c. 496–406 BCColonus, near Athens
The most successful tragedian of Classical Athens, author of Oedipus the King and Antigone, who won more first prizes than any rival.
Read the profile“I tell you, someone will remember us in time to come.”
Life
Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, mostly in the city of Mytilene, around 600 BC. She came from an aristocratic family, had several brothers and possibly a daughter named Cleis, and spent a period in exile in Sicily. Later legends, such as her leap from a cliff for love of a ferryman, are almost certainly fiction.
Poetry
Sappho wrote lyric poetry, meant to be sung to the lyre, in her local Aeolic dialect. Her poems speak in a deeply personal voice about love, longing, jealousy, friendship and the beauty of the people around her, many of them women. In her most famous surviving poem she describes the physical symptoms of desire: a broken tongue, fire running under the skin, a roaring in the ears.
Fragments
Ancient scholars collected her work in nine books, but only one poem survives complete, together with hundreds of fragments, some recovered from scraps of papyrus found in the rubbish heaps of Egyptian towns. New pieces are still being found, and two previously unknown poems were identified in 2014. Her name and her island have given us the words sapphic and lesbian.
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