welcome back to the deep dive today we are attempting
something that um feels a bit like ghost hunting
that's a good way to put it we're trying to tune
into a frequency that has been almost entirely
drowned out by the static of what 26 centuries
2600 years yeah it's almost impossible to even
imagine We're going back to the archaic period
of Greece, specifically the late 7th century
BC, to talk about a writer who is, at the same
time, the most famous and maybe the most invisible
figure in the entire Western canon. We are talking
about Sappho. Sappho of Lesbos. No. And, you
know, that name carries so much weight. In antiquity,
she wasn't just a poet. Plato, of all people,
referred to her as the 10th muse. Other sources,
they just called her the poetess. Right. In the
same way Homer was just the poet. Exactly. There
was no need for a name. The title was enough.
Everybody knew who you were talking about. That
distinction, the poetess, is what really stopped
me in my tracks when I was prepping the stack
for today. It implies a level of fame, of ubiquity,
that is. It's just hard for us to grasp now.
It is. But here's the hook, and really the tragedy
of this entire deep dive. We are essentially
profiling a phantom. Scholars estimate her total
output was somewhere around 10 ,000 lines of
poetry. That is the going estimate, yes. And
that's based on how the scholars at the Library
of Alexandria organized her work. Centuries after
her death, they filled nine distinct volumes.
Nine books. Nine full papyrus rolls. And today,
today we have... What is it? Roughly 650 lines.
And I mean, lines is a generous term for some
of them. It really is. We're talking about a
single word on a tiny shred of papyrus or a phrase
quoted by some later grammarian just to explain
a verb tense. Completely out of context. We have
lost about 97 percent of the work of someone
who was considered the equal of Homer. It is.
And I don't think this is an exaggeration. Arguably
the greatest single loss in the history of world
literature. How do you even come back from that?
Well, that's the challenge. Imagine if all we
had of Shakespeare were, say, two sonnets and
maybe three random sentences from Hamlet. And
from that, you had to reconstruct his entire
reputation, his genius. That's the task we face
with Sappho. So, OK. Our mission today is to
sift through this debris. We're going to try
to reconstruct the woman, the music, because
this was absolutely music, not just text, and
all the controversy that has surrounded her for
millennia. It is a lot of controversy. And I
want to get into the weeds on this. I want to
understand not just that we lost her, but how.
How does a civilization lose an author of that
magnitude? That how? It's a real detective story.
It involves changing technology, linguistics,
religious shifts, and honestly, just plain neglect.
But before we get to how we lost her, we need
to understand who we lost. We have to ground
her in some kind of reality, because for a very
long time, Sappho was treated almost like a mythological
creature, not a real person. That's right. So
let's start with the basics. The map. Right.
So she's from the island of Lesbos. It's in the
northeastern Aegean, very close to the coast
of modern -day Turkey. Yes. And she was born
around 630 BC. Maybe a little earlier, maybe
a little later. The dates are a bit fuzzy. And
I think we need to clear up a misconception right
away. When people hear Greek island, they might
picture some quaint backwater fishing village.
Lesbos wasn't that at all. Oh, not even close.
Far from it. In the 7th century BC, Lesbos, and
specifically the main city of Mytilene, where
Sappho probably lived, was a powerhouse. It was
a thriving commercial hub. A cultural center.
A huge cultural center, yeah. It was deeply connected
to the kingdom of Lydia on the mainland, which
was fabulously wealthy. Mylene was sophisticated,
it was rich, and it was culturally very distinct
from places like Athens or Sparta, which get
all the attention in the history books. And a
big part of that distinction was the language,
wasn't it? They spoke a different dialect of
Greek. Yes, Aeolic Greek. And that distinction
is... Absolutely crucial to her whole story,
especially to the story of why she disappeared.
How different was it, really? Like, could an
Athenian understand someone from Lesbos? They
could, but it would sound strange. Provincial
to an Athenian ear. Aeolic had different vowel
shifts, the accentuation was different, and it
kept some really archaic letters, like the digamma.
The digamma. Okay, what's that? It's basically
a W sound. Most other dialects had lost it by
this point, but Aeolic kept it. So the language
itself had this specific flavor, this sense of
otherness compared to the mainland Greeks who
would later dominate the historical record. And
Sappho wasn't just some random citizen living
there. She was aristocracy through and through.
Oh, absolutely. The sources, even the confusing
and contradictory ones, all suggest she was part
of a very specific social stratum that was incredibly
wealthy and, and this is key, incredibly unstable.
What do you mean by unstable? Well, she was...
Almost certainly a member of the old landed gentry,
what the Greeks called a genos. The biographical
tradition links her family to the high stakes
and often violent local politics of the island.
And you can see the wealth in the poems themselves,
right? In the fragments. You can. She talks about
purple headbands from Sardis, the capital of
Lydia. She mentions ivory, gold, fragrant perfumes.
These aren't the observations of a commoner.
This is the inventory of a woman who knows what
the best things in life are and what they cost.
But as you said, the money didn't buy safety.
This was one of the things that surprised me
most in the prep. She was an exile. We have this
image of her sitting in a quiet garden, strumming
a lyre, but she was actually a political refugee
for a period of her life. That's right. There's
a document called the Pecurian Chronicle. It's
this huge marble steel that was found on the
island of Paros, and it lists major events in
Greek history year by year. A timeline set in
stone. Literally. And it records that Sappho
was exiled to Sicily somewhere around 600 B .C.
This puts her right in the middle of the violent
factional conflicts that were tearing Mytilene
apart at the time. So what was going on? The
old aristocratic families like hers were fighting
against a series of tyrants. Now, tyrants in
the Greek sense doesn't mean evil dictator necessarily.
It just means someone who seized power outside
the normal constitutional order. A strongman.
A strongman, exactly. And one of them, a man
named Piticus, eventually consolidated power.
Empinicus is an interesting figure because he's
later remembered as one of the seven sages of
Greece. History paints him as this wise, benevolent
ruler. It does. But if you're Sappho or a member
of her family, he's the guy who kicked you out
of your home and forced you to flee across the
sea. It's a different perspective. A very different
perspective. Her contemporary and fellow poet
from Lesbos, Alcaeus. wrote these vicious, scathing
attack poems against Piticus. Sappho's work is
much more subtle about the politics, but the
fact of the exile proves she wasn't just a bystander.
She was part of a clan that was powerful enough
and dangerous enough to need removing. So that's
the political backdrop. Let's get more personal.
Let's talk about the rest of the clan. The family
dynamics are where we start to see the real woman
peeking through the cracks of history. Yes, because
we have names. We do. We have accounts of three
brothers, Caraxos, Larichos, and Eurygios. And
the drama with Caraxos is honestly something
you'd see on a reality TV show today. The Caraxos
saga is our best glimpse into Sappho as a sort
of moral authority within her own family. The
story is preserved by Herodotus, the historian,
and a few other sources. And what's the story?
The story is that Caraxas was a merchant. He
sailed a lot. trading goods, probably wine from
Lesbos. On one of his trips, he's in Nacridus,
which was a Greek trading post in Egypt. Okay.
And while he's there, he becomes completely infatuated
with a very famous courtesan, a hetera named
Rhodopis. And infatuated is putting it mildly
from what I've read. He spent an absolute fortune
on her. A colossal family -ruining fortune. He
ransomed her. He bought her freedom from her
pimp. presumably so he could live with her. This
is a massive drain on the family estate. And
a huge public embarrassment. A huge embarrassment.
And when he finally returns to Lesbos, Sappho
doesn't exactly welcome him home with open arms.
She reportedly savaged him in her poetry. She
called him out publicly for it. Now, for a long
time, this was dismissed as just a story, right?
Maybe something Herodotus picked up and embellished.
But this is where the archaeology, the recent
discoveries come in and just change everything.
This is the Brothers' poem. Its discovery, or
at least its publication in 2014, was a pivotal
moment in Sappho's studies. What does it say?
The papyrus proves that the family drama wasn't
just gossip. In the poem, the speaker, who is
undeniably Sappho, is praying. She's expressing
this deep anxiety about Caraxes' ship arriving
safely. She prays to the Nereids, the sea nymphs,
for his safe return. So she's worried about him.
She is, but the tone is tense. It's not just...
I hope my dear brother is safe. It's more like,
I hope he gets back here in one piece and finally
fixes the mess he made and restores our family's
honor. It grounds her. It's incredible. It transforms
her from this abstract 10th muse into a sister
who is stressed out about the family finances
and her brother's terrible life choices. Exactly.
And then you have the other brother, Larichos.
He's a different story. Yeah, Larichos serves
a different function in her biography. He does.
Sappho, in another fragment, seems to boast that
he was a wine pourer in the Britannian. That
was the town hall of Medellin, the civic heart
of the city. Now, to a modern ear, bragging that
your brother is a waiter sounds odd. It sounds
very strange. My brother pours drinks for the
city council. Right. But in Medellin... This
wasn't a service job. It was a prestigious ritual
office. It was an honor reserved for the most
beautiful and highborn young men of the aristocracy.
So it was a public display of status. A public
display of the family status and of the boy's
physical perfection, his kalos. By mentioning
this, Satho is signaling to her audience, we
are the elite. We are the beautiful people. We
are the ones who serve the gods and the state
in these honored positions. Okay, so we have...
the messy brother and the perfect brother. Now
we have to address the husband. And this, for
me, is my favorite part of the Sappho myth because
it reveals so much about how history, specifically
male -dominated history, treated her. Oh, this
is a classic. The Pseudo, which is this massive
Byzantine encyclopedia from the 10th century
AD. So... written over 1 ,500 years after she
died. Right. It claims she was married to a man
named Curculus of Andros. And this is, without
a doubt, the most famous dirty joke in all of
classical scholarship. It has to be. I mean,
break down the etymology for us because it is
not subtle. It is aggressively unsubtle. The
name Curculus is derived from the Greek word
kirkos, which means tail, but was standard. Common
slang for penis. Okay. And Andros, while being
a real Greek island, is also the genitive form
of the word anurner, which means man. So? So
the encyclopedia effectively records that the
greatest female poet in history was married to
Dick Alcock from the Isle of Man. It's just unbelievable
that this made it into a serious reference work,
but it didn't come from nowhere, right? This
joke had an origin. All certainly. It came from
the comic playwrights in Athens in the 4th century
BC, a couple hundred years after her death. Sappho
became a stock character in Athenian comedy.
And what was that character like? Well, the playwrights,
all men, didn't know what to do with a woman
of such power, fame, and independence. So they
neutralized her. They turned her into a joke.
Specifically, a sexually voracious heterosexual
joke. They couldn't compute a woman being a genius,
so they made her all about sex. Precisely. And
giving her a husband with a grotesque, hyper
-masculine name is a way of correcting her independence.
It's a way of saying, sure, she might be a genius,
but she's still defined by a man, even a ridiculously
named fictional one. It's a hostility that's
disguised as humor. And that same kind of hostility
seems to be what fuels the other big biographical
myth. The suicide. The leap from the Leucadian
cliffs. Exactly. The image of Sappho, heartbroken,
leaping to her death because a handsome ferryman
named Phaon didn't love her back. This image
is iconic. It dominated 19th century art. You
see these paintings of the tragic poetess, lyre
in hand, plunging into the sea. But it is pure,
100 % fiction. Phaon wasn't a real person. Phaon
is a figure from myth. He's an old ferryman who
was given the gift of magical youth and beauty
by the goddess Aphrodite. He wasn't a real guy.
Sappho deeded on Lysbos. So where did this story
come from? How did it get attached to her biography?
It's likely a conflation. A misreading. Sappho
probably wrote a poem about the myth of Phaon.
Or perhaps she wrote a poem where she adopted
the persona of a woman who was in love with him.
A common poetic device. And later readers took
it literally. Later readers who had lost the
nuance of the lyric persona assumed she was writing
a diary entry. They read a line like, I love
Fayon, and thought, oh, the historical Sappho
was in love with a historical guy named Fayon.
That is such a crucial distinction, the difference
between the poet and the persona. We don't assume
a novelist who writes about a murder is a murderer
themselves. We don't. But with female poets,
especially in the ancient world, there's this
persistent historical tendency to assume everything
is autobiography. And the suicide narrative,
it serves a similar function to the husband joke,
doesn't it? It does. It punishes her for her
greatness. If she kills herself over a man, it
re -centers her entire life's narrative around
male desire and rejection. It makes her tragic
and pathetic, rather than powerful and self -sufficient.
It straightens her legacy in the most violent
way possible. Okay, but there is one relationship
that scholars treat with a bit more respect,
and that's her relationship with her daughter,
Cleus. Yes, we have a beautiful and very famous...
where she speaks about her. She says, I have
a beautiful child, Pace, who looks like golden
flowers, my darling Clace. And then she says
she wouldn't trade her for all of Lydia. Not
even for all the wealth in the world. Exactly.
Now, the scholarly debate here has focused on
that word, Pace. Right, because it can mean different
things. It can. Pace can mean child, your biological
offspring. But it was also used in pederastic
context to mean a younger beloved or partner.
And it can even mean slave. So some people have
argued Clace might have been a younger lover,
not a daughter. Some have, yes. But in this specific
fragment, Sappho uses the word agapata, which
means beloved, in a way that usually implies
family affection. And the comparison to golden
flowers just feels so intensely maternal. The
overwhelming scholarly consensus is that Cleus
was her daughter and that she was probably named
after Sappho's own mother, which was the standard
Greek naming convention. OK, so if we strip away
prick from the Isle of Man and the melodramatic
cliff jumping, what are we left with? We're left
with a woman who is aristocratic, politically
active, deeply invested in her family's honor
and finances, and a mother, a real complex person
living in a turbulent time. That's life. Now
let's move to the work. The reason we are still
talking about her 2 ,600 years later? The poetry,
or more accurately, the songs. Yes. You mentioned
earlier the distinction between Sappho and the
epic poets like Homer or Hesiod. This shift to
what we call the lyric eye seems to be the defining
moment in the history of Western literature.
It's a seismic shift. It's impossible to overstate
how revolutionary it was. Think about the Iliad.
How does it begin? Sing, goddess of the wrath
of Achilles. The poet is invisible. Totally invisible.
He's just a conduit, a channel for the muse to
tell a grand story of gods and great men doing
great things on the battlefield. Sappho flips
the camera around. She points it directly at
herself, at her own feelings. She validates the
subjective individual experience as a worthy
subject for art. There's that incredible fragment.
It's fragment 16 where she makes this explicit.
She basically writes a manifesto for this new
kind of poetry. Yes. She writes, I just want
to pause on that for a second because it's so
incredibly bold. She is listing the ultimate
symbols of masculine power and glory in her world,
the army, the Navy. And she just dismisses them.
She's saying, That's your definition of value.
Mine is desire. It is a radical revaluation of
all values. She is asserting with total confidence
that the internal movements of the human heart
are just as valid, just as important a subject
for high art as the movements of armies. And
she's doing this in a culture that was hyper
-masculine and militaristic. And the way she
describes that desire, that love. It's not abstract
or philosophical. It's physical. It's visceral.
And I think to really understand how this would
have hit her original audience, we have to talk
about the mechanics of her music. We absolutely
do. Because we read these poems silently in books,
and that's just not how they were consumed. These
were songs. They were songs. The term lyric poetry
means poetry to be sung to the lyre. Sappho would
have performed these, most likely accompanying
herself on an instrument called the barbidos.
Which is a specific type of lyre. Different from
the standard one. Yes, the Barbidos was a longer
-armed lyre. It had a lower pitch than the standard
chili lyre that you see in a lot of Greek art.
It had a deeper, richer, more resonant sound.
And we even know something about the musical
scale she used. We do. The ancient sources tell
us she composed primarily in what they call the
Mixolydian mode. Okay, so explain that to those
of us who aren't music theorists. What does the
Mixolydian mode sound like? Well, in modern terms,
it's similar to a major scale. but with a flattened
seventh note. But for the Greeks, the modes weren't
just scales. They were associated with a specific
ethos, or emotional character. And what was the
character of the Mixolydian? It was considered
emotional, piercing, and even sorrowful. It was
a mode for high passion. The later Athenian tragedian
supposedly learned it from her work to use in
their most intense choral lamentations. So imagine
her words being sung to a deep -pitched instrument
with a melody that feels urgent, passionate,
and slightly unresolved. And then there's the
rhythm. We have to talk about the sapphic stanza.
This is a metrical form that she either invented
or at least perfected, and it's incredibly distinctive.
It is. It's famous. A sapphic stanza consists
of three identical long lines and then one short
concluding line, which is called the adonic.
And it has this very specific heartbeat to it.
It does. It has a rhythm that's something like
dum -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da. It creates
this driving forward momentum that pulls you
through the first three lines, and then that
short final line acts as a kind of break or a
punchline or a moment of reflection. It's a perfect
structure for conveying obsessive thought or
spiraling emotion. So let's look at how she uses
that vessel, that combination of music and rhythm,
in what we could call her greatest hits, the
fragments that have become famous. We have to
start with the Ode to Aphrodite, fragment one.
We have to. It's the only complete poem of hers
that we have. And it survived by a total fluke.
How did it survive? A literary critic from the
Roman period, a man named Dionysius of Halicarnassus,
quoted it in full in his treatise on literary
composition. He used it as the perfect example
of the polished or highly wrought style. He preserved
it by accident just because he thought it was
technically perfect. And the structure of this
poem is so fascinating because it starts out
like a very formal prayer, right? Deathless Aphrodite
of the spangled throne. Yes, it follows the strict
liturgical formula of what's called a colletic
hymn, a hymn of calling. You invoke the god,
you list their titles and attributes, you remind
them of past times they've helped you, and then
finally you make your current request. But Sappho
completely subverts the whole thing. She does.
Because when Aphrodite arrives in the poem, she
doesn't come in some grand chariot pulled by
fiery horses or dragons. She comes in a chariot
drawn by sparrows. Sparrow? Why sparrows? What's
the significance of that? In Greek symbolism,
sparrows were associated with lechery. They were
seen as hypersexual. constantly mating prolific
breeders. They were sacred to Aphrodite for that
reason. By choosing sparrows, Sappho is winking
at the audience. She's acknowledging the earthy,
urgent, erotic nature of her request. And then
the goddess actually speaks in the poem, and
she doesn't speak like some booming distant deity.
No, she speaks like an old friend, like a confidant.
The dialogue is so charming and intimate. Aphrodite
smiles and asks, Who is it this time, Sappho?
Who has wronged you? Who must I persuade to lead
you back to her love? And there's such a gentle
humor in that line, who is it this time? It implies
a long -standing pattern. Sappho is essentially
telling on herself. She's admitting she falls
in love constantly and always needs the goddess
to come bail her out. It's amazing. It portrays
the goddess of love not as this terrifying cosmic
force, but as a co -conspirator in Sappho's romantic
life. Okay, then we have fragment 31. This is
maybe her most famous poem after the ode. It's
the one that the Roman poet Catullus translated,
and it's basically the definitive medical description
of jealousy. It is a staggering piece of psychological
and physiological observation. The scenario is
simple. The speaker, Sappho, is watching the
woman she loves sitting across from a man. The
man is just there, listening to the woman laugh
and talk. And the sight of this completely dismantles
Sappho. The list of symptoms is just brutal.
It's not an emotion I felt jealous. It's a complete
physical collapse. It is. She says her tongue
breaks. A thin fire races just under her skin.
Her eyes see nothing but blackness. Her ears
are filled with a buzzing or roaring sound. Old
sweat. Yes. Sweat pours down her. A trembling
seizes her whole body. And then that famous,
unforgettable line. I am greener than grass.
Greener than grass. In English, we say pale as
a sheet, or maybe we connect green to envy, green
with envy. But here it implies a sickly, chlorotic
pallor, the color of a dying plant, like she's
actually dying. That's exactly it. The poem ends
with the line, I seem to myself to be a little
short of dying. This single poem established
the literary trope of love's sickness for the
next 2 ,000 years of Western literature. It defined
Eros not as a pleasant emotion, but as a pathology,
a disease that attacks the body from the outside
and takes it apart piece by piece. And finally,
let's touch on the Tithonus poem. This is one
of the more recent discoveries, or at least a
more complete version was found on that 2004
cologne papyrus. And it deals with aging, which
is a theme we don't often associate with the
poet of passionate love. It's a deeply moving
and very mature reflection on mortality. She
compares herself to the mythological figure Tithonus.
Right. He was the guy who asked for eternal life,
but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Exactly.
So he just got older and older and withered away
until he turned into a cicada. In the poem, Sappho
looks at her own aging body. Her hair that was
once black is now white. Her knees that used
to be nimble for dancing are now heavy and weak.
But she doesn't just despair. There's an affirmation
at the end. There is. It's a statement of incredible
resilience. She says, What does that word really
mean? It's hard to translate with one word. It
means delicacy. luxury, refinement, a certain
kind of tender beauty. She says that for her,
this love of beauty, Eros, is connected to the
desire for the sun, for brightness. She's choosing
to find value in the aesthetic beauty of the
world, even as her own physical capacity to participate
in, it fades. It's beautiful. So we have this
body of work that is psychologically acute, technically
perfect, and emotionally raw. Which brings us
back to the massive central question. How on
earth did we lose it? If she was the tenth muse,
if she was the poetess, why don't we have those
nine volumes? This is where we have to debunk
the popular villain of the story. Which is the
church burning the books. Right. There are these
persistent legends, which were very popular with
Renaissance scholars like Joseph Justice Scaliger
and Gerald Mocardano, that the early church,
specifically if that's just like Gregory Nazianzen
or Pope Gregory VII, ordered the public burning
of Sappho's works because they were too erotic,
too immoral, too pagan. It's a compelling story.
It's dramatic. It gives us a clear enemy censorship.
It's a great story. But there is zero contemporary
evidence for it ever happening. Not a single
source from the time mentions anything like it.
The truth is likely much more boring and in a
way much more tragic. It wasn't a bonfire. It
was a format change. The shift from the papyrus
scroll to the parchment codex. Exactly. From
about the 2nd to the 4th centuries AD, the entire
technology of the book changed. The world moved
from these long papyrus scrolls to parchment
codices, what we would recognize as a book with
pages. And this was an expensive process. Incredibly
expensive. You couldn't just copy everything
over. You had to make choices. So what gets copied?
You copy what's popular, what's being... taught
in schools, what's considered part of the standard
curriculum. And Sappho had a major strike against
her, the dialect. The Aeolic Greek we talked
about earlier. By the Roman period, the standard
literary Greek was Attic, the dialect of Athens.
To readers in the Roman Empire, Sappho's Aeolic
dialect looked weird on the page. It had strange
spellings, unfamiliar grammar. It was just...
plain hard to read. So it's like, imagine if
the greatest poet in English wrote in a very
heavy archaic regional dialect and then fast
forward 500 years and nobody speaks that dialect
anymore. Teachers aren't going to assign that
to their students because it's too much of a
headache to explain. That is the perfect analogy.
And if you're not on the syllabus, you don't
get copied. And if you don't get copies from
the scroll into the new durable codex format,
you effectively stay on the old decaying operating
system. And papyrus in a European climate. doesn't
last it has a shelf life of maybe a couple of
centuries if you're lucky before it rots or gets
eaten by worms or just falls apart so she wasn't
burned she just rotted away that is arguably
sadder than a bonfire it's death by neglect it
is it's the survival of the fittest applied to
literature where fitness equals ease of reading
and teaching she was too difficult so she was
left behind but And this is the incredible recovery
part of the story. Papyrus does survive in one
specific climate. The desert. The desert. And
that brings us to a place called Oxyrhynchus.
This name sounds like a dragon from a fantasy
novel, but it's a real town in Egypt. It means
city of the sharp -nosed fish. After fish, they
worship there. It was a provincial capital in
Roman Egypt, and in the late 19th century, two
young Oxford archaeologists, Bernard Grenfell
and Arthur Hunt, went there. And they weren't
looking for gold tombs or pharaohs? No, they
were looking for paper. Specifically, they were
looking for the town's ancient garbage dumps.
Literal trash heaps. Mounds of trash, some of
them 30 feet high. And because of the incredibly
dry sand, the garbage had been mummified for
centuries. They started digging, and what they
found was a literary treasure trove. What kind
of stuff was in there? Everything. Tax receipts,
census returns, private letters, shopping lists,
and torn up books. It turns out when the ancients
were done with a scroll or it got too damaged,
they just threw it in the trash like we would
an old newspaper. So this is where our fragments
of Sappho come from. A huge number of them, yes.
Grenfell and Hunt shipped massive wicker baskets
full of this literary garbage back to Oxford.
And for the last 120 plus years, scholars have
been painstakingly piecing these fragments together
like the world's most difficult jigsaw puzzle.
That's an amazing story. But the recovery isn't
over, and it's not all so clean. We have to talk
about the controversy surrounding the new finds.
That Brothers poem we mentioned earlier, that
didn't come from a regulated dig in the 1890s.
No, it didn't. It appeared on the antiquities
market in 2014. And this is the dark side of
the recovery story. It is. The Brothers poem,
and another one, the Kipris poem, were published
by a scholar named Dirk Abink. The initial story
he told was that they came from a private collection.
and that they had possibly been extracted from
pipa mache mummy cartonage, basically old papyrus
recycled to make mummy masks. But that story
fell apart pretty quickly. It fell apart spectacularly.
It turned out the provenance, the history of
ownership, was extremely murky. Allegations began
to fly that these fragments had been looted or
stolen from the official Oxyrhynchus collection
at Oxford and then sold illegally on the black
market. And this connects to the Green Collection,
right? The family behind the Hobby Lobby craft
store chain? Yes. They were buying up huge quantities
of biblical artifacts, often with very questionable
provenance, for their Museum of the Bible. It's
a whole tangled web of scholarship, money, and
the illicit antiquities trade. So even now, the
very act of recovering her voice is tainted by
this modern underworld. It complicates things
immensely. We have the text, and the text is
authentic. It's definitely Sappho. But... The
path it took to get to us in the 21st century
involves potential crimes. It just adds another
layer of shadow and controversy to her history.
OK, so let's pivot to the final puzzle piece
here, the social context. We know what she wrote.
We have some idea of how we found it. But we
still argue intensely about who she was in her
own society. Specifically, what was she doing
with all these young women she writes about in
her poems? This is the great Sappho question,
as it's sometimes called. For the last century
and a half, scholars have been trying to categorize
her circle to put a neat label on it. And the
Victorian favorite, the one that dominated for
a long time, was the schoolmistress theory. This
was championed by the great German philologist
Ulrich von Willem of Molendorf. He was a giant
in the field, but he simply could not reconcile
great poetry with what he saw as immoral lesbian
sexuality. So he came up with an explanation.
He argued that Sappho was essentially a headmistress
of a Mechen Pensionat, a German -style boarding
school for elite young girls. Which is such a
projection of his own time onto the past. It's
like Jane Eyre superimposed on archaic Greece.
It's a complete anachronism. He argued that the
love she expressed in the poems was purely pedagogical,
that she was just a teacher training these girls
in the arts to prepare them to be good wives
for aristocratic men. It was an attempt to sanitize
her, to make her respectable and safe for the
19th century classroom. But there's no evidence
for it. Absolutely none. There is no ancient
source that ever suggests she ran a school. OK,
so if not a school, what's another theory? Another
one is the Theosos theory that she was the leader
of a religious cult or association. A Theosos?
Exactly. We know that these kinds of religious
associations for women existed. So if Sappho
was the leader of a group of women dedicated
to the worship of goddesses like Aphrodite and
the Muses, it would explain the hymns, the ritual
language, and the strong sense of group identity
you find in the poems. It's more plausible in
the school. But the theory that seems to be gaining
the most traction now is the symposium theory.
Right. We know that aristocratic Greek men had
symposia. These were formal drinking parties
where they would recline, drink wine, recite
poetry, do business, and solidify political and
erotic relationships. So the idea is that women
did this too. The idea is that Sappho Circle
was a female counterpart to the male symposium.
A group of elite, aristocratic women gathering
in a private space to dine, drink, compose and
perform poetry for each other, and forge their
own social, emotional, and erotic bonds. And
that leads us, unavoidably, to the sexuality
question. The elephant that has been in the room
for centuries, was she a lesbian? Well, the answer
really depends on your definition of the word
lesbian. Break that down for us. What do you
mean? Okay, so if you mean lesbian as a modern
identity category, a fixed sexual orientation
that defines a person's core being based on exclusive
attraction to other women, then that concept
didn't really exist in antiquity. That's the
social constructionist argument. Yes, influenced
by thinkers like Michel Foucault. That school
of thought would argue that applying the label
lesbian to Sappho is anachronistic. It's imposing
our modern categories onto a world that didn't
have them. Because for the Greeks, sexuality
was more about acts than identity. And about
power dynamics, active versus passive? Generally
speaking, yes. However, other scholars, like
Judith Hallett, for example, argue that this
is just semantic hair splitting. Ah, so. They
would say, look at the poems. Sappho clearly
centers her emotional and her erotic life on
women. The electricity in her poetry, that passion,
is directed at women. Men, when they appear at
all, are usually rivals, obstacles, or peripheral
figures like her brothers. It's just, it's kind
of wild that the word lesbian itself. comes directly
from her home island and the word sapphic comes
from her name she is the literal etymological
root of the entire concept she is which makes
it all the more ironic that history spent so
much time and energy trying to deny it as we
said the comedy writers in athens made her into
a promiscuous heterosexual then the victorians
made her into a chaste sexless school teacher
It wasn't really until the modern era that we
allowed ourselves to just read the text for what
it plainly says. Speaking of reading the text,
let's look at her legacy. Who were the people
who kept the flame alive through those long centuries?
Well, the Romans were absolutely pivotal. The
poet Catullus, as we discussed, didn't just translate
her work. He channeled her. He breathed her poetry.
He used her meter, the sapphic stanza, to write
about his own tortured love affair. He did. And
in a move that's just the ultimate tribute, he
even named his own lover Lesbia in his poems.
That is the ultimate hat tip. Every single time
a Roman read the name Lesbia, they were being
reminded of Sappho and her island. Exactly. He
was placing himself in her lineage. And another
one of the great Roman poets, Horace, also wrote
extensively in her meters. He famously called
her Mascula Sappho. Masculine Sappho. Which sounds
like an insult to our ears. It does, but it was
almost certainly meant as a high compliment.
It was a recognition of her poetic power, her
gravitas. He was acknowledging that she could
stand toe to toe with any of the men in the canon.
So the Romans revered her. Then we have the long
gap of the Middle Ages, and then she reemerges
in a big way in the 19th century. The decadent
writers, they seem to have a weird, dark obsession
with her. They did. Writers like Charles Boller
in France and Algernon Charles Swinburne in England,
they were reacting against that prim, proper
schoolmistress image. They swung to the other
extreme. Completely. They turned Sappho into
this figure of dark, forbidden sexuality, a daughter
of Desaad. They were fascinated by the idea of
the lesbian vampire, the doomed sinner, the tragic,
perverse anti -heroine. It was still a projection,
just a much darker and more lurid one. And then
after them, the imagists, Ezra Pound, H .D. Yes.
Pound and the Modernists loved the fragmentation
itself. They looked at the broken papyri where
you have a single word, then a gap, then another
phrase. And they saw a modern aesthetic. They
felt the gaps, the silence, made the poetry more
powerful, more open to interpretation. A line
like, spring too long. Gangula. It's pure minimalism.
It is. And it had a huge influence on the way
modern poetry looks on the page, with all of
its white space. And finally, and maybe most
importantly, feminism. The most significant reclamation
of all. In the late 20th century, feminist scholars
and poets finally stopped trying to explain away
her life or her desires and started celebrating
them. She became a kind of matriarch, the new
woman of antiquity independent, articulate, economically
autonomous, and the head of a lost tradition
of female art. It really is a miracle of a survival
story when you think about it. We started with
10 ,000 lines. We lost 97 % of it, mostly due
to a format change and a difficult dialect. And
yet somehow she is still here. She is still the
poetess. It's a profound paradox, isn't it? We
know so little about her factually, and yet she
feels closer, more immediate than almost any
other ancient author. Homer feels like a marble
statue. Sappho feels like a real person whispering
in your ear. So as we wrap up, what does this
all mean for us? Why does Sappho still matter
so much, aside from the hysterical curiosity
of it all? I think for me, it connects all the
way back to that lyric I we started with. Sappho
teaches us that the small internal movements
of the heart jealousy over a lover's glance,
desire, the fear of losing your looks, the anxiety
about a brother's bad behavior, are just as epic
as the Trojan War. She validated the interior
life as a subject worthy of the highest art.
That's a powerful takeaway. The intimate is epic.
And I would leave you, the listener, with one
last provocative thought to mull over. We mourn
the loss of the nine volumes. We wish we had
it all. But I want you to ask yourself, do we
love Safa for what she said? Or do we perhaps
love her for the silence? The silence. What do
you mean? The gaps. The missing pieces. Because
she is so fragmented, she becomes a mirror. The
Victorians looked into the gaps and they saw
a respectable school teacher. The decadents looked
and saw a dangerous sinner. The feminists looked
and saw a revolutionary foremother. If we had
all 10 ,000 lines, if we knew every detail of
her potentially mundane daily life, would she
still hold the same mystique? Or does the very
fragmentation invite us, force us, to co -author
the poems with her, filling in the blanks with
our own desires, our own stories? That is definitely
something to think about. Maybe the fragments
aren't a tragedy. Maybe they're an invitation.
I would encourage everyone listening, go find
a good translation, Anne Carson's Academy. If
not, Winter is fantastic because she preserves
the brackets and the empty space on the page.
Read one of those broken lines and just see what
you fill the blank with. Thanks for listening
to this deep dive. We'll see you next time.