Sappho was born on the Greek island of Lesbos to an aristocratic family
in around 620 BCE and is known to have been a poet and a musician. Of the nine volumes
of poetry that she composed, only one full poem survives, and the rest are fragments. None
of her music survives, but she is remembered to have been the inventor of lyric poetry, the plektron
which is used to pick a lyre, the pektis which is a particular type of lyre, and the mixolydian
mode which is a major musical scale still used in jazz and blues music. Time and circumstance
have caused the loss of the majority of Sappho's work, but what has survived is incredibly
emotive.
From Sappho, we get the words ‘sapphic’ and ‘lesbian’, both of which concern themselves
with female homosexuality due to the many fragmentary poems surviving which concern
themselves with romantic love between females. Whether Sappho herself was a lesbian is not
known, and uncertainty clouds many aspects of her life as well. She was a daughter of
a wealthy family, and grew up on Lesbos which held women in higher esteem than much of Greece.
She grew up learning the lyre and composing poetry and music, she may have married a man
who died shortly afterwards, she may have had a daughter named Cleis, and she possibly
had three brothers. She was exiled to Sicily twice for her political views and was famous
enough to have statues erected in her honour and coins minted with her face and name on them
Although her poetry, as well as later works about her, suggest she was a lesbian, these
claims have been challenged. The “speaker” in Sappho’s poems may or may not be the
poetess herself and later writers drew their conclusions about her sexual preference from
these works. Although she is generally regarded as a lesbian poet in the modern day, this
may not have been the case.
Her sexual preference is not as important as the work she left behind which is her
legacy. Sappho’s poems are both intimate and honest, and even in fragments, displays her
understanding of enduring human emotion that still resonates with readers in the modern
day. Sappho invented her own poetry meter called the Sapphic Meter or Sapphic Stanza
which consists of three lines of eleven beats and a concluding line of five. She was revered
in her time and long afterwards as evidenced by the geographer and historian Strabo (who
lived 63 BCE-23 CE) who commented in his Geography: And along with these flourished also Sappho,
a marvellous woman; for in all the time of which we have record I do not know of the
appearance of any woman who could rival Sappho, even in a slight degree, in the matter of
poetry.
Sappho is believed to have died in around 570 BCE, although the cause of her death is unknown.
The Athenian playwright Menander wrote of her death as a suicide by jumping off the
Leucadian cliffs over unrequited love with a ferryman named Phaon: they say that Sappho
was the first, hunting down the proud Phaon, to throw herself, in her goading desire, from
the rock that shines from afar. This has been discredited as a myth which
draws parallels to Aphrodite who threw herself off the same cliffs known as the ‘lovers
leap’ while she was in mourning over the death of Adonis.
Although her poetry was much admired, it was written in a difficult dialect which Roman
scribes who were responsible for preserving the majority of Greek poetry, tended
to ignore. Her reputation as a great poetess endured through various references in many works
but the pieces themselves were eventually lost. Still, there is hope that many still
exist and are just waiting to be found as supported by the finds in 2004 and
2014 of one of her poems and fragments of others, some of which were unknown to scholars.
Even though much has been lost, Sappho’s poems live on, even in fragments, over 2000
years after they were composed. Sappho’s legacy epitomises her own desires as shown
in one of her best-known fragments: Someone will remember us I say Even in another time.
The enduring interest in Sappho and her poetry proves that she was right. Do you know of
another poet whose works have been lost to time? Who are they and what do their works mean
to you? Let us know in the comments below! If you enjoyed this video don’t forget to
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