Sappho was an ancient Greek poet from the island of Lesbos who wrote around the 7th century BCE. While very little of her work survives, she was highly renowned in antiquity. Her poetry focused on themes of love and passion, often depicting intimate relationships between women. She is considered the first lyric poet and was admired for her skillful and economical poetic style. Sappho explored concepts of beauty, desire, and the power of memory in evoking past loves. Her work had a significant influence on later poets.

1. SAPPHO
BORN CA. 630B.C.E

2.  https://www.slideshare.net/stevenatksu/sappho-presentation
 https://www.slideserve.com/agnes/sappho
 https://www.slideserve.com/agnes/sappho

3. Life & work
 Sappho was a prolific poet, probably composing around 10,000 lines. Her poetry was well-
known and greatly admired through much of antiquity, and she was among the canon of nine
lyric poets most highly esteemed by scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria. Sappho's poetry is still
considered extraordinary and her works continue to influence other writers. Beyond her poetry,
she is well known as a symbol of love and desire between women,[4] with the English
words sapphic and lesbian being derived from her own name and the name of her home island
respectively. Whilst her importance as a poet is confirmed from the earliest times, all
interpretations of her work have been coloured and influenced by discussions of her sexuality.

4.  For those who have read the fragmented remains of the Greek poet, Sappho the loss of most of
her poetic corpus is something to regret. With a mere two complete poems extant from nine
books of verse, much is left to the imagination in the reconstruction of the output (and life) of
this most mysterious of ancient poets.
 In a world dominated by male voices whose view of life, the universe and everything was the
loudest and most respected, Sappho’s songs were regarded as extraordinary. So revered was she
that the ancients called her the Tenth Muse, and her songs were passed down over centuries,
inspiring generations of poets, none of whom managed to replicate her command of metre and
sensual artistry.

5.  How Sappho managed to acquire the educational acumen to compose her
masterpieces has sometimes baffled both ancient and modern scholars. Women
lived quiet and controlled lives in ancient Mediterranean cultures with limited, if
any, access to formal education. If there were any perceived need to teach a girl
basic skills in reading, writing and arithmetic, it was only to equip her to run a
household once she was married-off

6. His poem

7.  Sappho presentation
 1. Sappho Bust inscribed Sappho of Eressos, Roman copy of a Greek original of the
5th century BC. - Steven Barnes
 2. Who? Sappho was born between 630 and 612 B.C. Born of the island of Lesbos ( off
the coast of modern day Greece ) Little is known about her actual life; it seems that
her poems were more important that the person writing them The vast majority of
her poems have been admired throughout history even though only mostly
fragments of her poetry exist. She was lyrist - her poems were meant to be preformed
with the accompany from a lyre Plato elevated her status from great poet to a muse
Sappho reading to her companions on an Attic vase of c. 435 BC.

8.  Fragments For as popular as Sappho was her work did not survive that well 9 possible
volumes of poetry were created. Changing styles of poetry, being a woman, censorship of
scholars, language issues, neglect Fragments were found as wrapping for mummies and
coffins as well as stuffing for sacred animals in ancient Egyptian times Most of her work was
written on papyrus strips Saphhos' poem "An Old Age" (lines 9-20). Papyrus from 3 cent.
B.C
 4. Translations Many unique translations are available today but only one or two were
studied and anthologized Main problem with the translations Do you trail off in to oblivion
when you reach a fragmented part? Do you speculate on what should be there to keep the
flow of the poem? Very few people are around today that understand / can read the
ancient languages of the poems to help translate Portrait of Sappho at Pompei

9.  Sappho and Sexuality Sappho's poetry centers on passion and love for various people and both
genders The narrators of many of her poems speak of infatuations and love for various females,
but descriptions of physical acts between women are few and subject to debate. The word
lesbian derives from the name of the island of her birth, Lesbos, also her name is also the origin
of the word sapphic; both words were only recently applied to female homosexuality beginning
in the 19th century by sexologists 1881 Lawrence Alma-Tadema - Sappho and Alcaeus oil on
canvas.

10.  Love of women
 Sappho was no epic poet, rather she composed lyrics: short, sweet verses on
a variety of topics from hymns to the gods, marriage songs, and mini-tales of myth
and legend. She also sung of desire, passion and love – mostly directed towards
women – for which she is best known. And it is for such poems that Sappho has
come down to us as history’s first lesbian

11.  Was Sappho a lesbian? An answer depends on how one is defined. If love of women,
even in a non-sexual sense, and an exclusive focus on the needs and lives of women
define a woman as a lesbian, then – yes – Sappho was a lesbian. However, if a lesbian is
defined more narrowly as a woman who has sex with another woman, then evidence to
define Sappho as one is harder to establish.
 Of course, these two binaries are inherently artificial and without nuance. They are also
ignorant of social constructionism, which insists on understanding an individual in her
or his historical environment, its values, and its cultural specificities. And, in the society
of Archaic Mytilene, Sappho was not defined as a lesbian. After all, the word “lesbian”
was not invented until the Victorian age.

12.  Sappho’s contemporaries were not responsible for her synonymy with women-loving. That
began with the Greeks and Romans of later centuries, who tended to interpret her skill as
stemming from a perverted form of masculinity, which sometimes found expression in
representations of her through the lens of a hyper-sexuality. Sappho’s reputation for sexual
proclivity initially linked her to passionate relations with men, which later morphed into a
stronger association with women.

13.  Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry,
and others of ships, is the most beautiful
thing on the dark earth, but I say it is
whatever a person loves.
It is perfectly easy to make this
understood by everyone: for she who far
surpassed mankind in beauty,
Helen, left her most noble husband
and went sailing off to Troy with no thought at all
for her child or dear parents,
but [love?] led her astray …
lightly …
[and she]
has reminded me
now of Anactoria
who is not here;
I would rather see her
lovely walk and the bright sparkle of herface than the Lydians’ chariots and armed
infantry …

15.  Sappho’s definition of beauty – that which a person loves – privileges the individual over
the community. She extends her dictum with the example of the mythical figure of Helen
of Troy, renowned in antiquity as the most beautiful woman in the world. As testimony to
Sappho’s unique interpretation of the story, she removes the standard figures of blame for
Helen’s role in the Trojan War – Paris, the Trojan prince who abducted her or, in other
versions, Aphrodite who forced her to go with him – and gives agency to Helen herself. In
Sappho’s world, where love is all, it is Helen who decides to leave her husband and elope
with Paris. Consequences be damned!

16.  Sappho’s thoughts on love and desire extend to a personal reverie on a woman by the
name of Anactoria. Sappho reveals that Anactoria is gone and is missed. She compares
her, indirectly, to Helen and then evokes her beauty, namely her gait and her sparkling
face. Sappho’s lyrics are sensual, gentle, intense. But they are also powerful, as she
rejects the world of masculine warfare in preference for beauty and desire.

17. Questions
 1.What are the themes and topics of Sappho's poetry?
 2. How do Sappho's poems illustrate "economy of expression"?
 3. Describe the different kinds of relationships between women that Sappho
depicts in her poetry.
 4. Discuss the relationship between Sappho and Aphrodite as depicted in her
work. To what extent does it conform to Greek religious convention?
 5.Much of Sappho’s poetry deals with the past. How does she depict
memory? How can it be powerful, and what are its limitations?

18.  1What we know today of Sappho's reputation in the Greek world after her time eclipses by far
what we actually still have of her poetic output. Sappho was revered on coins and in murals;
at the same time, she was ridiculed for her erotic love poems addressed to women (as was
very evident due to the gendered nature of the Ancient Greek language). Addressed as "The
Poetess" just as Homer was "The Poet," Sappho had huge poetic significance, but what
remains of her poetry seems to differ distinctly from epic and other poems of the same time.

19.  Perhaps the key reason for this is that Sappho's themes of love and longing are direct
and individual in a way that seems more modern than ancient in its style. Sappho
wrote a great deal of poems, which now survive only in fragments, about the pain of
loving someone who did not love her in return; about watching her beloved seemingly
flirting with others; and about the physical pain of unrequited love. Sappho's eroticism
also led to suppression of her...

20.  2. Sappho's poetry demonstrates "economy of expression" via the sparse, reserved
nature of the emotion contained within it. As a writer, Sappho is not overtly direct or
emotional. Her poems are not full of wild, vibrant descriptions that pull the reader
into an exciting poetic tour-de-force. Rather, the poems emit a pensive, almost quiet
serenity. For example, "One Girl" demonstrates this in both stanzas

21.  3.Much of Sappho’s poetry centers around relationships between women, whether friendly,
romantic, or communal. Her poetry often celebrates love, and the romances between
women she depicts are explicitly erotic. She uses intensely sensory imagery to make these
relationships feel especially vivid, even when they happened in the past. Yet these
relationships don’t happen in a vacuum; instead, the speaker sometimes joins voices with
a group of women while she describes them, or refers to other relationships in the past or
future despite focusing on one specific passion.

22.  4.Sappho’s poetry clearly depicts a close relationship between the poet
and the goddess of love. Her poetry depicts the goddess as distant and
cunning, a complex understanding that wasn’t unusual in Greek religious
practice. What is unusual is the intimacy that Sappho depicts between
herself and the goddess, especially in “Fragment 1,” which paints the two
persons as friends who parallel one another.

23.  5.The melancholy mood of much of Sappho’s work is often rooted in the inevitable passage of
time. Love is seldom free of aging or loss. Her poetry never attempts to reverse the passage of
time, or even to embrace the present and forget the change that the future promises. Instead,
memory exists vividly in the present, and often several layers of memory exist in one poem. As
Sappho’s characters remember, they are paradoxically both reminded of what is missing from the
present, and comforted by the power of memory to bring back what has been lost, if only
partially.