SAPPHO
A female poet in Greek society. Her lyrics are untranslatable, for in them the perfect harmony of sound and sense is achieved.
Some translations (a bit old, but readable) of Sappho's poetry are available on-line.
Personal life
Sappho was born towards the end of the seventh century B.C., around 590 during the Archaic period. Her name is properly Psappho. She belonged to the aristocratic party in Lesbos, in the Aegean Islands. She had three brothers named Eriggois, Charaxos and Larichos. She was married to Kerkylas of Andros. There is dispute about her marriage. Some claim that she was never married and others claim that she was. Because of the lack of concrete infromation about her, this is still unknown. We do know that she had a daughter named Kleis.
She was known mostly for her poetry but also as a singer. She composed several songs to Aphrodite as well as other people. Her face even appeared on some coins, although some are not marked with a name so we can not be certain that it is her. Her poetry and songs told of love and life. She wrote about her disputes with her brothers, and about other things in her personal life as well.
Sappho's girls
Sappho was the head of a girls' school. Ordinarily a girl was trained in weaving and taught to supervise the other home manufactures that were necessary to the Archaic Greek household, but here in Sappho's school her education was based on dance and song. Music was at the core of the curriculum. Voice was a principal point of praise. Sappho's pupils were not just sweet-voiced girls but true musicians. The girls were not taught just how to sing and dance, for in the songs they sang they were singing a lesson. The songs told of how to be a woman and how to treat a husband. They also learned the contradictory double lesson of the bride; that virginity kept was glorious, while virginity lost in a wedding bed was an even more splendid thing. One had to be both pure and desirable, and the balance was not easy to keep, for chastity was provocative. The songs that the girls learned were performed to audiences of other young women. Some indeed were hardly more than children, and for them Sappho's songs were educational as the older women taught the younger women what it meant to be a girl, that they might better become women later on.
Enrollment in Sappho's school was voluntary, and to a degree international. Girls came from other parts of Ionia, some staying a considerable length of time. When a girl joined Sappho's school she was separated from her relatives, making Sappho's school kind of like a boarding school.
Marriage was inevitable for Sappho's girls. After all, they were in Sappho's school to learn how to be a wife and to prepare for marriage itself. The need to marry well was evidently what brought the members of Sappho's group together. By educating these young girls their value as a wife was being increased, so that their fathers could boast more to their prospective grooms. When a girl was married she could never go back to Sappho's circle, she could never be a girl again. For once married they were women, the wife of a certain one or the mother of another, and their change of status would be as total and as irreversible as the loss of virginity that was its cause and its sign. Marriage would mean physical separation from a life they once knew, an end to a certain sort of friendship.
From Sappho her pupils learned about music and marriage as well as about cult. Above all Sappho's girls learned about themselves, for they were not just her audience of imitators, they were also the subjects of her poetry. Sappho taught her girls that their present experiences of love, enhanced by song, would let them recognise beauty later on in all various forms.
Sources:
Three Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho/ Anne Pippin Barnett.
Cambridge, Mass:Harvard University Press, 1983
The early greek poets and their times/ Anthony J. Podlecki
Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984
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