The Ancients - Sappho: The Poet from Lesbos

Episode Date: February 27, 2022

Famous throughout antiquity, yet retold only in fragments today - who is Sappho? Her poetry inspired generations, from Catullus to Byron, so how come we know so little about her life? This week Tristan is joined by Professor Margaret Reynolds from Queen Mary University in London to piece together what we know about Sappho. What can we learn from her fragmented history and how do her depictions in art further our understanding of who she was?For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast we're talking about a well-known figure from antiquity, but also quite an elusive, quite a mysterious figure who we don't know too much about. And this is the figure of Sappho. She was probably born, she was living at the end of

the 7th century in the early 6th century BC, centred around the island of Lesbos in the northeast Aegean, near Asia Minor, near Anatolia. She's renowned nowadays for her poetry and also for becoming this feminist, this gay icon. But what do we know about Sappho? Why is her poetry so extraordinary? How much of it has survived? Are there any particularly striking examples? And how has she come down to become this feminist this gay icon today well to answer all of these questions and more i was delighted to get on the podcast professor peggy reynolds from queen mary university of london peggy she knows all things sappho she's written a couple of books all about this figure and she's also incredibly engaging

incredibly passionate when talking about Sappho. It was wonderful to get her on the podcast and just to listen to Peggy talk about this ancient figure. So without further ado, to talk all things Sappho, here's Peggy. Peggy, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. You're welcome. Now, Sappho, about time we've talked about Sappho on this podcast because Peggy she seems to be this this very mysterious figure the real Sappho but she's left an extraordinary legend, legacy, myth down through the ages to the present day.

The truth is that we know very little about Sappho. It is a name of course that everybody knows. She does seem to have been a real person, a real person who actually lived on the island of Lesbos towards the end of the 7th century, beginning of the 6th century BCE, so before the Common Era. Other than that, there are absolutely no facts that we have about her whatsoever, and even that's only a speculation. But she composed poetry. Now, I say composed poetry advisedly, because at this period, this was a period of oral culture around the Mediterranean. The practice of writing had been invented in other cultures in China and India many, many thousands of years before. But in the Mediterranean, writing was still just about on the cusp of beginning to appear.

So insofar as we know anything about Sappho and the poetry that she composed, it would have been improvised and then memorised. Why she was doing this is quite another matter, but she seemed to have composed a great number of poems in this way. And so how much of these poems, you know, if she's not writing them down at this time, but we have later parts of them surviving. So, I mean, how much of her poetry does survive? Today, we know of about 200 and something fragments, 213, 230, something like that. However, although she was composing the poetry and improvising it within an oral culture, writing in the Mediterranean area was invented quite soon after she died. So her poetry did get written down very rapidly. But then, of course, it totally depends on whether

or not she's in fashion. Because remember that when these things get written down, they're written down mainly on papyrus, so paper made from reeds. And papyrus, you know, it's very vulnerable, mice eat it, it decays, it gets wet, so it crumbles away. So the whole transmission of her text relies completely upon somebody saying, oh, quick, I've got this papyrus, let's write it down again. So it's on a newer papyrus, so it's going to last longer. So therefore her work got written down and by the time around the third century BCE, there was a huge library at Alexandria and in this library at Alexandria there were said to be nine books of Sappho. Now when we're talking nine books, what we're talking about are papyrus

rolls. So essentially you have a long long long strip of papyrus and you have a spindle at one end and a spindle at the other and you roll it up to make a book but this would have been an awful lot of stuff and as I say from that nine books we only now have 200 and something extant today. I mean it's amazing that those fragments in themselves do survive, don't they, Peggy? Because those fragments in themselves, as you mentioned, you mentioned the word papyri there, these mentions in later historians. When you think of the words fragments, you can sometimes just think of, you know, little bits of parchment. And in some cases, I know that's true, but it's not always the case, isn't it? The poems of Sappho, these fragments of Sappho,

they come down to us today via various sources. Well, yeah, Tristan, absolutely. The thing is that there are two ways of knowing, in inverted commas, Sappho's poems. And one, you're absolutely right, is to do with the period in the late 19th century. So it's slightly weird here. Go to the late 19th century, and there was two weird here, go to the late 19th century and there

was two young men went out from Oxford at Grenfell and Hunt and they were funded by the Egypt Exploration Fund and they started digging in a place called Benassa, a little distance from Cairo, through a huge rubbish heap and in this rubbish heap they found fragments of papyrus that included Sappho poems. The fragments dated from the second to the third century AD, so after the, in the common era, so they were much much later copies but they are the earliest actual Sappho fragments that we have but they weren't found until the 19th century. I should say that these two chaps digging away in Egypt, they used to pack up these fragments and they would, they had Huntley and Palmer's biscuits sent out to them in Egypt. And they packed them up in the biscuit tins and

sent them back to Oxford. And in the vault at the Ashmolean in Oxford, they are still, you know, nearly 150 years later, there are still fragments that they have not looked at. There were so many. So who knows, we might get more. But the other reason why we have Asaphos poems, and this is why she's been known down the ages, because as I say, these papyrus fragments weren't discovered until the late 19th century, was because she was so famous in antiquity that other writers quoted her. So the two biggest poems of hers that we have today is one called Fragment 1, which is usually called The Ode to Aphrodite, Aphrodite the Goddess of Love, and one called Fragment 31, which is about a woman looking at a girl and falling in love with her, fancying her.

These two fragments, one, the first one, fragment one, was quoted by a chap who was writing about literary style in 30 BC. And the other one was quoted by Longinus, who was writing an essay on the sublime, and he quoted Sappho's Fragment 31. And lots of other ancient writers quoted her. So that's how she became imbued in the literature of Latin. So Catullus, famous Latin poet, copied her poetry. But because he was looking back to these quotations from earlier writers. I love all that you said there. And one of the things which was really interesting, like Sophocles' lost plays and those fragments that

we have surviving you know how much of that is still to be looked at by scholars so how exciting it is that we might know more about these figures like Sappho like Sophocles in the years ahead. I mean if we focus in on Sappho's poetry Peggy what are some of the iconic features of Sappho's poetry Peggy what are the some of the iconic features of Sappho's poetry from the fragments that we have surviving? I think and other scholars think that Sappho was probably writing within a deeply religious cult of Aphrodite who was a very important goddess goddess of love as I say on the island of Lesbos. She was probably writing within a cult that addressed specifically women and girls, and that addressed the major moments in women's lives, so puberty, betrothal, marriage, childbirth, child rearing, all of those things. But the reason why Sappho in particular is so important within

the whole of Western literary tradition is that she seems to have been the very first composer of poetry to think about desire, to think about how desire works on the body and this is why her fragment 31 is so enormously important the scenario in this poem is that she the speaker or whoever the persona is that she's invented there is looking at a man and this is man is sitting next to a girl that the speaker fancies. So it starts, that man appears to me more than the gods, that man who sits next to you and hears your sweet laughter. And then the speaker says, and when I look at you, my blood runs in my veins, my tongue feels heavy, I cannot speak, sweat pours down me, I am overwhelmed by the sense of your presence I'm you know doing a very free version here but those kinds of symptoms of desire the being unable

to speak your eyes going dark the blood running in your vein the fire in your veins, you know, the sweat quenching you, are things that go into everything since, including pop songs, you know, Shania Twain's Don't Do That, or Carole King, or anybody you care to mention, uses this repertoire of the physical symptoms of desire, and they can be threaded straight back to Sappho. Well, let's really focus in on this legacy now but in ancient times still at the moment Peggy because as you hinted at earlier as well it seems as very quickly after Sappho's death in that time she becomes very popular all across the Greek world. She does, she becomes very popular across the Greek world but for very complicated reasons. I mean first of all because she's an amazing poet. There's a lovely story about Solon of Athens, who was a big ruler, who one day at dinner, his nephew sang a poem of Sappho's. And he said, please, will you teach it to me? And he said, why?

Solon said, because I want to learn it and then die. Because it's such utter perfection, right? So she's the epitome of literary achievement. But even in the ancient world, she was also known of something as a naughty girl. The women of Lesbos were well-renowned as courtesans and to be skilled in the arts of love, the women generally. At Sappho herself, the legends start to grow up about her, that she first of all had female lovers and also male lovers. And what's interesting about

fragment one of so-called Ode to Aphrodite is again, it's a poem where Sappho says to the goddess Aphrodite, please help me. I'm in love with somebody and she isn't replying to me. please help me I'm in love with somebody and she isn't replying to me and the goddess of Saffrodisi says to her oh for goodness sake Sappho and Sappho is actually named the goddess says to her Sappho who is it you want me to turn to your love Sappho's been asking for this quite often we're guessing and the key point about this poem is that in the Greek a Sappho names herself the goddess Saffrodite calls her by name, and B, it's quite clear that this is a woman speaking about desiring a woman because of the feminine endings. So Sappho's reputation as a lover of women grew up at the same time as her reputation as a very fine literary stylist. And if you wouldn't mind quickly, Peggy, there's

something that I noticed whilst doing the research whilst reading one of your works on Sappho were these mentions that you later get of Sappho in classical Greek comedy now this sounds quite interesting talk me through these mentions. Yes she ends up being cited in various Greek writers of comic plays and remember that these comic plays in ancient Greece were kind of light relief in between the big, you know, around the festivals of Dionysus, the big tragedies would be performed and they were very serious, very ritualized. But the comedy was kind of light relief. And it's all very kind of low comedy. It's all very slapstick. So there's lots of big phalluses, phalli, whatever the plural

is. There's lots of people beating others around the head. There's lots of clowns wearing very grotesque masks. And Sappho once or twice appears in these and very made fun of within those stories. And just keeping on classical Greece a bit longer before we really delve into the Hellenistic period and the legacy on from that, because I'm guessing, do we also see Sappho depicted on ancient Greek arts like vessels and the legacy on from that because I'm guessing do we also see Sappho depicted on ancient Greek arts like vessels and the like? Absolutely there's one there's a vase a jar in a museum in Warsaw which is very early late on BCE so just before we move into the common era AD which shows her it's quite a crude one, the depiction here, but it is rather lovely,

and it does show her with a lyre, and there's another one later on in the AD area, which is more complex, but it shows Sappho and Altius, who is a male poet also from Lesbos, but it's interesting that it sets up this, as it were, notionally within the depiction, a dialogue between these two very important poets. She's also on coins. There were loads of coins. The two main towns on Lesbos are Mytilene and Erisos. And certainly coins from Mytilene that depict her head from quite early on. So, you know, the sense of her being there in the material culture of ancient Greece is very clear. That's so interesting. I mean, from an absolute

Joe Bloggs approach in this like me, I mean, to have the face of a woman on an ancient Greek coin that isn't a goddess, is that quite unusual in itself? There were other women who might be depicted who were usually historical figures who were held up as icons of good behaviour. But yes, the fact that Sappho was so celebrated, particularly within her own country, her own native land, is very significant. As you listen to this, me and Team History Hit

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And so how does the legacy of Sappho, Peggy, how does it evolve during the Hellenistic and Roman times? Well, as with actually her legacy and her legend across the ages, it always has this two strands to it. On the one hand, she's recognised as an eminent poet. On the other hand, there are these saucy stories. And the sauciest, as it were, and most repeated story is that she was indeed a lover of women. She was at the centre of this cult of Aphrodite, that she had female lovers on the island of Lesbos. And actually,

that's really in the poetry, because she does name these women and that she left these women she left these girls because she fell in love with a handsome fion and the handsome fion wasn't interested in her so she went to Sicily in despair and threw herself off a cliff and so you know this too adds to the legend the fact that she committed suicide she probably probably didn't. In fact, almost certainly Sappho lived to old age. But the fragmentation of her work is then gets imaginatively aligned with the fragmentation of her body, that her body, you know, is thrown into the sea and broken in the sea in this way. So she goes on through antiquity, as I say, with these two bizarre bizarre strands and some of them result in some you know crazy crazy version of her life and her story and yet the poetry remains significant within that. And I guess

it's so interesting you highlighted those two different strands I mean does that as you said it continues throughout all the ages and even following the end of the ancient period and the early medieval period the rise of Christianity and all of that, do those two strands really continue then? They do continue. In antiquity, if you think as I meant, the Latin poet Catullus, very famous poet of love, he addresses a woman in Rome, apparently, and he calls her lesbia. And he calls her lesbia because, of course, Sappho was the original lesbian. She comes from Lesbos. and he copies some of Sappho's poems there. So this element of, on the one hand, this being within a high poetic tradition, but at the same time, rather titillating and sexy is going on there. The other thing about Sappho's, the survival of Sappho's poems, is that first of all, as I say, they're repeated and memorized,

then they get written down, then they get recopied. She slightly goes out of fashion. I should have said this. She slightly goes out of fashion in antiquity because her poetry is in an Aeolic dialect, and the dialect of Athens becomes important. But she manages to stay in just about with these repeated quotations. The next

thing that she survives is the transition from manuscript to printed work that happened in the Renaissance, that happens in the 15th, 16th century. And the reason why she survives there is because once again, when the printing press was invented, all these printers were running around Europe, rushing off to monasteries saying, got any papyri or any manuscripts we can copy to print? And they said, yes, we've got Longinus on the sublime or Dionysius of Halicarnassus on literary style. And lo and behold, within these works are all these quotations of Sappho. So interestingly, because of these quotations embedded within other works, interestingly, because of these quotations embedded within other works, she gets printed and translated into English very early. 1652 is John Hall's translation of one of her poems.

So she stays within the European consciousness, but always with this double element. So on the one hand, John Hall is writing this poetry. Sir Philip Sidney does a version of her, Fragment 31. But John Donne, famous divine of St Paul's, writes a very rude poem called Sappho to Philonias, based on Sappho's Fragments. So this double life that she is leading is very clear throughout this period. And is this double life, Peggy,

is this also reflected in the art of the time too? You have the two different depictions of Sappho in art by artists. This was one of the most fun bits of my work because sometimes, you know, she's depicted as, you know, very noble, with her lyre, maybe with a papyrus roll, but quite often she's depicted sort of all wilty and abandoned and she's so consumed by desire and the wish for the beloved that she can't quite keep her clothes on so you know her breasts are exposed and little bits of drapery around her there's one sadly lost 19th century picture which I would love to find we only know it existed because there is an illustration of it in a book and she's lying on her side completely naked with a big fat liar behind her and it it's just so unbelievably, ridiculously erotic and suggestive.

But it is a depiction of Sappho. So yes, the art that comes up around her is most intriguing. Absolutely, indeed. And I mean, as we keep progressing down through the centuries, I think a big question to ask Peggy is when does Sappho, when can we say she really, and apologies if this isn't the right language, I emblem, the go-to figure for many, many intellectual women. Women who read Latin, read Greek, composed poetry, wanted to be recognized for their intelligence, for their powers of reasoning. And so many of her early translators

took her as their emblem in this way. But there were other writers too, like Madame de Stael. Madame de Stael was a very eminent writer of novels at the end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century. She wanted to be recognized as an intellectual woman. She had herself painted as a sort of version of Sappho, but she wrote a novel called Corinne, which was about a really important woman poet who is recognized in her own lifetime. And Sappho and Corinne sort of elide, and then they metamorphose into Madame de Sale as well. And from that period on, the late 18th century, early 19th century, you get many women who get called or call themselves the Russian Sappho, the English Sappho, the French Sappho, because she becomes this emblem of power for women. And many women poets, particularly in the 19th century,

wrote poems to or about Sappho, including well-known names like Christina Rossetti and lesser well-knowns like Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary Robinson in the 18th century. Later on, you have a very interesting situation where an aunt and niece couple Catherine Bradley and Edith Cooper wrote together under the pseudonym of Michael Field they wrote together but they were also lovers even though they were aunt and niece and they

wrote a whole volume of as it were Sappho inspired, which draws both on the Sappho who is a poet and the Sappho who is the legendary lesbian icon called Long Ago. So, yes, they're writing at the end of the 19th century, so the whole sense of breaking out of the bonds of conventional womanhood was very important for them and Sappho was part of that process. This legacy continued down to this day, Peggy. It's so interesting, you know, the name Sappho today.

Most people will know the name. But it's interesting whether you're looking at art or music or novels or movements, how this name, you can see it everywhere, how it has come to encompass these ideas. It's absolutely extraordinary, the legend of this figure, the actual figure we don't actually know that much about it is quite extraordinary and i think it's partly because there is so much of an afterlife for sappho you know there are so many different versions whether we're talking as a john dunn or philip sydney or ezra pound or tennyson he writes about Sappho, or, you know, more recently, Virginia Woolf in the

early 20th century, to this figure and rewrite her. So that makes her important. But then, of course, you know, she's woven into the language, isn't she? Because there are two names for women who are lovers of women, and one is lesbian, and the other one islist. So her name has become synonymous not only with the highest pinnacle of lyric poetry but with the boldness of being a woman who is very out and proud dare I say about herself as a woman and about her relationship with other women. And for me, you know, I've thought about Sappho for a very long time. The things that I've really come to appreciate is, and it's kind of a modern thing, I suppose, is that she names herself in her poetry more than once. And I love that. I love the fact that she uses her own names and she kind of says,

look, guys, I am here. And then I love the fact that she names all those women who are around her, as I say, Ases, Gogo, Gogodula, Anactoria, so that it's almost as though these shadowy presences from antiquity are still with us. She's celebrating the lives of these lost women in this incredibly vivacious and telling way so that's the thing that I really really appreciate. That personal nature is it's Peggy in her poetry how it's really conveyed it seems to be one of them another one of those really interesting things about her and her legacy. Well yes and again you know it seems to me that there are kind of two things going on here one is these probably are personal poems because the way that she speaks about desire is so intense and so recognisable.

And I also like the way that she formulates it, that she literally composes it, calms it down, makes it into this beautiful artistic shape and I think that comes from the fact that she was working within this ritual cult of Aphrodite so that these poems were for a purpose, they were there to celebrate weddings, to celebrate betrothals and that doubleness of the intense personal expression and the control of a very great artist makes such fragments as we do have immensely important. One other thing I'd like to ask about Peggy before we wrap up with this podcast is something that is sometimes also well something that we normally do see associated with Sappho in artistic representations and so on which are props because there seem to be a number of props don't there Peggy which are always associated with Sappho down through the ages what are these props? Yes number one of course the lyre so the lyre is a stringed

instrument it might be backed by wood it might be a tortoise shell or something a shell of an animal and it's a stringed instrument and the purpose of the lyre is that you sing lyrics that's why it's called lyric poetry to a lyre and that is to distinguish it from epic poetry which is a long narrative poem so most of her poetry would have been desired to have been performed with music quite what it sounds like lots of artists have tried to replicate that. And of course, her role in music is very important too. I don't know, but the lyre, number one. Number two, the laurel wreath. The laurel wreath, of course, is the wreath according to the victor at the Olympic Games. It is worn always by Apollo. And Apollo is, as well as being the sun god of course he's the god of poetry and so the fact

that Sappho often wears a lyre indicating her importance her eminence her pre-eminence among other composers is very important and then you know there's a very interesting moment when all things Greek become of a huge obsession across Europe with the excavations that take place at Herculaneum and Pompeii in the mid to late 19th century. And although Pompeii is in Italy, the people who were living there, it was a big Greek community. So suddenly you get plismoth chairs and sort of plastic like elaborate candlesticks and depictions of Zaffo suddenly get all this furniture you know beautiful little couches, ex-stools, things like this so you can see her with this massive repertoire of all different kinds of props but the lyre and the

laurel wreath are the two really important ones. Absolutely brilliant well Peggy this has been a fantastic chat now just just to wrap it all up appreciate we've got limited time and I know you've kind of hinted at this already but I think this is really nice as a wrapping up question why is it so important to learn about Sappho today more than 2,500 years after she was around? Well, first of all, because one hesitates, she does seem to have been a really amazing artist. Secondly, because very often the things that she speaks about are, you know, you can go to her poetry and relate it to your own life. I've spoken about desire.

Obviously, that's an important part of human life. But she also speaks in one fragment about growing old about how her knees hurt and she can't run like she once would have done and her hair is gray instead of you know dark she also speaks about her mother and inheriting things from her mother she also speaks about her daughter and how she loves her daughter. I have a golden child for whom I would not give all the wealth of Lydia. She talked about relations between parents and children. She talked about how war is unimportant. Remember that she's writing after Homer, composing after Homer. How war is unimportant in comparison with the loves and the loyalties of human life private

life feeling life and all of those things are things that we can really do with today but that's why i would most definitely recommend reading how well peggy this has been an absolutely brilliant chat and it only goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come the podcast today thank you Tristan it was a pleasure. Well there you go there was Professor Peggy Reynolds explaining all about Sappho. Now March is just around the corner and on the Anci, we're going to be doing something very, very special because we have got a special Ides of March mini season planned

that will last throughout the month of March. Every Sunday on the Ancients, we're going to be releasing a special Ides of March related episode from explainers on what happened on the Ides of March itself, going through the assassination of Julius Caesar, to in-depth character profiles on the likes of Brut itself, going through the assassination of Julius Caesar, to in-depth

character profiles on the likes of Brutus, to what happened next, and then also looking at the legacy of this perhaps the most famous day in the whole of antiquity, in the whole of history, the 15th of March 44 BC. Stay tuned for all that, it's coming to the ancients this March. But that's enough from me, I will see you in the next episode.