Sappho of Lesbos: the poet who gave desire a voice

On the island of Lesbos, between the late seventh and early sixth century BC, lived the poet whom the Greeks considered the greatest female lyric voice in their history. Sappho was probably born at Eresos or Mytilene and composed songs meant to be performed with the lyre, in the Aeolic dialect of the island. Her work, gathered by Alexandrian scholars into nine books, survives mostly in fragments, yet these are enough to make her the founder of a new way of speaking about love.

A poetry that reached us in pieces

The transmission of Sappho's verse is a story of loss. The only poem preserved almost in full is the Hymn to Aphrodite, in which the poet calls on the goddess to come to her aid in a love sorrow, as had already happened in the past. The rest reaches us through quotations by ancient grammarians and rhetoricians or from Egyptian papyri, above all those of Oxyrhynchus, which have returned damaged stanzas and sometimes single words.

The discoveries are not over. In 2004 a papyrus held in Cologne made it possible to reconstruct almost completely the so-called Old Age poem, devoted to the myth of Tithonus, and in 2014 a new fragment known as the Brothers poem was published. Each find partly corrects the image modern readers had built for themselves, and reminds us how much of archaic Greek poetry has been lost for ever.

Fragment 31 and the body of love

The most famous text is fragment 31, preserved because the treatise On the Sublime, attributed to an author tradition calls Longinus, quotes it as an example of intensity. The speaker watches a man sitting before the beloved woman and declares him «equal to the gods», then describes what happens in her own body: the tongue breaks, a subtle fire runs under the skin, the eyes no longer see, the ears hum.

It is one of the first systematic descriptions of the symptoms of passion in Western literature. Catullus translated it into Latin in poem 51, and since then the catalogue of the lover's physical disturbances has become a commonplace of love poetry. In another fragment Sappho calls Eros «bittersweet» and «loosener of limbs», two definitions that condense the ambivalence of the feeling into a few syllables.

Sappho's world and its interpretations

Many poems address young women, celebrating their grace or mourning their departure. Scholars have suggested linking them to a thiasos, a female community devoted to Aphrodite and the Muses in which girls would have been educated before marriage, but this is a reconstructive hypothesis, not a documented fact. Sappho also wrote epithalamia, wedding songs of which only a few lines remain.

Already in antiquity her figure was wrapped in legend. An epigram attributed to Plato calls her the tenth Muse, while Athenian comedy spread the tale of her unhappy love for the ferryman Phaon and of her leap from the cliff of Leucas, a story taken up by Ovid in the Heroides and now considered groundless. The link between the island's name and love between women is also a much later association.

In fragment 16 Sappho sets against those who think a host of horsemen or ships the most beautiful thing the idea that the most beautiful thing is whatever one loves. In this simple and radical statement lies the core of European love lyric: the worth of the world measured by the desire of a single individual. The Sapphic stanza, taken up by Catullus, Horace and many later poets, still bears her name.