SAPPHO (or as she calls herself PSAPPHO), the greatest poet ess of Greece, was a native of Lesbos. In spite of her fame almost every detail in her history is doubtful. Only a few of the many and often conflicting statements made about her by ancient authors can be checked by her own writings. It would seem probable that she came of an aristocratic Mytilenean family (an other account connects her with Eresus) and was born round about 600 B.C., so that she was contemporary with Pittacus and with the poet Alcaeus, with whom she may have exchanged verses. No less than eight versions of her father's name are recorded by Suidas, of which Scamandronymus, the form given by Herodotus (ii. 135), may be taken as the most acceptable. Her mother is said to have been named Clefs, and if the fragment inc. lib., 17 is rightly ascribed, the statement is supported by the fact that her daughter also was a Clefs. There is more certainty about her brothers, or at any rate about two of the three, Charaxus and Larichus. She speaks of Larichus as being cupbearer, a position filled by youths of good family, and Charaxus (though not mentioned by name in the extant remains) is evidently the "brother" referred to in a 3. We learn from Herodotus and others that he sailed to Egypt and bought out a courtesan, Rhodopis or Doricha, for which Sappho attacked him. a 3 seems to be a prayer for his safe return from overseas and a reconciliation with his sister and a4b perhaps con tained a prayer that Doricha may not entangle him again. The poetess's family is of less interest than the pupils, friends and rivals with whom we meet repeatedly in the fragments of the poems, with their references on the one hand to Atthis, once loved but now estranged, Anactoria, gone far away, Dica, "lovelier than soft Gyriuno," on the other to Andromeda, who stole Atthis away, Gorgo and others. In air there seems to be a hint of some enmity towards the house of Penthilus, with which Pittacus was con nected by marriage, but it happens most frequently that where we have names the thought cannot be followed far, and that in the longer pieces, where affection is most touchingly, or distaste most cuttingly expressed, no names have survived. Apart from the rela tions just referred to we know next to nothing of the life of Sappho. She is said to have been banished, like other aristocrats, and to have gone to Sicily, but this flight has left no trace in the remains unless the reference to Aphrodite of Panormus in a7 App. be such. As for the story of her passion for Phaon and her leap from the Leucadian rock, it bears every sign of being pure fiction. There are two references to the advance of old age ; we cannot tell whether her own or another's. Of the end of her life we know nothing at all.
Sappho's poems are said by Tullius Laurea to have been ar ranged in nine books. Suidas says there were nine books of lyrical poems, but epigrams, elegeia, etc., besides. The author of P. Oxy, i800, also counts a separate book of elegeia, but his figure for the books of lyrical poems is lost. From the fragments we know of only eight books of lyrical poems. It appears that these books were, as far as possible, arranged according to metre (Bk. 1, for in stance, containing only pieces in the so-called Sapphic stanza, and so on), but in the case of one book (the Epithalamia, perhaps Bk. 8) according to subject. The language seems to be no literary
dialect, but the ordinary speech used by the contemporaries of the poetess, and so to differ in a greater or less degree from almost all the other Greek poetry that has come down to us. The con junction of extreme simplicity of language with intensity of emotion, from which the poetry derives its peculiar effect, as well as the perfection of the form, has hitherto completely baffled translators, Swinburne among the rest.
Until comparatively recent times the poetry of Sappho sur vived only in the quotations made by ancient authors. The number of the fragments thus preserved was not inconsiderable, but their text was often seriously depraved, and, with two excep tions—the complete or nearly complete poems cited by Dionysius of Halicarnassus "Longinus"—their extent was insignificant. Within the last 5o years, however, there have been recovered from the soil of Egypt papyrus rolls and vellum codices, written at dates ranging from the 2nd to the 6th or 7th centuries A.D., which contain authentic texts of Sappho, terribly mutilated indeed, but remarkable for the integrity of their tradition. These remains are now preserved in Oxford, Berlin, London, Florence, Halle and Graz, and photographic facsimiles of parts of them may be seen in the publications of the Egyptian Exploration Society, the Berlin academy, the Societa Italiana and the Graeca Halensis. Of the older editors, who were concerned only with the quotations, none but Bergk need be mentioned (Poetae lyricae graecae, 4th ed., Leipzig, 1882). Those who have done most for the editing and interpretation of the book texts are Professors W. Schubart and U. von Wllamowitz Moellendorff in Germany and A. S. Hunt in England. The only complete collection of all the known mate rial is in norctoin /Ian (Oxford, 1925), by E. Lobel, but a reference may be made to Diehl's Anthologia Lyrica, iv. (Leipzig, 1923), though the text is uncritical and much of the illustrative material irrelevant. In the introductions to riair(PoOs #2,0?77 and its companion volume ' AXKaiov ;Lan (Oxford, 1927), will be found an attempt to establish the proper method of con stituting the text. There is an article on Sappho by W. Aly in Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyklopadie, which collects the material for the life work of the poetess, but its conclusions should be treated with caution.