The poet Sappho lived c.610-c.580 BC, mainly on the island of Lesbos in Greece. Her style was more colloquial than literary and her themes tended to be personal, relating the interactions and affections of her social group. Sappho is generally associated with lesbian practices, however, while her work sometimes expressed passionate love for other women, nothing that survives suggests she was actually homosexual. Only fragments of her work remain, apart from one poem of 28 lines and one of 16.

SAPPHO, Greek poet, was born in the later seventh century B.C. We do not know when she died. Like Alcaeus, who was approximately her contemporary, she lived on the island of Lesbos; she may have been born at Eresus, one of its towns. The name of her father was Scamandronymus, and her mother was Cleis. As a child, at some date between 604 and 595 B.C., she was taken to exile in Sicily, presumably owing to political disturbances at Lesbos. However, she returned to spend most of the rest of her life at Mytilene, the chief city of the island. She had three brothers, Larichus, Charaxus, and Erigys: Larichus, she tells us, poured the wine at council banquets and Charaxus, a merchant, sailed with a cargo of wine to Naucratis in Egypt, where he managed, to his sister’s disapproval, to involve himself expensively with a local woman, Doricha.

Sappho herself was married to Cercolas, a rich man from the island of Andros, and they had a daughter who was given her grandmother's name, Cleis. Some of the new discoveries of papyri, which have extended our fragmentary knowledge of Sappho’s poetry, record her relations with her daughter. One passage advises Cleis how to do her hair and discusses her desire for a brightly colored hat from Lydia. Elsewhere, Sappho speaks lovingly of her daughter's beauty. She herself, however, according to tradition, was short and sallow. The famous story that she jumped to her death from the promontories of Leucas was probably a myth.

One important group of her poems consted of wedding songs (epithalamia), which were, in origin, the pieces chanted by young men and young women in front of the bridal chamber, in order to celebrate the good fortune of the bridegroom and the beauty of the bride. Sappho composed her Epithalamia for performance by a chorus. The meagre fragments that survive show her remarkable capacity for elevating this tradional form to finished poetry without any sacrifice of spontaneous charm. One passage contains a nostalgic farewell to virginity; anther is humorous and shows the young women sneering at the large feet of the youth who has been set to guard the door of the house where the bride has been taken, in case the women try to rescue her from her husband.

Sappho's favorite poetic form was the inividual song to the lyre, describing the feelings of her own heart. It seems that in Lesbos at this period the women who could afford to do so gathered together in more or less informal groups and spent their days in pleasant occupations, including the composition and recitation of poetry; Sappho herelf expresses jealousy or contempt for rival groups, such as those of Archenassa and Lorgo. Some of the members of her own male circle are named by her, but more often those she sings about are left anonymous.

Much of her poetry revolves around the loves and hatreds that flourished in this hothouse atmosphere. The famous twentyeight line Prayer to Aphrodite, which is the only one of her poems to have survived intact, calls on the goddess, in verses of magical beauty and passion, to help her in her aim of unsatisfied longing. In another piece, of which sixteen lines survive, Sappho delares that godlike happiness is the lot of the man who sits quietly opposite a young woman and just listens to her talking and laughing; however, the poet, as she herself declares, is completely overcome by a lgimpse of the young woman's face.

Many of the other fragments, too, tell of her loves for the young women around her; in one of them, she speaks of one who is now far away in Sardis, where she outshines the women of Lydia as the moon outshines the stars and there follows an incomparable description of a moonlit night. The term lesbian is derived from the way in which Sappho writes about her female companions. In surviving fragments, there is no reference to any physical relationships, but her feelings for her own sex were evidently intense. This intensity of feeling emerges with burning directness from the verbal melodies of her candid and simple language. And while she has the power to stand back and recollect her agonies and ecstasies, she makes an unprecedentedly intimate contact with her listener or reader.

Sappho wrote in various meters, some probably of her own invention; an especially graceful type of four-line lyric stanza was given her name. Her influence on later poets, including Anacreon, Ibycus, and eventually Theocritus, was extensive, and Catullus produced a Latin version of her poem describing her reactions at the sight of the young woman she loved. Much of her work survived until the end of antiquity, but by the eighth or ninth century AD. nothing was left except quotations by subsequent authors; these were all we possessed until additional fragments were discovered on papyri during the past eighty years.

• http://search.eb.com/eb/article?eu=109201
• http://dmoz.org/Arts/Classical_Studies/Greek/Sappho/
• http://search.eb.com/eb/article?eu=67399