Sappho

Abstract

This bibliographical article focuses on studies on Sappho in the 20th and 21st centuries. Sappho, on whom modern research has been voluminous and labyrinthine, is the only ancient woman poet whose work and polyvalent figure have exerted lasting and deep influence on medieval, early modern, and modern European intellectual and sociocultural history. Her figure has further influenced modern Canadian, American (especially Latin American), African, and Australian gender ideologies; her influence goes as far as China and Japan. A Greek melic poet who, in Antiquity, was sometimes known simply as “the poetess,” just as Homer was known as “the poet” (Galen 4.771)—Sappho was born on Lesbos (probably) in the late 7th century bce. On the basis of later sources (the Parian Marble, Strabo, Athenaeus, Eusebius, the medieval Greek lexicon/encyclopedia entitled Suda), broad scholarly consensus holds that she composed many of her poems between c. 600 and 580 bce. Naturally, uncertainty remains as to the exact dates of her floruit, as there is uncertainty about the exact dates of the work and life of any Archaic poet (except for Pindar, whose life spans the Late Archaic and the Early Classical periods). Apart from numerous other poems, she composed epithalamia (wedding songs). Her compositions about her companions or her family might be viewed as song cycles. Extremely little is known about her activities in Mytilene, probably the most important city of Lesbos. A late-2nd- or early-3rd-century Oxyrhynchus papyrus (P.Oxy. 1800 fr. 1) and the 10th-century Greek lexicon Suda (Σ 107 Adler) provide accounts of her life (cf. P.Köln 5860, dated to the 2nd century ce): most of this late information belongs to what some scholars conventionally call “biographical tradition.” Mainly, but not exclusively, on the basis of ancient testimonia and specific aspects of her preserved fragments, scholars have often attempted to reconstruct hypothetically the original context within which she performed her compositions: such reconstructions are discussed in The (So-Called) Sapphic Question or Sapphofrage. It has recently been assumed that her compositions were transmitted by citharodes in the 6th and 5th centuries bce, that is, performed by them in the context of public competitions at the festival of the Panathenaea in Athens, but no ancient evidence exists for such a hypothesis. Sappho was granted an unparalleled status as a poet and sociocultural figure in Greek and Roman Antiquity. There is no complete compilation of all the ancient (and medieval Greek) testimonia. New fragmentary compositions of Sappho preserved on papyrus were discovered and published in 2004 and in 2014. Their importance is discussed in New Fragments and Ancient Transmission.