Sappho (/ˈsæfoʊ/; Aeolic Greek Ψάπφω Psáppho; c. 630 – c.
570 BC) was an Archaic Greek poet from the island of Lesbos. Sappho is known
for her lyric poetry, written to be sung while accompanied by a lyre. In ancient times, Sappho was widely regarded as
one of the greatest lyric poets and was given names such as the "Tenth
Muse" and "The Poetess". Most of Sappho's poetry is now lost,
and what is extant has survived only in fragmentary form, except for one
complete poem: the "Ode to Aphrodite". As well as lyric poetry,
ancient commentators claimed that Sappho wrote elegiac and iambic poetry. Three
epigrams attributed to Sappho are extant, but these are actually Hellenistic
imitations of Sappho's style.
Little is known of Sappho's life. She was from a wealthy
family from Lesbos, though her parents' names are uncertain. Ancient sources
say that she had three brothers; the names of two of them, Charaxos and
Larichos, are mentioned in the Brothers Poem discovered in 2014. She was exiled
to Sicily around 600 BC, and may have continued to work until around 570. Later
legends surrounding Sappho's love for the ferryman Phaon and her death are
unreliable.
Sappho was a prolific poet, probably composing around 10,000
lines. Her poetry was well-known and greatly admired through much of antiquity,
and she was among the canon of nine lyric poets most highly esteemed by
scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria. Sappho's poetry is still considered
extraordinary and her works continue to influence other writers. Beyond her
poetry, she is well known as a symbol of love and desire between women] with
the English words sapphic and lesbian being derived from her own name and the
name of her home island respectively.
Ancient sources
There are three sources of information about Sappho's life:
her testimonia, the history of her times, and what can be gleaned from her own
poetry — although scholars are cautious when reading poetry as a biographical
source.
Testimonia is a term of art in ancient studies that refers
to collections of classical biographical and literary references to classical
authors. The testimonia regarding Sappho do not contain references contemporary
to Sappho. The representations of
Sappho's life that occur in the testimonia always need to be assessed for
accuracy, because many of them are certainly not correct. The testimonia are also a source of knowledge
regarding how Sappho's poetry was received in antiquity. Some details mentioned
in the testimonia are derived from Sappho's own poetry, which is of great
interest, especially considering the testimonia originate from a time when more
of Sappho's poetry was extant than is the case for modern readers.
Life
Little is known about Sappho's life for certain. She was from Mytilene on the island of Lesbos
and was probably born around 630 BC. Tradition names her mother as Cleïs, though
ancient scholars may simply have guessed this name, assuming that Sappho's
daughter Cleïs was named after her. Sappho's father's name is less certain. Ten
names are known for Sappho's father from the ancient testimonia; this
proliferation of possible names suggests that he was not explicitly named in
any of Sappho's poetry. The earliest and
most commonly attested name for Sappho's father is Scamandronymus. In Ovid's Heroides, Sappho's father died when
she was seven. Sappho's father is not
mentioned in any of her surviving works, but Campbell suggests that this detail
may have been based on a now-lost poem. Sappho's
own name is found in numerous variant spellings, even in her own Aeolian
dialect; the form that appears in her own extant poetry is Psappho.
No reliable portrait of Sappho's physical appearance has
survived; all extant representations, ancient and modern, are artists'
conceptions. In the Tithonus poem she
describes her hair as now white but formerly melaina, i.e. black. A literary
papyrus of the second century A.D. describes her as pantelos mikra, quite tiny.
Alcaeus possibly describes Sappho as
"violet-haired", which was a common Greek poetic way of describing
dark hair. Some scholars dismiss this
tradition as unreliable.
Sappho (1877) by Charles Mengin (1853–1933). One tradition
claims that Sappho committed suicide by jumping off the Leucadian cliff.
Sappho was said to have three brothers: Erigyius, Larichus,
and Charaxus. According to Athenaeus, Sappho often praised Larichus for pouring
wine in the town hall of Mytilene, an office held by boys of the best families.
This indication that Sappho was born
into an aristocratic family is consistent with the sometimes rarefied
environments that her verses record. One ancient tradition tells of a relation
between Charaxus and the Egyptian courtesan Rhodopis. Herodotus, the oldest
source of the story, reports that Charaxus ransomed Rhodopis for a large sum
and that Sappho wrote a poem rebuking him for this.
Sappho may have had a daughter named Cleïs, who is referred
to in two fragments. Not all scholars
accept that Cleïs was Sappho's daughter. Fragment 132 describes Cleïs as
"παῖς" (pais), which, as well as meaning "child", can also
refer to the "youthful beloved in a male homosexual liaison". It has been suggested that Cleïs was one of
Sappho's younger lovers, rather than her daughter, though Judith Hallett argues
that the language used in fragment 132 suggests that Sappho was referring to
Cleïs as her daughter.
According to the Suda, Sappho was married to Kerkylas of
Andros. However, the name appears to
have been invented by a comic poet: the name "Kerkylas" comes from
the word "κέρκος" (kerkos), a possible meaning of which is
"penis", and is not otherwise attested as a name, while
"Andros", as well as being the name of a Greek island, is a form of
the Greek word "ἀνήρ" (aner), which means man. Thus, the name may be a joke name, and as such
could be rendered as "Dick Allcock from the Isle of Man".
Sappho and her family were exiled from Lesbos to Syracuse,
Sicily, around 600 BC. The Parian
Chronicle records Sappho going into exile sometime between 604 and 59. This may have been as a result of her
family's involvement with the conflicts between political elites on Lesbos in
this period, the same reason for Sappho's contemporary Alcaeus' exile from Mytilene
around the same time. Later the exiles
were allowed to return.
A tradition going back at least to Menander (Fr. 258 K)
suggested that Sappho killed herself by jumping off the Leucadian cliffs for
love of Phaon, a ferryman. This is regarded as unhistorical by modern scholars,
perhaps invented by the comic poets or originating from a misreading of a
first-person reference in a non-biographical poem. The legend may have resulted
in part from a desire to assert Sappho as heterosexual.
Works
Sappho probably wrote around 10,000 lines of poetry; today,
only about 650 survive. She is best
known for her lyric poetry, written to be accompanied by music. The Suda also attributes to Sappho epigrams,
elegiacs, and iambics; three of these epigrams are extant, but are in fact
later Hellenistic poems inspired by Sappho, as are the iambic and elegiac poems
attributed to her in the Suda. Ancient
authors claim that Sappho primarily wrote love poetry, and the indirect
transmission of Sappho's work supports this notion. However, the papyrus tradition suggests that
this may not have been the case: a series of papyri published in 2014 contains
fragments of ten consecutive poems from Book I of the Alexandrian edition of
Sappho, of which only two are certainly love poems, while at least three and
possibly four are primarily concerned with family.
Ancient editions
Sappho's poetry was probably first written down on Lesbos,
either in her lifetime or shortly afterwards, initially probably in the form of
a score for performers of Sappho's work. In the fifth century, Athenian book publishers
probably began to produce copies of Lesbian lyric poetry, some including
explanatory material and glosses as well as the poems themselves. Sometime in the second or third century,
Alexandrian scholars produced a critical edition of Sappho's poetry. There may have been more than one Alexandrian
edition – John J. Winkler argues for two, one edited by Aristophanes of
Byzantium and another by his pupil Aristarchus of Samothrace. This is not certain – ancient sources tell us
that Aristarchus' edition of Alcaeus replaced the edition by Aristophanes, but are
silent on whether Sappho's work, too, went through multiple editions.
The Alexandrian edition of Sappho's poetry was based on the
existing Athenian collections, and was divided into at least eight books,
though the exact number is uncertain. Many modern scholars have followed Denys Page,
who conjectured a ninth book in the standard edition; Yatromanolakis doubts
this, noting that though testimonia refer to an eighth book of Sappho's poetry,
none mention a ninth. Whatever its make-up, the Alexandrian edition of Sappho
probably grouped her poems by their metre: ancient sources tell us that each of
the first three books contained poems in a single specific metre. Ancient editions of Sappho, possibly starting
with the Alexandrian edition, seem to have ordered the poems in at least the
first book of Sappho's poetry – which contained works composed in Sapphic
stanzas – alphabetically.
Even after the publication of the standard Alexandrian
edition, Sappho's poetry continued to circulate in other poetry collections.
For instance, the Cologne Papyrus on which the Tithonus poem is preserved was
part of a Hellenistic anthology of poetry, which contained poetry arranged by
theme, rather than by metre and incipit, as it was in the Alexandrian edition.
Surviving poetry
Fragments of papyrus
Most of Sappho's poetry is preserved in manuscripts of other
ancient writers or on papyrus fragments, but part of one poem survives on a
potsherd. The papyrus pictured (left) preserves the Tithonus poem (fragment
58); the potsherd (right) preserves fragment 2.
The earliest surviving manuscripts of Sappho, including the
potsherd on which fragment 2 is preserved, date to the third century BC, and
thus predate the Alexandrian edition. The latest surviving copies of Sappho’s
poems transmitted directly from ancient times are written on parchment codex
pages from the sixth and seventh centuries AD, and were surely reproduced from
ancient papyri now lost. Manuscript
copies of Sappho's works may have survived a few centuries longer, but around
the 9th century her poetry appears to have disappeared, and by the twelfth
century, John Tzetzes could write that "the passage of time has destroyed
Sappho and her works".
According to legend, Sappho's poetry was lost because the
church disapproved of her morals. These
legends appear to have originated in the renaissance – around 1550, Jerome
Cardan wrote that Gregory Nazianzen had Sappho's work publicly destroyed, and
at the end of the sixteenth century Joseph Justus Scaliger claimed that
Sappho's works were burned in Rome and Constantinople in 1073 on the orders of
Pope Gregory VII. In reality, Sappho's work was probably lost as the demand for
it was insufficiently great for it to be copied onto parchment when codices
superseded papyrus scrolls as the predominant form of book. Another contributing factor to the loss of
Sappho's poems may have been the perceived obscurity of her Aeolic dialect,
which contains many archaisms and innovations absent from other ancient Greek
dialects. During the Roman period, by
which time the Attic dialect had become the standard for literary compositions,
many readers found Sappho's dialect difficult to understand and, in the second
century AD, the Roman author Apuleius specifically remarks on its
"strangeness".
Only approximately 650 lines of Sappho's poetry still
survive, of which just one poem – the "Ode to Aphrodite" – is
complete, and more than half of the original lines survive in around ten more
fragments. Many of the surviving fragments of Sappho contain only a single word–
for example, fragment 169A is simply a word meaning "wedding
gifts",[66] and survives as part of a dictionary of rare words. The two major sources of surviving fragments
of Sappho are quotations in other ancient works, from a whole poem to as little
as a single word, and fragments of papyrus, many of which were discovered at Oxyrhynchus
in Egypt. Other fragments survive on other materials, including parchment and
potsherds. The oldest surviving fragment of Sappho
currently known is the Cologne papyrus which contains the Tithonus poem, dating
to the third century BC.
Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, only the
ancient quotations of Sappho survived. In 1879, the first new discovery of a
fragment of Sappho was made at Fayum. By
the end of the nineteenth century, Grenfell and Hunt had begun to excavate an
ancient rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus, leading to the discoveries of many
previously unknown fragments of Sappho. Fragments of Sappho continue to be
rediscovered. Most recently, major discoveries in 2004 (the "Tithonus
poem" and a new, previously unknown fragment) and 2014 (fragments of nine
poems: five already known but with new readings, four, including the "Brothers
Poem", not previously known) have been reported in the media around the
world.
Style
Sappho clearly worked within a well-developed tradition of
Lesbian poetry, which had evolved its own poetic diction, meters, and
conventions. Among her famous poetic forebears were Arion and Terpander. Nonetheless, her work is innovative; it is
some of the earliest Greek poetry to adopt the "lyric 'I'" – to write
poetry adopting the viewpoint of a specific person, in contrast to the earlier
epic poets Homer and Hesiod, who present themselves more as "conduits of
divine inspiration". Her poetry
explores individual identity and personal emotions – desire, jealousy, and
love; it also adopts and reinterprets the existing imagery epic poetry in
exploring these themes.
Sappho's poetry is known for its clear language and simple
thoughts, sharply-drawn images, and use of direct quotation which brings a
sense of immediacy. Unexpected word-play
is a characteristic feature of her style.
An example is from fragment 96:
"now she stands out among Lydian women as after sunset the rose-fingered
moon exceeds all stars", a variation of the Homeric epithet
"rosy-fingered Dawn". Sappho's
poetry often uses hyperbole, according to ancient critics "because of its
charm". An example is found in
fragment 111, where Sappho writes that "The groom approaches like
Ares. Much bigger than a big man".
Leslie Kurke groups Sappho with those archaic Greek poets
from what has been called the "élite" ideological tradition, which
valued luxury (habrosyne) and high birth. These elite poets tended to identify
themselves with the worlds of Greek myths, gods, and heroes, as well as the wealthy
East, especially Lydia. Thus in fragment 2 Sappho describes Aphrodite
"pour into golden cups nectar lavishly mingled with joys", while in
the Tithonus poem she explicitly states that "I love the finer things [habrosyne]".
According to Page DuBois, the language,
as well as the content, of Sappho's poetry evokes an aristocratic sphere. She contrasts Sappho's "flowery, adorned"
style with the "austere, decorous, restrained" style embodied in the
works of later classical authors such as Sophocles, Demosthenes, and Pindar.
Traditional modern literary critics of Sappho's poetry have
tended to see her poetry as a vivid and skilled but spontaneous and naive
expression of emotion: typical of this view are the remarks of H. J. Rose that
"Sappho wrote as she spoke, owing practically nothing to any literary
influence," and that her verse displays "the charm of absolute naturalness."
Against this essentially romantic view, one school of more recent critics
argues that, on the contrary, Sappho's poetry displays and depends for its
effect on a sophisticated deployment of the strategies of traditional Greek
rhetorical genres.
Sexuality
Sappho's sexuality has long been the subject of debate. Sir
Lawrence Alma-Tadema's Sappho and Alcaeus portrays her staring rapturously at
her contemporary Alcaeus; images of a lesbian Sappho, such as Simeon Solomon's
painting of Sappho with Erinna, were much less common in the nineteenth
century.
Today Sappho, for many, is a symbol of female homosexuality;
the common term lesbian is an allusion to Sappho, originating from the name of
the island of Lesbos, where she was born.
However, she has not always been
so considered. In classical Athenian comedy (from the Old Comedy of the fifth
century to Menander in the late fourth and early third centuries BC), Sappho
was caricatured as a promiscuous heterosexual woman, and it is not until the
Hellenistic period that the first testimonia which explicitly discuss Sappho's
homoeroticism are preserved. The earliest of these is a fragmentary biography
written on papyrus in the late third or early second century BC, which states
that Sappho was "accused by some of being irregular in her ways and a woman-lover".
Denys Page comments that the phrase
"by some" implies that even the full corpus of Sappho's poetry did
not provide conclusive evidence of whether she described herself as having sex
with women. These ancient authors do not
appear to have believed that Sappho did, in fact, have sexual relationships
with other women, and as late as the tenth century the Suda records that Sappho
was "slanderously accused" of having sexual relationships with her
"female pupils".
Among modern scholars, Sappho's sexuality is still debated –
André Lardinois has described it as the "Great Sappho Question". Early translators of Sappho sometimes heterosexualised
her poetry. Ambrose Philips' 1711
translation of the Ode to Aphrodite portrayed the object of Sappho's desire as
male, a reading that was followed by virtually every other translator of the
poem until the twentieth century, while in 1781 Alessandro Verri interpreted
fragment 31 as being about Sappho's love for Phaon. Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker argued that
Sappho's feelings for other women were "entirely idealistic and
non-sensual", while Karl Otfried Müller wrote that fragment 31 described
"nothing but a friendly affection":
Glenn Most comments that "one wonders what language Sappho would
have used to describe her feelings if they had been ones of sexual
excitement" if this theory were correct.
By 1970, it would be argued that
the same poem contained "proof positive of [Sappho's] lesbianism".
Today, it is generally accepted that Sappho's poetry portrays
homoerotic feelings: as Sandra Boehringer puts it, her works
"clearly celebrate Eros between women". Toward
the end of the twentieth century, though, some scholars began to reject the
question of whether or not Sappho was a lesbian – Glenn Most wrote that Sappho
herself "would have had no idea what people mean when they call her
nowadays a homosexual", André Lardinois stated that it is
"nonsensical" to ask whether Sappho was a lesbian, and Page DuBois
calls the question a "particularly obfuscating debate".
One of the major focuses of scholars studying Sappho has
been to attempt to determine the cultural context in which Sappho's poems were
composed and performed. Various cultural
contexts and social roles played by Sappho have been suggested, including teacher,
cult-leader, and poet performing for a circle of female friends. However, the performance contexts of many of
Sappho's fragments are not easy to determine, and for many more than one possible
context is conceivable.
One longstanding suggestion of a social role for Sappho is
that of "Sappho as schoolmistress". At the beginning of the twentieth century, the
German classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff posited that Sappho was a
sort of schoolteacher, in order to "explain away Sappho's passion for her
'girls'" and defend her from accusations of homosexuality. The view continues to be influential, both
among scholars and the general public, though more recently the idea has been criticized
by historians as anachronistic and has been rejected by several prominent
classicists as unjustified by the evidence. In 1959, Denys Page, for example,
stated that Sappho's extant fragments portray "the loves and jealousies,
the pleasures and pains, of Sappho and her companions"; and he adds,
"We have found, and shall find, no trace of any formal or official or
professional relationship between them, ... no trace of Sappho the principal of
an academy." David A. Campbell in
1967 judged that Sappho may have "presided over a literary coterie",
but that "evidence for a formal appointment as priestess or teacher is
hard to find". None of Sappho's own poetry mentions her
teaching, and the earliest testimonium to support the idea of Sappho as a
teacher comes from Ovid, six centuries after Sappho's lifetime. Despite these problems, many newer
interpretations of Sappho's social role are still based on this idea. In these interpretations, Sappho was involved
in the ritual education of girls, for instance as a trainer of choruses of
girls.
Even if Sappho did compose songs for training choruses of
young girls, not all of her poems can be interpreted in this light, and despite
scholars' best attempts to find one, Yatromanolakis argues that there is no
single performance context to which all of Sappho's poems can be attributed.
Parker argues that Sappho should be considered as part of a group of female
friends for whom she would have performed, just as her contemporary Alcaeus
is. Some of her poetry appears to have
been composed for identifiable formal occasions, but many of her songs are
about – and possibly were to be performed at – banquets.
Legacy
Ancient reputation
In antiquity Sappho's poetry was highly admired, and several
ancient sources refer to her as the "tenth Muse". The earliest surviving poem to do so is a
third-century BC epigram by Dioscorides, but poems are preserved in the Greek
Anthology by Antipater of Sidon and attributed to Plato on the same theme. She
was sometimes referred to as "The Poetess", just as Homer was
"The Poet". The scholars of Alexandria included Sappho in the canon
of nine lyric poets. According to
Aelian, the Athenian lawmaker and poet Solon asked to be taught a song by
Sappho "so that I may learn it and then die". This story may well be apocryphal, especially
as Ammianus Marcellinus tells a similar story about Socrates and a song of
Stesichorus, but it is indicative of how highly Sappho's poetry was considered
in the ancient world.
Sappho's poetry also influenced other ancient authors. In
Greek, the Hellenistic poet Nossis was described by Marylin B. Skinner as an
imitator of Sappho, and Kathryn Gutzwiller argues that Nossis explicitly
positioned herself as an inheritor of Sappho's position as a woman poet. Beyond poetry, Plato cites Sappho in his
Phaedrus, and Socrates' second speech on love in that dialogue appears to echo
Sappho's descriptions of the physical effects of desire in fragment 31. In the first century BC, Catullus established
the themes and metres of Sappho's poetry as a part of Latin literature,
adopting the Sapphic stanza, believed in antiquity to have been invented by
Sappho, giving his lover in his poetry the name "Lesbia" in reference
to Sappho, and adapting and translating Sappho's 31st fragment in his poem 51.
Other ancient poets wrote about Sappho's life. She was a
popular character in ancient Athenian comedy, and at least six separate
comedies called Sappho are known. The
earliest known ancient comedy to take Sappho as its main subject was the
early-fifth or late-fourth century BC Sappho by Ameipsias, though nothing is
known of it apart from its name. Sappho
was also a favourite subject in the visual arts, the most commonly depicted
poet on sixth and fifth-century Attic red-figure vase paintings, and the
subject of a sculpture by Silanion.
From the fourth century BC, ancient works portray Sappho as
a tragic heroine, driven to suicide by her unrequited love for Phaon. For instance, a fragment of a play by
Menander says that Sappho threw herself off of the cliff at Leucas out of her
love for Phaon. Ovid's Heroides 15 is
written as a letter from Sappho to her supposed love Phaon, and when it was
first rediscovered in the 15th century was thought to be a translation of an
authentic letter of Sappho's. Sappho's
suicide was also depicted in classical art, for instance on a first-century BC
basilica in Rome near the Porta Maggiore.
While Sappho's poetry was admired in the ancient world, her
character was not always so well considered. In the Roman period, critics found
her lustful and perhaps even homosexual.
Horace called her "mascula Sappho" in his Epistles, which the
later Porphyrio commented was "either because she is famous for her
poetry, in which men more often excel, or because she is maligned for having
been a tribad". By the third
century AD, the difference between Sappho's literary reputation as a poet and
her moral reputation as a woman had become so significant that the suggestion
that there were in fact two Sapphos began to develop. In his Historical Miscellanies, Aelian wrote
that there was "another Sappho, a courtesan, not a poetess".
Modern reception
In the medieval period, Sappho had a reputation as an
educated woman and talented poet. In this woodcut, illustrating an early
incunable of Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris, she is portrayed surrounded by
books and musical instruments.
By the medieval period, Sappho's works had been lost, though
she was still known through later ancient authors such as Ovid. Her works began
to become accessible again in the sixteenth century, first in early printed
editions of authors who had quoted her. In 1508 Aldus Manutius printed an
edition of Dionysius of Hallicarnassus, which contained Sappho 1, the "Ode
to Aphrodite", and the first printed edition of Longinus' On the Sublime,
complete with his quotation of Sappho 31, appeared in 1554. In 1566, the French
printer Robert Estienne produced an edition of the Greek lyric poets which
contained around 40 fragments attributed to Sappho. In 1652, the first English translation of a
poem by Sappho was published, in John Hall's translation of On the Sublime. In
1681 Anne Le Fèvre's French edition of Sappho made her work even more widely
known. Theodor Bergk's 1854 edition
became the standard edition of Sappho in the second half of the 19th century; in
the first part of the 20th, the papyrus discoveries of new poems by Sappho led
to editions and translations by Edwin Marion Cox and John Maxwell Edmonds, and
culminated in the 1955 publication of Edgar Lobel's and Denys Page's Poetarum
Lesbiorum Fragmenta.
Like the ancients, modern critics have tended to consider
Sappho's poetry "extraordinary".
As early as the 9th century,
Sappho was referred to as a talented woman poet, and in works such as
Boccaccio's De Claris Mulieribus and Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of
Ladies she gained a reputation as a learned lady. Even after Sappho's works had been lost, the
Sapphic stanza continued to be used in medieval lyric poetry, and with the
rediscovery of her work in the Renaissance, she began to increasingly influence
European poetry. In the 16th century, members of La Pléiade, a circle of French
poets, were influenced by her to experiment with Sapphic stanzas and with
writing love-poetry with a first-person female voice. From the Romantic era, Sappho's work –
especially her "Ode to Aphrodite" – has been a key influence of
conceptions of what lyric poetry should be. Such influential poets as Alfred
Lord Tennyson in the nineteenth century, and A. E. Housman in the twentieth,
have been influenced by her poetry. Tennyson based poems including
"Eleanore" and "Fatima" on Sappho's fragment 31, while
three of Housman's works are adaptations of the Midnight poem, long thought to
be by Sappho though the authorship is now disputed. At the beginning of the twentieth century,
the Imagists – especially Ezra Pound, H. D., and Richard Aldington – were
influenced by Sappho's fragments; a number of Pound's poems in his early
collection Lustra were adaptations of Sapphic poems, while H. D.'s poetry was
frequently Sapphic in "style, theme or content", and in some cases,
such as "Fragment 40" more specifically invoke Sappho's writing.
It was not long after the rediscovery of Sappho that her
sexuality once again became the focus of critical attention. In the early
seventeenth century, John Donne wrote "Sapho to Philaenis", returning
to the idea of Sappho as a hypersexual lover of women. The modern debate on Sappho's sexuality began
in the 19th century, with Welcker publishing, in 1816, an article defending
Sappho from charges of prostitution and lesbianism, arguing that she was chaste
– a position which would later be taken up by Wilamowitz at the end of the 19th
and Henry Thornton Wharton at the beginning of the 20th centuries. Despite attempts to defend her good name, in
the nineteenth century Sappho was co-opted by the Decadent Movement as a
lesbian "daughter of de Sade", by Charles Baudelaire in France and
later Algernon Charles Swinburne in England.
By the late 19th century, lesbian
writers such as Michael Field and Amy Levy became interested in Sappho for her
sexuality, and by the turn of the twentieth century she was a sort of "patron
saint of lesbians".
From the 19th century, Sappho began to be regarded as a role
model for campaigners for women's rights, beginning with works such as Caroline
Norton's The Picture of Sappho. Later in
that century, she would become a model for the so-called New Woman – independent
and educated women who desired social and sexual autonomy –and by the 1960s,
the feminist Sappho was – along with the hypersexual, often but not exclusively
lesbian Sappho – one of the two most important cultural perceptions of Sappho.
The discoveries of new poems by Sappho in 2004 and 2014
excited both scholarly and media attention.
The announcement of the Tithonus
poem was the subject of international news coverage, and was described by
Marylin Skinner as "the trouvaille of a lifetime".
