Reputation in antiquity
In antiquity, Sappho was commonly regarded as the greatest, or one of the greatest, of lyric poets. The Milan Papyrus, recovered from a dismantled mummy casing and published in 2001, has revealed the high esteem in which the poet Posidippus of Pella, an important composer of epigrams (3rd century BC), held Sappho's "divine songs."
An epigram in the Anthologia Palatina (9.506) ascribed to Plato states:
- Some say the Muses are nine: how careless!
- Look, there's Sappho too, from Lesbos, the tenth.
Claudius Aelianus wrote in
Miscellany () that Plato called Sappho wise. A story is recounted in the
Florilegium (3.29.58) of Stobaeus:
Solon of Athens heard his nephew sing a song of Sappho's over the wine and, since he liked the song so much, he asked the boy to teach it to him. When someone asked him why, he said, "So that I may learn it, then die."
A few centuries later, Horace wrote in his Odes that Sappho's lyrics are worthy of sacred admiration. One of Sappho's poems was famously translated by the 1st century BC Roman poet Catullus in his "
Ille mi par esse deo videtur" ("He seems to me to be equal to a god") (Catullus 51).
Loss and preservation of Sappho's works
Although Sappho's work endured well into Roman times, with changing interests, styles, and aesthetics her work was copied less and less, especially after the academies stopped requiring her study. Part of the reason for her disappearance from the standard canon was the predominance of Attic and Homeric Greek as the languages required to be studied. Sappho's Aeolic Greek dialect, a difficult one, and by Roman times, arcane and ancient as well, posed considerable obstacles to her continued popularity. Still, the greatest poets and thinkers of ancient Rome continued to emulate her or compare other writers to her, and it is through these comparisons and descriptions that we have received much of her extant poetry.
Once the major academies of the Byzantine Empire dropped her works from their standard curricula, very few copies of her works were made by scribes, and the 12th century Byzantine scholar Tzetzes speaks of her works as lost.
Modern legends, with origins that are difficult to trace, have made Sappho's literary legacy the victim of purposeful obliteration by scandalized church leaders, often by means of book-burning. There is no known historical evidence for these accounts. Indeed, Gregory of Nazianzus, who along with Pope Gregory VII features as the villain in many of these stories, was a reader and admirer of Sappho's poetry. For example, modern scholars have noted the echoes of Sappho fr. 2 in his poem
On Human Nature, which copies from Sappho the quasi-sacred grove (
alsos), the wind-shaken branches, and the striking word for "deep sleep" (
k?ma).
It appears likely that Sappho's poetry was largely lost through action of the same indiscriminate forces of cultural change that have left us such paltry remains of all nine canonical Greek lyric poets, of whom only Pindar (whose works alone survive in a manuscript tradition) and Bacchylides (our knowledge of whom we owe to a single dramatic papyrus find) have fared much better.
Sources of the surviving fragments
Although the manuscript tradition broke off, some of Sappho's poetry has been discovered in Egyptian papyri fragments from an earlier period, such as those found in the ancient rubbish heaps of Oxyrhynchus, where a major find brought many new but tattered verses to light, providing a major new source. One substantial fragment is preserved on a potsherd. The rest of what we know of Sappho comes through citations in other ancient writers, often made to illustrate grammar, vocabulary, or meter.
Modern translations
From the time of the European Renaissance, the interest in Sappho's writing has grown, seeing waves of fairly widespread popularity as new generations rediscover her work. Since few people are able to understand ancient languages, each age has translated Sappho in its own idiomatic way. Poetry, such as Sappho's, written in quantitative verse, is difficult to reproduce in English which uses stress-based meters and rhyme compared to Ancient Greek's solely length-based meters. As a result, many early translators used rhyme and worked Sappho's ideas into English poetic forms.
In the 1960s, Mary Barnard reintroduced Sappho to the reading public with a new approach to translation that eschewed the use of rhyming stanzas and traditional forms. Subsequent translators have tended to work in a similar manner. In 2002, classicist and poet Anne Carson produced
If Not, Winter, an exhaustive translation of Sappho's fragments. Her line-by-line translations, complete with brackets where the ancient papyrus sources break off, are meant to capture both the original's lyricism and its present fragmentary nature. Translations of Sappho have also been produced by Willis Barnstone, Jim Powell, and Stanley Lombardo.