Sappho was born around 620 BCE on Lesbos, an island in the eastern Aegean already famous for its musicians. To a noble family — and to the company of young women she gathered around her — she taught music, dance, and verse. Out of that small school came something new: poetry sung not by an epic chorus but by one voice, accompanied by a single lyre. The lyric poem, with all its later European descendants, begins with her. The Library of Alexandria preserved nine books of her work — perhaps ten thousand lines. Almost all of it is lost. What survives reaches us as fragments on torn papyrus and as quotations in other writers: a few hundred lines, often only a phrase, often a single image. Plato called her the tenth Muse. Twenty-six centuries later, every new scrap of papyrus dug from Egyptian rubbish heaps that turns out to be Sappho is news.
All Figures
Lyric Poet · The Tenth Muse
Sappho
c. 620 BCE – 550 BCE
On the Aegean island of Lesbos she invented the lyric — and the first voice of longing in Western verse.
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