When was sappho born

Never again will I come to you, never again. Once again Love, that loosener of limbs, bittersweet and inescapable, crawling thing, seizes me. The very incompleteness of the verses can heighten the starkness of the emotions—a fact that a number of contemporary classicists and translators have made much of.

A few facts can be inferred by triangulating various sources: the poems themselves, ancient reference works, citations in later classical writers who had access to information that has since been lost. She was likely past middle age when she died, since in at least one poem she complains about her graying hair and cranky knees. Although her birthplace cannot be verified, Sappho seems to have lived mostly in Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos. Just across the strip of water that separates Lesbos from the mainland of Asia Minor present-day Turkey was the opulent city of Sardis, the capital of Lydia.

Mytilene was constantly seething with political and social dramas occasioned by rivalries and shifting alliances among aristocratic clans. Some things seem relatively certain, then. What did Sappho look like? A dialogue by Plato, written in the fourth century B. But some of these seemingly precious facts merely show that the encyclopedia—which, as old as it is, was compiled fifteen centuries after Sappho lived—could be prone to comic misunderstandings. Was Sappho really a mother?

Who were the members of her circle? The compilers of the Suda, like scholars today, may have been making educated guesses. However exalted her reputation among the ancient literati, in Greek popular culture of the Classical period and afterward Sappho was known primarily as an oversexed predator—of men.

Comic playwrights and authors of light verse portrayed Sappho as just another daughter of Lesbos, only too happy to fall into bed with her younger male rivals. For centuries, the most popular story about her love life was one about a hopeless passion for a handsome young boatman called Phaon, which allegedly led her to jump off a cliff.

Midway through the first century A. Some ancient writers assumed that there had to have been two Sapphos: one the great poet, the other the notorious slut. There is an entry for each in the Suda. The page is blank. One scholar claimed to have found evidence that classes were taught on how to apply makeup. Classicists today have no problem with the idea of a gay Sappho. But some have been challenging the interpretation of her work that seems most natural to twenty-first century readers: that the poems are deeply personal expressions of private homoerotic passion.

To answer that question, classicists lately have been imagining the purposes to which public performance of erotic poems might have been put. The late Harvard classicist Charles Segal made even larger claims. Between the paucity of actual poems and the woeful unreliability of the biographical tradition, these debates are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.

Indeed, the study of Sappho is beset by a curious circularity. For the better part of a millennium—between the compilation of the Suda and the late nineteenth century—the same bits of poetry and the same biographical gossip were endlessly recycled, the poetic fragments providing the sources for biographies that were then used as the basis for new interpretations of those same fragments.

Until the late nineteenth century, when the papyri started turning up, there were only the ancient quotations. Since then, the amount of Sappho that we have has more than doubled. However lowly its original purpose, the dump soon yielded treasures. Papyrus manuscripts dating to the first few centuries A. Some were fragments of works long known, such as the Iliad, but even these were of great value, since the Oxyrhynchus papyri were often far older than what had been, until that point, the oldest surviving copies.

Others revealed works previously unknown. Among the latter were several exciting new fragments of Sappho, some substantial. From the tattered papyri, the voice came through as distinctive as ever:. Over the decades that followed, more of the papyri were deciphered and published. That much, I reckon, Zeus knows. The poem closes with the hope that another, younger brother will grow up honorably and save his family from heartache—presumably, the anxiety caused by their wayward elder sibling.

At last, that particular biographical tidbit could be confirmed. After the University of Cologne acquired some papyri, scholars found that one of the texts overlapped with a poem already known: Fragment 58, one of the Oxyrhynchus papyri. The Oxyrhynchus fragment consisted mostly of the ends of a handful of lines; the new Cologne papyrus filled in the blanks, leaving only a few words missing. Finally, the lines made sense.

Sappho alludes to the story of Eos, the dawn goddess, who wished for, and was granted, eternal life for her mortal lover, Tithonus, but forgot to ask for eternal youth:. Her reputation for licentiousness would cause Pope Gregory to burn her work in Because social norms in ancient Greece differed from those of today and because so little is actually known of her life, it is difficult to unequivocally answer such claims.

Her poems about Eros, however, speak with equal force to men as well as to women. Sappho is not only one of the few women poets we know of from antiquity, but also is one of the greatest lyric poets from any age.

Most of her poems were meant to be sung by one person to the accompaniment of the lyre hence the name, "lyric" poetry. Rather than addressing the gods or recounting epic narratives such as those of Homer , Sappho's verses speak from one individual to another.

They speak simply and directly to the "bittersweet" difficulties of love. Many critics and readers alike have responded to the personal tone and urgency of her verses, and an abundance of translations of her fragments are available today.

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