WEBVTT - SYMHC Classics: Sappho 0:00:02.520 --> 0:00:06.440 Happy Saturday. Today's Saturday Classic is on Greek poet Sappho. 0:00:07.240 --> 0:00:10.560 We kick it off by talking about our then forthcoming 0:00:10.600 --> 0:00:14.240 trip to Paris. That trip did happen and it was 0:00:14.280 --> 0:00:17.479 a great success. We've taken other trip since then, and 0:00:17.560 --> 0:00:20.840 our next one is coming up to Morocco November four 0:00:21.000 --> 0:00:23.680 through fifteenth, twenty twenty five. If you would like to 0:00:23.760 --> 0:00:26.040 join us, you can find out more about the trip 0:00:26.079 --> 0:00:30.120 at Defined Destinations dot com. It is the trip called 0:00:30.240 --> 0:00:34.560 a Taste of Morocco. Right now, single rooms are sold out, 0:00:34.560 --> 0:00:37.080 but there's a wait list and there are still double 0:00:37.159 --> 0:00:40.360 rooms available. If you would be traveling by yourself but 0:00:40.400 --> 0:00:43.479 you're open to the idea of sharing a room with somebody, 0:00:43.520 --> 0:00:46.480 you can get in touch with Defined Destinations to talk 0:00:46.520 --> 0:00:49.920 about that possibility. That is not why we picked the 0:00:49.960 --> 0:00:53.640 episode for Today's Saturday Classic, though. We have an upcoming 0:00:53.720 --> 0:00:56.960 episode on someone who was described as the Sappho of 0:00:57.000 --> 0:01:00.520 her time, so we wanted to rerun our episode on Sapo, 0:01:00.720 --> 0:01:04.679 which gets into how the connotations around Sappho's name have 0:01:04.800 --> 0:01:08.720 evolved over the centuries. One thing we do want to 0:01:08.760 --> 0:01:12.800 note we talk in this episode about how various transcribers 0:01:12.840 --> 0:01:16.800 and translators have tried to minimize the homoerotic themes in 0:01:16.840 --> 0:01:22.160 Sappho's work. For licensing reasons, we needed to use translations 0:01:22.160 --> 0:01:25.040 that are in the public domain today, which means older 0:01:25.120 --> 0:01:29.160 translations were the ones that were available for us to read. So, 0:01:29.280 --> 0:01:33.640 for example, we read from a translation of Ode to Aphrodite, 0:01:33.760 --> 0:01:37.480 which reads as though Sapho is praying to Aphrodite about 0:01:37.520 --> 0:01:41.440 a man that she loves, but in most of today's translations, 0:01:41.880 --> 0:01:46.759 Sappho's unrequited love is for a woman. This episode came 0:01:46.760 --> 0:01:53.680 out on March thirteenth, twenty nineteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff 0:01:53.720 --> 0:02:04.400 You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey everyone. 0:02:04.480 --> 0:02:07.000 Before we get started today, we wanted to let you 0:02:07.160 --> 0:02:09.560 know that there are only a few spots left on 0:02:09.600 --> 0:02:13.920 our upcoming trip to Paris. Yes, which startles and delights me. 0:02:14.040 --> 0:02:15.600 I thought no one would want to come with us, 0:02:15.600 --> 0:02:20.120 and it turns out everybody does. Yay. So Yes, we 0:02:20.200 --> 0:02:24.160 are going to Paris June second through ninth, twenty nineteen. 0:02:24.520 --> 0:02:27.079 If you come to our website, which is missed inhistory 0:02:27.200 --> 0:02:30.800 dot com, you can click the link that says Paris 0:02:30.840 --> 0:02:34.040 trip exclamation point in either the top menu bar or 0:02:34.120 --> 0:02:36.400 under the little menu icon if you're on a mobile device, 0:02:36.560 --> 0:02:38.440 that will take you to the Sitehere we can learn 0:02:38.480 --> 0:02:40.880 all about the trip and sign up for it. Yes, 0:02:40.919 --> 0:02:42.520 so we hope to see you in Paris. We are 0:02:42.520 --> 0:02:45.960 going to have a splendid time. We're both extremely excited. 0:02:51.600 --> 0:02:55.079 Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson 0:02:55.240 --> 0:02:59.000 and I'm Holly Frye. The poet Sappho is the first 0:02:59.240 --> 0:03:02.520 known woman writer in the European literary tradition, and she 0:03:02.680 --> 0:03:06.560 is described as the greatest female poet of ancient Greece, 0:03:07.000 --> 0:03:11.560 or the greatest Greek lyric poet period, regardless of gender, 0:03:11.720 --> 0:03:15.360 or even the greatest female poet of all time. There's 0:03:15.400 --> 0:03:18.680 a nineteen twenty six addition to her work where C. R. Haines, 0:03:18.720 --> 0:03:21.600 who edited that edition, put it this way quote, with 0:03:21.639 --> 0:03:25.560 the possible exception of Shakespeare, Homer is still the supreme poet, 0:03:25.600 --> 0:03:30.639 and Sappho, without any exception, the poetess par excellence. Except 0:03:30.639 --> 0:03:32.639 those last two words were in Greek, so I got 0:03:32.680 --> 0:03:36.840 to figure out how to translate them, which was a challenge. 0:03:37.280 --> 0:03:40.640 Sappho's reputation as one of the world's finest poets has 0:03:40.680 --> 0:03:43.880 persisted for more than twenty five hundred years, and that's 0:03:44.080 --> 0:03:48.040 fascinating because the overwhelming majority of her work has not. 0:03:48.800 --> 0:03:52.920 And then also fascinating is that the words sapphic and lesbian, 0:03:53.000 --> 0:03:56.320 which is derived from the island of Lesbos, where Sappho lived, 0:03:56.760 --> 0:04:00.840 they've become synonymous with same sex relationships among women. But 0:04:01.160 --> 0:04:04.120 we actually know very very little about Sappho's life or 0:04:04.160 --> 0:04:08.080 her relationships, and two thousand years ago those terms had 0:04:08.240 --> 0:04:10.880 really different meanings from what they do now. So we 0:04:10.920 --> 0:04:13.720 are going to get into all of this today. Sappho 0:04:13.880 --> 0:04:16.479 is also a frequent listener request, and over the past 0:04:16.520 --> 0:04:19.960 few years we've gotten requests from Helen Cillian, pat Esther, 0:04:20.120 --> 0:04:22.279 and one person who didn't have a name on their emails. 0:04:22.839 --> 0:04:25.640 And then as a heads up, we talk about people's 0:04:25.720 --> 0:04:29.720 relationships often enough on the show, we don't usually need 0:04:29.760 --> 0:04:33.480 to mention a specific sex act. That is not the 0:04:33.480 --> 0:04:37.240 case today, so use discretion if it seems like that 0:04:37.360 --> 0:04:39.760 sort of territory might be an issue for you or 0:04:39.880 --> 0:04:43.719 people that you listen with. Now, I feel like we 0:04:43.800 --> 0:04:47.720 need to do a show called Sexy History, a whole 0:04:47.760 --> 0:04:53.000 other thing different, and we wouldn't need those warnings now so, 0:04:53.080 --> 0:04:56.560 the most referenced source of information about Sappho's life is 0:04:56.600 --> 0:05:01.200 a tenth century Byzantine compendium called the sh and the 0:05:01.200 --> 0:05:04.320 Suda is sort of a lexicon or encyclopedia of the 0:05:04.320 --> 0:05:08.440 ancient Mediterranean. It has two Sappho entries, and we'll get 0:05:08.480 --> 0:05:11.800 into why that is a little bit later. Sapo's name 0:05:12.080 --> 0:05:14.680 also comes up in lots of other entries in the Suda, 0:05:14.839 --> 0:05:19.120 including ones for her relatives, places she lived, people she knew, 0:05:19.160 --> 0:05:23.520 and definitions of various literary terms. She's also mentioned in 0:05:23.600 --> 0:05:26.800 lots of other historical writing that has survived until today, 0:05:26.920 --> 0:05:31.040 although usually those references are shorter and less detailed than 0:05:31.040 --> 0:05:33.480 what's in the Suda. This all makes it very tricky 0:05:33.480 --> 0:05:37.360 to piece together Sappho's biography. The Pseudo was compiled more 0:05:37.360 --> 0:05:40.960 than a thousand years after Sappo actually lived, and then 0:05:41.000 --> 0:05:43.839 on top of that, it's not exactly reliable all the time. 0:05:44.120 --> 0:05:47.120 It's cobbled together from all kinds of different sources, and 0:05:47.200 --> 0:05:50.040 some of its entries pick up information that is clearly 0:05:50.160 --> 0:05:53.719 not factual. In terms of the entries on Sappho, it's 0:05:53.880 --> 0:05:56.560 just not clear how much of the information came from 0:05:56.600 --> 0:06:00.160 historical sources. How much from what people just knew who 0:06:00.279 --> 0:06:03.440 in quotation marks about Sappho in the tenth century, and 0:06:03.520 --> 0:06:05.920 how much of it was gleaned from things that are 0:06:05.960 --> 0:06:09.479 mentioned in her poetry. It's always tricky to try to 0:06:09.560 --> 0:06:13.320 use poems as a source for the poet's biographical details, 0:06:13.360 --> 0:06:15.840 but it's even more of a challenge here because by 0:06:15.880 --> 0:06:18.360 the tenth century a lot of Sappho's work had already 0:06:18.360 --> 0:06:21.279 been lost, so we don't know the full context of 0:06:21.279 --> 0:06:25.120 those lines that we have. According to the Suda, Sapho 0:06:25.320 --> 0:06:28.320 was born in the forty second Olympiad, which was between 0:06:28.360 --> 0:06:32.400 six twelve and six oh nine BCE, but the wording 0:06:32.440 --> 0:06:35.760 of it could also be translated as flourished and not born, 0:06:35.800 --> 0:06:37.599 which would mean that those years were the height of 0:06:37.640 --> 0:06:41.520 her career and not her birth. The Pseudoist's eight different 0:06:41.600 --> 0:06:45.960 men as Sepho's potential father, Herodotus, on the other hand, 0:06:46.000 --> 0:06:49.200 lived about two hundred years after Sappho did, and he 0:06:49.240 --> 0:06:53.480 wrote that her father was named scam Andronomus, and that's 0:06:53.480 --> 0:06:55.880 one of the eight men that the pseudalistid as a possibility. 0:06:56.040 --> 0:06:59.359 Hundreds of years later, Sepho's mother may have been named 0:06:59.400 --> 0:07:02.159 Claus and we have to say may have been, because 0:07:02.440 --> 0:07:05.640 a couple of Sappho's fragments mentioned a daughter named Claus, 0:07:06.000 --> 0:07:08.400 and it was traditional for daughters to be named after 0:07:08.440 --> 0:07:12.120 their grandmother. But even that is pretty murky because the 0:07:12.560 --> 0:07:15.280 word that's used for daughter could also just mean child, 0:07:15.720 --> 0:07:18.800 and in some cases it could actually be translated as slave. 0:07:19.720 --> 0:07:21.800 So this Claus, who may or may not have been 0:07:21.880 --> 0:07:24.800 named after Sappho's mother, may or may not have been 0:07:24.840 --> 0:07:28.000 her child. This is like the most provisional discussion of 0:07:28.120 --> 0:07:32.320 hyderia ever. I feel like if you've heard the words 0:07:32.360 --> 0:07:36.920 possibly and may have been, you've heard most of Sappho's biography. 0:07:37.640 --> 0:07:40.080 We do know she lived on the island of Lesbos 0:07:40.080 --> 0:07:42.760 and the Aegean c and that's just across the water 0:07:42.840 --> 0:07:45.960 from what's now Turkey. At the time that was Sartis, 0:07:45.960 --> 0:07:49.440 which was the capital of Lydia. Sapho's place of birth 0:07:49.520 --> 0:07:52.840 on the island was probably the town of Eiresis or 0:07:52.880 --> 0:07:56.920 the capital of Middelini. She most likely lived most of 0:07:56.920 --> 0:07:59.680 her life in Middelini, although it is possible that she 0:07:59.840 --> 0:08:03.040 and her family either moved or fled to Sicily for 0:08:03.080 --> 0:08:07.360 a time, either because of general political upheaval on Lesbos, 0:08:07.440 --> 0:08:11.160 or because of their own political affiliations. She may have 0:08:11.200 --> 0:08:15.480 had three brothers. The Suda names them as Laricos, Carasos, 0:08:15.600 --> 0:08:18.760 and Eurygios, and two of those names appear in a 0:08:18.800 --> 0:08:21.560 poem that was on Earthed in twenty fourteen, which we 0:08:21.600 --> 0:08:24.000 talked about in one of our Unearthed episodes that year, 0:08:24.600 --> 0:08:27.600 and that poem has been nicknamed the Brother's Poem because 0:08:27.600 --> 0:08:32.040 it contains these two names. From here, the pseudo wanders 0:08:32.080 --> 0:08:36.840 into some more questionable territory. It says that Sappho's husband 0:08:37.120 --> 0:08:41.360 was Kirklius of Andros, but Kirklius is very close to 0:08:41.400 --> 0:08:44.319 a slang term for the word Penis, and Andros was 0:08:44.360 --> 0:08:46.959 a real place, but was also the word for man, 0:08:47.200 --> 0:08:50.840 So the Suda's name for Sappho's husband is sort of 0:08:50.920 --> 0:08:54.480 like saying he was Dick Johnson of Man Island. So 0:08:54.600 --> 0:08:57.120 this is more likely to be a crude joke than 0:08:57.160 --> 0:09:00.439 her husband's actual name. I want to make a sitcom 0:09:00.559 --> 0:09:04.840 now about Dick Johnson on Man Island. Uh. And then 0:09:05.200 --> 0:09:10.439 the Suda names three of Sappho's friends Athis, Tellisippa, and Magara, 0:09:10.559 --> 0:09:13.480 using a word to describe them that could mean companion, 0:09:13.960 --> 0:09:17.080 but it could also mean cortison, and the Suda says 0:09:17.160 --> 0:09:19.560 her relationship with them led her to be accused of 0:09:19.600 --> 0:09:23.120 a friendship or a love that was shameful. From there, 0:09:23.200 --> 0:09:26.400 the Suda goes into some more mundane territory, naming a 0:09:26.440 --> 0:09:29.840 few of Sappho's students, saying that she wrote nine volumes 0:09:29.880 --> 0:09:33.640 of poetry and crediting her with inventing the plectrum, which 0:09:33.679 --> 0:09:36.400 is like a pick for plucking the strings on a liar. 0:09:37.080 --> 0:09:41.839 It also describes her poetry as including epigrams, elegaics, iambics, 0:09:41.880 --> 0:09:46.760 and monodies. Her surviving work also includes a lot of epithalamia, 0:09:47.200 --> 0:09:49.880 and these are poems that were celebrating a marriage, which 0:09:49.920 --> 0:09:53.160 she was probably commissioned to write. In addition to the 0:09:53.200 --> 0:09:57.120 Suda's mention of students, a number of classical sources describe 0:09:57.160 --> 0:10:00.640 Sappho as a teacher, but none of these us mention 0:10:00.840 --> 0:10:04.040 what or where she taught. In spite of that lack 0:10:04.080 --> 0:10:07.599 of detail, a lot of articles that exist today definitively 0:10:07.679 --> 0:10:11.280 say that Sappho ran a theosos, which is sometimes described 0:10:11.320 --> 0:10:14.160 as a sort of finishing school for women waiting to 0:10:14.160 --> 0:10:17.160 get married, and it's also sometimes described as a religious 0:10:17.200 --> 0:10:21.320 community dedicated to Aphrodite, and sometimes as a group of 0:10:21.360 --> 0:10:25.560 temple courtisons. But really there's no substantiation to any of 0:10:25.600 --> 0:10:28.560 this or for the idea of a theosos as an 0:10:28.600 --> 0:10:33.400 actual established school of some sort. None of Sappho's surviving 0:10:33.440 --> 0:10:36.600 writing mentions a theosos at all. You will see a 0:10:36.600 --> 0:10:41.480 lot of just incredibly definitive saying with one hundred percent confidence, 0:10:41.520 --> 0:10:45.319 statements that are like, Cepho ran this theosos that taught 0:10:45.320 --> 0:10:48.760 these young women how to be wives and mothers, and 0:10:49.160 --> 0:10:54.120 maybe it's not no documentation of that. And then there 0:10:54.200 --> 0:10:57.600 is the story of Sapho and Feon, and the basic 0:10:57.640 --> 0:11:00.200 gist of this story is that Sappho fell in love 0:11:00.240 --> 0:11:03.320 with a ferryman named Faon, and when he rejected her, 0:11:03.400 --> 0:11:07.040 she threw herself off a cliff. That story makes up 0:11:07.080 --> 0:11:10.920 the bulk of the Suda's second Sappho entry, which says 0:11:10.960 --> 0:11:16.000 that this supposedly different Sapho was also from Middelini, also 0:11:16.040 --> 0:11:19.120 played a harp and may have written lyric poetry as well. 0:11:19.760 --> 0:11:23.480 This story about the ferryman is repeated over and over 0:11:23.559 --> 0:11:27.319 and over. It's depicted in numerous works of art and literature, 0:11:27.600 --> 0:11:31.880 including in Avid's herodies or epistles of the heroines. But 0:11:32.000 --> 0:11:35.040 Faon was a mythical figure, and it seems like this 0:11:35.200 --> 0:11:38.320 idea that the real Sapho threw herself over a cliff 0:11:38.360 --> 0:11:41.600 for him dates back to a comedy by Menander written 0:11:41.600 --> 0:11:44.960 about two hundred years after Sappho died, and in the 0:11:45.040 --> 0:11:47.680 thousands of years since then, the fact that at least 0:11:47.800 --> 0:11:51.440 one of Sappho's fragments mentions Faon has been used to 0:11:51.520 --> 0:11:54.880 try to substantiate this fictional story as though it were fact. 0:11:55.240 --> 0:11:57.560 So when it comes to Sappho's biography, we have a 0:11:57.600 --> 0:12:01.280 whole lot of contradictions and questionable and in some cases 0:12:01.320 --> 0:12:04.440 her poetry has been used to try to substantiate those claims. 0:12:05.040 --> 0:12:07.120 So we are going to take a look at her 0:12:07.160 --> 0:12:09.880 poems in some more detail after we take a quick 0:12:09.960 --> 0:12:23.120 sponsor break. Sapo was a lyric poet, meaning that she 0:12:23.200 --> 0:12:26.120 composed poems that were meant to be sung accompanied on 0:12:26.280 --> 0:12:30.360 a liar. In Ancient Greece, lyric poetry tended to be 0:12:30.440 --> 0:12:34.120 short and very personal, often sung from one person to 0:12:34.240 --> 0:12:38.400 another or written in the voice of one person addressing another. 0:12:38.880 --> 0:12:42.360 Many of Sappho's poems that have survived until today either 0:12:42.480 --> 0:12:45.400 our or are believe to be love poems. It's hard 0:12:45.440 --> 0:12:49.640 to tell sometimes because what survives can be incredibly short. Homer, 0:12:49.720 --> 0:12:52.240 on the other hand, wrote epic poetry, and this was 0:12:52.320 --> 0:12:55.079 much longer, with a narrative that told the story of 0:12:55.120 --> 0:12:58.000 the heroic deeds of the characters in the poem. And 0:12:58.040 --> 0:13:00.600 we should also note that it's very possis that the 0:13:00.640 --> 0:13:04.080 work attributed to Homer was really written by several people 0:13:04.160 --> 0:13:07.640 and not just one regardless, though in the ancient Western 0:13:07.679 --> 0:13:11.160 world he was called just the poet and Sappho was 0:13:11.200 --> 0:13:15.560 the poetess. Lyric poetry really flourished in ancient Greece between 0:13:15.640 --> 0:13:18.880 about six hundred and four fifty BCE, so that was 0:13:18.920 --> 0:13:23.680 when Sappho lived. It wasn't newly invented during that time. 0:13:23.800 --> 0:13:27.480 This was more a revival of an earlier poetic form. 0:13:27.800 --> 0:13:30.240 And then two people were considered to be the most 0:13:30.400 --> 0:13:34.600 notable lyric poets of this period. They were Sappho and Alcius, 0:13:34.720 --> 0:13:37.280 both of whom were from Lesbos and may have known 0:13:37.360 --> 0:13:40.720 each other and even written to each other. Sappho wrote 0:13:40.720 --> 0:13:44.000 her poems in Aolic Greek, which is sometimes also called 0:13:44.080 --> 0:13:47.400 Lesbian Greek, and in that dialect her name was more 0:13:47.520 --> 0:13:50.400 like Shappa than the Sappho that we know today. In 0:13:50.440 --> 0:13:55.000 about the third century BCE, Sapho's poetry was compiled into 0:13:55.040 --> 0:13:59.280 an eight or nine volume collection in Alexandria, Egypt. The 0:13:59.360 --> 0:14:02.439 volumes were arranged by the meter used for each poem, 0:14:02.480 --> 0:14:05.760 which set it apart for most other compilations, which tended 0:14:05.800 --> 0:14:09.480 to be organized instead by subject or seam. There were 0:14:09.520 --> 0:14:12.800 as many as ten thousand lines of poetry in this compilation, 0:14:13.520 --> 0:14:16.240 but it's possible that Sappho wrote much more than that, 0:14:16.520 --> 0:14:19.680 especially since many of her works were commissioned for special 0:14:19.680 --> 0:14:23.040 occasions like weddings, and they might not have been preserved 0:14:23.120 --> 0:14:26.440 after they were performed. Today, Sappho is known most for 0:14:26.560 --> 0:14:29.840 one particular poetic form, and that's the Sapphic, which is 0:14:29.880 --> 0:14:33.960 also called Sapphic meter or Sapphix stanzas. We don't really 0:14:34.000 --> 0:14:37.720 know whether Sapho developed this form herself or refined a 0:14:37.760 --> 0:14:40.760 form that already existed, but she was so skilled at 0:14:40.800 --> 0:14:43.560 writing in this form that it ultimately carried her name. 0:14:44.200 --> 0:14:47.880 The Sapphik used four line stanzas, with three longer lines 0:14:47.920 --> 0:14:50.960 followed by one shorter line, and then within those lines. 0:14:51.000 --> 0:14:53.840 The meter came from Lesbian Greek's pattern of long and 0:14:53.880 --> 0:14:58.480 short syllables. When people are translating Sappho's work today, sometimes 0:14:58.480 --> 0:15:01.680 they approximate the meter u using the characteristics of whatever 0:15:01.760 --> 0:15:05.000 language they're working in. So, for example, in English, there's 0:15:05.040 --> 0:15:08.760 a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, with the stressed 0:15:08.800 --> 0:15:11.960 syllables standing in for the long syllables in Greek, and 0:15:12.040 --> 0:15:15.200 the unstressed syllables taking the place of the short ones. 0:15:15.600 --> 0:15:19.640 These tend to be very personal, passionate, and emotional poems, 0:15:19.960 --> 0:15:24.520 and they're simultaneously very simple and elegant. During Sappho's lifetime, 0:15:24.600 --> 0:15:27.880 poetry was also believed to be magical, so poetry was 0:15:27.920 --> 0:15:31.280 thought to be able to influence or shape reality. So 0:15:31.320 --> 0:15:35.840 Sappho's poetry was considered to be beautiful and melodic and powerful. 0:15:36.600 --> 0:15:40.080 But we have unfortunately very little of this poetry today, 0:15:40.560 --> 0:15:43.320 and even less of it in the form of complete poems. 0:15:44.000 --> 0:15:47.160 The vast majority of what we have is just short fragments, 0:15:47.760 --> 0:15:50.080 and some of these fragments are from damaged pieces of 0:15:50.080 --> 0:15:54.600 writing material or pieces of clay pots. Others are quotations 0:15:54.600 --> 0:15:59.520 from other people's surviving work. For example, Cassius Longinus quoted 0:15:59.560 --> 0:16:03.600 forcedas by Sappho in On the Sublime, which was published 0:16:03.640 --> 0:16:07.320 around one hundred CE today, out of those ten thousand 0:16:07.440 --> 0:16:10.000 or so lines that we think that Sappho wrote, we 0:16:10.120 --> 0:16:14.160 have roughly six hundred and fifty lines of poetry remaining. 0:16:14.520 --> 0:16:18.360 That is spread out across about two hundred and fifty fragments. 0:16:18.760 --> 0:16:21.560 And of those six hundred and fifty lines, fewer than 0:16:21.640 --> 0:16:24.320 a third of them are even complete lines of poetry. 0:16:24.320 --> 0:16:27.120 A lot of them are partial lines. Six of the 0:16:27.160 --> 0:16:31.720 fragments are longer and more substantive, but still not entirely intact, 0:16:32.280 --> 0:16:34.840 and one of those longer fragments is the Brother's poem 0:16:34.880 --> 0:16:37.680 that we mentioned earlier, which is missing only its first 0:16:37.680 --> 0:16:41.920 few stanzas only one of Sappho's poems is believed to 0:16:41.960 --> 0:16:44.840 be complete today, and that is the Ode to Aphrodite. 0:16:45.560 --> 0:16:49.040 Different collections of Sappho's poetry use different numbering systems to 0:16:49.120 --> 0:16:51.720 keep up with all of these fragments, but most of 0:16:51.760 --> 0:16:56.040 the time Ode to Aphrodite, sometimes translated as Him or 0:16:56.080 --> 0:16:59.560 Prayer to Aphrodite, is number one. Here's the beginning of 0:16:59.600 --> 0:17:03.040 Ode to Aphrodite, translated by T. W. Higginson in eighteen 0:17:03.080 --> 0:17:09.200 seventy one quote beautiful throned immortal Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus beguiler, 0:17:09.320 --> 0:17:13.119 I implore THEE weigh me not down with weariness and anguish. 0:17:13.160 --> 0:17:16.640 Oh Thou most holy, come to me now, if ever thou, 0:17:16.640 --> 0:17:20.719 in kindness hearkenest my words. And in the poem, Aphrodite 0:17:20.760 --> 0:17:24.520 does come and says, who has harmed thee? Oh, my 0:17:24.640 --> 0:17:29.000 poor Sappho. Though now he flies erelong, he shall pursue thee, 0:17:29.440 --> 0:17:33.440 fearing thy gifts. He too, in turn, shall bring them loveless. 0:17:33.480 --> 0:17:37.760 Today tomorrow he shall woo thee, though thou should spurn him. 0:17:38.200 --> 0:17:40.600 Another of the longer fragments is the one that was 0:17:40.680 --> 0:17:44.000 quoted in On the Sublime, which we mentioned earlier, and 0:17:44.080 --> 0:17:47.679 it describes the speaker's response to sitting across from a 0:17:47.760 --> 0:17:50.879 woman that the poem is addressing. This is usually interpreted 0:17:50.920 --> 0:17:53.960 as Sappho herself describing her own response to the woman 0:17:54.359 --> 0:17:57.399 that she's facing, but that's not really clear here. It 0:17:57.480 --> 0:18:02.879 is as translated by John Addington's Simmons in eighteen eighty three, 0:18:03.080 --> 0:18:05.720 Peer of the Gods, he seemeth to me the blissful 0:18:05.720 --> 0:18:09.399 man who sits and gazes at THEE before him close 0:18:09.480 --> 0:18:13.840 besides these sits, and in silence hears THEE silverly speaking, 0:18:14.359 --> 0:18:19.159 laughing love's low laughter. Oh this, this only stirs the 0:18:19.200 --> 0:18:22.199 troubled heart in my breast to tremble. For should I 0:18:22.320 --> 0:18:27.040 but see thee a little moment? Straight? Is my voice hushed? Yeay, 0:18:27.160 --> 0:18:30.800 my tongue is broken, and through and through me neath 0:18:30.920 --> 0:18:36.080 the flesh impalpable, fire runs tingling nothing see mine eyes 0:18:36.359 --> 0:18:39.800 and our noise of roaring waves in my ear sounds. 0:18:40.280 --> 0:18:44.440 Sweat runs down in rivers. A tremor seizes all my limbs, 0:18:44.520 --> 0:18:47.960 and paler than grass in autumn, caught by pains of 0:18:48.080 --> 0:18:52.320 menacing death, eye falter lost in the love trance. But 0:18:52.400 --> 0:18:55.640 almost all the fragments are not nearly so long as this. 0:18:56.320 --> 0:18:59.760 Here is an example, Sweet mother, I cannot weave my 0:19:00.520 --> 0:19:03.480 broken as I am by longing for a boy at 0:19:03.600 --> 0:19:07.119 soft aphrodite's will. One that we think from a wedding 0:19:07.160 --> 0:19:11.720 poem goes neither honey nor bee for me. I don't 0:19:11.720 --> 0:19:15.639 know why I love that. I do too, neither of 0:19:15.640 --> 0:19:20.120 the above. Another fragment just says shot with a thousand hues, 0:19:20.680 --> 0:19:23.840 and one reads and I flutter like a child after 0:19:23.880 --> 0:19:27.720 her mother, and one fragment is simply the words you 0:19:27.800 --> 0:19:32.520 burn me. Sappho's fragments can be really evocative, and then 0:19:32.640 --> 0:19:36.720 combined with her pretty mysterious biography, they can just be beguiling. 0:19:37.400 --> 0:19:40.480 But the fact that they're so fragmented and scattered makes 0:19:40.560 --> 0:19:43.560 her work really difficult to study. We have a sense 0:19:43.600 --> 0:19:45.800 that she wrote lots of love poems, and that she 0:19:45.880 --> 0:19:49.480 wrote lots of poems for people's weddings. Her work seems 0:19:49.520 --> 0:19:52.720 to carry a lot of affection as well, including physical 0:19:52.760 --> 0:19:56.239 affection for men and women, but we don't necessarily have 0:19:56.320 --> 0:19:59.240 the greatest sense of what the whole body of her 0:19:59.320 --> 0:20:02.880 work is like. There's some guesswork going on, especially since 0:20:02.920 --> 0:20:05.239 some of the fragments are so short that were not 0:20:05.280 --> 0:20:08.600 even one hundred percent short that Sappho really wrote them. 0:20:08.840 --> 0:20:11.560 And we'll get into why there's so little of Sappho's 0:20:11.600 --> 0:20:14.959 work left today to study after we have another sponsor break. 0:20:23.720 --> 0:20:26.119 As far as we know, during her lifetime and at 0:20:26.160 --> 0:20:29.720 least for a while afterwards, Sapo was deeply respected and 0:20:29.800 --> 0:20:33.160 admired as a poet and a person. Plato, who lived 0:20:33.200 --> 0:20:35.920 roughly two hundred years after she did, wrote quote some 0:20:36.040 --> 0:20:39.520 say the muses are nine, but how carelessly look at 0:20:39.560 --> 0:20:44.280 the tenth Sapho from Lesbus. It doesn't seem as though 0:20:44.320 --> 0:20:48.320 her contemporaries really questioned her character in any way. I mean, 0:20:48.400 --> 0:20:50.639 after all, she was getting a lot of commissions to 0:20:50.680 --> 0:20:54.760 write poetry for people's weddings, and that doesn't seem like 0:20:54.800 --> 0:20:58.080 it would be happening if she were socially reviled. But 0:20:58.160 --> 0:21:02.160 in the century since then have interpreted Sappho in vastly 0:21:02.280 --> 0:21:06.159 different ways. In the words of Holt and Parker quote, 0:21:06.240 --> 0:21:09.760 every age creates its own Sappho, and many of these 0:21:09.800 --> 0:21:13.239 creations have imagined Sapho as being, at least in the 0:21:13.280 --> 0:21:17.719 morality of the time, deviant or depraved. Some of these 0:21:17.720 --> 0:21:20.520 shifts are thanks to her being from the island of Lesbos. 0:21:21.280 --> 0:21:23.919 While she was living, Lesbus was considered to be a 0:21:23.920 --> 0:21:28.000 place full of passion and poetry and sensuality, although also 0:21:28.160 --> 0:21:31.639 with a lot of political turmoil and infighting, which is 0:21:31.760 --> 0:21:34.679 why Sappho and her family may have fled at some point. 0:21:35.240 --> 0:21:38.560 Possibly see R. Haines, who we quoted at the top 0:21:38.560 --> 0:21:41.600 of the show, described it this way quote. The Aeolians 0:21:41.640 --> 0:21:45.120 of Lesbos were a vigorous and gifted race, brave in war, 0:21:45.440 --> 0:21:50.560 enterprising and trade, vehement and politics, eminent in poetry and music. 0:21:50.800 --> 0:21:54.120 But within a few centuries after her death, prevailing opinion 0:21:54.280 --> 0:21:58.040 of the island of Lesbus had shifted. That tendency toward 0:21:58.160 --> 0:22:02.360 passion and wealth moved more into perceived hedonism and excess. 0:22:03.200 --> 0:22:05.439 Lesbus went from being thought of as a place of 0:22:05.480 --> 0:22:10.119 beauty and refinement to one of licentiousness and corruption. The 0:22:10.200 --> 0:22:15.000 Greek word lesbiasen, meaning acting like someone from Lesbus, became 0:22:15.040 --> 0:22:20.080 associated with impurity and one specific sex act, that being fallatio. 0:22:20.600 --> 0:22:23.840 It wasn't just about the island, though eventually this also 0:22:24.000 --> 0:22:28.560 extended to Sappho herself. Greek comedy tended to be in 0:22:28.560 --> 0:22:31.840 one way or another satirical, although the exact nature and 0:22:31.880 --> 0:22:35.920 the primary targets of the satire shifted over time in 0:22:36.040 --> 0:22:39.800 the sort of history of Greek comedy, and starting a 0:22:39.840 --> 0:22:43.120 couple of centuries after she died, Sappho became the target 0:22:43.160 --> 0:22:46.639 of this satire. Her name was used for characters in 0:22:46.800 --> 0:22:51.400 several Greek comedies, and those characters were usually depicted as 0:22:51.520 --> 0:22:55.920 wanton and lustful and just excessively sexual with young men. 0:22:56.359 --> 0:23:01.200 Society's understanding of relationships and gender roles shifts over time, 0:23:01.359 --> 0:23:05.200 so it's certain that romantic and physical relationships were viewed 0:23:05.320 --> 0:23:09.160 very differently on Lesbis in the seventh century BCE than 0:23:09.160 --> 0:23:12.800 they are in various cultures today. But we know virtually 0:23:12.880 --> 0:23:15.840 nothing about the details, and many of the authors who 0:23:15.840 --> 0:23:19.399 have speculated about it have tried to draw conclusions based 0:23:19.400 --> 0:23:23.399 on ancient Sparta, But our understanding of Spartan society is 0:23:23.480 --> 0:23:27.639 also limited, and it was a completely different society from Lesbus, 0:23:28.000 --> 0:23:31.040 located in a different part of Greece, and it flourished 0:23:31.200 --> 0:23:35.000 starting two hundred years or so after Sappho's death. However, 0:23:35.480 --> 0:23:39.960 we do know that same sex relationships became increasingly taboo 0:23:40.000 --> 0:23:42.959 in parts of Europe in the centuries after Sappho lived, 0:23:43.440 --> 0:23:45.560 so we don't really know how they were regarded while 0:23:45.600 --> 0:23:48.199 she was living and where she was living, but we 0:23:48.320 --> 0:23:50.880 do know that it became more and more taboo afterward, 0:23:51.400 --> 0:23:55.280 and as that happened, the idea that Sappho was deviant 0:23:55.359 --> 0:23:58.760 because of her lust for young men morphed into the 0:23:58.800 --> 0:24:01.600 idea that she was devs because of her lust for 0:24:01.720 --> 0:24:04.800 young women. The first reference to this that we know 0:24:04.920 --> 0:24:07.679 about was written in the second or third century CE. 0:24:08.280 --> 0:24:12.600 In the sixteenth century, humanist scholars claimed that Christian Church 0:24:12.640 --> 0:24:17.000 officials had burned Sappho's work for this reason at least twice. 0:24:17.760 --> 0:24:21.199 That Bishop Gregory Nesienzin of Constantinople had done so in 0:24:21.240 --> 0:24:24.240 three eighty, followed by Pope Gregory the Seventh in ten 0:24:24.359 --> 0:24:28.560 seventy three, but it's not clear whether these burnings actually happened, 0:24:28.800 --> 0:24:33.760 especially since Bishop Gregory himself was known to quote from Sappho. Yes, 0:24:33.960 --> 0:24:37.639 there's some conjecture that over the centuries two different Gregory's 0:24:37.640 --> 0:24:41.520 were conflated together into this one person who supposedly did 0:24:41.520 --> 0:24:45.439 this burning. Even if her work was burned by the 0:24:45.520 --> 0:24:50.080 Church because of perceptions about Sappho's morality, that would not 0:24:50.160 --> 0:24:52.720