Sappho — Fragments

notes

Sappho of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos (c. 630–570 BCE) was, in the estimation of ancient Greeks and Romans, the greatest lyric poet who ever lived — Plato called her "the tenth Muse." Nine books of her poems were preserved in the great library of Alexandria; today all but one complete poem (Fragment 1, the Hymn to Aphrodite) survive only in fragments, most quoted by later grammarians and rhetoricians, some recovered from ancient papyri in the sands of Egypt in the last century and a half. Her surviving work centres on the pleasures and pains of love, most often between women — Anaktoria, Atthis, Kleïs (her daughter). Fragment 31 ("he seems to me equal to the gods") is the archetype of the phenomenological love poem and was famously imitated by Catullus (Poem 51). Fragment 16 ("some say a host of horsemen") is the earliest surviving philosophical argument in verse that beauty is what one loves rather than an objective quality. Fragment 168B ("The moon has set… I sleep alone") is one of the most quoted six-line poems in the world. Sappho's rediscovery, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, made her one of the most influential poets of the modernist movement. H.D., Ezra Pound, and Anne Carson are among many who have shaped their poetics in dialogue with her fragments. The scholarly numbering of the fragments follows the standard Lobel-Page edition (1955), reordering earlier numbering systems. Translation: composed from John Addington Symonds, "Studies of the Greek Poets," 1873, and Henry Thornton Wharton, "Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation," London: David Stott, 1885. Both public domain.

related texts