Latest / Ancient Greece: Philosophy, Democracy, and Endless War — Fexingo History / Sappho: The Eighth Muse and Lyric Poetry
Transcript
- Lucas: We’ve spent so much time tracing the footsteps of soldiers, statesmen, and philosophers through the stone streets of Athens and Sparta, but there’s a different kind of legacy that survives in the fragments. I want to talk about Sappho, the poet from the island of Lesbos, who was celebrated by the ancients as the Eighth Muse, standing right alongside Homer and Hesiod in their estimation of literary greatness. Luna: I always thought she was just famous for being a woman who loved women, but she was actually highly respected by men too? Lucas: Oh, absolutely. In fact, Plato calls her tenth muse, implying she’s part of a group that includes the nine canonical ones, but even if you take that literally, it shows how seriously he took her. She lived around 630 to 570 BCE, which puts her right in that golden window when Greek city-states were beginning to define themselves culturally, long before the Persian Wars reshaped everything. Luna: So she wasn't writing from Athens? Lucas: No, she was based on Lesbos, an island in the northeastern Aegean Sea, and she wrote in the Aeolic dialect, which sounds quite different from the Attic Greek spoken in Athens. Her most famous collection was nine books of lyric poetry, which is a massive volume, but tragically, almost all of it is gone. What we have today are just scattered fragments, some of them only a single line long, preserved on pottery shards or in quotes by later writers. Luna: That feels incredibly frustrating, losing all those books. Lucas: It is, but the survival rate is actually higher than you might expect for ancient texts because they were quoted extensively. For instance, we have a whole hymn to Aphrodite that’s surprisingly complete, and we know about her reputation because poets like Alcaeus, her contemporary and friend, referenced her work constantly. The problem is that the physical manuscripts didn’t make it past the medieval period intact; most of what we have comes from ostracon fragments found in Egypt or references in Byzantine encyclopedias. Luna: Did she write about war and politics like the guys did? Lucas: She definitely touched on politics, especially since she mentions being exiled by a tyrant named Pittacus, who ruled Mytilene on Lesbos. But her primary focus was personal emotion, desire, and the relationships within her own circle. She led a group of young women, which scholars call a thiasos, where they would sing, dance, and compose poetry together. It’s less about a modern concept of identity and more about a ritualized, educational space for young women before marriage. Luna: Was this like a school or a religious cult? Lucas: It’s best understood as both. These girls learned music, poetry, and perhaps some religious rites dedicated to Aphrodite and other goddesses. Sappho’s poems often address specific individuals—like Anaktoria, or Doris, or Atthis—and describe their beauty or the pain of missing them with an intensity that was revolutionary for its time. Unlike Homer’s epics, which focus on glory in battle, Sappho focuses on the internal landscape of longing. Luna: I remember reading that one poem makes her feel like she's fainting. Lucas: That’s fragment thirty-one, and it’s one of the most famous pieces of ancient literature for good reason. She describes watching a man speak to a woman she desires, and suddenly her body reacts violently: her tongue breaks, a subtle fire runs under her skin, and she can barely breathe. It’s a physiological description of erotic jealousy that feels incredibly modern, yet it’s rooted in the poetic conventions of the seventh century BCE. Luna: Does that mean she was romantically involved with these students? Lucas: The text suggests deep emotional bonds, and many scholars interpret this as romantic or sexual intimacy, though ancient critics also read it through the lens of mentorship. Later writers, especially in Rome, liked to frame her as the archetype of the lesbian, deriving the word 'lesbian' from her home island, but that’s a Roman projection onto a Greek reality. In her own time, she was seen as a master of the lyre, a technical virtuoso whose meter and rhythm were studied for centuries. Luna: How did she end up being exiled then? Lucas: According to later accounts, she fell out of favor with the ruling family or the tyrant Pittacus, possibly due to political factionalism or a personal dispute. She supposedly fled to Sicily, where she eventually died, though some stories say she threw herself off a cliff for unrequited love, which historians generally dismiss as a later fabrication designed to dramatize her life. The exile itself highlights how fragile her position was; she wasn’t a democratic citizen in the way Athenians were, but rather a noblewoman tied to the fortunes of local elites. Luna: It’s wild that we still quote her lines almost exactly. Lucas: And that brings us to how her work survived the burning of the Library of Alexandria. When the great repository of knowledge was damaged, many copies of Sappho were lost, but enough remained in circulation among scholars and poets that fragments were copied onto new scrolls. By the Hellenistic period, editors had organized her work into nine books based on the musical modes they were sung to, which tells us her poetry was meant to be performed, not just read silently. Luna: So it was basically songs set to music? Lucas: Yes, lyric poetry literally means poetry meant to be accompanied by the lyre. We don’t have the melodies anymore, which is a huge loss, but we can see the structure of the stanzas. She invented or popularized the Sapphic stanza, a specific metrical pattern that was admired so much by Roman poets like Catullus and Horace that they imitated it directly. If you read Latin poetry from the first century BCE, you’re hearing an echo of her rhythmic innovation. Luna: Catullus must have really admired her style. Lucas: He did, and he even translated several of her poems, showing that the emotional core of her work transcended language barriers. One of his most famous lines, 'Odi et amo,' which translates to 'I hate and I love,' is widely believed to be inspired by the contradictory, intense emotions found in Sappho’s fragments. It shows how her influence rippled outward, shaping Western literature’s understanding of passion. Luna: Did anyone try to hide her work later on? Lucas: Eventually, yes. As Christian morality became dominant in the late Roman Empire and Middle Ages, Sappho’s open expressions of female desire made her a target. Some bishops labeled her a harlot, and efforts were made to destroy her manuscripts or edit them to remove the homoerotic content. There’s a myth that Pope Gregory the Great ordered her works burned, but that’s likely apocryphal; however, the gradual decline in copying certainly accelerated during this period. Luna: So she survived mostly because people ignored her or forgot her? Lucas: Partly, but also because scholars in Byzantium kept quoting her for grammatical examples. They cared about her words as artifacts of ancient Greek usage, not necessarily as moral guides. So while the cultural reverence faded, the technical interest kept small fragments alive in dictionaries and commentaries until archaeologists started digging in Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Luna: What did they find in the Egyptian sand? Lucas: They found ostraka, which are potsherds used as scrap paper, and some contained lines from Sappho. More importantly, in 2014, researchers reconstructed a previously unknown poem from three separate fragments found in different collections. It was titled 'Brothers,' and it revealed that Sappho had a brother named Charaxos, whom she worried was behaving badly while traveling. It added a whole new layer to her biography, showing her concern for family beyond just her poetic circle. Luna: That discovery changed how we see her personal life completely. Lucas: It did. Before that, we knew very little about her family, and this gave us a glimpse into her domestic worries. It reminds us that behind the monumental status of the 'Eighth Muse' was a real woman dealing with the anxieties of travel, trade, and family reputation. Her poetry isn't just abstract art; it’s anchored in a specific social world that we are slowly piecing back together. Luna: It makes her feel much more human. Lucas: Exactly. And that’s why her story matters in the context of ancient Greece. We often think of history as the domain of kings and generals, but figures like Sappho remind us that intellectual and artistic life was vibrant, diverse, and often centered in spaces outside the male political arena. Her survival is a testament to the power of written word, even when it’s broken into pieces. Luna: Do you think we’ll find more of her work soon? Lucas: It’s possible, though new major discoveries are becoming rarer. Most of what’s left is likely already in museums or private collections, waiting for better imaging technology to reveal hidden text. But every time we look closer, whether through multispectral imaging or re-reading old commentaries, we add another stitch to the tapestry of her life. Luna: I’m glad we finally gave her the spotlight she deserves. Lucas: Me too. It’s a reminder that history isn't just about what was built or conquered, but also what was felt and expressed. If you've been stepping into history with us episode by episode, you know how much we value these quieter voices that shape our understanding of the past. If today was actually useful to you, the way these stay ad-free is listener support — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Supporting the show helps keep these deep dives going. Lucas: Thank you for that. Now, back to Sappho’s influence, because her impact didn't stop in antiquity. During the Renaissance, humanists rediscovered fragments of her work and tried to reconstruct her image, often projecting their own ideals onto her blank spaces. Luna: Did they get her right or did they mess it up? Lucas: They tended to idealize her as a chaste, noble poetess, downplaying the erotic elements that made her controversial in the first place. It wasn't until the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with advances in philology and archaeology, that scholars began to take her eroticism seriously as a legitimate subject of literary study rather than a scandal to be explained away. Luna: So modern scholarship finally corrected the record. Lucas: To a large extent, yes. Modern readers can appreciate her work without the baggage of Victorian morality or early Christian condemnation. We can read her descriptions of desire as part of a universal human experience, framed by the sophisticated poetic techniques she mastered. It allows us to see her not as a curiosity, but as a central figure in the development of Western lyric poetry. Luna: It’s amazing how much we can recover from just fragments. Lucas: It is. And those fragments, no matter how small, carry the weight of a voice that refused to be silenced by time. From the islands of the Aegean to the libraries of Alexandria, and finally to our screens today, Sappho’s words continue to resonate, proving that some things are truly eternal. Luna: Here’s to the eighth muse. Lucas: Here’s to her. Next week, we’ll be looking at another figure who shaped the ancient world from a different angle, so stay tuned.