What Sappho Still Teaches Us About Love

In Ancient Greece, the Iliad was the poem above all other poems -
an epic full of war and bloodshed that tells of the great heroes
who fought and died for Troy.  But not so long after the
supposed composition of the Iliad, a woman on the Mediterranean
island of Lesbos, close to the coast of modern-day Turkey,
introduced a new and enduring note to poetry: desire.  Her
name was Sappho. She was revered through the Ancient World, but
today only one work survives in its entirety: a poem usually known
as the Hymn to Aphrodite. The rest is fragments - only about 600
lines of the 10,000 lines the Romans were still reading seven
centuries after her death.  Sappho lived in the 7th Century
BCE, long before the rise of Athens as the dominant city-state in
Ancient Greece. It was before democracy, before the Parthenon and,
arguably, before the extreme subjugation of women common in the
later “classical” period. Women weren’t exactly liberated in
seventh century Lesbos, but it looks like they were a lot freer
than in fifth-century Athens.  From her poetry, we can tell
she was an aristocrat, a singer, a lover, and a mother. 
Sappho, famously, loved women. And in this episode, Charlotte and
Mary explain why they also love Sappho. Not only is she the great
poet of desire, but she also writes about nature, motherhood,
middle-age, bad knees, and why war - despite what her brothers
might say - is boring.  Charlotte and Mary recreate what they
can of Sappho’s life and art. And they ask the big question: why is
it that so little of her work survives compared to many male
writers of the ancient world? Are medieval monks to blame? Was she,
as Otis Redding sang, just too hot to handle? 
@instaclassicpod for Insta, TikTok and YouTube @insta_classics for
X email: instantclassicspod@gmail.com To join the Instant Classics
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members beginning 30th September. Sign up now with the promo code
EARLYBIRD25 to receive a 25% discount on membership.  Mary and
Charlotte’s recommended reads: There are hundreds of translations
and adaptations of Sappho. Two of Mary and Charlotte’s recent
favourites are: Anne Carson: If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
and Stanley Lombardo: Sappho, Poems and Fragments In her book,
Eros, the Bittersweet, Carson also asks what makes Sappho the great
poet of desire.  The world behind the poetry is the subject of
Rosalind Thomas’s “Sappho’s Lesbos”, in The Cambridge Companion to
Sappho. This is a fairly specialist collection of essays, but takes
the story of Sappho’s influence right up to the present, from the
USA to India, China and Latin America. For the controversies around
the new discoveries of Sappho’s poetry made a decade ago, start
with Roberta Mazza, Stolen Fragments (extraordinary detective work
on the world of the illegal  trade in ancient papyri). Three
articles by Charlotte also discuss that “new” Sappho and lift the
lid on the problems:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/29/sappho-ancient-greek-poet-unknown-works-discovered 
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jan/09/a-scandal-in-oxford-the-curious-case-of-the-stolen-gospel 
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/25/doubts-cast-over-provenance-of-unearthed-sappho-poems
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