author
Sappho
Celebrated since antiquity as one of the great lyric voices of Greece, she wrote poetry so personal and musical that it still feels immediate across more than two millennia. Though only fragments survive, those lines shaped the way later readers imagined love, longing, and song.
3 Audiobooks
Les poésies de Sapho de Lesbos
by Sappho
Sappho: A New Rendering
by Sappho
About the author
Born on the island of Lesbos around the late 7th century BCE, Sappho was an ancient Greek poet associated with Mytilene or Eresos. She composed lyric poetry meant to be sung with musical accompaniment, and in the ancient world she was admired so deeply that later writers called her the "Tenth Muse."
Very little about her life can be known with certainty, and much of what later generations said about her is tangled with legend. What is clear is that her poetry was famous in antiquity and widely collected, yet most of it has been lost over time; today, only one complete poem and many fragments survive.
Even in fragments, her work remains striking for its intimacy, emotional precision, and vivid sense of voice. She wrote about love, desire, beauty, ritual, and the lives of women, and her influence has lasted from the classical world to modern poetry, music, and feminist and queer literary history.