In the lengthy corpus of Greek Literature, there is not a single scrap of text that
was half-assed. Since the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet in the early 700s BC,
Greek writing was full speed ahead for the entire next millennium. If you gave these madmen a stylus
and a vaguely flat surface they’d go absolutely feral in their pursuit of literary excellence.
And that applied to all genres, even the ones they’d have to invent themselves.
Greeks in the early Archaic period used this newfangled “Writing” trick to jot down old
oral traditions of epic poetry about gods and heroes, but just four centuries later they’d
come up with History, Philosophy, Tragic and Comic Theater, and all those hits we know and
love from the classical period. That is a pace of innovation I
would describe as Frighteningly Swift! However, in the space between the Epic
Age and the Classical Athenian heyday there’s a brilliant phase in this evolution of poetry that’s
often overlooked (for reasons we’ll see later). In the 6 and 500s BC, the name of the poetic
game was Lyric, and the single most prominent voice in that movement was Sappho of Lesbos.
So, to understand the life and work of this “Tenth Muse” and appreciate why her
poetry resonates through the ages, Let’s do some, uh, poetry. Yeahhh, that one.
As we’re setting the literary scene, I ought to explain, uh, what is Lyric poetry?
Well, it’s a bit of a standout compared to the other classics. History, theater, and philosophy
all still resemble their ancient roots, and Epic went through a couple iterations before arriving
more or less as the Fantasy genre; but while Lyric doesn’t have the name recognition of the others,
it’s a style we can easily get the gist of. The formal definition is poetry performed
with musical accompaniment from the Lyre, but really it’s poetry written and performed by
individuals, on topics consisting of whatever the Hell they wanted.
As is the case in the modern music world, the themes varied wildly by time, place,
and the artists themselves. And this style didn’t just invent itself in a vacuum.
The shift away from the iterative culture of communal storytelling parallels the rise of
independent city states across the Greek world. In the age of the Polis, everything was local to
that city, and regional subcultures developed around the various dialects of Ancient Greek.
So Aeolic poets from the eastern Aegean and Anatolian coast were totally distinct in style,
meter, and tone from poets of, say, the Doric-speaking poets of the Peloponnese.
To give you a sense of the variety here: the Spartan Tyrtaeus wrote Hype-Up poetry
to motivate the soldiers before big battles; the Athenian lawgiver Solon wrote poems to
support his political reforms and defend himself against accusations of corruption,
which, fun fact, is the first recorded instance of political propaganda;
and the Theban poet Pindar took commissions to write victory odes in praise of winners
at the Olympic games; and, finally arriving at the subject of our video,
the poet Sappho wrote about her own experiences and what it’s like to feel love.
Now, that’s a fairly personal subject, so we would hope to get a bit of background
on her life and character in order to better understand her work. But hahahhh… not a chance.
We’re looking way back at the turn of the 6th century BC,
and biographic writing is centuries off. So, as is the case with many pioneers in Greek literature,
whatever scraps we have left of their own writing is about all we get.
The earliest surviving account of Sappho comes from a Byzantine encyclopedia written in the
10th century. The book is actually pretty cool, it’s a 30,000-item fortress of a text called
The Suda that combines explanatory entries and dictionary definitions.
Insofar as it describes Sappho, we can gather that the original compilers had access to some sources
we no longer do, but even their Hellenistic Era citations would have themselves been working
with a dismal lack of biographic records. We can surmise that she was born on the
island of Lesbos to a wealthy family around 630 BC, and political rivalries in Mytilene got her
family exiled to Sicily around 600, where Sappho lived until her death in about 570.
Now, this is almost insultingly-little material to work from, and those dates are ball-park at best,
but compared to some of the other HistoryMakers, we have seen worse:
at least we know Sappho was real. Naturally, later classical and Hellenistic sources
sought to fill in these gaps with narratives of their own, and build a figure to match her
10,000-odd lines of poetry. But these are all just speculative fanfiction, and often contradictory.
The most popular legend is of Sappho killing herself at the Lefkadian Cliffs in anguish over
the unrequited love of a Mytilenian boatman named Phaon, but this is first attested in a
Hellenistic-era Comedic play so ehhhhh, not great. In another comedy, we’re informed that Sappho was
married to Kerkylas of Andros, which seems innocuous until you translate
it and see that it means “Dick from Man Island”. And even the Suda fell for this,
listing Kerkylas as Sappho’s husband. At this rate, Guy Fawkes would’ve had
better luck skipping the alias of John Johnson and going right to Richard of Bollocksville.
So, if even the best source we have got trolled by such an obvious joke, we can’t
take any secondary sources on Sappho at face value, and we have to go right to her own text.
For all of the goofs propagated by Classical, Hellenistic, and early Byzantine sources,
they at least had thousands of lines of her poetry on hand.
Unfortunately, of all that work which earned her so much praise, we today
only have several hundred, most of which are fragmentary phrases and single words.
Since the composition of the Suda up until the 20th century, the Ode to Aphrodite was our only
complete poem; but archaeologists have actually discovered two new poems in the past two decades,
one of which is ragging on her two brothers as well as the gods, bold of her, and the other is
asking Aphrodite to make her less lovesick. These are just drops in the bucket of the
metric Odyssey’s-worth of poetry Sappho wrote, but there’s still plenty we can
appreciate about her work. Her lines are spontaneous and authentic, as if she’s
simply saying what she feels, but all the poems are carefully constructed and highly polished.
Lots of talent and hard work goes into making something look easy. The genuine and almost
casual attitude of her poetry is aided by her use of the “Lyric I”, a convention
wherein a poet not only uses the I pronoun but draws focus to themselves as the speaker.
Back in the day, Homer asked the muses to sing about the Trojan war,
and while the early Lyric poets weren’t going out of their way to ask the muses’ permission,
they weren’t as bold as Sappho and her contemporaries who specifically framed themselves
as the speaker and often the subject of the poems. Most of the Sappho we have is her reflections
on how she experiences love and wanting. This isn’t some tired love song that goes no deeper
than stating “Hey hot stuff, you sure are hot, and boy do I have opinions about that” — No,
there’s way more going on here. Fragment 31 describes the step-by-step process
of Sappho hearing the sound of a woman’s laugh from across a room and then fully passing out;
And that’s after noting that the man to whom this woman is speaking is literally godlike
because he’s simply able to sit next to her. 16 lines, not even the full poem, and it’s still
such an evocative story! Writers, take notes. The Ode to Aphrodite essentially 28 lines of
Sappho saying “Aphrodite, help. I need help. Get in your golden chariot and get your butt over
here before I die of THIRST!” or the internet’s favorite, “It’s no use, dear mother, I cannot
weave. You may blame slender Aphrodite, for she has crushed me with longing for a companion.”
Honestly, they’re all fantastic, and anyone who’s read it will wish we had so much more,
but I’d still count us extremely lucky for even the scraps and fragments we have.
So the obvious question is: if she’s so good, why don’t we have more?
Before we jump to blaming everything on losing the Library of Alexandria, which, granted, did
make some things harder, the culprit is actually a lot more, relatable. Before anything made its
way to Alexandria, her works were compiled and republished by classical-era Athenians.
This shiny edition was then recompiled and re-republished in Egypt during the
Hellenistic period. But by that point, most Greek speakers would’ve had some difficulty reading it.
I mentioned earlier that Greece was home to a handful of different dialects,
and while Sparta’s Doric and Athens’ Attic dialects are the best remembered,
there were a few others, such as the Aeolian dialect of Thebes, Thessaly,
and the northeast Aegean. In the classical period,
the dialects weren’t too big a barrier, but after the conquests of Alexander the You’re All
Speaking Greek Now, the universal language was a new, simplified Greek called Koine.
This was the standard dialect in all Hellenistic kingdoms outside the Greek
homelands as well as the go-to dialect used by Latin-speakers in the Roman world.
The problem is that Koine speakers had a much harder time understanding Sappho’s Aeolic dialect.
Most literary types knew Attic to read history, philosophy, and theater, and some took the plunge
into old Homeric Greek if they wanted to read the epics, but Aeolic just didn’t connect anymore.
So after the initial Alexandrian editions of Sappho, her work wasn’t widely reprinted or
translated enough to keep it accessible and carry it far into the medieval period. The poet Ovid
was one of many Romans who absolutely adored her work, but that popularity just didn’t last.
Renaissance scholars were quick to scoff that her work was censored because the icky nasty
church disapproved of her less-than-straight inclinations, but that’s just not true. By the
time there was a church, Sappho had already fallen victim to the mundane menace of linguistic drift.
The Renaissance commentators might have swung and missed on the censorship, but their view
of Sappho’s sexuality is important to a broader understanding of her character, if not necessarily
for the reasons we might first imagine. After all, Sappho is the literal
trope-namer for being a Lesbian, but that was a shockingly-recent development. As we saw earlier,
many of the classical-era fables about her life focused on her relationships with men.
Hellenistic sources floated the possibility of her involvement with men and women,
but then later Byzantines considered it slanderous against Sappho to say she slept with women.
The Renaissance popularized the view that Sappho was gay,
but the word “Lesbian” wasn’t used to describe relationships between women until the 1870s!
Even then, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, scholars had some really
weird takes, like the doofus who argued that Sappho was chaste.
Nowadays, it’s common for us to think of Sappho as a gay icon, but it’s critical
that we not impose our categorization of sexuality onto ancient Greek culture.
We can accurately describe Sappho as a Lesbian, but that is not an exclusive label.
The Greeks and Romans were indiscriminately thirsty, those scamps banged anybody they had
the hots for regardless of gender, so Sappho getting it on also with dudes shouldn’t even
slightly diminish her modern status as a gay icon. You’ve seen her poetry, you know she’s legit.
To that end, Fragment 31 is a fitting analogy to our modern experience with Sappho.
We only hear a tiny sliver of what she wrote, as if we’re, say, all the way across a room,
and us classicists are so deeply jealous of the ancient Greeks and Romans who had so much of her
work they might as well have been sitting next to her, but even the tiny lilt that we catch from a
distance is enough to make us lose our minds. Sappho is so special because she’s one
the very first writers to make herself the subject and to make her perspective matter.
The epics are way cool, but you don’t get a sense of what Homer thinks about any of it.
In Sappho’s poetry, you understand that there’s a real person behind those words
with complex feelings, who wrote from a place of deep sincerity, and thirst.
We’re far too under-sourced to understand Sappho’s life,
as she’s armored up in 2600 years of solid mystery. The only thing
we actually have about Sappho is her feelings. I don’t think she’d be mad.
Thank you so much for watching! I apologize to anyone who showed up expecting a full video about
Gay pride and instead got an intricate look at poetic evolution, source degradation, and ancient
linguistics, but like, I only slightly apologize. However, if you want to see more Women Writers
being awesome, I highly recommend you check out this video on the Byzantine historian Anna Komnena
that I did last year for Women’s History Month. As always, thank you to the amazing patrons
who make this channel possible, and I will see you in the next video.