WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.480 welcome back to the deep dive today we are attempting 00:00:02.480 --> 00:00:06.299 something that um feels a bit like ghost hunting 00:00:06.299 --> 00:00:08.279 that's a good way to put it we're trying to tune 00:00:08.279 --> 00:00:11.039 into a frequency that has been almost entirely 00:00:11.039 --> 00:00:13.900 drowned out by the static of what 26 centuries 00:00:13.900 --> 00:00:16.579 2600 years yeah it's almost impossible to even 00:00:16.579 --> 00:00:19.760 imagine We're going back to the archaic period 00:00:19.760 --> 00:00:22.739 of Greece, specifically the late 7th century 00:00:22.739 --> 00:00:26.260 BC, to talk about a writer who is, at the same 00:00:26.260 --> 00:00:28.920 time, the most famous and maybe the most invisible 00:00:28.920 --> 00:00:32.219 figure in the entire Western canon. We are talking 00:00:32.219 --> 00:00:35.700 about Sappho. Sappho of Lesbos. No. And, you 00:00:35.700 --> 00:00:38.179 know, that name carries so much weight. In antiquity, 00:00:38.179 --> 00:00:41.179 she wasn't just a poet. Plato, of all people, 00:00:41.299 --> 00:00:44.340 referred to her as the 10th muse. Other sources, 00:00:44.420 --> 00:00:46.039 they just called her the poetess. Right. In the 00:00:46.039 --> 00:00:48.560 same way Homer was just the poet. Exactly. There 00:00:48.560 --> 00:00:50.500 was no need for a name. The title was enough. 00:00:50.740 --> 00:00:53.000 Everybody knew who you were talking about. That 00:00:53.000 --> 00:00:55.659 distinction, the poetess, is what really stopped 00:00:55.659 --> 00:00:57.420 me in my tracks when I was prepping the stack 00:00:57.420 --> 00:01:01.500 for today. It implies a level of fame, of ubiquity, 00:01:01.500 --> 00:01:03.579 that is. It's just hard for us to grasp now. 00:01:03.780 --> 00:01:06.439 It is. But here's the hook, and really the tragedy 00:01:06.439 --> 00:01:08.959 of this entire deep dive. We are essentially 00:01:08.959 --> 00:01:12.280 profiling a phantom. Scholars estimate her total 00:01:12.280 --> 00:01:14.700 output was somewhere around 10 ,000 lines of 00:01:14.700 --> 00:01:17.560 poetry. That is the going estimate, yes. And 00:01:17.560 --> 00:01:19.500 that's based on how the scholars at the Library 00:01:19.500 --> 00:01:22.900 of Alexandria organized her work. Centuries after 00:01:22.900 --> 00:01:25.519 her death, they filled nine distinct volumes. 00:01:25.700 --> 00:01:28.980 Nine books. Nine full papyrus rolls. And today, 00:01:29.239 --> 00:01:33.659 today we have... What is it? Roughly 650 lines. 00:01:34.040 --> 00:01:36.359 And I mean, lines is a generous term for some 00:01:36.359 --> 00:01:38.260 of them. It really is. We're talking about a 00:01:38.260 --> 00:01:41.840 single word on a tiny shred of papyrus or a phrase 00:01:41.840 --> 00:01:44.299 quoted by some later grammarian just to explain 00:01:44.299 --> 00:01:46.760 a verb tense. Completely out of context. We have 00:01:46.760 --> 00:01:49.400 lost about 97 percent of the work of someone 00:01:49.400 --> 00:01:51.780 who was considered the equal of Homer. It is. 00:01:51.819 --> 00:01:54.159 And I don't think this is an exaggeration. Arguably 00:01:54.159 --> 00:01:56.219 the greatest single loss in the history of world 00:01:56.219 --> 00:01:58.019 literature. How do you even come back from that? 00:01:58.430 --> 00:02:00.689 Well, that's the challenge. Imagine if all we 00:02:00.689 --> 00:02:03.590 had of Shakespeare were, say, two sonnets and 00:02:03.590 --> 00:02:06.209 maybe three random sentences from Hamlet. And 00:02:06.209 --> 00:02:08.270 from that, you had to reconstruct his entire 00:02:08.270 --> 00:02:11.449 reputation, his genius. That's the task we face 00:02:11.449 --> 00:02:14.419 with Sappho. So, OK. Our mission today is to 00:02:14.419 --> 00:02:16.659 sift through this debris. We're going to try 00:02:16.659 --> 00:02:19.759 to reconstruct the woman, the music, because 00:02:19.759 --> 00:02:22.280 this was absolutely music, not just text, and 00:02:22.280 --> 00:02:24.259 all the controversy that has surrounded her for 00:02:24.259 --> 00:02:26.900 millennia. It is a lot of controversy. And I 00:02:26.900 --> 00:02:28.520 want to get into the weeds on this. I want to 00:02:28.520 --> 00:02:31.020 understand not just that we lost her, but how. 00:02:31.500 --> 00:02:34.360 How does a civilization lose an author of that 00:02:34.360 --> 00:02:38.550 magnitude? That how? It's a real detective story. 00:02:38.689 --> 00:02:40.770 It involves changing technology, linguistics, 00:02:40.990 --> 00:02:44.030 religious shifts, and honestly, just plain neglect. 00:02:44.409 --> 00:02:46.590 But before we get to how we lost her, we need 00:02:46.590 --> 00:02:48.530 to understand who we lost. We have to ground 00:02:48.530 --> 00:02:51.110 her in some kind of reality, because for a very 00:02:51.110 --> 00:02:53.289 long time, Sappho was treated almost like a mythological 00:02:53.289 --> 00:02:55.409 creature, not a real person. That's right. So 00:02:55.409 --> 00:02:57.689 let's start with the basics. The map. Right. 00:02:57.830 --> 00:03:00.330 So she's from the island of Lesbos. It's in the 00:03:00.330 --> 00:03:02.210 northeastern Aegean, very close to the coast 00:03:02.210 --> 00:03:04.469 of modern -day Turkey. Yes. And she was born 00:03:04.469 --> 00:03:07.599 around 630 BC. Maybe a little earlier, maybe 00:03:07.599 --> 00:03:10.099 a little later. The dates are a bit fuzzy. And 00:03:10.099 --> 00:03:12.219 I think we need to clear up a misconception right 00:03:12.219 --> 00:03:15.280 away. When people hear Greek island, they might 00:03:15.280 --> 00:03:18.360 picture some quaint backwater fishing village. 00:03:18.900 --> 00:03:21.340 Lesbos wasn't that at all. Oh, not even close. 00:03:21.599 --> 00:03:25.800 Far from it. In the 7th century BC, Lesbos, and 00:03:25.800 --> 00:03:27.900 specifically the main city of Mytilene, where 00:03:27.900 --> 00:03:31.539 Sappho probably lived, was a powerhouse. It was 00:03:31.539 --> 00:03:34.060 a thriving commercial hub. A cultural center. 00:03:34.219 --> 00:03:37.120 A huge cultural center, yeah. It was deeply connected 00:03:37.120 --> 00:03:39.159 to the kingdom of Lydia on the mainland, which 00:03:39.159 --> 00:03:42.099 was fabulously wealthy. Mylene was sophisticated, 00:03:42.479 --> 00:03:45.039 it was rich, and it was culturally very distinct 00:03:45.039 --> 00:03:47.659 from places like Athens or Sparta, which get 00:03:47.659 --> 00:03:49.419 all the attention in the history books. And a 00:03:49.419 --> 00:03:50.960 big part of that distinction was the language, 00:03:51.039 --> 00:03:52.879 wasn't it? They spoke a different dialect of 00:03:52.879 --> 00:03:55.280 Greek. Yes, Aeolic Greek. And that distinction 00:03:55.280 --> 00:03:58.039 is... Absolutely crucial to her whole story, 00:03:58.180 --> 00:04:00.300 especially to the story of why she disappeared. 00:04:00.580 --> 00:04:02.699 How different was it, really? Like, could an 00:04:02.699 --> 00:04:05.259 Athenian understand someone from Lesbos? They 00:04:05.259 --> 00:04:08.159 could, but it would sound strange. Provincial 00:04:08.159 --> 00:04:11.819 to an Athenian ear. Aeolic had different vowel 00:04:11.819 --> 00:04:14.539 shifts, the accentuation was different, and it 00:04:14.539 --> 00:04:17.199 kept some really archaic letters, like the digamma. 00:04:17.300 --> 00:04:19.379 The digamma. Okay, what's that? It's basically 00:04:19.379 --> 00:04:22.680 a W sound. Most other dialects had lost it by 00:04:22.680 --> 00:04:25.490 this point, but Aeolic kept it. So the language 00:04:25.490 --> 00:04:28.250 itself had this specific flavor, this sense of 00:04:28.250 --> 00:04:32.629 otherness compared to the mainland Greeks who 00:04:32.629 --> 00:04:34.709 would later dominate the historical record. And 00:04:34.709 --> 00:04:36.769 Sappho wasn't just some random citizen living 00:04:36.769 --> 00:04:39.110 there. She was aristocracy through and through. 00:04:39.370 --> 00:04:42.089 Oh, absolutely. The sources, even the confusing 00:04:42.089 --> 00:04:44.769 and contradictory ones, all suggest she was part 00:04:44.769 --> 00:04:47.810 of a very specific social stratum that was incredibly 00:04:47.810 --> 00:04:50.829 wealthy and, and this is key, incredibly unstable. 00:04:51.189 --> 00:04:53.430 What do you mean by unstable? Well, she was... 00:04:53.579 --> 00:04:55.779 Almost certainly a member of the old landed gentry, 00:04:55.860 --> 00:04:59.199 what the Greeks called a genos. The biographical 00:04:59.199 --> 00:05:01.500 tradition links her family to the high stakes 00:05:01.500 --> 00:05:04.100 and often violent local politics of the island. 00:05:04.279 --> 00:05:06.160 And you can see the wealth in the poems themselves, 00:05:06.379 --> 00:05:09.379 right? In the fragments. You can. She talks about 00:05:09.379 --> 00:05:11.579 purple headbands from Sardis, the capital of 00:05:11.579 --> 00:05:14.899 Lydia. She mentions ivory, gold, fragrant perfumes. 00:05:15.040 --> 00:05:16.980 These aren't the observations of a commoner. 00:05:17.139 --> 00:05:19.480 This is the inventory of a woman who knows what 00:05:19.480 --> 00:05:21.519 the best things in life are and what they cost. 00:05:22.279 --> 00:05:24.279 But as you said, the money didn't buy safety. 00:05:24.519 --> 00:05:26.500 This was one of the things that surprised me 00:05:26.500 --> 00:05:29.579 most in the prep. She was an exile. We have this 00:05:29.579 --> 00:05:32.100 image of her sitting in a quiet garden, strumming 00:05:32.100 --> 00:05:34.680 a lyre, but she was actually a political refugee 00:05:34.680 --> 00:05:37.040 for a period of her life. That's right. There's 00:05:37.040 --> 00:05:40.040 a document called the Pecurian Chronicle. It's 00:05:40.040 --> 00:05:43.279 this huge marble steel that was found on the 00:05:43.279 --> 00:05:46.600 island of Paros, and it lists major events in 00:05:46.600 --> 00:05:49.040 Greek history year by year. A timeline set in 00:05:49.040 --> 00:05:52.000 stone. Literally. And it records that Sappho 00:05:52.000 --> 00:05:54.839 was exiled to Sicily somewhere around 600 B .C. 00:05:54.920 --> 00:05:57.060 This puts her right in the middle of the violent 00:05:57.060 --> 00:05:58.980 factional conflicts that were tearing Mytilene 00:05:58.980 --> 00:06:01.279 apart at the time. So what was going on? The 00:06:01.279 --> 00:06:03.220 old aristocratic families like hers were fighting 00:06:03.220 --> 00:06:05.800 against a series of tyrants. Now, tyrants in 00:06:05.800 --> 00:06:08.339 the Greek sense doesn't mean evil dictator necessarily. 00:06:08.660 --> 00:06:11.240 It just means someone who seized power outside 00:06:11.240 --> 00:06:13.779 the normal constitutional order. A strongman. 00:06:13.920 --> 00:06:16.560 A strongman, exactly. And one of them, a man 00:06:16.560 --> 00:06:18.980 named Piticus, eventually consolidated power. 00:06:19.539 --> 00:06:21.839 Empinicus is an interesting figure because he's 00:06:21.839 --> 00:06:24.079 later remembered as one of the seven sages of 00:06:24.079 --> 00:06:27.860 Greece. History paints him as this wise, benevolent 00:06:27.860 --> 00:06:30.740 ruler. It does. But if you're Sappho or a member 00:06:30.740 --> 00:06:33.300 of her family, he's the guy who kicked you out 00:06:33.300 --> 00:06:34.980 of your home and forced you to flee across the 00:06:34.980 --> 00:06:37.279 sea. It's a different perspective. A very different 00:06:37.279 --> 00:06:39.680 perspective. Her contemporary and fellow poet 00:06:39.680 --> 00:06:43.860 from Lesbos, Alcaeus. wrote these vicious, scathing 00:06:43.860 --> 00:06:47.120 attack poems against Piticus. Sappho's work is 00:06:47.120 --> 00:06:49.639 much more subtle about the politics, but the 00:06:49.639 --> 00:06:52.319 fact of the exile proves she wasn't just a bystander. 00:06:52.379 --> 00:06:54.699 She was part of a clan that was powerful enough 00:06:54.699 --> 00:06:58.000 and dangerous enough to need removing. So that's 00:06:58.000 --> 00:06:59.740 the political backdrop. Let's get more personal. 00:06:59.819 --> 00:07:01.579 Let's talk about the rest of the clan. The family 00:07:01.579 --> 00:07:05.439 dynamics are where we start to see the real woman 00:07:05.439 --> 00:07:07.779 peeking through the cracks of history. Yes, because 00:07:07.779 --> 00:07:09.980 we have names. We do. We have accounts of three 00:07:09.980 --> 00:07:14.819 brothers, Caraxos, Larichos, and Eurygios. And 00:07:14.819 --> 00:07:16.939 the drama with Caraxos is honestly something 00:07:16.939 --> 00:07:20.040 you'd see on a reality TV show today. The Caraxos 00:07:20.040 --> 00:07:24.259 saga is our best glimpse into Sappho as a sort 00:07:24.259 --> 00:07:27.339 of moral authority within her own family. The 00:07:27.339 --> 00:07:29.579 story is preserved by Herodotus, the historian, 00:07:29.899 --> 00:07:31.920 and a few other sources. And what's the story? 00:07:32.060 --> 00:07:34.439 The story is that Caraxas was a merchant. He 00:07:34.439 --> 00:07:36.829 sailed a lot. trading goods, probably wine from 00:07:36.829 --> 00:07:39.550 Lesbos. On one of his trips, he's in Nacridus, 00:07:39.589 --> 00:07:41.730 which was a Greek trading post in Egypt. Okay. 00:07:41.870 --> 00:07:44.490 And while he's there, he becomes completely infatuated 00:07:44.490 --> 00:07:48.009 with a very famous courtesan, a hetera named 00:07:48.009 --> 00:07:51.149 Rhodopis. And infatuated is putting it mildly 00:07:51.149 --> 00:07:53.930 from what I've read. He spent an absolute fortune 00:07:53.930 --> 00:07:57.389 on her. A colossal family -ruining fortune. He 00:07:57.389 --> 00:08:00.009 ransomed her. He bought her freedom from her 00:08:00.009 --> 00:08:02.680 pimp. presumably so he could live with her. This 00:08:02.680 --> 00:08:04.459 is a massive drain on the family estate. And 00:08:04.459 --> 00:08:06.819 a huge public embarrassment. A huge embarrassment. 00:08:07.060 --> 00:08:09.100 And when he finally returns to Lesbos, Sappho 00:08:09.100 --> 00:08:11.160 doesn't exactly welcome him home with open arms. 00:08:11.279 --> 00:08:13.680 She reportedly savaged him in her poetry. She 00:08:13.680 --> 00:08:16.139 called him out publicly for it. Now, for a long 00:08:16.139 --> 00:08:18.519 time, this was dismissed as just a story, right? 00:08:18.579 --> 00:08:20.660 Maybe something Herodotus picked up and embellished. 00:08:20.800 --> 00:08:23.420 But this is where the archaeology, the recent 00:08:23.420 --> 00:08:25.500 discoveries come in and just change everything. 00:08:25.819 --> 00:08:29.209 This is the Brothers' poem. Its discovery, or 00:08:29.209 --> 00:08:31.990 at least its publication in 2014, was a pivotal 00:08:31.990 --> 00:08:34.029 moment in Sappho's studies. What does it say? 00:08:34.330 --> 00:08:36.970 The papyrus proves that the family drama wasn't 00:08:36.970 --> 00:08:39.850 just gossip. In the poem, the speaker, who is 00:08:39.850 --> 00:08:43.190 undeniably Sappho, is praying. She's expressing 00:08:43.190 --> 00:08:45.990 this deep anxiety about Caraxes' ship arriving 00:08:45.990 --> 00:08:49.409 safely. She prays to the Nereids, the sea nymphs, 00:08:49.409 --> 00:08:52.029 for his safe return. So she's worried about him. 00:08:52.190 --> 00:08:55.269 She is, but the tone is tense. It's not just... 00:08:55.549 --> 00:08:57.769 I hope my dear brother is safe. It's more like, 00:08:57.850 --> 00:09:00.629 I hope he gets back here in one piece and finally 00:09:00.629 --> 00:09:02.970 fixes the mess he made and restores our family's 00:09:02.970 --> 00:09:05.289 honor. It grounds her. It's incredible. It transforms 00:09:05.289 --> 00:09:08.730 her from this abstract 10th muse into a sister 00:09:08.730 --> 00:09:10.809 who is stressed out about the family finances 00:09:10.809 --> 00:09:13.309 and her brother's terrible life choices. Exactly. 00:09:13.309 --> 00:09:15.070 And then you have the other brother, Larichos. 00:09:15.070 --> 00:09:17.169 He's a different story. Yeah, Larichos serves 00:09:17.169 --> 00:09:19.470 a different function in her biography. He does. 00:09:20.149 --> 00:09:22.590 Sappho, in another fragment, seems to boast that 00:09:22.590 --> 00:09:25.220 he was a wine pourer in the Britannian. That 00:09:25.220 --> 00:09:27.279 was the town hall of Medellin, the civic heart 00:09:27.279 --> 00:09:30.419 of the city. Now, to a modern ear, bragging that 00:09:30.419 --> 00:09:32.980 your brother is a waiter sounds odd. It sounds 00:09:32.980 --> 00:09:35.019 very strange. My brother pours drinks for the 00:09:35.019 --> 00:09:37.759 city council. Right. But in Medellin... This 00:09:37.759 --> 00:09:40.120 wasn't a service job. It was a prestigious ritual 00:09:40.120 --> 00:09:42.860 office. It was an honor reserved for the most 00:09:42.860 --> 00:09:45.840 beautiful and highborn young men of the aristocracy. 00:09:46.080 --> 00:09:48.820 So it was a public display of status. A public 00:09:48.820 --> 00:09:52.379 display of the family status and of the boy's 00:09:52.379 --> 00:09:55.820 physical perfection, his kalos. By mentioning 00:09:55.820 --> 00:09:58.460 this, Satho is signaling to her audience, we 00:09:58.460 --> 00:10:00.899 are the elite. We are the beautiful people. We 00:10:00.899 --> 00:10:02.779 are the ones who serve the gods and the state 00:10:02.779 --> 00:10:05.559 in these honored positions. Okay, so we have... 00:10:05.720 --> 00:10:07.820 the messy brother and the perfect brother. Now 00:10:07.820 --> 00:10:09.919 we have to address the husband. And this, for 00:10:09.919 --> 00:10:11.860 me, is my favorite part of the Sappho myth because 00:10:11.860 --> 00:10:15.000 it reveals so much about how history, specifically 00:10:15.000 --> 00:10:17.320 male -dominated history, treated her. Oh, this 00:10:17.320 --> 00:10:19.399 is a classic. The Pseudo, which is this massive 00:10:19.399 --> 00:10:21.840 Byzantine encyclopedia from the 10th century 00:10:21.840 --> 00:10:25.620 AD. So... written over 1 ,500 years after she 00:10:25.620 --> 00:10:28.039 died. Right. It claims she was married to a man 00:10:28.039 --> 00:10:31.179 named Curculus of Andros. And this is, without 00:10:31.179 --> 00:10:34.500 a doubt, the most famous dirty joke in all of 00:10:34.500 --> 00:10:37.080 classical scholarship. It has to be. I mean, 00:10:37.120 --> 00:10:39.220 break down the etymology for us because it is 00:10:39.220 --> 00:10:42.559 not subtle. It is aggressively unsubtle. The 00:10:42.559 --> 00:10:45.100 name Curculus is derived from the Greek word 00:10:45.100 --> 00:10:48.809 kirkos, which means tail, but was standard. Common 00:10:48.809 --> 00:10:51.389 slang for penis. Okay. And Andros, while being 00:10:51.389 --> 00:10:53.809 a real Greek island, is also the genitive form 00:10:53.809 --> 00:10:57.610 of the word anurner, which means man. So? So 00:10:57.610 --> 00:10:59.769 the encyclopedia effectively records that the 00:10:59.769 --> 00:11:02.870 greatest female poet in history was married to 00:11:02.870 --> 00:11:05.929 Dick Alcock from the Isle of Man. It's just unbelievable 00:11:05.929 --> 00:11:08.129 that this made it into a serious reference work, 00:11:08.169 --> 00:11:10.190 but it didn't come from nowhere, right? This 00:11:10.190 --> 00:11:12.809 joke had an origin. All certainly. It came from 00:11:12.809 --> 00:11:14.990 the comic playwrights in Athens in the 4th century 00:11:14.990 --> 00:11:17.950 BC, a couple hundred years after her death. Sappho 00:11:17.950 --> 00:11:19.990 became a stock character in Athenian comedy. 00:11:20.169 --> 00:11:22.529 And what was that character like? Well, the playwrights, 00:11:22.529 --> 00:11:24.889 all men, didn't know what to do with a woman 00:11:24.889 --> 00:11:27.669 of such power, fame, and independence. So they 00:11:27.669 --> 00:11:29.889 neutralized her. They turned her into a joke. 00:11:30.330 --> 00:11:33.029 Specifically, a sexually voracious heterosexual 00:11:33.029 --> 00:11:35.470 joke. They couldn't compute a woman being a genius, 00:11:35.570 --> 00:11:38.230 so they made her all about sex. Precisely. And 00:11:38.230 --> 00:11:40.549 giving her a husband with a grotesque, hyper 00:11:40.549 --> 00:11:43.570 -masculine name is a way of correcting her independence. 00:11:44.110 --> 00:11:46.889 It's a way of saying, sure, she might be a genius, 00:11:46.990 --> 00:11:49.649 but she's still defined by a man, even a ridiculously 00:11:49.649 --> 00:11:52.230 named fictional one. It's a hostility that's 00:11:52.230 --> 00:11:55.230 disguised as humor. And that same kind of hostility 00:11:55.230 --> 00:11:57.730 seems to be what fuels the other big biographical 00:11:57.730 --> 00:12:00.200 myth. The suicide. The leap from the Leucadian 00:12:00.200 --> 00:12:03.299 cliffs. Exactly. The image of Sappho, heartbroken, 00:12:03.399 --> 00:12:05.759 leaping to her death because a handsome ferryman 00:12:05.759 --> 00:12:08.740 named Phaon didn't love her back. This image 00:12:08.740 --> 00:12:11.980 is iconic. It dominated 19th century art. You 00:12:11.980 --> 00:12:14.120 see these paintings of the tragic poetess, lyre 00:12:14.120 --> 00:12:17.259 in hand, plunging into the sea. But it is pure, 00:12:17.440 --> 00:12:20.659 100 % fiction. Phaon wasn't a real person. Phaon 00:12:20.659 --> 00:12:23.740 is a figure from myth. He's an old ferryman who 00:12:23.740 --> 00:12:25.659 was given the gift of magical youth and beauty 00:12:25.659 --> 00:12:28.690 by the goddess Aphrodite. He wasn't a real guy. 00:12:29.129 --> 00:12:31.830 Sappho deeded on Lysbos. So where did this story 00:12:31.830 --> 00:12:33.970 come from? How did it get attached to her biography? 00:12:34.269 --> 00:12:37.789 It's likely a conflation. A misreading. Sappho 00:12:37.789 --> 00:12:40.110 probably wrote a poem about the myth of Phaon. 00:12:40.389 --> 00:12:42.750 Or perhaps she wrote a poem where she adopted 00:12:42.750 --> 00:12:44.830 the persona of a woman who was in love with him. 00:12:44.889 --> 00:12:47.590 A common poetic device. And later readers took 00:12:47.590 --> 00:12:49.970 it literally. Later readers who had lost the 00:12:49.970 --> 00:12:53.269 nuance of the lyric persona assumed she was writing 00:12:53.269 --> 00:12:55.889 a diary entry. They read a line like, I love 00:12:55.889 --> 00:12:58.590 Fayon, and thought, oh, the historical Sappho 00:12:58.590 --> 00:13:00.730 was in love with a historical guy named Fayon. 00:13:00.809 --> 00:13:03.009 That is such a crucial distinction, the difference 00:13:03.009 --> 00:13:05.649 between the poet and the persona. We don't assume 00:13:05.649 --> 00:13:07.909 a novelist who writes about a murder is a murderer 00:13:07.909 --> 00:13:10.750 themselves. We don't. But with female poets, 00:13:10.870 --> 00:13:13.370 especially in the ancient world, there's this 00:13:13.370 --> 00:13:16.529 persistent historical tendency to assume everything 00:13:16.529 --> 00:13:19.029 is autobiography. And the suicide narrative, 00:13:19.190 --> 00:13:21.230 it serves a similar function to the husband joke, 00:13:21.350 --> 00:13:23.820 doesn't it? It does. It punishes her for her 00:13:23.820 --> 00:13:27.399 greatness. If she kills herself over a man, it 00:13:27.399 --> 00:13:30.120 re -centers her entire life's narrative around 00:13:30.120 --> 00:13:33.759 male desire and rejection. It makes her tragic 00:13:33.759 --> 00:13:36.919 and pathetic, rather than powerful and self -sufficient. 00:13:37.019 --> 00:13:39.480 It straightens her legacy in the most violent 00:13:39.480 --> 00:13:42.039 way possible. Okay, but there is one relationship 00:13:42.039 --> 00:13:43.940 that scholars treat with a bit more respect, 00:13:44.059 --> 00:13:45.580 and that's her relationship with her daughter, 00:13:45.740 --> 00:13:49.419 Cleus. Yes, we have a beautiful and very famous... 00:13:49.909 --> 00:13:52.350 where she speaks about her. She says, I have 00:13:52.350 --> 00:13:54.690 a beautiful child, Pace, who looks like golden 00:13:54.690 --> 00:13:57.409 flowers, my darling Clace. And then she says 00:13:57.409 --> 00:13:59.309 she wouldn't trade her for all of Lydia. Not 00:13:59.309 --> 00:14:00.950 even for all the wealth in the world. Exactly. 00:14:01.509 --> 00:14:03.889 Now, the scholarly debate here has focused on 00:14:03.889 --> 00:14:06.370 that word, Pace. Right, because it can mean different 00:14:06.370 --> 00:14:09.809 things. It can. Pace can mean child, your biological 00:14:09.809 --> 00:14:12.070 offspring. But it was also used in pederastic 00:14:12.070 --> 00:14:14.269 context to mean a younger beloved or partner. 00:14:14.679 --> 00:14:17.080 And it can even mean slave. So some people have 00:14:17.080 --> 00:14:18.799 argued Clace might have been a younger lover, 00:14:18.960 --> 00:14:22.700 not a daughter. Some have, yes. But in this specific 00:14:22.700 --> 00:14:26.379 fragment, Sappho uses the word agapata, which 00:14:26.379 --> 00:14:29.159 means beloved, in a way that usually implies 00:14:29.159 --> 00:14:32.139 family affection. And the comparison to golden 00:14:32.139 --> 00:14:35.440 flowers just feels so intensely maternal. The 00:14:35.440 --> 00:14:38.340 overwhelming scholarly consensus is that Cleus 00:14:38.340 --> 00:14:40.799 was her daughter and that she was probably named 00:14:40.799 --> 00:14:43.200 after Sappho's own mother, which was the standard 00:14:43.200 --> 00:14:45.879 Greek naming convention. OK, so if we strip away 00:14:45.879 --> 00:14:48.440 prick from the Isle of Man and the melodramatic 00:14:48.440 --> 00:14:51.100 cliff jumping, what are we left with? We're left 00:14:51.100 --> 00:14:53.080 with a woman who is aristocratic, politically 00:14:53.080 --> 00:14:55.919 active, deeply invested in her family's honor 00:14:55.919 --> 00:14:59.659 and finances, and a mother, a real complex person 00:14:59.659 --> 00:15:02.429 living in a turbulent time. That's life. Now 00:15:02.429 --> 00:15:04.230 let's move to the work. The reason we are still 00:15:04.230 --> 00:15:06.830 talking about her 2 ,600 years later? The poetry, 00:15:06.950 --> 00:15:09.990 or more accurately, the songs. Yes. You mentioned 00:15:09.990 --> 00:15:12.070 earlier the distinction between Sappho and the 00:15:12.070 --> 00:15:15.129 epic poets like Homer or Hesiod. This shift to 00:15:15.129 --> 00:15:17.470 what we call the lyric eye seems to be the defining 00:15:17.470 --> 00:15:18.970 moment in the history of Western literature. 00:15:19.289 --> 00:15:21.809 It's a seismic shift. It's impossible to overstate 00:15:21.809 --> 00:15:24.250 how revolutionary it was. Think about the Iliad. 00:15:24.250 --> 00:15:27.049 How does it begin? Sing, goddess of the wrath 00:15:27.049 --> 00:15:29.799 of Achilles. The poet is invisible. Totally invisible. 00:15:30.000 --> 00:15:32.720 He's just a conduit, a channel for the muse to 00:15:32.720 --> 00:15:35.700 tell a grand story of gods and great men doing 00:15:35.700 --> 00:15:38.679 great things on the battlefield. Sappho flips 00:15:38.679 --> 00:15:40.980 the camera around. She points it directly at 00:15:40.980 --> 00:15:43.399 herself, at her own feelings. She validates the 00:15:43.399 --> 00:15:45.720 subjective individual experience as a worthy 00:15:45.720 --> 00:15:48.070 subject for art. There's that incredible fragment. 00:15:48.070 --> 00:15:50.570 It's fragment 16 where she makes this explicit. 00:15:50.649 --> 00:15:52.830 She basically writes a manifesto for this new 00:15:52.830 --> 00:16:05.649 kind of poetry. Yes. She writes, I just want 00:16:05.649 --> 00:16:07.409 to pause on that for a second because it's so 00:16:07.409 --> 00:16:09.669 incredibly bold. She is listing the ultimate 00:16:09.669 --> 00:16:12.789 symbols of masculine power and glory in her world, 00:16:12.830 --> 00:16:15.509 the army, the Navy. And she just dismisses them. 00:16:15.549 --> 00:16:17.679 She's saying, That's your definition of value. 00:16:17.840 --> 00:16:21.279 Mine is desire. It is a radical revaluation of 00:16:21.279 --> 00:16:24.820 all values. She is asserting with total confidence 00:16:24.820 --> 00:16:27.179 that the internal movements of the human heart 00:16:27.179 --> 00:16:29.940 are just as valid, just as important a subject 00:16:29.940 --> 00:16:33.220 for high art as the movements of armies. And 00:16:33.220 --> 00:16:35.100 she's doing this in a culture that was hyper 00:16:35.100 --> 00:16:37.679 -masculine and militaristic. And the way she 00:16:37.679 --> 00:16:41.460 describes that desire, that love. It's not abstract 00:16:41.460 --> 00:16:44.000 or philosophical. It's physical. It's visceral. 00:16:44.279 --> 00:16:46.759 And I think to really understand how this would 00:16:46.759 --> 00:16:49.299 have hit her original audience, we have to talk 00:16:49.299 --> 00:16:51.340 about the mechanics of her music. We absolutely 00:16:51.340 --> 00:16:53.860 do. Because we read these poems silently in books, 00:16:53.960 --> 00:16:56.460 and that's just not how they were consumed. These 00:16:56.460 --> 00:16:59.519 were songs. They were songs. The term lyric poetry 00:16:59.519 --> 00:17:02.860 means poetry to be sung to the lyre. Sappho would 00:17:02.860 --> 00:17:04.880 have performed these, most likely accompanying 00:17:04.880 --> 00:17:07.019 herself on an instrument called the barbidos. 00:17:07.339 --> 00:17:10.240 Which is a specific type of lyre. Different from 00:17:10.240 --> 00:17:12.519 the standard one. Yes, the Barbidos was a longer 00:17:12.519 --> 00:17:15.599 -armed lyre. It had a lower pitch than the standard 00:17:15.599 --> 00:17:17.940 chili lyre that you see in a lot of Greek art. 00:17:18.039 --> 00:17:20.900 It had a deeper, richer, more resonant sound. 00:17:21.160 --> 00:17:22.799 And we even know something about the musical 00:17:22.799 --> 00:17:26.200 scale she used. We do. The ancient sources tell 00:17:26.200 --> 00:17:28.839 us she composed primarily in what they call the 00:17:28.839 --> 00:17:31.519 Mixolydian mode. Okay, so explain that to those 00:17:31.519 --> 00:17:34.039 of us who aren't music theorists. What does the 00:17:34.039 --> 00:17:36.859 Mixolydian mode sound like? Well, in modern terms, 00:17:36.880 --> 00:17:39.970 it's similar to a major scale. but with a flattened 00:17:39.970 --> 00:17:42.910 seventh note. But for the Greeks, the modes weren't 00:17:42.910 --> 00:17:45.650 just scales. They were associated with a specific 00:17:45.650 --> 00:17:48.869 ethos, or emotional character. And what was the 00:17:48.869 --> 00:17:50.950 character of the Mixolydian? It was considered 00:17:50.950 --> 00:17:54.150 emotional, piercing, and even sorrowful. It was 00:17:54.150 --> 00:17:57.609 a mode for high passion. The later Athenian tragedian 00:17:57.609 --> 00:18:00.349 supposedly learned it from her work to use in 00:18:00.349 --> 00:18:03.309 their most intense choral lamentations. So imagine 00:18:03.309 --> 00:18:05.630 her words being sung to a deep -pitched instrument 00:18:05.630 --> 00:18:08.519 with a melody that feels urgent, passionate, 00:18:08.519 --> 00:18:10.720 and slightly unresolved. And then there's the 00:18:10.720 --> 00:18:12.839 rhythm. We have to talk about the sapphic stanza. 00:18:12.859 --> 00:18:15.400 This is a metrical form that she either invented 00:18:15.400 --> 00:18:18.259 or at least perfected, and it's incredibly distinctive. 00:18:18.519 --> 00:18:20.660 It is. It's famous. A sapphic stanza consists 00:18:20.660 --> 00:18:23.839 of three identical long lines and then one short 00:18:23.839 --> 00:18:25.819 concluding line, which is called the adonic. 00:18:25.960 --> 00:18:28.160 And it has this very specific heartbeat to it. 00:18:28.490 --> 00:18:30.569 It does. It has a rhythm that's something like 00:18:30.569 --> 00:18:32.450 dum -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da. It creates 00:18:32.450 --> 00:18:35.450 this driving forward momentum that pulls you 00:18:35.450 --> 00:18:37.650 through the first three lines, and then that 00:18:37.650 --> 00:18:40.529 short final line acts as a kind of break or a 00:18:40.529 --> 00:18:43.089 punchline or a moment of reflection. It's a perfect 00:18:43.089 --> 00:18:45.710 structure for conveying obsessive thought or 00:18:45.710 --> 00:18:48.369 spiraling emotion. So let's look at how she uses 00:18:48.369 --> 00:18:50.890 that vessel, that combination of music and rhythm, 00:18:51.029 --> 00:18:53.150 in what we could call her greatest hits, the 00:18:53.150 --> 00:18:55.880 fragments that have become famous. We have to 00:18:55.880 --> 00:18:57.920 start with the Ode to Aphrodite, fragment one. 00:18:58.039 --> 00:19:00.500 We have to. It's the only complete poem of hers 00:19:00.500 --> 00:19:03.400 that we have. And it survived by a total fluke. 00:19:03.420 --> 00:19:05.720 How did it survive? A literary critic from the 00:19:05.720 --> 00:19:08.500 Roman period, a man named Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 00:19:08.579 --> 00:19:11.619 quoted it in full in his treatise on literary 00:19:11.619 --> 00:19:14.630 composition. He used it as the perfect example 00:19:14.630 --> 00:19:18.069 of the polished or highly wrought style. He preserved 00:19:18.069 --> 00:19:20.009 it by accident just because he thought it was 00:19:20.009 --> 00:19:21.890 technically perfect. And the structure of this 00:19:21.890 --> 00:19:24.130 poem is so fascinating because it starts out 00:19:24.130 --> 00:19:27.109 like a very formal prayer, right? Deathless Aphrodite 00:19:27.109 --> 00:19:30.450 of the spangled throne. Yes, it follows the strict 00:19:30.450 --> 00:19:32.769 liturgical formula of what's called a colletic 00:19:32.769 --> 00:19:35.839 hymn, a hymn of calling. You invoke the god, 00:19:36.039 --> 00:19:38.720 you list their titles and attributes, you remind 00:19:38.720 --> 00:19:40.960 them of past times they've helped you, and then 00:19:40.960 --> 00:19:43.700 finally you make your current request. But Sappho 00:19:43.700 --> 00:19:46.000 completely subverts the whole thing. She does. 00:19:46.420 --> 00:19:49.339 Because when Aphrodite arrives in the poem, she 00:19:49.339 --> 00:19:52.099 doesn't come in some grand chariot pulled by 00:19:52.099 --> 00:19:54.740 fiery horses or dragons. She comes in a chariot 00:19:54.740 --> 00:19:57.480 drawn by sparrows. Sparrow? Why sparrows? What's 00:19:57.480 --> 00:19:59.700 the significance of that? In Greek symbolism, 00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:02.619 sparrows were associated with lechery. They were 00:20:02.619 --> 00:20:05.509 seen as hypersexual. constantly mating prolific 00:20:05.509 --> 00:20:07.950 breeders. They were sacred to Aphrodite for that 00:20:07.950 --> 00:20:10.990 reason. By choosing sparrows, Sappho is winking 00:20:10.990 --> 00:20:13.690 at the audience. She's acknowledging the earthy, 00:20:13.710 --> 00:20:16.789 urgent, erotic nature of her request. And then 00:20:16.789 --> 00:20:18.589 the goddess actually speaks in the poem, and 00:20:18.589 --> 00:20:21.130 she doesn't speak like some booming distant deity. 00:20:21.390 --> 00:20:23.950 No, she speaks like an old friend, like a confidant. 00:20:24.250 --> 00:20:27.069 The dialogue is so charming and intimate. Aphrodite 00:20:27.069 --> 00:20:29.809 smiles and asks, Who is it this time, Sappho? 00:20:29.890 --> 00:20:32.450 Who has wronged you? Who must I persuade to lead 00:20:32.450 --> 00:20:35.009 you back to her love? And there's such a gentle 00:20:35.009 --> 00:20:37.890 humor in that line, who is it this time? It implies 00:20:37.890 --> 00:20:40.509 a long -standing pattern. Sappho is essentially 00:20:40.509 --> 00:20:42.839 telling on herself. She's admitting she falls 00:20:42.839 --> 00:20:45.380 in love constantly and always needs the goddess 00:20:45.380 --> 00:20:48.079 to come bail her out. It's amazing. It portrays 00:20:48.079 --> 00:20:50.920 the goddess of love not as this terrifying cosmic 00:20:50.920 --> 00:20:54.420 force, but as a co -conspirator in Sappho's romantic 00:20:54.420 --> 00:20:57.799 life. Okay, then we have fragment 31. This is 00:20:57.799 --> 00:21:00.880 maybe her most famous poem after the ode. It's 00:21:00.880 --> 00:21:02.880 the one that the Roman poet Catullus translated, 00:21:03.079 --> 00:21:05.940 and it's basically the definitive medical description 00:21:05.940 --> 00:21:09.460 of jealousy. It is a staggering piece of psychological 00:21:09.460 --> 00:21:12.759 and physiological observation. The scenario is 00:21:12.759 --> 00:21:15.319 simple. The speaker, Sappho, is watching the 00:21:15.319 --> 00:21:17.980 woman she loves sitting across from a man. The 00:21:17.980 --> 00:21:20.079 man is just there, listening to the woman laugh 00:21:20.079 --> 00:21:23.079 and talk. And the sight of this completely dismantles 00:21:23.079 --> 00:21:25.390 Sappho. The list of symptoms is just brutal. 00:21:25.470 --> 00:21:27.509 It's not an emotion I felt jealous. It's a complete 00:21:27.509 --> 00:21:30.049 physical collapse. It is. She says her tongue 00:21:30.049 --> 00:21:32.710 breaks. A thin fire races just under her skin. 00:21:32.990 --> 00:21:35.609 Her eyes see nothing but blackness. Her ears 00:21:35.609 --> 00:21:37.910 are filled with a buzzing or roaring sound. Old 00:21:37.910 --> 00:21:41.410 sweat. Yes. Sweat pours down her. A trembling 00:21:41.410 --> 00:21:44.869 seizes her whole body. And then that famous, 00:21:45.009 --> 00:21:48.210 unforgettable line. I am greener than grass. 00:21:48.470 --> 00:21:51.190 Greener than grass. In English, we say pale as 00:21:51.190 --> 00:21:53.970 a sheet, or maybe we connect green to envy, green 00:21:53.970 --> 00:21:57.250 with envy. But here it implies a sickly, chlorotic 00:21:57.250 --> 00:21:59.849 pallor, the color of a dying plant, like she's 00:21:59.849 --> 00:22:02.829 actually dying. That's exactly it. The poem ends 00:22:02.829 --> 00:22:04.990 with the line, I seem to myself to be a little 00:22:04.990 --> 00:22:07.730 short of dying. This single poem established 00:22:07.730 --> 00:22:10.470 the literary trope of love's sickness for the 00:22:10.470 --> 00:22:13.269 next 2 ,000 years of Western literature. It defined 00:22:13.269 --> 00:22:16.470 Eros not as a pleasant emotion, but as a pathology, 00:22:16.630 --> 00:22:19.130 a disease that attacks the body from the outside 00:22:19.130 --> 00:22:22.039 and takes it apart piece by piece. And finally, 00:22:22.059 --> 00:22:24.420 let's touch on the Tithonus poem. This is one 00:22:24.420 --> 00:22:26.380 of the more recent discoveries, or at least a 00:22:26.380 --> 00:22:28.500 more complete version was found on that 2004 00:22:28.500 --> 00:22:31.839 cologne papyrus. And it deals with aging, which 00:22:31.839 --> 00:22:33.799 is a theme we don't often associate with the 00:22:33.799 --> 00:22:36.339 poet of passionate love. It's a deeply moving 00:22:36.339 --> 00:22:39.519 and very mature reflection on mortality. She 00:22:39.519 --> 00:22:42.099 compares herself to the mythological figure Tithonus. 00:22:42.140 --> 00:22:43.940 Right. He was the guy who asked for eternal life, 00:22:44.019 --> 00:22:46.160 but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Exactly. 00:22:46.359 --> 00:22:48.440 So he just got older and older and withered away 00:22:48.440 --> 00:22:52.289 until he turned into a cicada. In the poem, Sappho 00:22:52.289 --> 00:22:55.109 looks at her own aging body. Her hair that was 00:22:55.109 --> 00:22:57.809 once black is now white. Her knees that used 00:22:57.809 --> 00:23:00.390 to be nimble for dancing are now heavy and weak. 00:23:00.710 --> 00:23:03.450 But she doesn't just despair. There's an affirmation 00:23:03.450 --> 00:23:05.789 at the end. There is. It's a statement of incredible 00:23:05.789 --> 00:23:12.990 resilience. She says, What does that word really 00:23:12.990 --> 00:23:15.410 mean? It's hard to translate with one word. It 00:23:15.410 --> 00:23:18.509 means delicacy. luxury, refinement, a certain 00:23:18.509 --> 00:23:20.910 kind of tender beauty. She says that for her, 00:23:20.990 --> 00:23:23.910 this love of beauty, Eros, is connected to the 00:23:23.910 --> 00:23:26.849 desire for the sun, for brightness. She's choosing 00:23:26.849 --> 00:23:28.690 to find value in the aesthetic beauty of the 00:23:28.690 --> 00:23:31.910 world, even as her own physical capacity to participate 00:23:31.910 --> 00:23:35.259 in, it fades. It's beautiful. So we have this 00:23:35.259 --> 00:23:38.200 body of work that is psychologically acute, technically 00:23:38.200 --> 00:23:40.920 perfect, and emotionally raw. Which brings us 00:23:40.920 --> 00:23:43.759 back to the massive central question. How on 00:23:43.759 --> 00:23:46.140 earth did we lose it? If she was the tenth muse, 00:23:46.299 --> 00:23:48.539 if she was the poetess, why don't we have those 00:23:48.539 --> 00:23:50.720 nine volumes? This is where we have to debunk 00:23:50.720 --> 00:23:53.460 the popular villain of the story. Which is the 00:23:53.460 --> 00:23:56.079 church burning the books. Right. There are these 00:23:56.079 --> 00:23:58.339 persistent legends, which were very popular with 00:23:58.339 --> 00:24:00.579 Renaissance scholars like Joseph Justice Scaliger 00:24:00.579 --> 00:24:03.700 and Gerald Mocardano, that the early church, 00:24:03.839 --> 00:24:06.799 specifically if that's just like Gregory Nazianzen 00:24:06.799 --> 00:24:09.720 or Pope Gregory VII, ordered the public burning 00:24:09.720 --> 00:24:11.880 of Sappho's works because they were too erotic, 00:24:11.920 --> 00:24:15.079 too immoral, too pagan. It's a compelling story. 00:24:15.259 --> 00:24:18.779 It's dramatic. It gives us a clear enemy censorship. 00:24:19.039 --> 00:24:22.599 It's a great story. But there is zero contemporary 00:24:22.599 --> 00:24:24.900 evidence for it ever happening. Not a single 00:24:24.900 --> 00:24:26.940 source from the time mentions anything like it. 00:24:27.180 --> 00:24:29.960 The truth is likely much more boring and in a 00:24:29.960 --> 00:24:32.240 way much more tragic. It wasn't a bonfire. It 00:24:32.240 --> 00:24:34.599 was a format change. The shift from the papyrus 00:24:34.599 --> 00:24:37.160 scroll to the parchment codex. Exactly. From 00:24:37.160 --> 00:24:39.720 about the 2nd to the 4th centuries AD, the entire 00:24:39.720 --> 00:24:41.980 technology of the book changed. The world moved 00:24:41.980 --> 00:24:44.480 from these long papyrus scrolls to parchment 00:24:44.480 --> 00:24:46.960 codices, what we would recognize as a book with 00:24:46.960 --> 00:24:49.980 pages. And this was an expensive process. Incredibly 00:24:49.980 --> 00:24:51.640 expensive. You couldn't just copy everything 00:24:51.640 --> 00:24:54.539 over. You had to make choices. So what gets copied? 00:24:54.660 --> 00:24:56.599 You copy what's popular, what's being... taught 00:24:56.599 --> 00:24:58.920 in schools, what's considered part of the standard 00:24:58.920 --> 00:25:02.059 curriculum. And Sappho had a major strike against 00:25:02.059 --> 00:25:04.940 her, the dialect. The Aeolic Greek we talked 00:25:04.940 --> 00:25:07.539 about earlier. By the Roman period, the standard 00:25:07.539 --> 00:25:10.859 literary Greek was Attic, the dialect of Athens. 00:25:11.119 --> 00:25:14.279 To readers in the Roman Empire, Sappho's Aeolic 00:25:14.279 --> 00:25:17.380 dialect looked weird on the page. It had strange 00:25:17.380 --> 00:25:19.779 spellings, unfamiliar grammar. It was just... 00:25:20.039 --> 00:25:22.380 plain hard to read. So it's like, imagine if 00:25:22.380 --> 00:25:24.960 the greatest poet in English wrote in a very 00:25:24.960 --> 00:25:27.880 heavy archaic regional dialect and then fast 00:25:27.880 --> 00:25:30.519 forward 500 years and nobody speaks that dialect 00:25:30.519 --> 00:25:32.440 anymore. Teachers aren't going to assign that 00:25:32.440 --> 00:25:33.960 to their students because it's too much of a 00:25:33.960 --> 00:25:36.380 headache to explain. That is the perfect analogy. 00:25:36.720 --> 00:25:38.880 And if you're not on the syllabus, you don't 00:25:38.880 --> 00:25:40.660 get copied. And if you don't get copies from 00:25:40.660 --> 00:25:43.160 the scroll into the new durable codex format, 00:25:43.339 --> 00:25:46.000 you effectively stay on the old decaying operating 00:25:46.000 --> 00:25:49.240 system. And papyrus in a European climate. doesn't 00:25:49.240 --> 00:25:52.019 last it has a shelf life of maybe a couple of 00:25:52.019 --> 00:25:55.019 centuries if you're lucky before it rots or gets 00:25:55.019 --> 00:25:57.619 eaten by worms or just falls apart so she wasn't 00:25:57.619 --> 00:26:01.039 burned she just rotted away that is arguably 00:26:01.039 --> 00:26:04.539 sadder than a bonfire it's death by neglect it 00:26:04.539 --> 00:26:07.400 is it's the survival of the fittest applied to 00:26:07.400 --> 00:26:10.500 literature where fitness equals ease of reading 00:26:10.500 --> 00:26:13.079 and teaching she was too difficult so she was 00:26:13.079 --> 00:26:15.740 left behind but And this is the incredible recovery 00:26:15.740 --> 00:26:18.039 part of the story. Papyrus does survive in one 00:26:18.039 --> 00:26:21.660 specific climate. The desert. The desert. And 00:26:21.660 --> 00:26:23.759 that brings us to a place called Oxyrhynchus. 00:26:24.079 --> 00:26:26.539 This name sounds like a dragon from a fantasy 00:26:26.539 --> 00:26:29.339 novel, but it's a real town in Egypt. It means 00:26:29.339 --> 00:26:32.140 city of the sharp -nosed fish. After fish, they 00:26:32.140 --> 00:26:34.599 worship there. It was a provincial capital in 00:26:34.599 --> 00:26:37.099 Roman Egypt, and in the late 19th century, two 00:26:37.099 --> 00:26:40.380 young Oxford archaeologists, Bernard Grenfell 00:26:40.380 --> 00:26:43.000 and Arthur Hunt, went there. And they weren't 00:26:43.000 --> 00:26:45.640 looking for gold tombs or pharaohs? No, they 00:26:45.640 --> 00:26:47.740 were looking for paper. Specifically, they were 00:26:47.740 --> 00:26:50.000 looking for the town's ancient garbage dumps. 00:26:50.099 --> 00:26:53.259 Literal trash heaps. Mounds of trash, some of 00:26:53.259 --> 00:26:56.160 them 30 feet high. And because of the incredibly 00:26:56.160 --> 00:26:58.680 dry sand, the garbage had been mummified for 00:26:58.680 --> 00:27:01.440 centuries. They started digging, and what they 00:27:01.440 --> 00:27:04.319 found was a literary treasure trove. What kind 00:27:04.319 --> 00:27:06.880 of stuff was in there? Everything. Tax receipts, 00:27:06.980 --> 00:27:10.019 census returns, private letters, shopping lists, 00:27:10.220 --> 00:27:13.970 and torn up books. It turns out when the ancients 00:27:13.970 --> 00:27:16.369 were done with a scroll or it got too damaged, 00:27:16.589 --> 00:27:18.750 they just threw it in the trash like we would 00:27:18.750 --> 00:27:20.990 an old newspaper. So this is where our fragments 00:27:20.990 --> 00:27:23.170 of Sappho come from. A huge number of them, yes. 00:27:23.829 --> 00:27:26.369 Grenfell and Hunt shipped massive wicker baskets 00:27:26.369 --> 00:27:28.730 full of this literary garbage back to Oxford. 00:27:28.910 --> 00:27:32.390 And for the last 120 plus years, scholars have 00:27:32.390 --> 00:27:35.170 been painstakingly piecing these fragments together 00:27:35.170 --> 00:27:38.029 like the world's most difficult jigsaw puzzle. 00:27:38.230 --> 00:27:40.769 That's an amazing story. But the recovery isn't 00:27:40.769 --> 00:27:43.609 over, and it's not all so clean. We have to talk 00:27:43.609 --> 00:27:45.349 about the controversy surrounding the new finds. 00:27:45.430 --> 00:27:47.710 That Brothers poem we mentioned earlier, that 00:27:47.710 --> 00:27:50.190 didn't come from a regulated dig in the 1890s. 00:27:50.210 --> 00:27:52.410 No, it didn't. It appeared on the antiquities 00:27:52.410 --> 00:27:55.309 market in 2014. And this is the dark side of 00:27:55.309 --> 00:27:57.789 the recovery story. It is. The Brothers poem, 00:27:58.029 --> 00:28:00.650 and another one, the Kipris poem, were published 00:28:00.650 --> 00:28:04.029 by a scholar named Dirk Abink. The initial story 00:28:04.029 --> 00:28:06.329 he told was that they came from a private collection. 00:28:06.839 --> 00:28:08.920 and that they had possibly been extracted from 00:28:08.920 --> 00:28:12.259 pipa mache mummy cartonage, basically old papyrus 00:28:12.259 --> 00:28:15.099 recycled to make mummy masks. But that story 00:28:15.099 --> 00:28:18.140 fell apart pretty quickly. It fell apart spectacularly. 00:28:18.140 --> 00:28:20.200 It turned out the provenance, the history of 00:28:20.200 --> 00:28:23.140 ownership, was extremely murky. Allegations began 00:28:23.140 --> 00:28:25.440 to fly that these fragments had been looted or 00:28:25.440 --> 00:28:27.640 stolen from the official Oxyrhynchus collection 00:28:27.640 --> 00:28:30.940 at Oxford and then sold illegally on the black 00:28:30.940 --> 00:28:32.970 market. And this connects to the Green Collection, 00:28:33.190 --> 00:28:35.369 right? The family behind the Hobby Lobby craft 00:28:35.369 --> 00:28:38.329 store chain? Yes. They were buying up huge quantities 00:28:38.329 --> 00:28:41.170 of biblical artifacts, often with very questionable 00:28:41.170 --> 00:28:44.029 provenance, for their Museum of the Bible. It's 00:28:44.029 --> 00:28:46.509 a whole tangled web of scholarship, money, and 00:28:46.509 --> 00:28:49.490 the illicit antiquities trade. So even now, the 00:28:49.490 --> 00:28:52.130 very act of recovering her voice is tainted by 00:28:52.130 --> 00:28:54.849 this modern underworld. It complicates things 00:28:54.849 --> 00:28:57.490 immensely. We have the text, and the text is 00:28:57.490 --> 00:29:00.210 authentic. It's definitely Sappho. But... The 00:29:00.210 --> 00:29:02.670 path it took to get to us in the 21st century 00:29:02.670 --> 00:29:05.569 involves potential crimes. It just adds another 00:29:05.569 --> 00:29:08.009 layer of shadow and controversy to her history. 00:29:08.190 --> 00:29:10.849 OK, so let's pivot to the final puzzle piece 00:29:10.849 --> 00:29:13.829 here, the social context. We know what she wrote. 00:29:13.930 --> 00:29:16.650 We have some idea of how we found it. But we 00:29:16.650 --> 00:29:19.750 still argue intensely about who she was in her 00:29:19.750 --> 00:29:22.809 own society. Specifically, what was she doing 00:29:22.809 --> 00:29:24.769 with all these young women she writes about in 00:29:24.769 --> 00:29:27.430 her poems? This is the great Sappho question, 00:29:27.690 --> 00:29:29.910 as it's sometimes called. For the last century 00:29:29.910 --> 00:29:32.329 and a half, scholars have been trying to categorize 00:29:32.329 --> 00:29:34.289 her circle to put a neat label on it. And the 00:29:34.289 --> 00:29:36.289 Victorian favorite, the one that dominated for 00:29:36.289 --> 00:29:38.769 a long time, was the schoolmistress theory. This 00:29:38.769 --> 00:29:40.950 was championed by the great German philologist 00:29:40.950 --> 00:29:44.329 Ulrich von Willem of Molendorf. He was a giant 00:29:44.329 --> 00:29:46.990 in the field, but he simply could not reconcile 00:29:46.990 --> 00:29:50.690 great poetry with what he saw as immoral lesbian 00:29:50.690 --> 00:29:52.970 sexuality. So he came up with an explanation. 00:29:53.309 --> 00:29:55.869 He argued that Sappho was essentially a headmistress 00:29:55.869 --> 00:29:58.309 of a Mechen Pensionat, a German -style boarding 00:29:58.309 --> 00:30:01.049 school for elite young girls. Which is such a 00:30:01.049 --> 00:30:03.970 projection of his own time onto the past. It's 00:30:03.970 --> 00:30:07.150 like Jane Eyre superimposed on archaic Greece. 00:30:07.430 --> 00:30:10.210 It's a complete anachronism. He argued that the 00:30:10.210 --> 00:30:13.529 love she expressed in the poems was purely pedagogical, 00:30:13.549 --> 00:30:16.309 that she was just a teacher training these girls 00:30:16.309 --> 00:30:19.210 in the arts to prepare them to be good wives 00:30:19.210 --> 00:30:22.549 for aristocratic men. It was an attempt to sanitize 00:30:22.549 --> 00:30:24.690 her, to make her respectable and safe for the 00:30:24.690 --> 00:30:27.069 19th century classroom. But there's no evidence 00:30:27.069 --> 00:30:29.829 for it. Absolutely none. There is no ancient 00:30:29.829 --> 00:30:32.450 source that ever suggests she ran a school. OK, 00:30:32.529 --> 00:30:34.589 so if not a school, what's another theory? Another 00:30:34.589 --> 00:30:37.789 one is the Theosos theory that she was the leader 00:30:37.789 --> 00:30:40.410 of a religious cult or association. A Theosos? 00:30:40.410 --> 00:30:42.730 Exactly. We know that these kinds of religious 00:30:42.730 --> 00:30:45.569 associations for women existed. So if Sappho 00:30:45.569 --> 00:30:47.230 was the leader of a group of women dedicated 00:30:47.230 --> 00:30:49.750 to the worship of goddesses like Aphrodite and 00:30:49.750 --> 00:30:52.869 the Muses, it would explain the hymns, the ritual 00:30:52.869 --> 00:30:55.190 language, and the strong sense of group identity 00:30:55.190 --> 00:30:58.049 you find in the poems. It's more plausible in 00:30:58.049 --> 00:31:00.809 the school. But the theory that seems to be gaining 00:31:00.809 --> 00:31:03.349 the most traction now is the symposium theory. 00:31:03.670 --> 00:31:06.710 Right. We know that aristocratic Greek men had 00:31:06.710 --> 00:31:09.420 symposia. These were formal drinking parties 00:31:09.420 --> 00:31:11.960 where they would recline, drink wine, recite 00:31:11.960 --> 00:31:15.140 poetry, do business, and solidify political and 00:31:15.140 --> 00:31:17.720 erotic relationships. So the idea is that women 00:31:17.720 --> 00:31:20.339 did this too. The idea is that Sappho Circle 00:31:20.339 --> 00:31:23.420 was a female counterpart to the male symposium. 00:31:23.839 --> 00:31:27.720 A group of elite, aristocratic women gathering 00:31:27.720 --> 00:31:31.359 in a private space to dine, drink, compose and 00:31:31.359 --> 00:31:33.759 perform poetry for each other, and forge their 00:31:33.759 --> 00:31:36.700 own social, emotional, and erotic bonds. And 00:31:36.700 --> 00:31:39.099 that leads us, unavoidably, to the sexuality 00:31:39.099 --> 00:31:41.599 question. The elephant that has been in the room 00:31:41.599 --> 00:31:45.200 for centuries, was she a lesbian? Well, the answer 00:31:45.200 --> 00:31:46.940 really depends on your definition of the word 00:31:46.940 --> 00:31:48.819 lesbian. Break that down for us. What do you 00:31:48.819 --> 00:31:50.920 mean? Okay, so if you mean lesbian as a modern 00:31:50.920 --> 00:31:53.099 identity category, a fixed sexual orientation 00:31:53.099 --> 00:31:56.000 that defines a person's core being based on exclusive 00:31:56.000 --> 00:31:58.769 attraction to other women, then that concept 00:31:58.769 --> 00:32:00.690 didn't really exist in antiquity. That's the 00:32:00.690 --> 00:32:03.869 social constructionist argument. Yes, influenced 00:32:03.869 --> 00:32:06.410 by thinkers like Michel Foucault. That school 00:32:06.410 --> 00:32:08.670 of thought would argue that applying the label 00:32:08.670 --> 00:32:12.150 lesbian to Sappho is anachronistic. It's imposing 00:32:12.150 --> 00:32:14.990 our modern categories onto a world that didn't 00:32:14.990 --> 00:32:16.950 have them. Because for the Greeks, sexuality 00:32:16.950 --> 00:32:19.799 was more about acts than identity. And about 00:32:19.799 --> 00:32:22.880 power dynamics, active versus passive? Generally 00:32:22.880 --> 00:32:25.700 speaking, yes. However, other scholars, like 00:32:25.700 --> 00:32:27.859 Judith Hallett, for example, argue that this 00:32:27.859 --> 00:32:30.200 is just semantic hair splitting. Ah, so. They 00:32:30.200 --> 00:32:32.319 would say, look at the poems. Sappho clearly 00:32:32.319 --> 00:32:35.119 centers her emotional and her erotic life on 00:32:35.119 --> 00:32:38.440 women. The electricity in her poetry, that passion, 00:32:38.599 --> 00:32:41.380 is directed at women. Men, when they appear at 00:32:41.380 --> 00:32:43.519 all, are usually rivals, obstacles, or peripheral 00:32:43.519 --> 00:32:45.859 figures like her brothers. It's just, it's kind 00:32:45.859 --> 00:32:48.640 of wild that the word lesbian itself. comes directly 00:32:48.640 --> 00:32:51.039 from her home island and the word sapphic comes 00:32:51.039 --> 00:32:53.700 from her name she is the literal etymological 00:32:53.700 --> 00:32:56.640 root of the entire concept she is which makes 00:32:56.640 --> 00:32:59.299 it all the more ironic that history spent so 00:32:59.299 --> 00:33:02.640 much time and energy trying to deny it as we 00:33:02.640 --> 00:33:05.339 said the comedy writers in athens made her into 00:33:05.339 --> 00:33:08.200 a promiscuous heterosexual then the victorians 00:33:08.200 --> 00:33:10.880 made her into a chaste sexless school teacher 00:33:11.319 --> 00:33:13.740 It wasn't really until the modern era that we 00:33:13.740 --> 00:33:15.859 allowed ourselves to just read the text for what 00:33:15.859 --> 00:33:18.319 it plainly says. Speaking of reading the text, 00:33:18.420 --> 00:33:21.140 let's look at her legacy. Who were the people 00:33:21.140 --> 00:33:23.720 who kept the flame alive through those long centuries? 00:33:24.119 --> 00:33:26.480 Well, the Romans were absolutely pivotal. The 00:33:26.480 --> 00:33:28.740 poet Catullus, as we discussed, didn't just translate 00:33:28.740 --> 00:33:31.559 her work. He channeled her. He breathed her poetry. 00:33:31.839 --> 00:33:34.640 He used her meter, the sapphic stanza, to write 00:33:34.640 --> 00:33:37.640 about his own tortured love affair. He did. And 00:33:37.640 --> 00:33:39.799 in a move that's just the ultimate tribute, he 00:33:39.799 --> 00:33:42.019 even named his own lover Lesbia in his poems. 00:33:42.240 --> 00:33:45.000 That is the ultimate hat tip. Every single time 00:33:45.000 --> 00:33:46.940 a Roman read the name Lesbia, they were being 00:33:46.940 --> 00:33:49.559 reminded of Sappho and her island. Exactly. He 00:33:49.559 --> 00:33:52.099 was placing himself in her lineage. And another 00:33:52.099 --> 00:33:54.660 one of the great Roman poets, Horace, also wrote 00:33:54.660 --> 00:33:57.000 extensively in her meters. He famously called 00:33:57.000 --> 00:34:00.799 her Mascula Sappho. Masculine Sappho. Which sounds 00:34:00.799 --> 00:34:04.039 like an insult to our ears. It does, but it was 00:34:04.039 --> 00:34:05.720 almost certainly meant as a high compliment. 00:34:06.170 --> 00:34:08.670 It was a recognition of her poetic power, her 00:34:08.670 --> 00:34:11.610 gravitas. He was acknowledging that she could 00:34:11.610 --> 00:34:14.170 stand toe to toe with any of the men in the canon. 00:34:14.329 --> 00:34:17.210 So the Romans revered her. Then we have the long 00:34:17.210 --> 00:34:19.750 gap of the Middle Ages, and then she reemerges 00:34:19.750 --> 00:34:22.789 in a big way in the 19th century. The decadent 00:34:22.789 --> 00:34:25.349 writers, they seem to have a weird, dark obsession 00:34:25.349 --> 00:34:28.019 with her. They did. Writers like Charles Boller 00:34:28.019 --> 00:34:30.780 in France and Algernon Charles Swinburne in England, 00:34:30.940 --> 00:34:33.639 they were reacting against that prim, proper 00:34:33.639 --> 00:34:36.539 schoolmistress image. They swung to the other 00:34:36.539 --> 00:34:39.219 extreme. Completely. They turned Sappho into 00:34:39.219 --> 00:34:42.500 this figure of dark, forbidden sexuality, a daughter 00:34:42.500 --> 00:34:44.920 of Desaad. They were fascinated by the idea of 00:34:44.920 --> 00:34:47.559 the lesbian vampire, the doomed sinner, the tragic, 00:34:47.659 --> 00:34:49.840 perverse anti -heroine. It was still a projection, 00:34:49.980 --> 00:34:52.239 just a much darker and more lurid one. And then 00:34:52.239 --> 00:34:56.019 after them, the imagists, Ezra Pound, H .D. Yes. 00:34:56.239 --> 00:34:58.300 Pound and the Modernists loved the fragmentation 00:34:58.300 --> 00:35:00.559 itself. They looked at the broken papyri where 00:35:00.559 --> 00:35:02.139 you have a single word, then a gap, then another 00:35:02.139 --> 00:35:05.380 phrase. And they saw a modern aesthetic. They 00:35:05.380 --> 00:35:07.579 felt the gaps, the silence, made the poetry more 00:35:07.579 --> 00:35:11.179 powerful, more open to interpretation. A line 00:35:11.179 --> 00:35:15.320 like, spring too long. Gangula. It's pure minimalism. 00:35:15.480 --> 00:35:17.539 It is. And it had a huge influence on the way 00:35:17.539 --> 00:35:19.480 modern poetry looks on the page, with all of 00:35:19.480 --> 00:35:21.480 its white space. And finally, and maybe most 00:35:21.480 --> 00:35:24.400 importantly, feminism. The most significant reclamation 00:35:24.400 --> 00:35:27.900 of all. In the late 20th century, feminist scholars 00:35:27.900 --> 00:35:30.340 and poets finally stopped trying to explain away 00:35:30.340 --> 00:35:33.260 her life or her desires and started celebrating 00:35:33.260 --> 00:35:35.719 them. She became a kind of matriarch, the new 00:35:35.719 --> 00:35:38.739 woman of antiquity independent, articulate, economically 00:35:38.739 --> 00:35:41.199 autonomous, and the head of a lost tradition 00:35:41.199 --> 00:35:43.920 of female art. It really is a miracle of a survival 00:35:43.920 --> 00:35:45.880 story when you think about it. We started with 00:35:45.880 --> 00:35:48.980 10 ,000 lines. We lost 97 % of it, mostly due 00:35:48.980 --> 00:35:51.460 to a format change and a difficult dialect. And 00:35:51.460 --> 00:35:54.460 yet somehow she is still here. She is still the 00:35:54.460 --> 00:35:57.880 poetess. It's a profound paradox, isn't it? We 00:35:57.880 --> 00:36:00.539 know so little about her factually, and yet she 00:36:00.539 --> 00:36:03.199 feels closer, more immediate than almost any 00:36:03.199 --> 00:36:06.039 other ancient author. Homer feels like a marble 00:36:06.039 --> 00:36:08.860 statue. Sappho feels like a real person whispering 00:36:08.860 --> 00:36:12.210 in your ear. So as we wrap up, what does this 00:36:12.210 --> 00:36:14.670 all mean for us? Why does Sappho still matter 00:36:14.670 --> 00:36:16.449 so much, aside from the hysterical curiosity 00:36:16.449 --> 00:36:18.809 of it all? I think for me, it connects all the 00:36:18.809 --> 00:36:21.289 way back to that lyric I we started with. Sappho 00:36:21.289 --> 00:36:23.769 teaches us that the small internal movements 00:36:23.769 --> 00:36:25.730 of the heart jealousy over a lover's glance, 00:36:26.010 --> 00:36:29.230 desire, the fear of losing your looks, the anxiety 00:36:29.230 --> 00:36:32.170 about a brother's bad behavior, are just as epic 00:36:32.170 --> 00:36:35.230 as the Trojan War. She validated the interior 00:36:35.230 --> 00:36:37.489 life as a subject worthy of the highest art. 00:36:37.690 --> 00:36:40.170 That's a powerful takeaway. The intimate is epic. 00:36:40.409 --> 00:36:42.230 And I would leave you, the listener, with one 00:36:42.230 --> 00:36:45.050 last provocative thought to mull over. We mourn 00:36:45.050 --> 00:36:47.449 the loss of the nine volumes. We wish we had 00:36:47.449 --> 00:36:50.110 it all. But I want you to ask yourself, do we 00:36:50.110 --> 00:36:52.769 love Safa for what she said? Or do we perhaps 00:36:52.769 --> 00:36:55.090 love her for the silence? The silence. What do 00:36:55.090 --> 00:36:58.369 you mean? The gaps. The missing pieces. Because 00:36:58.369 --> 00:37:01.070 she is so fragmented, she becomes a mirror. The 00:37:01.070 --> 00:37:02.809 Victorians looked into the gaps and they saw 00:37:02.809 --> 00:37:05.489 a respectable school teacher. The decadents looked 00:37:05.489 --> 00:37:08.179 and saw a dangerous sinner. The feminists looked 00:37:08.179 --> 00:37:10.920 and saw a revolutionary foremother. If we had 00:37:10.920 --> 00:37:13.920 all 10 ,000 lines, if we knew every detail of 00:37:13.920 --> 00:37:16.400 her potentially mundane daily life, would she 00:37:16.400 --> 00:37:19.280 still hold the same mystique? Or does the very 00:37:19.280 --> 00:37:23.440 fragmentation invite us, force us, to co -author 00:37:23.440 --> 00:37:25.920 the poems with her, filling in the blanks with 00:37:25.920 --> 00:37:28.679 our own desires, our own stories? That is definitely 00:37:28.679 --> 00:37:30.400 something to think about. Maybe the fragments 00:37:30.400 --> 00:37:31.960 aren't a tragedy. Maybe they're an invitation. 00:37:32.039 --> 00:37:33.960 I would encourage everyone listening, go find 00:37:33.960 --> 00:37:36.340 a good translation, Anne Carson's Academy. If 00:37:36.340 --> 00:37:39.039 not, Winter is fantastic because she preserves 00:37:39.039 --> 00:37:40.800 the brackets and the empty space on the page. 00:37:40.880 --> 00:37:43.400 Read one of those broken lines and just see what 00:37:43.400 --> 00:37:45.039 you fill the blank with. Thanks for listening 00:37:45.039 --> 00:37:46.699 to this deep dive. We'll see you next time.