The <strong>Gateway</strong> <strong>Chronicle</strong> The Tenth Muse: The Loss of Sappho’s Work Born c. 630 BC, Sappho was to become one of the most revered poets of her time, her work challenging popular standards around poetry at the time and its influence still being felt today. Sappho, or Psappha in her native Aeolic, is most well-known today for discussions surrounding her sexuality and gender in the ancient world – to an extent this overshadows the success she deserves to receive. Yet, for someone who was dubbed the ‘Tenth Muse’ by Plato, surprisingly little survives of her poetry today. Myths and fact often become confused when understanding the reasons behind this tragedy but nevertheless it is fascinating to try to unravel. A depiction of Pope Gregory VII little evidence to support this idea: it is much more likely there was a translation error when the scholars reported it. Joseph Scaliger, a French scholar, wrote in 1666 of Pope Gregory VII ordering the destruction of all promiscuous poems and later commented on Gregory of Nazianzus’ burning of comedians’ and lyrical poets’ works in the 4 th century (including Sappho). It seems that in later years, there was an understandable confusion between the Gregories. What’s more likely is that the reasons scholars listed for this burning was not because of both Sappho and the object of her desire being a woman, but rather because it was considered too promiscuous. One could argue that the most obvious pointer to Sappho’s sexuality, apart from the subjects of her poems, are the words ‘sapphic’ and ‘lesbian’ that find their origins in her name, ‘Sappho’, and her birthplace, the islands of ‘Lesbos’. While she was rumoured to have a husband – Kerkyas of Andros – the chances are he never existed as his name literally translates to ‘Penis Allcock from the Isle of Man’. It is likely he was made up as a joke by Sappho’s contemporaries. Whether this was an attempt to discredit her is unclear yet later attacks on Sappho as a result of her sexuality can be easily discerned. Despite the fact that same-sex relationships were seen as an act rather than an aspect of one’s self in ancient Greece, Sappho was still ridiculed for her sexuality. Anacreontic fragments, a type of poem, used her as an object to sneer at lesbians as a whole, New Comedians picked up on this slander and used the poet as a popular burlesque figure in a number of plays. In the years after her death, Christian moralists formally cursed her while even modern editors changed and edited the lines of her poetry found to obscure her yearning for women who were the subject of her poems. But is her sexuality the reason why so little of her poetry survives into today? A popular myth is that Pope Gregory VII in 1073 had Sappho’s poetry burned since it detailed her lesbian desires. There is While the myth doesn’t account for the loss of Sappho’s work, there are several possible reasons that are more feasible. To begin with, Sappho’s work continued to be translated and studied considerably in the Roman Era and throughout its empire, although towards the end of its period she was less focused on. Partially due to the transformation of lyrical to written poetry as well as the movement into Attic and Homeric Greek, Sappho’s poetry slipped out of the limelight. The native Aeolic, which Sappho would have written and spoken, was notably difficult for Romans to translate and study. The Aeolic Dialect was the language spoken in Boeotia, Thessaly and Lesbos and contained many linguistic nuances unfamiliar and confusing to Roman scholars, much like how an average reader would find it difficult to understand Middle English today. Rather than a ruthless and targeted destruction of great poetry, it appears as though the sad reality is that we have so little of Sappho’s poetry today because of a language barrier. Even celebrated poet Apuleius commented on the ‘strangeness’ of her writing. While the main, and most obvious, reason for the disappointing lack of Sappho’s poetry remaining today is indeed translation difficulties, this would have been further impacted by the change from papyrus scrolls to parchment. As the demand to study her work declined, so did the need to transcribe it to the 26
27 Hidden Voices