The Writers Who Preserved Her
Most of Sappho’s poetry survives because later writers quoted it to illustrate something else: style, word order, a point of argument or an anecdote. Their own works were copied through the Middle Ages, and the lines inside them survived with the copies. Scholars call this the indirect tradition.
The authors are grouped by the kind of use they made of her. Each quoted passage is described within the quoting author’s own context.
Critics of Style
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek critic and teacher of rhetoric, wrote a treatise on the arrangement of words, known as On Literary Composition or de Compositione Verborum. In it he sorts composition into three kinds, and he names Sappho among the chief representatives of the smooth kind, alongside Hesiod, Anacreon, Simonides and Euripides. As an illustration he quotes Sappho’s Hymn to Aphrodite in full. The treatise also survives with a Greek epitome, and a modern editor of the treatise remarks that, had the epitome alone been preserved, the Sappho would still be possessed but the Simonides lost.
The treatise On the Sublime, of disputed authorship and attributed in manuscripts to Longinus, mentions Sappho only once. In its tenth chapter the author gives her as an example of selecting the most striking circumstances and binding them together, saying that “Sappho everywhere chooses the emotions that attend delirious passion from its accompaniments in actual life.” He then quotes the love ode that begins “φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θεοῖσιν.” The ode is the one numbered fragment 2 (Voigt 31) in the Bergk numbering the site prints. A modern editor of the treatise observes that the author’s method allows greater copiousness of quotation than Aristotle’s Poetics, which makes the work the better anthology.
On Style, a Greek treatise on the types of style attributed to Demetrius, treats the elegant or graceful style as one of four types. It draws its illustrations of that style from Sappho among poets and from Xenophon among prose writers. In a passage on hyperbole the author quotes a Sapphic phrase, “φαλακρότερος χρυσῶ χρυσοτέρα,” as a hyperbole, and calls her “Sappho the divine,” praising her for handling a risky subject gracefully.
Philosophers, Orators and Anthologists
Maximus of Tyre, a Greek orator and philosopher of the second century AD, compares the love poetry of Sappho with that of Socrates in one of his discourses. He says that the Lesbian studies the same kind of love as Socrates, among females where Socrates studies it among males. He pairs Gyrinna, Atthis and Anactoria with Socrates’ Alcibiades, Charmides and Phaedrus. He then sets individual lines of hers beside sayings of Socrates and Diotima, including lines on love as sweetly bitter and on love shaking her mind like wind on mountain oaks. In the same passage he reports that Sappho writes to her daughter that grief is not lawful in the house of the muse.
Athenaeus, a Greek author of the late second and early third century AD, wrote The Deipnosophists, a long table-talk of quotations from earlier writers. The excerpts from Book XII in Yonge’s translation concern the luxury of Persian kings, Alcibiades and Alexander the Great, and none of them quotes Sappho.
Other Writers Who Named Her
In his Apology, Apuleius, a Roman writer of the second century AD, defends himself against a charge of magic by pointing to earlier poets who wrote erotic verse. He lists a Teian, a Lacedaemonian, a Cean and a Lesbian woman, whom the translator’s notes identify as Anacreon, Alcman, Simonides and Sappho. He says she wrote with such grace and passion that “the sweetness of her song makes us forgive the impropriety of her words.” He is a witness to her reputation and does not quote her.