How Sappho’s Poems Survived

Sappho’s poems were collected in antiquity in nine books, and almost all of that output was lost. What survives reached the modern world by two routes: quotations in later Greek writers, and pieces of ancient copies recovered from Egypt.

What Was Lost

The editors of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, volume 10 (1914), Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, report that the roll of Book i is titled with the number of the book and of its verses: 1320 verses, or 330 stanzas. They note that the grammarians stated that the pieces in Sapphics were all included in that book, and they estimate that Sappho’s entire works may well have extended to something like 9,000 verses.

The same editors describe the surviving remains before the papyrus finds as exiguous, and report that substantial additions had lately come from Egypt, where the lyric poets were still popular in the Roman period.

How the Fragments Survive

Some lines survive as quotations in later writers. In the Oxyrhynchus volume of 1922, Hunt cites Hephaestion’s account of the Aeolic meter, in which Hephaestion cites fragments of Sappho as examples and describes her second and third books as consisting entirely of two-line strophes. Athenaeus is cited there for two verses of a poem on old age, which a papyrus of Book iv then supplied in context. Grammarians’ attributions also helped identify papyrus fragments as Sappho’s: the 1914 editors show that the authorship of the fragments of Book i was placed beyond question by coincidences with fragments expressly cited from her.

Other lines survive on ancient copies. Papyri from Oxyrhynchus, a site in Egypt, supplied several of these, as described below.

Finds from Oxyrhynchus

The first volume of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri (1898), edited by Grenfell and Hunt, printed a fragment of Sappho as a new classical text, with a plate. It preserves portions of twenty lines of a poem in Sapphic stanzas in the Aeolic dialect. The editors assigned the poem to Sappho from its dialect, its meter and the digamma in the sixth line, and took it as concerning her brother Charaxus, who is returning home across the sea. They dated the papyrus to the third century AD. They credit F. Blass with the restoration and most of the notes. In the preface they state that another poem of Sappho was not very likely to be found.

Volume 10 (1914) printed a papyrus of Sappho’s Book i, dated to the second century, with the editors’ remark that its roll title gives the number of the book and of its verses. Its two columns together preserve remains of four poems. The first two are identified as a poem concerning her brother Charaxus and a poem of longing for Anactoria, and the next column contains a poem to Hera.

Volume 15 (1922) printed a papyrus assigned to Sappho’s Book iv, dated to the third century. Hunt describes it as the sixth distinct papyrus of Sappho obtained from Oxyrhynchus. He assigns the papyrus to Book iv from the two-line strophes described by Hephaestion. The roll had been torn into small pieces and was found with other lyric fragments in an identical hand, which he says made reconstruction difficult. Edgar Lobel is credited with assistance.