The Most Cited Fragments
The fragments most often searched for by number are listed here, each with a well-known line and a note on how the text survives. The lines are quoted from public-domain translations: Henry Thornton Wharton’s literal prose translation (fifth edition, 1908) for poems known before the papyrus finds, and J. M. Edmonds’s Lyra Graeca (Loeb Classical Library, 1922) for poems recovered afterward.
Fragment numbers follow Wharton’s edition, which uses the numbering of Theodor Bergk’s Poetae Lyrici Graeci. The modern number, Voigt’s (equivalent to Lobel–Page), is added only where a concordance of the Greek confirms the match.
Fragments preserved by quotation
Most of the fragments below survive only because later ancient writers quoted them to illustrate a meter, a word or a point of style. Wharton’s notes name the quoting author for each fragment.
Wharton renders the opening as “That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy presence, and hears close to him thy sweet speech and lovely laughter”. The poem is preserved in the treatise On the Sublime, ascribed to Longinus, and was adapted in Latin by Catullus in his poem 51.
The Hymn to Aphrodite is the one complete poem. It is preserved by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the critic of the Augustan age, in his work On Composition. Wharton’s translation opens: “Immortal Aphrodite of the broidered throne, daughter of Zeus, weaver of wiles, I pray thee break not my spirit with anguish and distress, O Queen.”
The comparison to an apple at the end of the bough, “As the sweet-apple blushes on the end of the bough, the very end of the bough, which the gatherers overlooked, nay overlooked not but could not reach,” is quoted by a commentator on Hermogenes.
The line “Now Love masters my limbs and shakes me, fatal creature, bitter-sweet” is quoted by Hephaestion, the metrical writer, in his Handbook of Metre.
“Men I think will remember us even hereafter” is quoted by Dio Chrysostom, the orator.
“Sweet Mother, I cannot weave my web, broken as I am by longing for a boy” is quoted by Hephaestion.
“As on the hills the shepherds trample the hyacinth under foot, and the flower darkens on the ground” is quoted by Demetrius in On Style.
“Evening, thou that bringest all that bright morning scattered; thou bringest the sheep, the goat, the child back to her mother” is quoted in the Etymologicum Magnum, a Byzantine dictionary, and by Demetrius.
“For lamentation may not be in a poet’s house: such things befit not us” is quoted by Maximus of Tyre, the philosopher and orator.
“I loved thee once, Atthis, long ago” is quoted by Hephaestion.
“Now Eros shakes my soul, a wind on the mountain falling on the oaks” is quoted by Maximus of Tyre.
“But thou shalt ever lie dead, nor shall there be any remembrance of thee then or thereafter, for thou hast not of the roses of Pieria” is quoted by Stobaeus, the anthologist, and by Plutarch.
“The moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, the time is going by, and I sleep alone.” The concordance has not confirmed the modern number of this fragment, and its attribution to Sappho is doubted.
Fragments recovered from papyrus and parchment
Fragments 16, 44, 94 and 96 (Voigt numbers) are not in Wharton’s edition: 94 and 96 were published in 1902, 16 and 44 later. They are quoted from Edmonds’s 1922 translation, only where a line is complete in his Greek. Fragment 58 and the full text of fragment 2 (Voigt) were published after 1922, so no public-domain translation exists for them.
Edmonds translates a line of the farewell poem as “…and in sooth I might as well be dead.” The poem is on the Berlin parchment, published in 1902.
Edmonds gives “…but to me ’tis the heart’s belovèd.” The poem comes from an Oxyrhynchus papyrus published in 1914.
Edmonds translates “And now she shines among the dames of Lydia as after sunset the rosy-fingered Moon beside the stars that are about her…” The poem is on the Berlin parchment.
Edmonds translates “Hector and his comrades bring from sacred Thebe and ever-flowing Placia, by ship upon the briny sea, the dainty Andromache of the glancing eye…” The poem comes from an Oxyrhynchus papyrus published in 1914.
The poem on old age (Voigt 58) survives on an Oxyrhynchus papyrus and the Cologne papyrus. The poem “Come to me from Crete” (Voigt 2) survives in full on a potsherd published in 1937.