Her poems about Eros, however, speak with equal force to men as well as to women. Because social norms in ancient Greece differed from those of today and because so little is actually known of her life, it is difficult to unequivocally answer such claims. Her reputation for licentiousness would cause Pope Gregory to burn her work in 1073. This characterization held fast, so much so that the very term “lesbian” is derived from the name of her home island. Three centuries after her death the writers of the New Comedy parodied Sappho as both overly promiscuous and lesbian. In 1914, in Egypt, archeologists discovered papier-mâché coffins made from scraps of paper that contained more verse fragments attributed to Sappho. In 1898, scholars unearthed papyri that contained fragments of her poems. ![]() Merely one twenty-eight-line poem of hers has survived intact, and she was known principally through quotations found in the works of other authors until the nineteenth century. Her poems were first collected into nine volumes around the third century BC, but her work was lost almost entirely for many years. It is unclear whether she invented or simply refined the meter of her day, but today it is known as “Sapphic” meter. She was known in antiquity as a great poet: Plato called her “the tenth Muse” and her likeness appeared on coins. The history of her poems is as speculative as that of her biography. Other historians posit that she died of old age around 550 BC. A legend from Ovid suggests that she threw herself from a cliff when her heart was broken by Phaon, a young sailor, and died at an early age. ![]() ![]() Sappho’s school devoted itself to the cult of Aphrodite and Eros, and Sappho earned great prominence as a dedicated teacher and poet. She spent most of her adult life in the city of Mytilene on Lesbos where she ran an academy for unmarried young women. Evidence suggests that she had several brothers, married a wealthy man named Cercylas, and had a daughter named Cleis. She was born around 615 BC to an aristocratic family on the Greek island of Lesbos. Only a handful of details are known about the life of Sappho.
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