In Our Time - Sappho

Episode Date: April 9, 2015

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Greek poet Sappho. Born in the late seventh century BC, Sappho spent much of her life on the island of Lesbos. In antiquity she was famed as one of the greatest lyric poets, but owing to a series of accidents the bulk of her work was lost to posterity. The fragments that do survive, however, give a tantalising glimpse of a unique voice of Greek literature. Her work has lived on in other languages, too, translated by such major poets as Ovid, Christina Rossetti and Baudelaire.WithEdith Hall Professor of Classics at King's College, LondonMargaret Reynolds Professor of English at Queen Mary, University of Londonand Dirk Obbink Professor of Papyrology and Greek Literature at the University of Oxford Fellow and tutor at Christ Church, OxfordProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in antiquity, the Greek lyric poet Sappho was known as the 10th muse, or as Sappho the Wise, where Homer was the poet, Sappho was the poetess. She was as prolific as she was celebrated, her work filled nine papyrus roles in the Alexandra Library. Today, it sought less than one percent, of Sappho's poetry remains. Even so, she's been a significant influence on literature since the Renaissance,

and an inspiration to many, struck by the vividness of her writing and the way she describes her desires often for other women. Just as little of her verse remains, so we know a few hard facts about her. But rarely a new fragment of Papyrus is discovered,

as it was recently about one of our guests, giving her more of her poetry and some tantalizing personal details. I have to take a glass of water. Sorry about this. We can't have that time on, unfortunately. With me to discuss Sappho, Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at King's College London. Margaret Reynolds, Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London. And Dirk Obink, Professor of Papyrology and Greek Literature at the University of Oxford and fellow and tutor at Christchurch College, Oxford. Edithaul, how important was the island where Sappho lived, Lesbos?

Lesbos was a prominent and prosperous island in the Eastern Aegean very close to what is now the Turkish seaboard. It had been very important for many centuries because it was an important trading place. It was known as a place where particularly beautiful women came from. We know that women ended up from the island of Lesbos as commodities in Mycenaean, Greece. And it had very strong contacts with the early civilizations of Anatolia,

like the Hittites and in Suffol's time, the very wealthy Lydian kingdom. So it's easily stretched back to the pre-Greek times. Very much so. And one of the exciting things about having a poet from the late 7th century BC, a Greek poet from that time, is that her poetry shows the sort of hybrid nature of the culture on her island. It's very different from the mainland Greek culture. And her language is full of allusions to the exotic empires of the East

and indeed interesting exotic items of vocabulary. Can we talk about Lesbos in two ways? First of us, how the island was like Greece and how it was unlike Greece at the time. Well, in one way it was very like Greece because at the time, in the 7th century and the early 6th, we're talking about political system, which was called the tyrannies. That actually means that hereditary kingship had been replaced by Parvenu, upstart leaders of the aristocracy who came into power on popular waves of support. And Lesbos is run by tyrants just like the rest of Greece.

This meant a lot of aristocratic and business families. vying for prominence. And there's every reason to believe that Sappho was a member of one of the kind of families who's vying for power and money and status within the Eastern Aegean island networks of tyrannies. And they had their own... It was Greek island, but they also...

They had their own dialect. Was it a dialect which included Greek words, was deviated from it based on Greek words? Can you tell us about it? Because obviously in the case of a poet, it's very important. There's three main dialects of ancient Greek, and the one that we mostly hear is the one based in Athens. that's what most of the poets people will have heard of wrote in.

Sapphoes is called Aeolic, and it's very, very rare. There are very few poets that we've got. We've got very few examples of texts in this dialect. She's really our main representative, along with a male poet of the same era called Arceas. And it's very, very exquisite on the ear. It sounds very different in some ways from mainland Greek. In particular, the openness of the vowels,

the e-sounds in Athenian Greek become very often R sounds in the saffic, the aolic dialect. Was the aeolic dialect understood by people who had an Ionian dialect as in Athens, or the Doric dialect as in Sparta? They could all understand each other, I think. I think it's like somebody from south of England going up to Scotland. They may have some trouble with some specialist items of vocabulary and may have to ask them to speak a bit more slowly. but they share a basic understanding. However, it did certainly strike the ear very, very differently and was regarded as strange and peculiar, and by later antiquity, four or five hundred years later,

I think people had some difficulty understanding it when they read it. Derk Obing, what role did poetry have at that time in the Greek-speaking world, and then let's particularise Lesbos? Well, ancient Greek lyric poetry was actually song. what got remembered and what has passed down to us are the words, the lyrics, to songs that were actually sung and performed and remembered. They could even be danced and performed to the lyre. Melet is the Greek word, and it means a musical song. So for us, it's a little bit like opening up a piece of sheet music of an opera and being able to read the words of the aria, but not. the score, let alone here, see how it would have looked when it was staged. The songs tended to be

about special occasions, births, weddings, deaths, victories, or defeats, partings, partings, and love affairs. So they tended to be memorializing of these events and conveying what was personal to the singer in a situation that was typical and experienced by everybody, maybe by the community. On Lesbos, they were unique in having a cult site for the performance of this lyric poetry in the center of the island, Mesa, which was held in common by all the cities of the island, in which people worshipped uniquely three gods in a single temple. Zeus, Hera and Dionysus. They were said to be Sunnaoi, sharing a single temple, and they worship them together. This would have been the performance space for the songs that Sappho sung, and it would have been an area in which some of the emotions and issues, political issues, were contested and worked out in the context of worship of the gods.

so the first fragment of the Haft-Safo is a hymn to Aphrodite. And also, unusually, there was a beauty contest, a calishtea held in this sanctuary, in this space, which we hear about from some of Sappho's compatriots, the poet Alcius, for example. Two questions in one, really. Did poets or singers, which might be better to say? I mind it really. Did singers have a special place in that society? Were they part of the established

hierarchy and high up the hierarchy? Did you have to have a singer? Did they specialize if you had a wedding or a funeral or death or whatever it was? Well, education consisted mainly in learning the traditional meters and measures and melodies in which the traditional songs had been performed. But we're with the poets who got remembered, like Sappho, and Alcius. We're talking about professional composers. They're even said to have invented new instruments, for example. So these were people who specialized at a very high level of continuing the traditional songs while innovating

and introducing new and exciting melodies. How rare was it for a woman poet to be so celebrated in her time as Sappho? Well, it would have been famous, it would have been unusual for a woman to achieve the kind of fame that Sappho did, and she did partly through the notoriety she attracted for the subject she sang about. We do know of many other female poets, some of whom were celebrated,

but Aristotle, for example, says that the people of Lesbos honored Sappho, even though she was a woman. So you're talking about the themes. We'll go to Peggy Reynolds for that. What other themes likely touched? on by Dirk, but now let's go for it. What are the themes that may people raise their Greek eyebrows?

Safa's main themes are love, desire, longing, loss. So she's not... I mean, and this is an obvious thing to say, but let's get the obvious out of the way first. There's a great heroic, narrative, tradition in Greek poetry, great battles, great scenes, great epics,

and she cut through all that. And these individual love poems about her and her love for somebody else. Whether or not they're about her is another question. That's a delicate matter on these fragments. Indeed. And as Dirk says, they are

ceremonial. They're performed, they're ritualized. I go away from my own question which is much more interesting, which is themes. Thames. Okay. So love, desire, loss, longing, the beauties of the natural world, the progression of women's lives, in particular

as Dirk has said, you know, the betrothal, marriage, childbirth, these kinds of themes. But she also, to my mind, writes about poetry. She writes about the construction of poetry. I'm thinking of something like, you know, let us not in the house of the muses. There should be no space for lamentation. But are we ducking what Dirk referred to?

And let's address it straight on, because it's what she's most famous for, really, that she wrote poems of passionate love about other women. I mean, you haven't said that yet. All right. Well, I'll say it now. Absolutely, she does, because Fragment 1, which Dirk has mentioned, is a hymn to Aphrodite, and Sappho calls herself Sappho in the course of this poem, but the pronouns are feminine.

So we know that she, Sappho, a woman, is talking about a woman. And the same thing happens in Fragment 31, which is the other really famous extract that we have. It's not a complete poem, but it comes down to us from antiquity. And again, it's clearly a woman talking about a woman. So if you call herself Sappho, and why do you tell me a few minutes ago that we didn't know that it was about Sappho? Because it is still within this very ritualised, performative space. And she's owning, sorry.

She's owning herself as the author of these poems, not necessarily talking about personal experience. We can't tell from this distance, whether it is actually possible. So the person who writes the poem is we know is Sappho. She calls this person in the poem Sappho, but you're not sure it's Sappho. There are a plenty of poems where she doesn't. There are plenty of poems where she doesn't. She's about, for example, mythical subject matter, aren't there, Peg?

Yes. Where she's not... But she's taking a personal angle on them. So that subjective, romantic sense about them. But she doesn't call them. There's only a few poems where she calls herself like that. I don't think we need to go for one or the other. I think that the two things, the element of the personal

and the element of the performative, can sit quite happily side by side. And the fact that she, to my mind, names herself like this, makes her very attractive to a modern audience because we like the fact that she's claiming the authorship and the sense of herself. But I think in some ways it's denigrating her work to say that it is a purely personal, emotional expression

in a sense of overflow of emotion. I don't see it. I never said any of those things. All right. Who's saying those things? I would like to say that. I think that when also leaves within it this element of the performative, the ritualised,

the very authoritative poet. figure speaking. Okay, but can you tell us how unusual it was at the time for a woman to write as straightforward passionately about her love for other women and how that affected her reputation at the time, insofar as one can gather this from, as we've kept saying, the fragments that remain. It most definitely affected her reputation. We can't know about her lifetime, but it most definitely affected her reputation in latter times, in latter times in antiquity and in modern times. that has been a major theme that people have picked up on.

I have no idea how unusual it would have been in ancient Greece because we have so little it comes down to us and we're lucky to have the amount of suffer that we actually have. Okay, Edith Hall, there's an anecdote about the Athenian statesman Solon when he was, I presume in a symposium with Plato,

in which he refers to Sapphire. Can you tell us about that and how you find it significant? Well, Solon said that he wanted to learn a particular poem by Sappho off by heart, and then he could die happily. I mean, it was like this ultimate transcendent song that would allow him to pass into death. What's interesting, though, is that he's a very stodgy chap Solon. He's a poet himself, and he's a statesman. He goes around abolishing taxes and bringing in new laws.

So for somebody is sort of deeply solid and patriarchal and statesman like a Solon, to say he likes lesbian love poetry, shows just a... how popular they were, and people did recognise her genius. Would it be more popular in Plato Symposium than outside Plato Symposium, that affection for homoerotic poetry? Yes, and I think the word symposium is so key to everything that we've been saying. I personally believe that women have their own drinking parties, their own sessions where they trained young girls in the proper manners appropriate to social behaviour

and in proper relationships between women of different ages and that there were plenty of other songs that women sang to each other. The men had loads of them. They heard these wonderful songs by Sappho and they decided to have them at their symposia. So what we very rarely hear about, parallel societies, men's society and the women's society which you very rarely hear about,

which you say, might be similar, in mimicking, equal to the men's societies. Certainly in this period of Greek history in the East and Aegean, I think the position of women was probably far freer, especially aristocratic women than it was in the famous historical periods of Athens. I also believe that the symposium was a crucial place for quite semi-public training of the next generation of your own sex.

Before you go any further, could you give us an idea of what her poetry might have sounded like in the original dialect? Well, I would so love to be able to sing to an ancient pectus. Go on, Edith, wish everything. A pectus. She played both instruments, which she strunged with a plectron. Some people said she even invented the plectron, and a little Lydian harp called the Perctis,

which she strummed softly with her fingertips, as she sang, Poikilotra, Nata, Natanatapolita, Pai Dios Doloplochekloch, Liseomaiser, Mema sysa, ma'amah, soeatni a tumon, to tweedelt,

and potto catirot, Tarsimars, Aodas, I, o'a, sepeloes. Which means? deathless Aphrodite on your spangled throne, daughter of many white who can weave wiles, daughter of Zeus who can weave miles. I beg you, I beg you, with my pain in my heart, come here if you've ever come here before and heard my voice and come to help me. And she wants help in motivating the person that she's in love with to love her back.

She's summoning the goddess Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic allure to make her sexy so she can get hold of this other woman. Dick, I mean, we've returned to the fragments I have in the trailer and in the introduction a few times. There's very little left. You said about 1% left. You think, there's a lot of guesses going on here, but you're better guesses than anybody, you three, so we'll take that.

You discovered a couple of new poems quite recently a year or two ago, to the delight of the Suffolk world. You're not going to say, well, you've got them from a collector who actually is not going to tell you where he got them from, so let's be. forget all that, and you tell us what the firms were. Yes, a year before last, I was shown a papyrus fragment that had been salvaged by a collector from a collection formed in the 1950s. He was actually quite open about where the fragment came from,

and I immediately, when I looked at it... Geographically or where it came from in terms of one collector to another? From one collector to another. Yeah, but we didn't say where he dug it up. And it came from Middle Egypt initially. Big place, Middle Egypt. It's a real clue. Thanks for that day.

We'll rush off that tomorrow morning. So, come on. Tell us what it was. And I immediately recognized from the layout of the lines, three long lines followed by a fourth considerably shorter line, from the diction, from the language and the names in the fragment. that it was a previously unknown poem by Sappho, five stanzas of one,

just missing probably the beginning stanza. And so for a couple of months, it was just me and a girl named Sappho. Nothing between me and the text, no translation, no commentary. And it was, it was, it was like being shipwrecked on a desert island with Marilyn Monroe. It was a delightful experience

to decipher this text. No spaces between the words. The first line mentioned Caraxos coming with a full ship al-a-yi tru lace the Charaxon Elthain. And already Herodotus tells us

that Caraxos was the brother of Sappho and that he spent an immense amount of money on an expensive call girl in the Egyptian port of Naukratus. Surely Cautazan might be a little bit more period of a probary, but never mind, you're the loss. And that Sappho expressed her anxiety and concern over this in a poem. So the new poem opened up like a switch of conduit between an early fifth-century reader of Sappho's poetry

and a 21st-century audience. Now, I don't think there's time because I've got so much to discuss to go into the amazing painstaking research that was gone into by you and others about the ink, the papyrus, the dating, the comparisons to make sure this was really the real thing. But it was, and it is. There's a lot of stuff there.

What does it add to what you scholars have at the moment about Sappho? Although Sappho doesn't mention herself in the poem, she doesn't mention herself by name. She does speak in the first person. She addresses another person in the second person who is a female, and it may be one of her girlfriends, but there's also a good possibility that it's her mother that she addresses in another fragment that we have. She mentions two of her brothers, one of whom is out at sea, on a trading mission. So there's a concern over wealth, family wealth, national pride,

concerned with his return. And she says, this is in the hands of the gods. She tells the other person, if you're concerned, you should go to the temple of Hera and have me go there and pray to Hera because fair weather follows on from harsh gales. And then she wishes well for her younger brother, Laracos, hoping that he will soon become a man and that all of their cares will be suddenly lifted. So it shows a woman in her own poetry expressing a woman's concerns over the family's wealth, its security in society, marriage, transition of the younger brother to a good family. So it broadens the context of her life considerably. Can I come to you, Pager Reynolds, which other poems, which are the main poems of these fragments that deserve closest attention?

Well, the next important one is definitely Fragment 31, which is, that man seems to me like a god whoever it is that is sitting next to you and listening to your lovely voice and hearing your beautiful laughter and then she turns around and starts to think about herself and whenever I look at you so it is Sappho, yes indeed at looking at this woman whenever I look at you

my voice dries in my throat a fire runs through my veins sweat pours down from me and I am close to death but all can be endured because even a pauper and it's a fragment that is quoted by Long Guinness much, much later, and in an essay on The Sublime. So it breaks off there.

And what he says in his commentary is that this is the most astonishing description of the physical effects of desire, and it is indeed about a woman speaking about another woman. And those symptoms of desire have gone into poetry from John Dunn to Christina Rossetti to, you know, Christina Rossetti, Sylvia Plath to any kind of pop song you care to mention. So that that is a massively important poem in terms of this. So you see a direct line.

You've mentioned several people. Let's take John Donn and pop songs from Saffa. Well, no, I'm just trying to get along. You think that there is a direct line that people read or heard about that and therefore incorporated it and their own thinking about the poems they would write and therefore it moved to songs or popular songs. There's a direct transmission because one can, I mean, some cases it's made completely explicit. For somebody like Shelley in a poem to Constancia singing, he read Greek.

He read Greek as a schoolboy. He would have read such fragments of Sahur as were available. And so it goes directly into it. Sometimes it's attributed, sometimes it's not. But there is a direct line of reception and transmission through all of these authors. Is there any other poem we can just bring? up before we move on slightly, that do you think expresses her in a fuller way

than these tantalizing fragments? I mean, we have what Dirk has discovered, which obviously is a bigger difference. I like the poem that is often called fragment 16. I don't know about you two, but I like this poem called fragment 16, which begins saying some say a host of cavalry or a huge army is the most beautiful sight in the world.

But I say it is whatever you desire. She then goes on to revise kind of Homer because she says, this reminds me of Helen, who, after all, left her husband, her parents, her child for desire. And then she switches again and she says, and that reminds me of Anactoria, who is not here. And I would rather see her shining face than all the armies of Lydia. And that interestingly reminds me of something that Edith said earlier about the symposium,

because Sappho, in such fragments as we have, names herself. But the other wonderful thing from my point of view is she names other women. You know, these lost women who live these lives in ancient Greek, whose lives are otherwise so hidden to us, she names Anactoria, she names Athos, she names Gorgos, she names. Gungilla, that's right. And, you know, these names come down to us in this way. Thank you very much. Edith, Eidth Hall. We mentioned her reputation as the poetess.

How did, if you can, can you, as it were, ripple through the next few centuries, how he was, changed. We've talked about references in antiquity. We've talked about Plato Symposium. We've got into Roman, so forth with Catullus and Horus and so on. What then happened? Okay.

Poems didn't survive in the tradition of being copied out in manuscripts after the advent of Christianity if they were regarded as not suitable for educating young men. So although there was still a complete set of her poems in Alexandria in the 3rd century BC, by the

4th century AD and the triumph of Christianity, people weren't reading Sappho as part of their education. That's why we lost almost all of her. To add an insult to injury, I mean, Pope Gregory the 7th allegedly took out what did remain of her

from the library in Byzantium and burnt it publicly because it was regarded as so immoral. So Christianity was against Sappho because of the... Because of the... It was rude. Yeah, because of what they regarded as the disgusting tri-badism. The word tri-buddism is found in some of the early ancient texts. It means this woman who rubs something.

It's a very rude word about lesbian sexual habits. And this became the main objection to her. And you find once the Renaissance happens, Sappho's first printed in 1555, that very often translation has tried to mask these pronouns so that it could be songs about men. I mean, that's quite consistent. all the way through, really, until the translation of Longina's boy, Bualo,

which is what everybody in the literary world reads and really brings Sappho in the late 17th century to the eyes of everyone. And ever since then, she's been thoroughly contested as to whether she was a schoolmistress or just using sex as a metaphor or what. That has become the questionable topic. Can we dwell on this a little, der Boving, please? because Edith outlined it, so we've got a very good overview. But can we go into some of the details of why she was, let's say, neglected or lost, both of those things,

and that you only have 1% left? Well, Sappho was difficult for one thing. The eolic dialect fell into disuse. It wouldn't have been easy for Roman period readers to read Sappho. We know from the Papyrus remains they couldn't read her without a commentary beside her. It was hotly debated what some of the poems meant, what her sexual orientation was clear enough, but the social setting in which it had been expressed was lost.

And people really only had the language and diction and metaphors, the top of lyric poetry to study and to go on. And for a while it was part of the school tradition. There was a very fine edition of her poems produced, as you said, in nine books at Alexandria, organized some of them by meter, by meter. All of the first book were in the meter of the sapphic stanza, and very highly worked over to root out details, errors that had creeped in through the oral tradition and the recording tradition, and then through the later copying tradition.

So it was produced to a very high level, and that's what we have remains of in the papyrus tradition. And for a while she was part of the school tradition, but as Christianity and a new curriculum took over a different ethos, a different set of moral criteria for selection of works for copying and transmission, she fell into disuse. But that said, there is some evidence that she could be read in Byzantine Constantinople in whole roles.

Christian book burnings notwithstanding. There are also mechanical reasons that she didn't survive. Any work that didn't get itself copied in sufficient numbers from the papyrus roll into the codex by about the 6th century AD didn't survive to be copied into the

Middle Ages. We have only one manuscript of Sappho fragments on a parchment codex of the 6th century AD. So there simply weren't enough to launch her into the Renaissance, which would have appreciated the classical models in her writing and perpetuated them. Yes, but nevertheless, Pegger Reynolds,

in the Lentera Renaissance, as Edith has said, the interest in her was awakened, where did that, do we know specifically where that came from? Yes, it comes from a very early publication, as Edith's mentioned, of the translation of Longinus's Treatas on the Sublime, which quotes fragment 31 of Sappho, almost in full possibly. And the other work is Dionysus of Halicanasis,

who quotes fragment one, the ode to Aphrodite, so called, in a book on literary composition. So these works start being translated and printed and disseminated, and so Sappho comes back into the realm of knowledge. And interestingly, well, although this is absolutely right in saying, you know, early translations like by John Addison or Ambrose Phillips turn Fragment 31 into a boy talking about a girl, rather than a girl talking about a girl.

People still knew that something else was going on. So John Dunn's poem, Sappho to Philanais, is definitely a rude poem about two girls doing lots and lots of robbing, I imagine, as Edith says. Right. Now then, let's go to the Enlightenment. and get away from all this rude talking. Enlightenment, what did the Enlightenment make of Sappho's sexuality?

Did they not think it was rude? Actually, there's a particular French scholar called Anne Dacier in the late 17th, early 18th century, who manages to imply that Sappho is part of a sort of literary coterie. This is the time of the ladies' salons in France, and she produces an extraordinarily important French. version and because she was a respectable married woman herself a widow in fact by this time it's it was seen as as sort of putting the stamp on this is respectable having said that um i think that always goes with a slight countercultural tendency people who like sappho very often are slightly on the bohemian and end of society or they have been people who've had to have covert homosexual lives or they've been feminites or they've been femininely because she is the first great female poet. I'd like to pick up on that

because the point where this becomes absolutely crucial is the end of the 18th century, the beginning of the 19th century, when many, many intellectual women identified themselves with Sappho. You know, across Europe, there was the British Sappho, there was the Russian Sappho, there was the German Sappho. And I'm thinking of two people in particular.

Mary Robinson, who in England was an actress, she was the mistress of the Prince of Wales. She writes a long sonnet sequence, called Sappho Tafian, but she also writes a pamphlet about women's rights, and she's a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft. And in Europe, you have Jemend de Stale, Madame de Stale,

who composes a novel called Corinne or Italy, but she's a kind of Sappho figure. She is a performing intellectual woman. So these women incorporate Sappho into their works, but there is a bohemian element to it always. Dirk, Aubing, lots of anecdotes which turned into myths, which were perhaps mere rumours, which were sometimes fantasies, gather around suffer.

One of which is that she threw herself off a cliff at the end of her life, a high cliff in Greece, because of the unrequited love for a man called Fayon. Now, where did that come from, and why did it hang around? Well, we know there was a myth on the island of Lesbos of a fairy man, an old ferryman who carried people across the straight to Asia Minor. And Sappho, we sung in a poem about how Aphrodite appeared to him as an old woman, and he ferried her across at her request and didn't charge her anything. And in return, Aphrodite made him into a young and beautiful young man

and fell in love with him. And I think it's pretty long been realized that this is a replication of the myth of Adonis who is associated with Aphrodite in women's worship. Adonis then dies through the overwhelming power of contact with Aphrodite. And the women collectively lament for Adonis. So references in ancient authors suggest that Fa'an was kind of stand in, maybe even a pseudonym for Adonis,

and that Sappho expressed personal or collective lamentation for him in a poem and described herself as being overwhelmingly in love with him on the point of death, as she does in a number of her other fragments and fragment. she says, I'm so close to death, I can see the shores of Akeron, for example, to common topos and Aphrodite. But in this case, it looks like clearly Sappho identified herself with Aphrodite. And we see this in a number of the other fragments, or identified one of the beloved as Aphrodite, as an sort of expression or embodiment of desire. At the end of fragment one, she asked Saffroditey to be her.

fellow fighter in battle, Sumacos, she identifies so closely with her. And this seems to have given ancient readers the impression that Sappho had a love affair with Fa'Own and Ovid wrote, or pseudo-Ovid wrote one of the

heroides about Sappho dying out of love for Fa'Oum. Can we just go a bit more in a little more detail to her adoption by the women's movement? What we've talked about, you've about Mary Robinson referred to Mary Romney,

Rompsey referred to Mary, Wilson Craft with Madame de Stahl and so on. What are they adopting? Well, they're adopting the right of women to poetic expression or any kind of expression at all. Because from antiquity in general, we have

fewer women's voices, direct women's voices, than you can count on the fingers of your fingers and your toes. I mean, there are hardly any women who speak to us directly from pagan antiquity. They're almost always mediated or quoted by male authors. So there is something incredibly thrilling.

For me, as a woman, to hear say the brothers poem about this woman complaining about holding up the family business with these two, you know, feckless brothers. It makes you feel very, makes us all feel as though, you know, we have a stake in antiquity. So is it just the fact that it's a woman coming out of a golden age of culture and poetry, or is this woman saying something that is particularly irrelevant to Mary Wilsoncraft and Mary Robinson at the time?

She is because she's claiming poetic authority. And actually this sense of women claiming Sappho starts in antiquity. Nossus of Loughry writes a poem saying, if you go to Lesbos to Mertilani of the lovely dancers, say hello to Sappho for me. You know, and Mary Wilsoncroft and Madame de Stale and all these Christina Rosetti, all these other poets who subsequently impersonate her or take over her voice to some degree

are similarly, as either says, celebrating the fact that here is a woman with authority working within a recognised cult who wants to be claimed and recognised as a poet, as an artist, as a creative artist. And because of her fragmentary survival, she could even be claimed by male poets as a figure of authority, as repound, for example.

Yes, because he writes a lovely little poem called Spring, Too Long, Gungula. Exactly. And that's it. That's why I said Gungula. That's also meant for gay, male poets, she has been extraordinarily important. You find there's a whole, you know, all the way through Oscar Wilde, there's numerous, numerous, numerous poets who weren't able necessarily. Cavafis, the great Greek poet, is massively influenced by her descriptions of, of,

tender love on warm, perfumed coverlets in the sort of Higian sunset, the sort of sensuality. And in fact, some of the best metrical imitations, Alan Ginsberg, has done the best ever poem in modern sapphic meters. He uses the very meter when he's talking about his red-cheeked boyfriends, tenderly kissing, sweet-mouth. And everybody who knows anything about erotic literature knows just through that meter that he's talking about a slightly covert or illegitimate love affair with somebody of his own sex. Now, Doug, how, what are the... We're getting towards the end of time, but can you be succinct?

What are the chief difficulties in translating what you find of Suffolk? I've got a book of her stuff here, and most of it is lines, meaning, I mean, just a line, not of words, just a line, saying there should be words here, but there isn't. Most of it is gaps. I've got a book of gaps with some words in by Sappho. So you've got that, I think of you. What makes it quite tricky, doesn't it? Yes, I mean, we have to apply all the skills of modern science to try to,

put the text back together as far as possible. And the papyrus fragments and quotations in ancient authors and parallels in other lyric poetry do allow us to assemble a kind of skeleton of some of the poems without being able to see the full shape of the body. One of the difficulties is it leads to the impression that all of her poetry had a kind of fragmentary style. It simply didn't.

The poems were composed and understood as holes. The difficulty is that because we A know so little about her and B have so little of her work perversely, that's one reason why she is so enormously attractive because you can pour into her into this empty space that is called Sappho that begins with an essence with an O all your own ideas and all your own desires and that's exactly what's happened to her.

For me the big problem is what Emily Dickinson said I know it's a poem when it blows the top of my head off We know from everybody in antiquity that it blew their heads off. So it's very easy to get hold of your big Greek dictionary and do a lexical version that is so boring and so dodgy and so pedantic. You've got to get a poet who can really express that star-spangled, sexy style that just leaves you breathless as Sappho was. Which she does.

Whatever you say about it being tantalising that they're so little, it's also sort of annoying that they're so little. It's a bit like we really know about 5% of the universe and now they're having a go with a new Hadron Collider to get hold of dark energy and dark matter and the other 95% we all revealed. Do you think if the other 99% of Sappho is revealed, something different will turn up?

I think this is what's so exciting about these new papyrus finds. The further away we get from Sappho in time, bizarrely, the closer we are getting in with these papyrus to her work. I mean, if you look at the end of the 19th century before the papyrus finds, there were really just only a handful of quotations in ancient authors that were, in editions of Sappho.

And the papyrus vines have expanded that to the 200-some fragments that are in modern editions. New progress continues to be made just on those alone, putting the fragments back together into whole poems. And there's every reason to think that there is lurking in other papyrs collections.

In Middle Ages. Well, particularly in little-accessed collections, like in the museum in Cairo. in Moscow and St. Petersburg. That there's more of Sappho waiting to see light. Well, we hope so. Thank you very much. Then we do another program about the other 90s, whatever it is.

Thank you very much, Edith Hall, Peggy Reynolds and Derk Hoping. Next week we'll be talking about Mati Orichie, a Jesuit priest in the 16th century. We went on a Christian mission to China and met up with the leaders of the Ming dynasty. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. You enjoyed it? Did you enjoy it? Very much, though. It's not often we get to

talk about this stuff. I know, I know, no, tell me what you didn't get to talk about. Okay, I would have talked about the two sapphows. You want to talk about the two suffoc? Oh, yes. There's one from Eresis and the one from Mertilini. The ancients got so confused about

whether she was a sussy little prostitute or the most exquisite lyric poetry of all time that they decided there were two sapphos. One from Erosaws. And one from Mertalini. Do you agree that there were two students That might have been too soon? Of course not

Of course not Why didn't you say that on the programme? Then we could have talked Because you didn't love the question Of the script as ever Melbourne You're allowed to I didn't love it as ever you mean Well anyway I think that's a bit too confusing

I mean because it's very It seems to me Given that there is so much In terms of transmission and reception It seems to me absolutely crucial To talk about the real Sapo you know to put the actual poems back The interesting thing about the division

is there's some evidence that she was like the slutty Sappho from Erosau because people did associate her with the drinking party and the excitement and the retention of the eroticism that flourished in the drinking in the drinking party so there is

it's not as though that Sappho doesn't exist and it's only the high class saphro from Mittolini they're both present The one poem I really wanted to get in and didn't was the other one that we've managed to complete which is because it gives us

the elderly Sappho Oh yes The Cologne Yeah Looking back on With her bad knees She wants to dance She used to be able to dance

Like a thorn When you can learn about What you didn't get in I read this Look at all those clicks I didn't get all my clicks in Oh That I think that

I really like that translation I think Anne Carson's translation Is so good That's the one that blays your head off Yeah it is Because she puts back She she makes it to spiky somehow or other again.

Although when the Tithonus poem was published, that was the second most recent new find, a poem about comparing Saffa and her old age to Tithonus, who is allowed by his divine wife, Aos, to just get old and old until he lost his voice. But he still has a divine wife, she says at the end of the poem. And when that poem was published, it combined with a previously published fragment of the same poem,

but only the line beginnings. And Anne Carson said after it was published that she actually preferred the first version, the more fragmentary version, because it mentioned a fawn, she says, my knees are no longer as nimble as fawns and can't dance. And she said she actually preferred it

when it just referred to the fawn as a symbol of sexuality. It's a brilliant thing about that poem, though, and it's very, very, very interesting to me is that it does not gender identify the speaker. It's the only substantial one we've got that doesn't. Or even reverses. To compare it to... Arguably. Yes. Exactly.

So that is a poem that a man could have sung. So there's some man for... And you wouldn't have been able to identify he was singing in a female persona. And I suspect there was a lot more of that that we haven't got. Or that the poems were read or even composed to be attractive to the expression of desire

for a female by a male audience. I think there is a lot more recoverable paparice. so he's not a hope. Our fantasy. It's not only hope. I mean, the recent discoveries have borne and out. I think there must be. It's just a case of finding it, as you say.

Dirk? He has the boxes. You never know. You never know. Well, exactly. You're still working through Orcsorinkas. Here's Simon, the producer, who's going to offer us. What do you offer?

I think it's your copy. There are many more Radio 4 Arts and Discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.uk slash radio four.