“She who shuns love will soon pursue it,
She who scorns gifts will send them still
That girl will learn love, though she do it
Against her will.” (Sappho, quoted in Poochgian 52)
Did you ever make papier-mâché as a kid? Soaking paper, pasting it onto a form, drying it, painting it? Turns out that method of creating things has a very long history. In Egypt, during the Hellenistic period – that’s the period during and after Alexander the Great’s conquest in the 300s BCE – they used a similar material called cartonnage, and they chiefly used it for covering mummified bodies. Cartonnage could be molded easily to fit the corpse – human, animal, didn’t matter – and then decorated with paint or applied materials.
Previous generations, according to a reference page on the University College London website, used strips of linen stuck down with plaster to make cartonnage for their mummies. By Alexander’s time, people had a much cheaper and more abundant resource to hand: papyrus. Hellenistic cartonnage-makers recycled whatever papyrus scrolls they had available into packing material for the dead. Shopping lists, financial documents, prayer books – all of it was fair game.
Massive deposits of cartonnage were dumped in an Egyptian village called Oxyrhynchus. In the 19th century, archaeologists realized the potential for recovering lost works from this well-preserved garbage pile. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, as they say. Papyrologists (experts who study documents on papyrus) have managed to recover a wealth of lost information from these chunks of plaster and paper. By carefully, painstakingly soaking them and teasing the layers of papyrus apart – or nowadays, by scanning them with lasers or other imaging technology – papyrologists bring to light the writing on the original material.
In 2005, some German scholars announced that they had finally got round to studying a piece of cartonnage which had been in the archives of the University of Cologne since 1922. In it, they found pieces of a scroll of ancient Greek poetry, in stanzas of four lines, copied around 300 BCE. Soon after the scholarly translation of this fragment of poetry was published, the poet Anne Carson gave her own working of it in the New York Review of Books:
“You, children, be zealous for the beautiful gifts of the violetlapped Muses
and for the clear songloving lyre.
But my skin once soft is now taken by old age,
my hair turns white from black.
And my heart is weighed down and my knees do not lift,
that once were light to dance as fawns.
I groan for this. But what can I do?
A human being without old age is not a possibility.”
“Being astonished by time is a mood not unknown to most of us,” Carson says in the essay which accompanies her translation. But it was astonishing to uncover new work by this particular poet, especially in the context of junk used to cover a dead body. The newly discovered lines were the missing pieces of a poem that had been known, in part, for more than 2,600 years. This poem came from the mind of the first – and to some the greatest – woman poet in Western literature: Sappho of Lesbos.
I’m Rose Judson. Welcome to Books of All Time.
Books of All Time is a podcast that’s tackling classic literature in chronological order. This is episode 19: Sappho: The Tenth Muse. As always, if you want to read the transcript of this episode or see the references I used to write it, you can visit our website, www.booksofalltime.co.uk. There’s a link in the show notes if you need it. Let’s begin.
This week’s episode – which is late, yes, thanks for bearing with me – breaks with our usual format in that it’s a one-off episode. Usually we take two episodes per item on the reading list: one summary, and one meta-episode. But I can’t do that with today’s subject, Sappho. I simply don’t have enough material to work with. Nobody does. A 2005 article in The Guardian about the discovery of that poem in the show’s opening notes that “Sappho’s pre-eminent reputation as an artist of lyricism and love is based on only three complete poems, 63 complete single lines, and up to 264 fragments.” (Ezard)
And yet, from such scraps and fragments, she emerges as a writer without peer, a master of Greek lyrical forms. Today she’s considered an unabashed champion of same-sex love, and even an icon of feminism. Our modern expectations can cloud our perceptions of her just as much as her gender can. In “Sappho and Her Sisters: Women in Ancient Greece,” the scholar Marilyn A. Katz notes that “as the principal female voice to survive from Greek antiquity, Sappho is pressed into service to speak for all women.” (Katz 520)
In this episode, we’ll walk through what we know about Sappho, illustrated by many of the fragments that remain to us. Then we’ll bathe in the one truly complete poem we have of hers, the Ode to Aphrodite, before wrapping up with a rather entertaining modern-day controversy about yet another new poem of hers discovered in 2014. This last section features scholars facing allegations of skulduggery – the Books of All Time stock in trade.
As with so many of the works we’ve explored together this year, it’s amazing we have anything by Sappho at all. A 1902 introduction to an edition of her work by the fabulously named scholar Henry De Vere Stacpoole rhapsodizes about this fact. Quote:
“For her, the Historical Past, which is the background of all thought, held little but the echoes, voices, and the forms of gods, and the immediate present little but Lesbos and the Ægean Sea, whose waters had been broken by the first trireme only 150 years before her birth . . . What fate gave us the shipping lists of Homer, yet denied us Sappho? Or decided that Sophists and grammarians, exhibiting dry-as-dust truths, should be a medium between her and us?” (Sappho et. al. 9-10)
Stacpoole hits on an important point: until relatively recently, most of what we have of Sappho’s work came from quotations by other, later writers. Usually they were quoting her to praise her style: Aristotle, according to the scholar Maarit Kvilo, put her on the same pedestal as Homer. “You only have to say the Poet and the Poetess –“ (and he uses capital Ps there, for those of you listening at home) “- and everyone knows you mean Homer and Sappho.” (Kvilo 184) Plato, who didn’t really like poetry all that much, ranked Sappho among his personal list of “wise and ancient women” (Kvilo 184), and later declared that “some say there are nine Muses – how cheap! Look – Sappho of Lesbos is the tenth.” (Poochigian et. al. 56)
This fulsome praise may not have been as laudatory as it sounds. The scholar Judith Hallett, in her 1979 paper “Sappho and Her Social Context: Sense and Sensuality,” notes that, Aristotle aside, when most ancient male writers classed Sappho “as the tenth of the female Muses,” (Hallett 447) they were kind of implying that Sappho couldn’t have earned her talent by studying and working at a craft. Instead, they saw her as sort of a freak of nature, or as Hallett says “an inspired and immortal figure to whom self-expression and success came naturally.” (Hallett 448)
You can, if you’re tuned in, hear this in Stacpoole’s 1902 essay on Sappho, too.
“Her voice is more than the voice of a lyric poet, it is the voice of a world that has been, of a freshness and beauty that will never be again, and to give that voice a last touch of charm remains the fact that it comes to us as an echo.” (Sappho et. al. 7)
If you’ve ever read any English literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, you will recognize some of these words – “freshness,” “charm” – as the sort of things male narrators say about the fetching young lady in the lace tucker, even though she’d only bring £10 pounds a year as a dowry. Isn’t she adorable, gentlemen?
Adorable or not, Sappho seems to have been prolific, even if we no longer have the evidence: the Library of Alexandria, famously put to the torch by Julius Caesar in 48 BCE, reportedly had a nine-volume collection of her songs. (Poochigian 43) Think about that. Nine books full of her songs, and today we have just three of them, with a potential fourth – more on that later.
Let’s move on to what we know about who Sappho was. Anything we know about Sappho’s life story is mostly hearsay from other, much later writers, or details gleaned by reading between the lines of what little remains her work. The scholar Maarit Kvilo, in her chapter on Sappho in the 2010 book Early Greek Poets’ Lives: The Shaping of the Tradition, lays out the current understanding of Sappho’s story.
Sappho’s dates are uncertain, though we have a pretty well-defined window thanks to recent scholarship. Over the centuries, scholars’ estimates about when she lived have varied wildly. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 460s BCE, notes that “some Greeks” say she had lived 2000 years before his time, deep in the Bronze Age, but that this seemed far off to him. According to Kvilo, the current best estimate for when Sappho lived is 630 to 570 BCE. Sappho seems to have become famous pretty quickly, because we have vases depicting her holding a lyre on them from the start of the 5th century BCE onwards. (Kvilo 198)
Sappho was from the island of Lesbos, which is in the northeastern Aegean Sea off the coast of modern-day Turkey – Homer mentions it in The Iliad as being part of Priam’s kingdom of Troy. The principal city on Lesbos, then and now, was Mytilene, and it’s possible that Sappho spent most of her life there, although many ancient writers mention that she and her family were, for a time, exiled in Syracuse.
Sappho’s family of origin seems to have been wealthy and influential. She had three brothers. One of them, Charaxus, got romantically entangled with an Egyptian prostitute and apparently became a pirate, much to his sister’s annoyance. The controversial fourth poem by Sappho – the one discovered in 2014 – mentions this rapscallion of a brother:
“Nereids, Kypris, please restore
My brother to this port, unkilled;
May all his heart most wishes for
Now be fulfilled.
“Excuse the misdeeds in his past,
Make him his friends’ boon and foes’ bane
And may we never find the least
Cause to complain.” (Poochigian 76-77)
This is rather sweet, if a bit prissy: gods, make my brother a better man. Writers who had access to more of Sappho’s work claimed that she wrote scorching invective poetry about this brother, too. I wish we had more of that. In addition to her brothers, Sappho was also reportedly married with a daughter, Kleïs, whom she’d named after her mother. One fragment mentions this girl:
“I have a daughter who reminds me of
A marigold in bloom
Kleïs is her name,
And I adore her.
I would refuse all Lydia’s glitter for her
And all other love.” (Poochigian 78)
I find that very touching, being myself the mother of a lovely teenage girl. She’d hit me with a chair if I ever compared her to a marigold in bloom, however. Lydia, by the way, is a region of Greece that was known in ancient times as a place of great wealth – King Croesus of Lydia, defeated by the Persians in 585 BCE, was so fabulously rich that his name has long been a byword for having stacks of cash.
Sorry, digression. Another thing we don’t know about Sappho is what she looked like. There is a tradition that she was as beautiful and graceful as her verses, but also a contrary tradition that describes her, per Kvilo, as a “dark, unpleasant-looking, short, small and lustful woman, but nevertheless, honored for her wisdom and poetry.” (Kvilo 167) Certainly Sappho did not describe herself as beautiful, although she did frequently talk about the delight of adorning herself in beautiful clothes and flowers and perfumes. As she says in one fragment:
“But I love extravagance,
And wanting it has handed down
The glitter and the glamour of the sun
As my inheritance.” (Poochigian 40)
That comes from the collection Stung With Love: Poems and Fragments of Sappho, translated for Penguin Classics by the poet and classicist Aaron Poochigian. He wisely concludes that, given how we don’t have any contemporary accounts of her appearance, “it is safer to leave Sappho’s physical appearance a mystery.” (Poochigian 18)
Back to Kvilo’s book chapter. Kvilo explains that Sappho was not just renowned as a poet in ancient times – she was also credited as the originator or inventor of several musical and poetic innovations. She popularized (and may even have devised) a four-line poetic stanza with three long lines and one short line – the “Sapphic verse,” as it’s now known. Various ancient writers credit her as having invented a type of lyre, or as being the first person to use a plectrum or pick to strum a lyre. (Kvilo 168-9) She’s also credited with the invention of the Mixolydian mode.
I remember the Mixolydian mode from the music theory classes I took a long time ago, but if you need to brush up, here’s a brief refresher – hope you don’t mind this extended passage from Wikipedia:
“In Greek theory, the Mixolydian tonos (‘mode’ is a later Latin term) employs a scale (or ‘octave species’) corresponding to the Greek Hypolydian mode inverted. In its diatonic genus, this is a scale descending from paramese to hypate hypaton: in the diatonic genus, a whole tone (paramese to mese) followed by two conjunct inverted Lydian tetrachords (each being two whole tones followed by a semitone descending). This diatonic genus of the scale is roughly the equivalent of playing all the white notes of a piano from B to B, which is also known as modern Locrian mode.”
I hope that clears that up for you. If it didn’t: basically a mode is a musical scale of eight notes, the equivalent of our musical keys. Modern songs can also be written in the Mixolydian mode. It’s mostly a major or upbeat-sounding key, with a weird flat note at the top end that can make it sound a little sad, if you’re Sappho, or even a little sinister, if you’re Paul McCartney – Paperback Writer by the Beatles fits with modern Mixolydian mode.
Anyway. Sappho is associated with music because she was apparently a singer: she composed all her songs to be performed. In fact, many of her songs were written to be performed by choruses, and almost certainly by choruses of girls.
Judith Hallett argues that “Sappho was a poet with an important social purpose and public function,” (450) composing songs for public performance that may even have been instructional in nature: “a social vehicle,” she explains, “for imparting sensual awareness and sexual self-esteem to women on the threshold of marriage.” (456) Poochigian asserts that these women would actually have been adolescent girls just past puberty, probably in their early- to mid-teens. (Poochigian 23)
Whether there was a specific social organization in which Sappho carried out her purpose seems less clear. Scholars over the years have posited that she might have been a priestess in a religious cult that worshipped Aphrodite, or the leader of a kind of ancient Greek finishing school for young ladies. We just don’t know. Poochigian says that whatever the situation was, “we can be confident that Sappho passed on proverbial wisdom and instructed girls in choral and probably monadic song” – “monadic” here means a solo singer accompanied by a lyre. (Poochigian 26)
We do know about forms of popular songs circulating elsewhere in ancient Greece close to Sappho’s time which could give us clues. Judith Hallett explains that one type of these songs is called the “epithalamium” – a song sung at a wedding by the bride’s unmarried female friends. Weddings were big, raucous affairs, and the epithalamia fit with that. Sometimes the lyrics expressed anguish and sorrow at the fact that the bride was leaving – even describing the bride’s beauty in homoerotic terms. Other times, according to Aaron Poochigian, these epithalamia might have been sung outside the bridal chamber during the, uh, consummation of the proceedings.
Here’s a fragment – I may be wrong in counting this among the epithalamia, but it’s thematically appropriate:
“A hillside hyacinth shepherds treaded flat,
A red bloom in the dust – it is like that.
Maidenhead, maidenhead, where have you gone?
I shall never, ever join you again.” (Poochigian 89)
Eeesh. Here’s another wedding song that is even more erotic:
“And may the maidens all night long
Celebrate your shared love in song
And the bride’s bosom
A violet-blossom.
Get up, now! Rouse that gang of fellows –
Your boys – and we shall sleep as well as
The bird that intones
Piercing moans.” (Poochigian 35-36)
“Get up, now!” and “rouse your boys” – dunno about you, but I find comfort in the fact that dick jokes transcend time and space and language.
[Music]
Whatever her social or performance context, Sappho certainly does have a theme: love. She is the source of the terms Sapphic and Lesbian – the inspiration for the names of both a poetics and a sexuality, as the British poet Carol Ann Duffy says in the introduction to Stung With Love. Given all that,it’s probably time for us to ask the big question: just how gay was Sappho?
A 2015 New Yorker article by Daniel Mendelsohn, with the somewhat hacky title of “Girl, Interrupted,” addresses this head on. “Sappho’s sexuality, which for modern readers is the most famous thing about her,” Mendelsohn writes, “has been controversial from the start . . . in Greek popular culture of the Classical period and afterward Sappho was known primarily as an oversexed predator—of men.” That doesn’t mean that Sappho was heterosexual, but it’s also worth asking if we’re not putting a presentist spin on her.
Maybe, suggests Mendelsohn, it’s not correct to assume that Sappho’s “poems are deeply personal expressions of private homoerotic passion . . . the relentlessly public and communitarian character of ancient-Greek society, with its clan allegiances, its endless rounds of athletic games and artistic competitions, its jammed calendar of civic and religious festivals . . . What is ‘personality’ in such a group-oriented society as archaic Greece?”
That’s a good question, and not one we can really answer well without time travel. Certainly the intensity and persistence of homoerotic themes in Sappho suggests some degree of personal investment? I feel like we should give Sappho the benefit of the doubt and believe that she meant exactly what she said about feeling spun up by the lovely forms of girls. Maybe it’s enough for now for us to know that this is up for debate, and that we can’t assume she would have thought, felt, or behaved the way modern lesbians might.
Anyway, let’s talk about those words she inspired. Lesbian and Sapphic have only been associated with same-sex relationships between women for about 120 or so years. Judith Hallett notes that “lesbian,” for instance, initially meant any sexually enthusiastic woman, straight or otherwise. Apparently the women of Lesbos had a reputation for being frisky, and that’s what those Classical Greek writers were getting at when they depicted Sappho as oversexed. (Hallett 451)
In her own time, however, Sappho’s homoeroticism seems not to have ruffled too many feathers. Judith Hallett says that neither Herodotus, Plato, nor Aristotle (going in chronological order) mention her sexuality as an aberration. “The lesbian eroticism simply does not seem to be anything the early authors would have found disturbing.” (Hallett 189)
Poochigian, for his part, suggests there may have been a culture of socially sanctioned same-sex relationships between women and teenage girls on Lesbos – there famously was that kind of thing in Sparta among men and boys, after all, and he cites examples of compositions by other writers which feature girls singing similarly thirsty things to one another. (Poochigian 30)
He goes on to suggest that if Sappho’s songs were performed in public, which it appears they were, the imagery and emotions within them must have been socially sanctioned, and if they were socially sanctioned, they were probably religiously sanctioned, too. He quotes the writer Walter Burkert: “the worship of Aphrodite finds its most personal and most complete expression in the poems of Sappho.” (Poochigian 32)
However, times change. What society sanctions cycles in and out of acceptability. Within a couple of centuries of Sappho’s death, same-sex love between women came to be seen as sinful – or, at the very least, a grotesque expression of women’s sexuality, which the Ancient Greeks felt was sort of insatiable and animalistic. (Poochigian 50)
Sappho’s literary merit, in the eyes of these later ancients, meant that the homoerotic imagery – the bits which made them squirm – must not be saying what they were obviously saying. In fact, any suggestion that she might actually have been a homosexual woman was dismissed as slander. People began adding to the Sappho legend as time went on, straight-washing her whenever they could. For example, about 200 years after she died, a legend began to appear that she had actually thrown herself off a cliff after being rejected by a younger man. Suicide, it seems, was preferable to being a gay or bisexual woman. (Hallett 448)
Hallett is quick to note that many of these same writers had no such qualms about male homoeroticism, which they presented as natural and necessary for the proper functioning of society, but “rather than sanction female homosexuality, they retreat[ed] to incredulity.” (Hallett 449)
That incredulous attitude has persisted until quite recently. It’s only since the late 19th century, Hallett explains, that Lesbian and sapphic began to refer to women in love with other women – and those words were first used that way, as you might have guessed, by professionals in the emerging fields of psychology and psychiatry. Those words were used as diagnoses, to label women who loved women as pathological and disordered. (Hallett 451-452)
Hallett laments that modern readers have an “obsession with Sappho’s sexual preferences to the neglect of her poetry.” (Hallett 450) So let’s get back to that poetry, which is, Poochigian says, “important because [it] gives a fully human voice to female desire for the first time in Western literature.” (46)
And boy, does she ever. In a 2020 interview with the poetry magazine Smartish Pace, Aaron Poochigian says “I can think of no body of work that is, well, hotter, sexier than [Sappho’s], and yet we do not find one explicit reference to sex anywhere in the poems and fragments.” And he’s right. Instead of pornographic details, you instead get this beautiful, simple language that articulates longing, rage, jealousy, and bittersweet release of someone who’s moving on from you. Who among us, for example, hasn’t found it difficult to concentrate on our weaving when in love:
“Sweet mother, I can’t take shuttle in hand
There is a boy, and lust
Has crushed my spirit –
As gentle Aphrodite planned.” (Poochigian 50-51)
Gently crushing you, that’s what Aphrodite does. This next fragment mentions the only male god Sappho ever seems to talk about in her work: Eros, god of lust and desire. Note how she ties him to violent imagery:
“That impossible predator
Eros the Limb-Loosener
Bitter-sweetly and afresh
Savages my flesh.
Like a gale smiting an oak
On mountainous terrain
Eros with a stroke
Shattered my brain.” (Poochigian 60)
Savaged, shattered – yes, that checks out. I’ve been there. Hope you have, too. Another delightful fragment is, as Daniel Mendelson puts it in that New Yorker article, “a kind of reaction shot.” In it, Sappho watches while some guy talks to the woman she loves. It’s hard to tell whether she’s suffused by envy or amazed by his audacity, but either way, she is having some big feelings:
“That fellow strikes me as god’s double
Couched with you face to face, delighting
In your warm manner, your amiable
Talk and inviting
Laughter – the revelation flutters
My ventricles, my sternum and stomach.
The least glimpse, and my lost voice stutters,
Refuses to come back . . .
Gauzy flame runs radiating under
My skin; all that I see is hazy,
My ears all thunder.” (Poochigian 61-62)
Would love to have my ventricles fluttered, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
Sappho is also a master at evoking the pain and anguish of breakups. Two fragments show this. First, the painful but necessary parting, presented as a dialogue between Sappho and her younger lover:
“’In all honesty, I want to die.’
Leaving for good after a good long cry,
She said: “We have both suffered terribly,
But, Sappho, it is hard to say goodbye.” (Poochigian 63)
Sappho convinces her to go, but not after reminiscing about the good times in a rising crescendo of eroticism: we plucked flowers, we twined them about your throat, you perfumed your hair – we retired to bed.
The second fragment is – well, less poignant:
“May gales and anguish sweep elsewhere
The killer of my character
But I am hardly some backbiter bent
On vengeance; no, my heart is lenient
You were at hand,
And I broke down raving . . .
Cold grew
The spirits of the ladies
They drew
Their wings close to their bodies.” (Poochigian 64)
I hope they never find more of this poem, honestly. I like it as it is – what it suggests. I think we’ve all been in love with someone who treated us as disposable – who because of selfishness or immaturity or a plain inability to empathise with others. And we’ve probably all found ourselves in a situation where we lash out at the other person – killing our characters in an attempt to be heard or seen – or in one where we withdraw after love fails. Why risk that pain again? Why risk the fire? Fold your wings and go quiet.
I also want to highlight this fragment, translated by O’Hara in 1902:
“The moon has set beyond the seas,
And vanished are the Pleiades;
Half the long weary night has gone
Time passes – yet I lie alone.” (Sappho et. al. 70)
I am the sort of person who a) has insomnia and b) pays attention to the night sky, so this echoes for me. I like the fact that the star cluster she mentions – the Pleiades, in the constellation of Taurus, the bull, represents a group of beautiful young women from mythology. Sappho’s shining girls – maybe her shining girl – has vanished. All is dark.
Now, we should come to the Ode to Aphrodite. This finds Sappho in epic, Homeric form, though not in Homeric quantities: there’s just 27 lines of poetry here. You could read it twice in five minutes, and you should. The Ode begins with an invocation of the goddess:
“Deathless daughter of Zeus, wile-weaver,
I beg you, Empress, do not smite me
With anguish and fever
But come as often, on request
(Hearing me, heeding from afar…)” (Poochigian 51)
Down comes the goddess of love, in a chariot drawn by sparrows. Aphrodite is amused: Sappho is a repeat customer, it seems, because the goddess immediately asks who’s got her upset this time. Then we get the stanza I quoted at the top of the episode, which seems to be Aphrodite either describing what she’ll do to the woman Sappho’s in love with, or warning Sappho about the consequences of asking Aphrodite to take away her pain:
“‘She who shuns love will soon pursue it,
She who scorns gifts will send them still
That girl will learn love, though she do it
Against her will.’
And Sappho responds to this by accepting the goddess’s terms:
“Come to me now. Drive off this brutal
Distress. Accomplish what my pride
Demands. Come, please, and in this battle
Stand at my side.” (Poochigian 51)
I don’t care which way you swing in love: the Poetess delivers. I highly recommend getting yourself a copy of Sappho, even if you think you don’t like love poetry. The 1902 edition I found was fine, if a little dated, with too many “thees” and “thines”. It also has the advantage of being available as a very cheap e-book – I paid 99p on Kindle. Anne Carson, the Canadian poet who I quoted in the show opening, also has a highly praised edition that I want to check out, called If Not, Winter, that’s only available in print format.
The Aaron Poochigian translation for Penguin, Stung With Love, is also worth your time, although some of the explanatory material can go way out into the weeds with talk about meter and double consciousness and other more academic concerns. Still, it incorporates the most recently found fragments. Which, of course, have their own story.
[Music]
Everyone’s always looking for new fragments of Sappho. Daniel Mendelsohn, in his 2015 New Yorker article, declared that “the greatest problem for Sappho studies is that there’s so little Sappho to study.” (Mendelsohn) His article was reporting on an exciting new find of more poetry by Sappho. Like the 2005 discovery by the University of Cologne, this new Sappho was also discovered within cartonnage. Unlike the 2005 discovery, however, this new Sappho wasn’t merely fragments – it was an entirely new poem – the so-called Brothers Poem, which I quoted earlier in the show.
There’s some great long-form journalism on this controversy. A 2020 Guardian article by Charlotte Higgins lays out the story, while a Dublin Review of Books article by Peter Sirr from this past June adds some new details – they’re both linked in the transcript if you want to read them; just visit the show notes. But here’s a summary:
The new Sappho poem was found by a Macarthur Grant-winning scholar from the University of Oxford called Dirk Obbink, who specialized in papyrology. His discovery was greeted with a flash of excitement – and then frowns of puzzlement.
Apparently, Obbink had published a paper with photographs of his find, detailing how old it was, what was written on it, and a translation of the poem, which he authenticated as Sappho’s. He even suggested the Brothers Poem may actually have been written to be read by her brothers rather than performed. “Private as it is,” Obbink said in the conclusion to his paper, “[this new poem] can still welcome and engage the modern reader, and it adds an important piece to the jigsaw that is Sappho and her work.” (Obbink, quoted in Sirr)
The one thing Obbink didn’t discuss in his paper was where he actually got the papyrus. He told the media that it had been gathering dust in the collection of a high-ranking German officer before it was bought by a private individual in London who rang up Obbink out of the blue and asked him to examine it. Obbink claimed that the cartonnage had come from a mummy, and that it had been carbon-dated to 201 CE. Other scholars sat up and took notice – that just wasn’t possible, because the practice of using cartonnage in mummies had stopped nearly 180 years before that. Another red flag: Obbink seemed reluctant to make the original papyrus available for others to inspect, a standard scholarly practice.
When confronted with the detail about mummy cartonnage, Obbink changed his story, claiming his private client had given him incorrect information – his papyrus had actually come from industrial cartonnage, for bookbinding. Then he said it had been bought at Christie’s in 2011, but Mike Sampson, an enterprising professor at the University of Manitoba in Canada examined a digital brochure purportedly from Christie’s that was evidence of this sale and determined it had been altered, to the point of staging photographs. (You can imagine how difficult it must be for someone from Oxford to be presented with receipts by someone from a lowly North American university.)
“In this entire story,” writes Charlotte Higgins of the Guardian, “there was no solid evidence, no documentation, no images, and no external witnesses.” Controversy swirled from 2015 onward, but then, in 2020, Obbink was suspended from his position at Oxford pending an investigation into the unauthorized sale of other artefacts to private collectors – allegations Obbink denies. It’s worth noting that the 2020 Guardian article walks through some evidence that Obbink may have been set up by others to take the blame for these sales.
Proceedings continue, but subsequent reporting appears to show that Obbink has worked with the Green family, the American billionaires who own the Hobby Lobby chain of crafting stores and sponsor the Museum of the Bible. They’ve been implicated in several illegal, black-market purchases of artefacts from Iraq and Egypt – the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau seized and repatriated many of these artefacts in 2018.
So what’s the deal with the Sappho manuscript? Is the Brothers Poem a fake? Possibly not – Mike Sampson’s personal theory is that Obbink or his clients were trying to cover up the papyrus’s potentially illegal provenance on the black market rather than trying to pass off a forgery as authentic. For now, many scholars accept the poem is, in fact, Sappho’s – too bad that genuine discovery has been overshadowed by the shenanigans around its origins.
Peter Sirr sums up the disgraceful episode this way: “It’s naive if depressing to think that a discussion of Sappho can take place . . . safe from the depredations of those whose interest in what she actually said or sung is minimal. But then, she has always been threatened and often marginalised.” (Sirr)
Let’s rinse ourselves clean with one last fragment from the Poetess.
“Beyond all hope, I prayed those timeless
days we spent might be made twice as long.
I prayed one word: I want.
Someone, I tell you, will remember us,
even in another time.” (Sappho, quoted in Delahoyd and Hughes)
That’s it for this episode. Next time, we’re back to our usual two-episode format, and it’s an exciting time, because China is entering the chat. Join me on Thursday, November 21st for “Episode 20: The Analects of Confucius – When I Was 40, I Had No Delusions.”
Books of All Time is written and produced by me, Rose Judson. The Disclaimer Voice of Doom is Ed Brown. Lluvia Arras designed our cover art and logo. Special thanks to Yelena Shapiro, Cathy Merli, Matt Brough, John Cole and the Books of All Time Advisory Council: Ed Brown, Beck Collins, Neil Dowling, Caitlin McMullin, Hugh Parker, and Jonathan Skipp. You can support the show by subscribing and leaving a rating or review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on social media: we’re on Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook. Thanks for listening! I’ll be back in two weeks.
References and Works Cited:
Cartonnage, University College London, 2002, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/burialcustoms/cartonnage.html.
Ezard, John. “After 2,600 Years, the World Gains a Fourth Poem by Sappho.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 24 June 2005, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/jun/24/gender.books.
Hallett, Judith P. “Sappho and Her Social Context: Sense and Sensuality.” Signs, vol. 4, no. 3, 1979, pp. 447–464, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173393.
Higgins, Charlotte. “Doubts Cast Over Provenance of Unearthed Sappho Poems.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 25 Mar. 2021, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/25/doubts-cast-over-provenance-of-unearthed-sappho-poems.
Hughes, and Delahoyd. Sappho, Washington State University, public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/mythology/sappho.html.
Katz, Marilyn A. “Sappho and Her Sisters: Women in Ancient Greece.” Signs, vol. 25, no. 2, 2000, pp. 505–531, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175564.
Kivilo, Maarit. “Sappho.” Vol. 322, Brill, 2010, pp. 167–200. The Shaping of the Tradition, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctv4cbgkd.11.
Mendelsohn, Daniel. “How Gay Was Sappho?” The New Yorker, 9 Mar. 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/girl-interrupted.
Parsons, P.J. “Waste Paper City.” The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, University of Oxford, oxyrhynchus.web.ox.ac.uk/waste-paper-city.
Sappho, et al. Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments. Penguin Books, 2015.
Sappho. Ode to Aphrodite – the Poems and Fragments of Sappho. Wine Dark Press, 2022.
“Sappho.” Brooklyn Museum, http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/place_settings/sappho.
“Sappho.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sappho.
“Sappho’s Immortal Daughters : Williamson, Margaret, 1947- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive, Cambridge, Mass. ; London : Harvard University Press, 1 Jan. 1998, archive.org/details/sapphosimmortald00marg.
Books Of All Time 
Leave a comment