The Ancient Lives of Sappho

Herodotus of Halicarnassus, the Greek historian of the fifth century BC, mentions Sappho in the second book of the Histories, in his account of the courtesan Rhodopis. He reports that Charaxus of Mytilene, whom he calls Sappho’s brother, bought Rhodopis her freedom, and that Sappho attacked her brother over the affair in a poem. In the first book Herodotus describes the island Sappho came from. He reports that five cities divided Lesbos among them, a sixth, Arisba, having been enslaved by its kinsfolk of Methymna. He also tells a story, attributed to either Bias of Priene or Pittacus of Mytilene, of a visit to the Lydian king Croesus at Sardis.

Strabo, a Greek geographer writing around the turn of the era, describes Lesbos in the thirteenth book of the Geography as the island lying alongside the coast from Lectum to the Caicus River. In his account of Mytilene he names Sappho and the poet Alcaeus among the city’s notable people. He calls Sappho a marvelous woman and states that no woman in recorded history can be compared with her in poetry.

The Roman poet Horace, in the nineteenth epistle of his first book, describes Sappho as tempering the Muse of the poet Archilochus. He uses the Latin adjective mascula, “manly,” for her.

The Roman poet Ovid composed the Heroides as fictional verse letters from women of legend to the men they loved. The fifteenth is written in the voice of Sappho to Phaon. Its Sappho explains why her verses alternate, as elegiac couplets do, “when I am better suited to the lyric mode.” She places Phaon far away, in the region of Aetna, and describes her own passion as a heat not less than the fires of Aetna. The letter goes on to the Leucadian cliff, the source of the story of Sappho’s leap. A note in the Loeb edition records that the letter is absent from the earliest manuscripts and that its authorship has been disputed, though the note describes Ovid’s authorship as generally conceded. The same note states that the Sappho–Phaon story seems to have been well known by the fourth century BC.

Pliny the Elder, the Roman encyclopedist, mentions Phaon of Lesbos, “loved by Sappho,” in the twenty-second book of the Natural History. The passage concerns a plant whose root is said to make men attractive to women.

Apuleius of Madaura, a Latin writer and Platonist of the second century AD, delivered the Apologia as his defense against a charge of practicing magic. Part of it answers the accusation that he wrote erotic verse. Apuleius lists earlier poets who did the same: a Teian, a Lacedaemonian, a Cean, and “a woman, a Lesbian, who wrote with such grace and such passion that the sweetness of her song makes us forgive the impropriety of her words.” He does not name her. The translator’s notes identify the four as Anacreon, Alcman, Simonides and Sappho, and date Sappho to about 600 BC.

Maximus of Tyre, a Greek lecturer in philosophy of the second century AD, discusses Sappho in an oration on Socratic love. He reports that in Plato’s Phaedrus Socrates says his mind is filled, like a vessel, with foreign streams drawn from “the beautiful Sappho” and the wise Anacreon. Maximus adds that Socrates calls her this because of the elegance of her verses, “though she was short and of a dark complexion.” He then compares the Lesbian poet with Socrates. In his comparison, Gyrinna, Atthis and Anactoria stand to Sappho as Alcibiades, Charmides and Phaedrus stand to Socrates, and Gorgo and Andromeda stand to her as his rivals Prodicus, Gorgias, Thrasymachus and Protagoras stand to him. He reports that Sappho calls love sweetly bitter, and that she wrote to her daughter that grief is not lawful in the residence of the Muses.

Volume 15 of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri (1922) lists no. 1800 in its table of papyri as “Miscellaneous Biographies.”