Paris Review Gathers Elements of Sappho

Paris Review shares a lovely piece about Sappho, excerpted from An Inventory of Losses (New Directions), a collection of prose pieces that blur the line between fiction and essay, by the German author Judith Schalansky. "No other woman from early antiquity has been so talked about, and in such conflicting terms," Schalansky writes. "The sources are as sparse as the legends are manifold, and any attempt to distinguish between the two virtually hopeless." Further: 

Every age has created its own Sappho. Some even invented a second in order to sidestep the contradictions of the stories: she was variously described as a priestess in the service of Aphrodite or the Muses, a hetaera, a man-crazed woman, a love-crazed virago, a kindly teacher, a gallant lady; by turns shameless and corrupt, or prim and pure.

Her countryman and contemporary Alcaeus described her as “violet-haired, pure, honey-smiling,” Socrates as “beautiful,” Plato as “wise,” Philodemus of Gadara as “the tenth Muse,” Strabo as “a marvelous phenomenon,” and Horace as “masculine,” but there is now no way of knowing what exactly he meant by that.

A papyrus from the late second or early third century for its part claims that Sappho was “ugly, being dark in complexion and of very small stature,” “contemptible,” and “a woman-lover.”

At one time bronze statues of her were common; even today, silver coins still bear her laurel-crowned profile, a water jug from the school of Polygnotos portrays her as a slim figure reading a scroll, and a gleaming black vase from the fifth century before Christ shows her as tall in stature, holding an eight-stringed lyre in her hand as if she had just finished playing or were just about to start. We do not know how Sappho’s verses sounded in Aeolic—the most archaic and tricky of the extinct ancient Greek dialects, in which the initial aspiration was omitted from words—when they were sung at a wedding ceremony, at a banquet, or in the women’s circle, accompanied by a stringed instrument: the hushed sound of a plucked phorminx or the festive ring of the cithara, the deep tones of the barbitos or the harp-like strains of the pectis, the high tones of a magadis or the dull resonance of a tortoiseshell lyre.

Read more at Paris Review.