(“A sex-crazed whore who sings of her own wantonness,” one theologian wrote, just as a scribe was meticulously copying out the lines that Obbink deciphered.) A millennium passed, and Byzantine grammarians were regretting that so little of her poetry had survived. Legend has it that the early Church burned her works. In antiquity, literary critics praised her “sublime” style, even as comic playwrights ridiculed her allegedly loose morals. For the better part of three millennia, she has been the subject of furious controversies-about her work, her family life, and, above all, her sexuality. “Papyrological finds,” as one classicist put it, “ordinarily do not make international headlines.”īut then Sappho is no ordinary poet.

The new additions to the extant corpus of antiquity’s greatest female artist were reported in papers around the world, leaving scholars gratified and a bit dazzled. Remarkably enough, this was the second major Sappho find in a decade: another nearly complete poem, about the deprivations of old age, came to light in 2004. The text is now known as the “Brothers Poem.”

The four-line stanzas were in fact part of a schema she is said to have invented, called the “sapphic stanza.” To clinch the identification, two names mentioned in the poem were ones that several ancient sources attribute to Sappho’s brothers. lyric genius whose sometimes playful, sometimes anguished songs about her susceptibility to the graces of younger women bequeathed us the adjectives “sapphic” and “lesbian” (from the island of Lesbos, where she lived). The dialect, diction, and metre of these Greek verses were all typical of the work of Sappho, the seventh-century-B.C. Much older: about a thousand years more ancient than the papyrus itself. But, as he looked at the curious pattern of the lines-repeated sequences of three long lines followed by a short fourth-he saw that the text, a poem whose beginning had disappeared but of which five stanzas were still intact, had to be older. Judging from the style of the handwriting, Obbink estimated that it dated to around 200 A.D. Some scholars question how personal her erotic poems actually are.

New papyrus finds are refining our idea of Sappho.

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