Born: c. 610, Lesbos [now part of Greece]
Died: c. 570 BC
Sappho was Greek poeters, whose poetry was so renowned that Greek philosopher Plato referred to her two centuries after her death as the tenth muse. Sappho was born on the island of Lesbos (now Lésvos), probably in the city of Mytilini. Although the details of her life are lacking, it appears that she was born to an aristocratic family and was a contemporary of Greek lyric poets Alcaeus and Stesichorus. According to tradition, Alcaeus was Sappho’s lover. Another legend holds that because of her unrequited love for the young boatman Phaon she leaped to her death from a steep rock on the island of Leucas (now Levkás).
The fragmentary remains of Sappho’s poems indicate that she taught her art to a group of young women, to whom she was devotedly attached and whose bridal odes she composed when they left her to be married. Greek poet Anacreon, writing a generation later, implied that the name of the island Lesbos connoted female homosexuality. That association is the source of the modern terms, i.e. lesbianism and sapphism.
Sappho wrote nine books of odes and a number of epithalamia (wedding songs), elegies and hymns, but only a few fragments remain. They include the Ode to Aphrodite, quoted by the scholar Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the 1st century BC. Sappho’s poems are marked by the beauty of diction, simplicity of form, and intensity of emotion. She invented the verse form known as Sapphics, a four-line stanza in which the first three lines are each 11 syllables long and the fourth is 5 syllables long. Many later Greek poets were influenced by Sappho, particularly Theocritus.
