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. 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. As recently as 2014, yet another discovery of a missing poem created a media stir around the world. 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. 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. An exploration of the fascinating poetry, life, and world of Sappho, including a complete translation of all her poems. But more than half of the two hundred or so more substantial poems and fragments are to be found. Some come from ancient papyri, pottery shards and mummy wrappings found in Egypt.

That is challenging as much of it has survived only as fragments. The book’s concern, however, is to get a sense of Sappho’s life from her poetry. Sappho was exiled in Sicily around 600 BCE and presumably returned to Lesbos, where she died in old age. She did have a much loved daughter also named Cleis. We cannot be certain, however, who her father was or the name of her husband (the latter might have been Cercylas according to the Suda, a tenth-century encyclopaedia). We do know she was born on Lesbos in the seventh century BCE into a wealthy merchant family, that she had three brothers and her mother was Cleis. Biographical facts he admits are few and some questionable. The book also includes Freeman’s own translations of all the surviving poems and fragments, including those most recently discovered.įreeman sets out to explore the life, poetry and world of Sappho. Other passages bring the ancient world vividly alive with well-chosen detail. Some parts – for example, Grenfell and Hunt’s discovery in Egypt in 1897 of papyrus with lines by Sappho – read like a detective story. There have been many books by scholars for scholars on Sappho but American academic Philip Freeman describes his Searching for Sappho as ‘a book for everyone else’.

Searching for Sappho by Philip Freeman