Who is Sappho?
Sappho is an ancient poet from the Greek island of Lesbos. She was born between 612 BC and 630 BC, and died around 570 BC. Her poetry has been heralded by even the great masters, drawing praise from the likes of Plato and Horace. She is one of the first female writers that we know of, and although her work only now exists in fragments, with only one truly complete poem surviving, her reputation continues. Sappho was a lyric poet and wrote in the arcane Aeolic dialect, which is thought to be one of the reasons why study of her work was dropped in the Byzantine era — her language had become obsolete in Roman times. This disappearance of her work from the academic canon of the day resulted in less and less of her poems being produced by the scribes, which explains, at least in part, why so much of her work has been lost to antiquity. At present, we can only read snatches of her work and have to fill in the blanks with allusions to her work by other sources. Apart from what ancient documen
