Sappho

Sappho of Lesbos was antiquity's supreme lyric poet — ranked beside Homer, and called "the tenth Muse" in an epigram attributed to Plato. The Library of Alexandria collected her work in nine books; nearly all of it is lost. What survives are quotations preserved by other ancient writers and tattered papyrus scraps, some pulled from an Egyptian rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus.

Only one poem, the "Hymn to Aphrodite," survives essentially complete. Yet even the fragments — a few lines about the moon setting, an apple out of reach on the highest branch — carry an intimacy and directness that feel startlingly modern. Her home island gave the language the word "lesbian," and her name the word "sapphic."

We present her here in public-domain English translations and renderings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.