![]() For all her metrical complexity and innovation (one of the meters in which she composed her poems later became known as the "Sapphic" meter), for all the vowel-rich melody of her verse, it is the content that has fascinated her readers. Noting the great passion, the accuracy of observation, and the felicitous combination of detail, he asks, in the impressionistic way characteristic of Sappho's admirers, "Are you not astonished?" For this critic, Sappho illustrates "the most extreme and intense expression of emotion," and his reading surely exemplifies the primary way in which her work has been read. This poem is preserved in On the Sublime (circa 1st century CE), whose author, traditionally known as Longinus, cites it as an example of the attainment of great sublimity by skillful arrangement of content. Perhaps the text that best represents the more purely poetic influence of Sappho is number 31, which catalogues the physical symptoms of love longing in the writer as she watches her beloved chatting with a man. This history of her reception is itself part of Sappho's significance. Many modern editors have exercised "gallantry" and "discretion" by eliminating or changing words or lines in her poems that they believed would be misunderstood by readers. Christian moralists pronounced anathemas upon her. Ovid related the story of Phaon, who, according to some traditions, rejected Sappho's love and caused her to leap from a rock to her death. Sappho was lampooned by the writers of New Comedy. An Anacreontic fragment that was written in the generation after Sappho sneers at Lesbians. Indeed, the facts of her life have often been distorted to serve the moral or psychological ends of her readers. Nonetheless, an ancient, scurrilous tradition attacked and ridiculed her for her evident sexual preferences. In antiquity Sappho was regularly counted among the greatest of poets and was often referred to as "the Poetess," just as Homer was called "the Poet." Plato hailed her as "the tenth Muse," and she was honored on coins and with civic statuary. ![]() Scholars have discussed her likely political connections and have proposed plausible biographical details, but these remain highly speculative. Sappho seems also to have exchanged verses with the poet Alcaeus. Even the names of her family members are inconsistently reported, but she does seem to have had several brothers and to have married and had a daughter named Cleis. Apparently her birthplace was either Eressos or Mytilene, the main city on the island, where she seems to have lived for some time. She was born probably about 620 BCE to an aristocratic family on the island of Lesbos during a great cultural flowering in the area. Little is known with certainty about the life of Sappho, or Psappha in her native Aeolic dialect.
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