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that we’re unable to read, much less assess critically; imagine what the name Homer would mean to Western civilization if all we had of the Iliad and the Odyssey was their reputations and, say, ninety lines of each poem. The Greeks, in fact, seem to have thought of Sappho as the female counterpart of Homer: he was known as ‘the Poet’, and they referred to her as ‘the Poetess’. Many scholars now see her poetry as an attempt to appropriate and ‘feminize’ the diction and subject matter of heroic epic. (For instance, the appeal to Aphrodite to be her ‘comrade in arms’ – in love.)

      The good news is that the surviving fragments of Sappho bear out the ancient verdict. One fine example is her best-known verse, known to classicists as Fragment 31, which consists of four sapphic stanzas. (They appear below in my own translation.) These were singled out by the author of a first-century-AD literary treatise called ‘On the Sublime’ for the way in which they ‘select and juxtapose the most striking, intense symptoms of erotic passion’. Here the speaker expresses her envy of the men who, presumably in the course of certain kinds of social occasions, have a chance to talk to the girl she yearns for:

      He seems to me an equal of the gods –

      whoever gets to sit across from you

      and listen to the sound of your sweet speech

      so close to him,

      to your beguiling laughter: O it makes my

      panicked heart go fluttering in my chest,

      for the moment I catch sight of you there’s no

      speech left in me,

      but tongue gags –: all at once a faint

      fever courses down beneath the skin,

      eyes no longer capable of sight, a thrum-

      ming in the ears,

and sweat drips down my body, and the shakes

      lay siege to me all over, and I’m greener

      than grass, I’m just a little short of dying,

      I seem to me;

      but all must be endured, since even a pauper …

      Even without its final lines (which, maddeningly, the author of the treatise didn’t go on to quote), it’s a remarkable work. Slyly, the speaker avoids physical description of the girl, instead evoking her beauty by detailing the effect it has on the beholder; the whole poem is a kind of reaction shot. The verses subtly enact the symptoms they describe: as the poet’s faculties fail one by one in the overpowering presence of her beloved, the outside world – the girl, the man she’s talking to – dissolves and disappears from the poem, too, leaving the speaker in a kind of interior echo chamber. The arc from ‘he seems to me’ in the first line to the solipsistic ‘I seem to me’ at the end says it all.

      Even the tiniest scraps can be potent, as Rayor’s plainspoken and comprehensive translation makes clear. (Until now, the most noteworthy English version to include translations of virtually every fragment was ‘If Not, Winter’, the 2002 translation by the poet and classicist Anne Carson.) To flip through these truncated texts is a strangely moving experience, one that has been compared to ‘reading a note in a bottle’:

      You came, I yearned for you,

      and you cooled my senses that burned with desire

      or

love shook my senses

      like wind crashing on mountain oaks

      or

      Maidenhood, my maidenhood, where have you gone

      leaving me behind?

      Never again will I come to you, never again

      or

      Once again Love, that loosener of limbs,

      bittersweet and inescapable, crawling thing,

      seizes me.

      It’s in that last verse that the notion of desire as ‘bittersweet’ appears for the first time in Western literature.

      The very incompleteness of the verses can heighten the starkness of the emotions – a fact that a number of contemporary classicists and translators have made much of. For Stanley Lombardo, whose Sappho: Poems and Fragments (2002) offers a selection of about a quarter of the fragments, the truncated remains are like ‘beautiful, isolated limbs’. The late Thomas Habinek, a classicist at the University of Southern California, nicely summed up this rather postmodern aspect of Sappho’s appeal: ‘The fragmentary preservation of poems of yearning and separation serves as a reminder of the inevitable incompleteness of human knowledge and affection.’

In Sappho’s biography, as in her work, gaps predominate. A few facts can be inferred by triangulating various sources: the poems themselves, ancient reference works, and citations in later classical writers who had access to information that has since been lost. The Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia of ancient culture, which is the basis of much of our information, asserts that Sappho ‘flourished’ between 612 and 608 BC; from this, scholars have concluded that she was born around 640. She was likely past middle age when she died, since in at least one poem she complains about her greying hair and cranky knees.

      Although her birthplace cannot be verified, Sappho seems to have lived mostly in Mytilene, the capital of Lesbos. Just across the strip of water that separates Lesbos from the mainland of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) was the opulent city of Sardis, the capital of Lydia. Some classicists have argued that the proximity of Lesbos to this lush Eastern trading hub helps to explain Sappho’s taste for visual gorgeousness and sensual luxury: the ‘myrrh, cassia, and frankincense’, the ‘bracelets, fragrant / purple robes, iridescent trinkets, / countless silver cups, and ivory’ that waft and glitter in her lines, often in striking counterpoint to their raw emotionality.

Mytilene was constantly seething with political and social dramas occasioned by rivalries and shifting alliances among aristocratic clans. Sappho belonged to one of these – there’s a fragment in which she chastises a friend ‘of bad character’ for siding with a rival clan – and a famous literary contemporary, a poet called Alcaeus, belonged to another. Alcaeus often refers to the island’s political turbulence in his poems, and it’s possible that at some point Sappho and her family fled, or were exiled, to Southern Italy: Cicero refers in one of his speeches to a statue of the poet that had been erected in the town hall of Syracuse, in Sicily. The Victorian critic John Addington Symonds saw the unstable political milieu of Sappho’s homeland as entwined with the heady erotic climate of her poems. Lesbos, he wrote in an 1872 essay on the poet, was ‘the island of overmastering passions’.

      Some things seem relatively certain, then. But when it comes to Sappho’s personal life – the aspect of her biography that scholars and readers are most eager to know about – the ancient record is confused. What did Sappho look like? A dialogue by Plato, written in the fourth century BC, refers to her as ‘beautiful’; a later author insisted that she was ‘very ugly, being short and swarthy’. Who were her family? The Suda (which gives eight possible names for Sappho’s father) asserts that she had a daughter and a mother both named Kleïs, a gaggle of brothers, and a wealthy husband named Kerkylas, from the island of Andros. But some of these seemingly precious facts merely show that the encyclopedia – which, as old as it is, was compiled fifteen centuries after Sappho lived – could be prone to comic misunderstandings. ‘Kerkylas’, for instance, looks a lot like kerkos, Greek slang for ‘penis’, and ‘Andros’ is very close to the word for ‘man’; and so the encyclopedia turns out to have been unwittingly recycling a tired old joke about oversexed Sappho, who was married to ‘Dick of Man’.

Many other alleged facts of Sappho’s biography similarly dissolve on close scrutiny. Was Sappho really a mother? There is indeed a fragment that mentions a girl named Kleïs, ‘whose form resembles golden blossoms’, but the word that some people have translated as ‘daughter’ can also mean ‘child’, or even

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