April Poet : Sappho

What do the ancient sources say about the first poet's life?

This month we are looking at the first and still one of the greatest of all poets, Sappho. Today, I want to attend to Sappho’s biography, which turns out to be the most political aspect about her (phenomenon) for two reasons.

The first is that it is ‘simply’ impossible to construct a factual biography of her, a figure who lived more than 2500 years ago, not only because she was so ancient and removed in time and the very idea of authors’ lives, literary biography, did not exist. Rather, because the vast majority of her poetry (songs) have been lost, poetry which was (for the first time) a kind of self-writing, a life-writing dramatizing the author’s own desires, consciousness and lived experience. The sources we do have constitute quite a few testimonies, many centuries years later, including Greek scenic vases (closer to Sappho’s time) and satiric caricatures from Athenian drama, all of which is more conjecture and gossip than anything like historical fact. Already by 400 BCE, Sappho was legend. Plato, who envied and hated poets, called her the Tenth Muse. Yet her fame was the stuff of theater: