Sappho
A poet on Lesbos writes about desire in the first person, and antiquity calls her the tenth Muse.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 30 years
- Known to
- ± 20 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
Sappho composes lyric poetry to be sung to the lyre, addressing love, longing and jealousy with a directness and psychological precision that had no precedent. Ancient critics ranked her with Homer. Almost all of it is lost — one complete poem survives, the rest in fragments, many recovered from papyrus used to stuff mummies. Her name and her island supply two words still used for love between women.