The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones. Daniel Mendelsohn

But then Sappho is no ordinary poet. 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. In antiquity, literary critics praised her ‘sublime’ style, even as comic playwrights ridiculed her allegedly loose morals. Legend has it that the early Church burned her works. (‘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. Seven centuries later, Victorian scholars were doing their best to explain away her erotic predilections, while their literary contemporaries, the Decadents and the Aesthetes, seized on her verses for inspiration. Even today, experts can’t agree on whether the poems were performed in private or in public, by soloists or by choruses, or, indeed, whether they were meant to celebrate or to subvert the conventions of love and marriage. The last is a particularly loaded issue, given that, for many readers and scholars, Sappho has been a feminist heroine or a gay role model, or both. ‘As far as I knew, there was only me and a woman called Sappho,’ the critic Judith Butler once remarked.

      Now the first English version of Sappho’s works to include the recent finds has appeared: Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works (Cambridge), with translations by Diane J. Rayor and a thoroughgoing introduction by André Lardinois, a Sappho specialist who teaches in the Netherlands. (Publication of the book was delayed by several months to accommodate the ‘Brothers Poem’.) It will come as no surprise to those who have followed the Sappho wars that the new poems have created new controversies.

      The greatest problem for Sappho studies is that there’s so little Sappho to study. It would be hard to think of another poet whose status is so disproportionate to the size of her surviving body of work.

We don’t even know how much of her poetry Sappho actually wrote down. The ancients referred to her works as melê, ‘songs’. Composed to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre – this is what ‘lyric’ poetry meant for the Greeks – they may well have been passed down from memory by her admirers and other poets before being committed at last to paper. (Or whatever. One fragment, in which the poet calls on Aphrodite, the goddess of love, to come into a charming shrine ‘where cold water ripples through apple branches, the whole place shadowed in roses’, was scribbled onto a broken clay pot.) Like other great poets of the time, she would have been a musician and a performer as well as a lyricist. She was credited with having invented a certain kind of lyre and the plectrum.

      Four centuries after her death, scholars at the Library of Alexandria catalogued nine ‘books’ – papyrus scrolls – of Sappho’s poems, organized primarily by metre. Book 1, for instance, gathered all the poems that had been composed in the sapphic stanza – the verse form Obbink recognized in the ‘Brothers Poem’. This book alone reportedly contained thirteen hundred and twenty lines of verse; the contents of all nine volumes may have amounted to some ten thousand lines. So much of Sappho was circulating in antiquity that one Greek author, writing three centuries after her death, confidently predicted that ‘the white columns of Sappho’s lovely song endure / and will endure, speaking out loud … as long as ships sail from the Nile’.

      By the Middle Ages, nearly everything had disappeared. As with much of classical literature, texts of her work existed in relatively few copies, all painstakingly transcribed by hand; as the centuries passed, fire, flood, neglect, and bookworms – to say nothing of disapproving Church Fathers – took their devastating toll. Market forces were also at work: over time, fewer readers – and fewer scribes – understood Aeolic, the dialect in which Sappho composed, and so demand for new copies diminished. A twelfth-century Byzantine scholar who had hoped to write about Sappho grumbled that ‘both Sappho and her works, the lyrics and the songs, have been trashed by time’.

Until a hundred years ago or so, when papyrus fragments of her poems started turning up, all that remained of those ‘white columns of Sappho’s song’ was a handful of lines quoted in the works of later Greek and Roman authors. Some of these writers were interested in Lesbos’ most famous daughter for reasons that can strike us as comically arcane: the only poem that has survived in its entirety – a playful hymn to Aphrodite in which the poet calls upon the goddess to be her ‘comrade in arms’ in an erotic escapade – was saved for posterity because the author of a first-century-BC treatise called ‘On the Arrangement of Words’ admired her handling of vowels. At present, scholars have catalogued around two hundred and fifty fragments, of which fewer than seventy contain complete lines. A great many consist of just a few words; some, of a single word.

      The common theme of most ancient responses to Sappho’s work is rapturous admiration for her exquisite style, or for her searing content, or both. An anecdote from a later classical author about the Athenian legislator Solon, a contemporary of Sappho’s and one of the Seven Sages of Greece, is typical:

      Solon of Athens, son of Execestides, after hearing his nephew singing a song of Sappho’s over the wine, liked the song so much that he told the boy to teach it to him. When someone asked him why he was so eager, he replied, ‘so that I may learn it and then die’.

      Plato, whose attitude toward literature was, to say the least, vexed – he thought most poetry had no place in the ideal state – is said to have called her the ‘Tenth Muse’. The scholars at the Library of Alexandria enshrined her in their canon of nine lyric geniuses – the only woman to be included. At least two towns on Lesbos vied for the distinction of being her birthplace; Aristotle reports that she ‘was honoured although she was a woman’.

All this buzz is both titillating and frustrating, stoking our appetite for a body of work that we’re unable to read, much less assess critically; imagine what the name Homer would mean to Western civilization if all we had of the Iliad and the Odyssey was their reputations and, say, ninety lines of each poem. The Greeks, in fact, seem to have thought of Sappho as the female counterpart of Homer: he was known as ‘the Poet’, and they referred to her as ‘the Poetess’. Many scholars now see her poetry as an attempt to appropriate and ‘feminize’ the diction and subject matter of heroic epic. (For instance, the appeal to Aphrodite to be her ‘comrade in arms’ – in love.)

      The good news is that the surviving fragments of Sappho bear out the ancient verdict. One fine example is her best-known verse, known to classicists as Fragment 31, which consists of four sapphic stanzas. (They appear below in my own translation.) These were singled out by the author of a first-century-AD literary treatise called ‘On the Sublime’ for the way in which they ‘select and juxtapose the most striking, intense symptoms of erotic passion’. Here the speaker expresses her envy of the men who, presumably in the course of certain kinds of social occasions, have a chance to talk to the girl she yearns for:

      He seems to me an equal of the gods –

      whoever gets to sit across from you

      and listen to the sound of your sweet speech

      so close to him,

      to your beguiling laughter: O it makes my

      panicked heart go fluttering in my chest,

      for the moment I catch sight of you there’s no

      speech left in me,

      but tongue gags –: all at once a faint

      fever courses down beneath the skin,

      eyes no longer capable of sight, a thrum-

      ming in the ears,

and sweat drips down my body, and the shakes

      lay siege to me all over, and I’m greener

      than grass, I’m just a little short of dying,

      I seem to me;

      but all must be endured, since even a pauper …

      Even without its final lines (which, maddeningly, the author of the treatise didn’t go on to quote), it’s a remarkable work. Slyly, the speaker avoids physical