Sappho (Understanding Classics)

Sappho has been constructed as many things: proto-feminist, lesbian icon and even – by the Victorians – chaste headmistress of a girls’ finishing school. Yet ironically, as Page DuBois shows, the historical poet herself remains elusive. We know that Sappho’s contemporary Alcaeus described her as ‘violet, pure, honey-smiling Sappho’; and that the rhetorician and philosopher Maximus of Tyre saw her, perhaps less enthusiastically, as ‘small and dark’. We also know that her 7th/6th century BCE island of Lesbos was riven by tyrannical and aristocratic factionalism and that she was probably exiled to Sicily. Much of the rest is speculative. DuBois suggests that the value of Sappho lies elsewhere: in her remarkable verse, and in the poet’s reception