In Ancient Greece, the Iliad was the poem above all other poems - an epic full of war and bloodshed that tells of the great heroes who fought and died for Troy.
But not so long after the supposed composition of the Iliad, a woman on the Mediterranean island of Lesbos, close to the coast of modern-day Turkey, introduced a new and enduring note to poetry: desire.
Her name was Sappho. She was revered through the Ancient World, but today only one work survives in its entirety: a poem usually known as the Hymn to Aphrodite. The rest is fragments - only about 600 lines of the 10,000 lines the Romans were still reading seven centuries after her death.
Sappho lived in the 7th Century BCE, long before the rise of Athens as the dominant city-state in Ancient Greece. It was before democracy, before the Parthenon and, arguably, before the extreme subjugation of women common in the later “classical” period. Women weren’t exactly liberated in seventh century Lesbos, but it looks like they were a lot freer than in fifth-century Athens. From her poetry, we can tell she was an aristocrat, a singer, a lover, and a mother.
Sappho, famously, loved women. And in this episode, Charlotte and Mary explain why they also love Sappho. Not only is she the great poet of desire, but she also writes about nature, motherhood, middle-age, bad knees, and why war - despite what her brothers might say - is boring.
Charlotte and Mary recreate what they can of Sappho’s life and art. And they ask the big question: why is it that so little of her work survives compared to many male writers of the ancient world? Are medieval monks to blame? Was she, as Otis Redding sang, just too hot to handle?
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Mary and Charlotte’s recommended reads:
There are hundreds of translations and adaptations of Sappho. Two of Mary and Charlotte’s recent favourites are: Anne Carson: If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho and Stanley Lombardo: Sappho, Poems and Fragments
In her book, Eros, the Bittersweet, Carson also asks what makes Sappho the great poet of desire.
The world behind the poetry is the subject of Rosalind Thomas’s “Sappho’s Lesbos”, in The Cambridge Companion to Sappho. This is a fairly specialist collection of essays, but takes the story of Sappho’s influence right up to the present, from the USA to India, China and Latin America.
For the controversies around the new discoveries of Sappho’s poetry made a decade ago, start with Roberta Mazza, Stolen Fragments (extraordinary detective work on the world of the illegal trade in ancient papyri). Three articles by Charlotte also discuss that “new” Sappho and lift the lid on the problems:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/29/sappho-ancient-greek-poet-unknown-works-discovered
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jan/09/a-scandal-in-oxford-the-curious-case-of-the-stolen-gospel
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/25/doubts-cast-over-provenance-of-unearthed-sappho-poems
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Producer: Jonty Claypole
Executive Producer: Jo Meek
Senior Producer: Natalia Rodriguez Ford
Video Editor: Jak Ford
Theme music: Casey Gibson
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