page_title: Sappho
section_title: Surviving poetry
hierarchical_section_title: Sappho / Works / Surviving poetry
caption_attribution_description: English: Fragment of Papyrus preserving parts of two poems by Sappho. The papyrus measures 176 x 111mm. The top 20 lines are the final five stanzas of the Brothers Poem; the final 9 lines are the beginning of the Kypris poem. The text was written some time between the first and third centuries AD. The papyrus was published for the first time by Dirk Obbink in 2014.
context_page_description: Sappho was an Archaic Greek poet from the island of Lesbos. Sappho is known for her lyric poetry, written to be sung while accompanied by a lyre. In ancient times, Sappho was widely regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets and was given names such as the "Tenth Muse" and "The Poetess". Most of Sappho's poetry is now lost, and what is extant has mostly survived in fragmentary form; two notable exceptions are the "Ode to Aphrodite" and the Tithonus poem. As well as lyric poetry, ancient commentators claimed that Sappho wrote elegiac and iambic poetry. Three epigrams attributed to Sappho are extant, but these are actually Hellenistic imitations of Sappho's style.
  Little is known of Sappho's life. She was from a wealthy family from Lesbos, though her parents' names are uncertain. Ancient sources say that she had three brothers; the names of two of them, Charaxos and Larichos, are mentioned in the Brothers Poem discovered in 2014. She was exiled to Sicily around 600 BC, and may have continued to work until around 570. Later legends surrounding Sappho's love for the ferryman Phaon and her death are unreliable.
  Sappho was a prolific poet, probably composing around 10,000 lines.
context_section_description: The earliest surviving manuscripts of Sappho, including the potsherd on which fragment 2 is preserved, date to the third century BC, and thus predate the Alexandrian edition. The latest surviving copies of Sappho’s poems transmitted directly from ancient times are written on parchment codex pages from the sixth and seventh centuries AD, and were surely reproduced from ancient papyri now lost. Manuscript copies of Sappho's works may have survived a few centuries longer, but around the 9th century her poetry appears to have disappeared, and by the twelfth century, John Tzetzes could write that "the passage of time has destroyed Sappho and her works".
  According to legend, Sappho's poetry was lost because the church disapproved of her morals.  These legends appear to have originated in the renaissance – around 1550, Jerome Cardan wrote that Gregory Nazianzen had Sappho's work publicly destroyed, and at the end of the sixteenth century Joseph Justus Scaliger claimed that Sappho's works were burned in Rome and Constantinople in 1073 on the orders of Pope Gregory VII.
  In reality, Sappho's work was probably lost as the demand for it was insufficiently great for it to be copied onto parchment when codices superseded papyrus scrolls as the predominant form of book. Another contributing factor to the loss of Sappho's poems may have been the perceived obscurity of her Aeolic dialect, which contains many archaisms and innovations absent from other ancient Greek dialects. During the Roman period, by which time the Attic dialect had become the standard for literary compositions, many readers found Sappho's dialect difficult to understand and, in the second century AD, the Roman author Apuleius specifically remarks on its "strangeness".
  Only approximately 650 lines of Sappho's poetry still survive, of which just one poem – the "Ode to Aphrodite" – is complete, and more than half of the original lines survive in around ten more fragments.  Many of the surviving fragments of Sappho contain only a single word  – for example, fragment 169A is simply a word meaning "wedding gifts", and survives as part of a dictionary of rare words.  The two major sources of surviving fragments of Sappho are quotations in other ancient works, from a whole poem to as little as a single word, and fragments of papyrus, many of which were discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.  Other fragments survive on other materials, including parchment and potsherds.  The oldest surviving fragment of Sappho currently known is the Cologne papyrus which contains the Tithonus poem, dating to the third century BC.
  Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, only the ancient quotations of Sappho survived.  In 1879, the first new discovery of a fragment of Sappho was made at Fayum.  By the end of the nineteenth century, Grenfell and Hunt had begun to excavate an ancient rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus, leading to the discoveries of many previously unknown fragments of Sappho.  Fragments of Sappho continue to be rediscovered.  Most recently, major discoveries in 2004 (the "Tithonus poem" and a new, previously unknown fragment) and 2014 (fragments of nine poems: five already known but with new readings, four, including the "Brothers Poem", not previously known) have been reported in the media around the world.
caption: P. Sapph. Obbink: the fragment of papyrus on which the Sappo's Brothers Poem was discovered
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