Freeman is certain that Sappho was married, “since the single life was simply not a viable option, especially for a woman” and since weddings emerged as a theme in her poetry. The result is an authoritative, insightful narrative that looks at childhood, marriage, motherhood, sexuality, religion, and death to speculate about the realities of Sappho’s life. Since a biography is impossible, the author looks to literary, artistic, and archaeological sources to investigate women’s experiences on the island of Lesbos in the late seventh to early sixth centuries B.C.E. Oh My Gods: A Modern Retelling of Greek Myths, 2012, etc.), and of nine scrolls of her poetry once housed in the ancient Library of Alexandria, only a few poems remain, some represented by a single word.
Nonetheless, although most people have heard of Sappho, the story of her lost poems and the lives of the ancient women they celebrate has never been told for a general audience.Searching for Sappho is the exciting tale of the rediscovery of Sappho’s poetry and of the woman and world they reveal.From fragmentary sources, a classicist reconstructs the life and times of the poet Plato called the 10th Muse.īiographical facts about Sappho “are few and often subject to dispute,” acknowledges Freeman (Classics/Luther Coll. Sappho was the daughter of an aristocratic family, a wife, a devoted mother, a lover of women, and one of the greatest writers of her own or any age.
As recently as 2014, yet another discovery of a missing poem created a media stir around the world.The poems of Sappho reveal a remarkable woman who lived on the Greek island of Lesbos during the vibrant age of the birth of western science, art, and philosophy. But within the last century, dozens of new pieces of her poetry have been found written on crumbling papyrus or carved on broken pottery buried in the sands of Egypt. Yet those meager remains showed such power and genius that they captured the imagination of readers through the ages. An exploration of the fascinating poetry, life, and world of Sappho, including a complete translation of all her poems.For more than twenty-five centuries, all that the world knew of the poems of Sappho-the first woman writer in literary history-were a few brief quotations preserved by ancient male authors.
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