About 10,000 lines once; roughly 650 remain
Sappho of Lesbos (c. 630–c. 570 BC) was antiquity's celebrated "Tenth Muse," yet only the Ode to Aphrodite is certainly complete today. Of some 10,000 lines she probably wrote, about 650 survive—enough to name desire after her island.
Sappho came from wealthy Lesbos—Eresos or Mytilene—and composed lyric poetry meant to be sung with music. Ancients ranked her among the greatest lyricists and among Alexandria's Nine Lyric Poets. She may have written elegiac and iambic verse too; three surviving "Sappho" epigrams are Hellenistic imitations. Love poetry made her fame, but 2014 papyri of ten consecutive poems show only two certainly erotic, while three or four center on family. Clarity, vivid image, and immediacy mark what remains. English sapphic and lesbian derive from her name and home island.
Hard facts are scarce. Parents' names are uncertain; tradition gives mother Cleïs and as many as ten father-names, Scamandronymus earliest. Brothers Charaxos, Larichos, and Eurygios appear in ancient testimonia; the 2014 Brothers Poem names Charaxos and Larichos. Athenaeus says she praised Larichos as Mytilene town-hall cupbearer—an aristocratic office. Cleïs in fragments 98 and 132 may be a daughter or a young beloved; scholars dispute pais. The Suda's husband "Kerkylas of Andros" looks like a comic penis joke. The Parian Chronicle records exile to Sicily sometime between 604 and 595 BC, perhaps amid Lesbian elite strife with Alcaeus's faction. The leap from Leucadian cliffs for ferryman Phaon is treated as ahistorical myth, useful later to "prove" heterosexuality.
Whether she wrote for education, cult, or symposium remains debated. Fifth-century Athenian publishers likely copied Lesbian lyric; second- or third-century BC Alexandrian editors—possibly Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus—made a critical edition in at least eight books grouped by metre, book one in Sapphic stanzas ordered alphabetically. Her first-person "I" may not be simple autobiography; Mary Lefkowitz argues almost nothing secure is known, while most scholars treat ancient lives cautiously. Still the fragments keep working: a voice so immediate that later centuries borrowed her name for a whole grammar of women's desire.
Source: Sappho
