(b Lesbos, c612 bce). Greek lyric poet. A younger contemporary of Alcaeus, she devoted much of her mature life to leading and training a group of well-born young girls of Mitylene, a chief city of Lesbos, in the performance of ritual and music dedicated mostly to Aphrodite, the Graces and the Muses. Men had no part in the life of this group; loyalties and passions were intense. In Plutarch's description (Dialogue on Love, 762–3), Sappho ‘speaks words mingled truly with fire, and through her songs, she draws up the heat of her heart’. To express her own powerful moods of love, jealousy and disappointment, Sappho employed the new form of lyric monody and the stanza since called by her name. (See also Alcaeus.) Of her choral compositions for cult use, only scattered lines remain. More extensive fragments of her epithalamia (wedding songs) survive. Divided choirs of young men and girls, it seems, performed these antiphonally.
Sappho mentioned the pēktis (Campbell, frags.22, 156), usually identified as a harp-like Lydian instrument. She used the term chelus, the specific Greek name for the true lyre (lura), just once (Campbell, frag.118). This is presumably a generic usage; the string instrument regularly associated with her is the Barbitos. Later claims (e.g. in Athenaeus, xiv.635e; Pseudo-Plutarch, On Music, 1136d, citing the authority of Aristoxenus) that she first brought into use the pēktis (alternatively, the plēktron or plectrum, the similar Greek terms having been confused) and invented the Mixolydian tonos are not compelling.
E. Lobel and D.L. Page, eds.: Poetarum lesbiorum fragmenta (Oxford, 1955/R)
E.-M. Voigt: Sappho et Alcaeus: fragmenta (Amsterdam, 1971)
D.A. Campbell, ed. and trans.: Greek Lyric, i (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1982)
U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff: Sappho und Simonides (Berlin, 1913/R)
C.M. Bowra: Greek Lyric Poetry from Alcman to Simonides (Oxford, 1936, 2/1961), 176–240
D.L. Page: Sappho and Alcaeus (Oxford, 1955/R)
G.M. Kirkwood: Early Greek Monody: the History of a Poetic Type (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1974), 100–49
R. Jenkyns: Three Classical Poets: Sappho, Catullus and Juvenal (London, 1982)
A.P. Burnett: Three Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho (London, 1983)
B. Gentili: ‘La veneranda Saffo’, Poesia e pubblico nella Grecia antica: da Omero al V secolo (Rome, 1984, 2/1995), 285–93; (Eng. trans., 1988), 216–22
For further bibliography see Greece, §I.
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN