Author: SAPPHO
Biography:
SAPPHO (late 7th century BCE: OCD)
Although she produced nine “books” of poems in various metres and was admired in antiquity, only one complete poem and various fragments remain, and biographical evidence is scanty. The Sapphic stanza was her invention. In the twentieth century her canon was expanded with the discovery of further papyrus fragments so her achievement may be reassessed. Details of her life remain obscure. In his introductory note about Sappho, the translator Francis Fawkes—for whom see the headnote to Musaeus—accepted most of the post-classical legendary material about her that more recent scholarship has rejected as fanciful or purely romantic, particularly the story that she followed Phaon, with whom she was infatuated, to Sicily and threw herself into the sea when he once again rejected her. It is however certain that she was born on the island of Lesbos, perhaps at Mitylene, and that most of her poems deal with love, requited or not. From internal evidence and some more or less contemporary witness, it seems likely that she was married and had a daughter, Cleis. She may have spent a period of exile in Sicily. The fact that many of her poems describe relations among girls or young women in erotic terms may have been a literary convention and not proof of what is now, in tribute to her, called lesbianism. (OCD 7 Mar. 2025; Harvey; A. Grafton et al., eds., The Classical Tradition [2010]) HJ