HoP 500a Marguerite Johnson on Sappho

History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps

In this special milestone episode, Peter Adamson interviews Professor Marguerite Johnson to explore the life and enduring legacy of the Gree

Key takeaways

• Sappho lived in the late 7th/early 6th century BCE on the island of Lesvos.
• Only about 650 lines of her estimated 10,000 survive, often recovered from ancient rubbish heaps like Oxyrhynchus.

Main topics

• Biographical details of Sappho
• Papyrology and the Oxyrhynchus collection

Notable quotes

Eros, the limb loosener, yet again shakes me to the core.

Conclusion

The episode highlights how Sappho's lyrical fragments serve as a vital

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:07) Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. This is a special episode. It's the first of five episodes to celebrate reaching the 500-episode milestone. And to mark this occasion, we're going to be retracing our steps to cover a few topics I skipped over when I was doing previous series of the podcast. So we're going way back to antiquity. in several cases, and that's what we're going to do right now. I'm being joined by Marguerite Johnson, who's a professor of classics at the University of Queensland in Australia, and she's going to speak to us about Sappho, an early Greek poet who lived around the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers. So actually, Sappho should have been one of the first 10 episodes, but she wasn't because I skipped her, and I'm very grateful to Marguerite for helping me to correct this oversight. Welcome to the podcast. Speaker 1 (1:04) Thank you, Pasha. So Speaker 2 (1:05) as I say, I did not cover Sappho when doing early Greek philosophy. To be honest, when I was doing the first maybe series of the whole project, I had a much less kind of expansive and capacious approach to the whole thing. So I just thought, oh, I'll start with the Presocratics and didn't think about too much what I might do alongside that. And so the listeners won't have heard anything about Sappho earlier. They have probably heard of her. But nonetheless, I think it would be good to start by introducing her to the listeners. So when did she live? Who was she? Speaker 1 (1:38) Sappho is the first extant female poet we have in the Western canon. She's an archaic Greek poet. So she's writing lyric and not the grand epics of her predecessors, the Homeric poets. So it's personal lyric poetry, not always personal, but they're short poems. She's from the Greek island of Lesvos, possibly born in Oresos in the southwest part of the island. Maybe, however, she was born in the capital of Lesvos, Mytilene. So we're looking at a female poet in the North Aegean, which is really interestingly miles or around about 36 kilometers from Turkey. Speaker 1 (2:28) Very, very close. You can stand in Mitalimi and look at Turkey across the Aegean. Thessaloniki was founded, if she's born in a restless, around about the 8th century BCE. The foe is said to have been born circa 620 BCE, give and take a few years. So toward the end of the 7th century BCE. Dies around about 570 BCE. And she composes in Aeolic dialect. So it's a dialect spoken on the island and in some other locations in Greece. So on the mainland, you've got Boeotia and also Thessaly. And this Aeolic dialect is noted by linguistics to be a little bit archaic in the meaning of old-fashioned. So what remains of a poetry when you read it? It's quite difficult Greek. We don't have that much biographical detail, Peter. The most credible information, and people always say you should be careful of this, but I think the most credible information comes from references in her own poetry. She mentions she has a daughter, Cleus, and she also mentions she has brothers. So she doesn't say this, but clearly she was married at some point. Although in what survives of her lyrics, don't mention is ever made of her husband. Certainly the child, but not the husband. Her brothers are mentioned, one of him really quite disparagingly. Apparently this was because from what we can get from the poem, what remains of it. He has a liaison with a woman and Sappho is really not approving of this liaison. So I think there's a little bit of a snobbish element, and that's because she clearly comes from a well-off family. Most likely, scholars think, a wealthy merchant family. Now, what is really unusual is she clearly receives an excellent education, especially for a female. Now, that doesn't mean she had an education that we can relate to. She would have been educated in the works of the Homeric poets. And keep in mind, this would have been still an oral tradition. So how they sounded, how they were sung. She would have been educated in choral performance, which was to perform poetry, possibly in competitions within groups. And that would have included lessons in dancing. So she was clearly well-educated in the literature up until her time. And you see that coming out in her poetry. There are beautiful references and reworkings of Homeric lines and themes. We also know that for a period of time, her family went into exile in Sicily. So most scholarly takes on that is that they were involved in political factionalism and they eventually return and she appears to have died on the island. And in ancient times, you could actually... go to Lesvos and see Sappho's tomb. We'd also know that she seems to have been a teacher of sorts, perhaps a choral instructor or a leader of a theasis, a group of religious worshippers, perhaps in Sappho's case, a cult of Aphrodite. And of course, there is the issue of lesbianism, that Sappho was the first lesbian ever, sometimes. But I think we have to remember that the term is only coined in the mid-18th century, and it's rather anachronistic to apply it to Sappho. Now, of course, the word lesbian originates from Sappho's reputation as a lover of women. But when you look at what remains of her poetry, there is quite limited evidence. There are important informative pieces, but I don't think it would... classify her definitively as a lesbian in any way that we could relate to today. So this reputation really comes in the works of later writers, particularly Greek comic playwrights and Latin erotic poets like Ovid. This sort of reputation as a lover of women really took off at least a generation. after her death and she was marked forever more than and pigeonholed for a for more as Sappho the lesbian. So that's about the extent of what we know of her. What she leaves to us most importantly are her words. Speaker 2 (7:29) And that's what I wanted to ask you about next. So it would be nice to say that we have a complete collection of her poems. Needless to say, we don't. So. Here, I think actually the comparison to the pre-Socratics is maybe useful because the earliest pre-Socratics around the same time, actually, some of them were from the coast of Turkey, so not far away. And like them, her work is preserved in fragmentary form, basically. So can you just tell us like how much do we have? What kind of poems are we talking about? And maybe also how did, why do we still have them, right? Because we don't have like a collection of her works. So why do we have anything at all? Speaker 1 (8:09) She composed a tremendous amount of poetry. And it's so sad to hear that as a scholar of Sappho. About 10,000 lines of poetry. And they were so venerated in antiquity, they were later arranged into nine books via the library at Alexandria. Unfortunately, most of her corpus is now lost. Of the 10,000 lines, give or take. We now have about 650. We have two complete poems. Poem 1, the so-called Hymn to Aphrodite, and I say so-called because ancient poets did not name their poems. There were no titles, so it's just Poem 1, 2, 3, 4. So Poem 1, the Hymn to Aphrodite, and also Poem 58, the so-called Poem 1, Old Age, Now. What is exciting for Sappho scholars is the poem on old age was only discovered in the early years of the 21st century. So that means that there is hope that more and more poetry is going to be discovered. So in addition to these two complete poems, we have near complete poems as well. So fragment 16, where she is thinking about a friend of hers and reminiscing on missing her. and mucking around with definitions of beauty. Fragment 31, where she describes this panic attack almost when she lays eyes on this beautiful woman. So these are almost complete poems. And then we have Speaker 2 (9:46) around Speaker 1 (9:46) about Speaker 2 (9:47) 200 Speaker 1 (9:47) fragments, and some of these consist of just a single word, but everyone has been preserved. And much of what we have may sound unusual. but is not so to classicist and papyrologists, is that most of this material we have comes from this massive collection we call the Oxyrhynchus papyri, named after the location Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, where a huge collection of papyri was discovered in the 19th and 20th centuries. And this collection were all random. pieces of scraps of papyrus. And basically, oxyrhynchus was an ancient rubbish dump or rubbish tip. And these pieces were just thrown all together, discarded. And you might find receipts for a purchase. You might find someone trying to work out their tax. All like scraps of letters. And within this, we find... quotations from ancient authors as well, and Sappho was one of those. Other pieces of Sappho are embedded in other ancient texts, such as Longinus' On the Sublime. In fact, Fragment 31, one of her most famous pieces, was rediscovered in a 1554 edition of Longinus' text. And that discovery actually ignited the Sappho boom in the Renaissance. So it's a ragtag history. Why they don't survive, what happens, I mean, we know that there's a fire in Alexandria, but there were lots of conspiracy theories that there was some sort of Christian cabal where they all got together and they burned her books because she was wicked and attracted to women. All of these theories about a systematic destruction of the corpus, they simply are not true. Some things survive from the ancient world, others don't, and that's about it. What we have, we're getting more and more poems and fragments coming to light. It's just the way of the business of papyrology and classics. Speaker 2 (12:10) Yeah, I always say the question is not. Why did these things not survive, but why did they survive when you think about what had to happen for them to still exist today, right? Speaker 1 (12:20) Exactly. When you look at some of the things that have survived, my prime example is Marshall's epigrams. Now, they're some of the most scurrilous, at times quite grotesque, accounts of the life in the first century CE and really offensive. But we've