The greatest lyric poet of the ancient world, surviving in fragments — desire, jealousy, the sweat and the trembling of love, named without flinching.
The Hymn to Aphrodite — fragment 1, the only poem of Sappho that survives whole — is live as a word-depth beta: all seven Sapphic stanzas in the original Aeolic Greek, every word glossed with its sense (and its Attic equivalent) and the flowing English beside it. Aphrodite comes down in her sparrow-drawn chariot, smiling, and asks Sappho who has wronged her this time. More fragments grow onto the shelf from here.
❦ Read Sappho’s Hymn to Aphrodite in GreekA taste of the format — open the reader above to read all of Sappho: Fragments word by word.
The most admired lyric poet of the ancient Greek world, and almost all of her is gone. Sappho wrote nine books of songs. What survives is one complete poem and a few hundred fragments, some of them a single word wide.
She lived around 600 BC on the island of Lesbos, off the coast of what is now Turkey, and wrote in Aeolic, her local dialect of Greek, in stanzas so distinctive that one shape is still called the Sapphic. Her poems were sung to the lyre. Most of what we have was pieced back together over the last century from scraps of papyrus dug up in Egypt, torn where the page tore; a new poem about her brothers surfaced as recently as 2014.
Her most famous fragment reads like a clinical report on desire. Watching someone she loves sit and laugh with another person, she lists what her own body does: her tongue breaks, a thin fire runs under her skin, her ears hum, she goes greener than grass and feels close to dying. Two and a half thousand years on, it is still one of the most exact descriptions of jealousy anyone has written.
Read in her own Aeolic Greek, the gaps become part of the poem. You hold a torn line, sound out the words that are left, and feel how much a very few of them still carry.
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