Sappho was born in 650 BC and died in 590 BC. She was a Greek poet, whose poetry was so renowned (famous) that Plato referred to her two centuries after her death as the tenth muse. She was born on the island of Lesbos, probably in Mytilene. Although the details of her life are lacking, it appears that she was of good family and was a contemporary of lyric poets such as Alcaeus and Stesichorus. According to tradition, Alcaeus was her lover. However, another legend holds that because of unrequited love for the young boatman Phaon she leaped to her death from a steep rock on the island of Levkis. Sappho had a daughter named Cleos and two brothers.
The fragmentary remains of Sappho's poems show that she taught her art to a group of maidens to whom she was devotedly attached. She eventually wrote their bridal odes when they left her to be married. Later writers of antiquity, commenting upon the group, have accused Sappho of immorality and vice. It is from these individuals that the modern terms for female homosexuality, lesbianism and sapphism, arose.
Sappho wrote nine books of odes, epithalamia, or wedding songs, elegies, and hymns. However, the surviving fragments are very few. They include the Ode to Aphrodite, quoted by the scholar Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the 1st century BC.
Sappho's poems are marked by exquisite beauty of
diction, perfect simplicity of form, and intensity of emotion.
She invented the verse form known as Sapphics, a four-line
stanza in which the first three lines are each 11 syllables long
and the fourth is 5 syllables long. Many later Greek poets were
influenced by Sappho, particularly Theocritus.
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