(Think of what goes on in your mind when someone mentions the song “Let It Be.”) Unfortunately, although ancient musical papyri have turned up, and classicists are increasingly confident about what Greek music might have sounded like, Sappho’s melodies, like ninety-nine per cent of her lyrics, are lost. Ancient authors loved to quote lines of her work, but for all we know when they did so readers were hearing certain famous melodies in their heads as well as registering the words. Like Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan, she wrote her music as well as her lyrics, and performed her songs in public. What Sappho really was was a singer-songwriter.

The ancients referred to her as, simply, “the Poetess,” but today the term is likely to give the wrong impression: a life spent cramped over a desk or a laptop sparsely attended readings in small cafés Iowa.

For the Greeks, the “lyric” in “lyric poetry” was literal: the verses were composed to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. What was all the fuss about?Įven when we have the words themselves, much is missing. His extravagant admiration for her hotly yearning lyrics was shared by most literate people in the ancient world: from Plato, who called her the Tenth Muse, to the Roman poet Catullus, who, five centuries after she died, adapted a famous song of hers about erotic frustration into Latin.Īnd yet today so little of her poetry survives-only one complete poem and a handful of substantial fragments-that the rave reviews of two millennia ago can be more frustrating than inspiring.

“Because once I’ve learned it, I can die.” So said Solon the Wise, the great Athenian lawmaker of the sixth century B.C., when asked why he wanted to be taught a certain poem by Sappho.

Sappho poems and fragments