
What Sappho Still Teaches Us About Love
In Ancient Greece, the Iliad was the poem above all other poems - an epic full of war and bloodshed that tells of the great heroes who fought and died for Troy. But not so long after the supposed composition of the Iliad, a woman on the Mediterranean island of Lesbos, close to the coast of modern-day Turkey, introduced a new and enduring note to poetry: desire. Her name was Sappho. She was revered through the Ancient World, but today only one work survives in its entirety: a poem usually known as the Hymn to Aphrodite. The rest is fragments - only about 600 lines of the 10,000 lines the…
The skinny
The skinny isn't ready yet — notes appear once the transcript is processed.