SYMHC Classics: Sappho

This 2019 episode covers Sappho, often described as the greatest female poet of ancient Greece. Her reputation as a poet has persisted for more than 2500 years, but the overwhelming majority of her work has not.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Today's Saturday Classic is on Greek poet Sappho.
We kick it off by talking about our then forthcoming
trip to Paris. That trip did happen and it was
a great success. We've taken other trip since then, and
our next one is coming up to Morocco November four
through fifteenth, twenty twenty five. If you would like to

(00:23):
join us, you can find out more about the trip
at Defined Destinations dot com. It is the trip called
a Taste of Morocco. Right now, single rooms are sold out,
but there's a wait list and there are still double
rooms available. If you would be traveling by yourself but
you're open to the idea of sharing a room with somebody,
you can get in touch with Defined Destinations to talk

(00:46):
about that possibility. That is not why we picked the
episode for Today's Saturday Classic, though. We have an upcoming
episode on someone who was described as the Sappho of
her time, so we wanted to rerun our episode on Sapo,
which gets into how the connotations around Sappho's name have
evolved over the centuries. One thing we do want to

(01:08):
note we talk in this episode about how various transcribers
and translators have tried to minimize the homoerotic themes in
Sappho's work. For licensing reasons, we needed to use translations
that are in the public domain today, which means older
translations were the ones that were available for us to read. So,

(01:29):
for example, we read from a translation of Ode to Aphrodite,
which reads as though Sapho is praying to Aphrodite about
a man that she loves, but in most of today's translations,
Sappho's unrequited love is for a woman. This episode came
out on March thirteenth, twenty nineteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff

(01:53):
You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey everyone.
Before we get started today, we wanted to let you
know that there are only a few spots left on
our upcoming trip to Paris. Yes, which startles and delights me.

(02:14):
I thought no one would want to come with us,
and it turns out everybody does. Yay. So Yes, we
are going to Paris June second through ninth, twenty nineteen.
If you come to our website, which is missed inhistory
dot com, you can click the link that says Paris
trip exclamation point in either the top menu bar or

(02:34):
under the little menu icon if you're on a mobile device,
that will take you to the Sitehere we can learn
all about the trip and sign up for it. Yes,
so we hope to see you in Paris. We are
going to have a splendid time. We're both extremely excited.
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson

(02:55):
and I'm Holly Frye. The poet Sappho is the first
known woman writer in the European literary tradition, and she
is described as the greatest female poet of ancient Greece,
or the greatest Greek lyric poet period, regardless of gender,
or even the greatest female poet of all time. There's

(03:15):
a nineteen twenty six addition to her work where C. R. Haines,
who edited that edition, put it this way quote, with
the possible exception of Shakespeare, Homer is still the supreme poet,
and Sappho, without any exception, the poetess par excellence. Except
those last two words were in Greek, so I got
to figure out how to translate them, which was a challenge.

(03:37):
Sappho's reputation as one of the world's finest poets has
persisted for more than twenty five hundred years, and that's
fascinating because the overwhelming majority of her work has not.
And then also fascinating is that the words sapphic and lesbian,
which is derived from the island of Lesbos, where Sappho lived,
they've become synonymous with same sex relationships among women. But

(04:01):
we actually know very very little about Sappho's life or
her relationships, and two thousand years ago those terms had
really different meanings from what they do now. So we
are going to get into all of this today. Sappho
is also a frequent listener request, and over the past
few years we've gotten requests from Helen Cillian, pat Esther,
and one person who didn't have a name on their emails.

(04:22):
And then as a heads up, we talk about people's
relationships often enough on the show, we don't usually need
to mention a specific sex act. That is not the
case today, so use discretion if it seems like that
sort of territory might be an issue for you or
people that you listen with. Now, I feel like we

(04:43):
need to do a show called Sexy History, a whole
other thing different, and we wouldn't need those warnings now so,
the most referenced source of information about Sappho's life is
a tenth century Byzantine compendium called the sh and the
Suda is sort of a lexicon or encyclopedia of the

(05:04):
ancient Mediterranean. It has two Sappho entries, and we'll get
into why that is a little bit later. Sapo's name
also comes up in lots of other entries in the Suda,
including ones for her relatives, places she lived, people she knew,
and definitions of various literary terms. She's also mentioned in
lots of other historical writing that has survived until today,

(05:26):
although usually those references are shorter and less detailed than
what's in the Suda. This all makes it very tricky
to piece together Sappho's biography. The Pseudo was compiled more
than a thousand years after Sappo actually lived, and then
on top of that, it's not exactly reliable all the time.
It's cobbled together from all kinds of different sources, and

(05:47):
some of its entries pick up information that is clearly
not factual. In terms of the entries on Sappho, it's
just not clear how much of the information came from
historical sources. How much from what people just knew who
in quotation marks about Sappho in the tenth century, and
how much of it was gleaned from things that are
mentioned in her poetry. It's always tricky to try to

(06:09):
use poems as a source for the poet's biographical details,
but it's even more of a challenge here because by
the tenth century a lot of Sappho's work had already
been lost, so we don't know the full context of
those lines that we have. According to the Suda, Sapho
was born in the forty second Olympiad, which was between
six twelve and six oh nine BCE, but the wording

(06:32):
of it could also be translated as flourished and not born,
which would mean that those years were the height of
her career and not her birth. The Pseudoist's eight different
men as Sepho's potential father, Herodotus, on the other hand,
lived about two hundred years after Sappho did, and he
wrote that her father was named scam Andronomus, and that's

(06:53):
one of the eight men that the pseudalistid as a possibility.
Hundreds of years later, Sepho's mother may have been named
Claus and we have to say may have been, because
a couple of Sappho's fragments mentioned a daughter named Claus,
and it was traditional for daughters to be named after
their grandmother. But even that is pretty murky because the
word that's used for daughter could also just mean child,

(07:15):
and in some cases it could actually be translated as slave.
So this Claus, who may or may not have been
named after Sappho's mother, may or may not have been
her child. This is like the most provisional discussion of
hyderia ever. I feel like if you've heard the words
possibly and may have been, you've heard most of Sappho's biography.

(07:37):
We do know she lived on the island of Lesbos
and the Aegean c and that's just across the water
from what's now Turkey. At the time that was Sartis,
which was the capital of Lydia. Sapho's place of birth
on the island was probably the town of Eiresis or
the capital of Middelini. She most likely lived most of
her life in Middelini, although it is possible that she

(07:59):
and her family either moved or fled to Sicily for
a time, either because of general political upheaval on Lesbos,
or because of their own political affiliations. She may have
had three brothers. The Suda names them as Laricos, Carasos,
and Eurygios, and two of those names appear in a
poem that was on Earthed in twenty fourteen, which we

(08:21):
talked about in one of our Unearthed episodes that year,
and that poem has been nicknamed the Brother's Poem because
it contains these two names. From here, the pseudo wanders
into some more questionable territory. It says that Sappho's husband
was Kirklius of Andros, but Kirklius is very close to
a slang term for the word Penis, and Andros was

(08:44):
a real place, but was also the word for man,
So the Suda's name for Sappho's husband is sort of
like saying he was Dick Johnson of Man Island. So
this is more likely to be a crude joke than
her husband's actual name. I want to make a sitcom
now about Dick Johnson on Man Island. Uh. And then

(09:05):
the Suda names three of Sappho's friends Athis, Tellisippa, and Magara,
using a word to describe them that could mean companion,
but it could also mean cortison, and the Suda says
her relationship with them led her to be accused of
a friendship or a love that was shameful. From there,
the Suda goes into some more mundane territory, naming a

(09:26):
few of Sappho's students, saying that she wrote nine volumes
of poetry and crediting her with inventing the plectrum, which
is like a pick for plucking the strings on a liar.
It also describes her poetry as including epigrams, elegaics, iambics,
and monodies. Her surviving work also includes a lot of epithalamia,

(09:47):
and these are poems that were celebrating a marriage, which
she was probably commissioned to write. In addition to the
Suda's mention of students, a number of classical sources describe
Sappho as a teacher, but none of these us mention
what or where she taught. In spite of that lack
of detail, a lot of articles that exist today definitively

(10:07):
say that Sappho ran a theosos, which is sometimes described
as a sort of finishing school for women waiting to
get married, and it's also sometimes described as a religious
community dedicated to Aphrodite, and sometimes as a group of
temple courtisons. But really there's no substantiation to any of
this or for the idea of a theosos as an

(10:28):
actual established school of some sort. None of Sappho's surviving
writing mentions a theosos at all. You will see a
lot of just incredibly definitive saying with one hundred percent confidence,
statements that are like, Cepho ran this theosos that taught
these young women how to be wives and mothers, and

(10:49):
maybe it's not no documentation of that. And then there
is the story of Sapho and Feon, and the basic
gist of this story is that Sappho fell in love
with a ferryman named Faon, and when he rejected her,
she threw herself off a cliff. That story makes up
the bulk of the Suda's second Sappho entry, which says

(11:10):
that this supposedly different Sapho was also from Middelini, also
played a harp and may have written lyric poetry as well.
This story about the ferryman is repeated over and over
and over. It's depicted in numerous works of art and literature,
including in Avid's herodies or epistles of the heroines. But

(11:32):
Faon was a mythical figure, and it seems like this
idea that the real Sapho threw herself over a cliff
for him dates back to a comedy by Menander written
about two hundred years after Sappho died, and in the
thousands of years since then, the fact that at least
one of Sappho's fragments mentions Faon has been used to
try to substantiate this fictional story as though it were fact.

(11:55):
So when it comes to Sappho's biography, we have a
whole lot of contradictions and questionable and in some cases
her poetry has been used to try to substantiate those claims.
So we are going to take a look at her
poems in some more detail after we take a quick
sponsor break. Sapo was a lyric poet, meaning that she

(12:23):
composed poems that were meant to be sung accompanied on
a liar. In Ancient Greece, lyric poetry tended to be
short and very personal, often sung from one person to
another or written in the voice of one person addressing another.
Many of Sappho's poems that have survived until today either
our or are believe to be love poems. It's hard

(12:45):
to tell sometimes because what survives can be incredibly short. Homer,
on the other hand, wrote epic poetry, and this was
much longer, with a narrative that told the story of
the heroic deeds of the characters in the poem. And
we should also note that it's very possis that the
work attributed to Homer was really written by several people
and not just one regardless, though in the ancient Western

(13:07):
world he was called just the poet and Sappho was
the poetess. Lyric poetry really flourished in ancient Greece between
about six hundred and four fifty BCE, so that was
when Sappho lived. It wasn't newly invented during that time.
This was more a revival of an earlier poetic form.

(13:27):
And then two people were considered to be the most
notable lyric poets of this period. They were Sappho and Alcius,
both of whom were from Lesbos and may have known
each other and even written to each other. Sappho wrote
her poems in Aolic Greek, which is sometimes also called
Lesbian Greek, and in that dialect her name was more
like Shappa than the Sappho that we know today. In

(13:50):
about the third century BCE, Sapho's poetry was compiled into
an eight or nine volume collection in Alexandria, Egypt. The
volumes were arranged by the meter used for each poem,
which set it apart for most other compilations, which tended
to be organized instead by subject or seam. There were
as many as ten thousand lines of poetry in this compilation,

(14:13):
but it's possible that Sappho wrote much more than that,
especially since many of her works were commissioned for special
occasions like weddings, and they might not have been preserved
after they were performed. Today, Sappho is known most for
one particular poetic form, and that's the Sapphic, which is
also called Sapphic meter or Sapphix stanzas. We don't really

(14:34):
know whether Sapho developed this form herself or refined a
form that already existed, but she was so skilled at
writing in this form that it ultimately carried her name.
The Sapphik used four line stanzas, with three longer lines
followed by one shorter line, and then within those lines.
The meter came from Lesbian Greek's pattern of long and
short syllables. When people are translating Sappho's work today, sometimes

(14:58):
they approximate the meter u using the characteristics of whatever
language they're working in. So, for example, in English, there's
a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, with the stressed
syllables standing in for the long syllables in Greek, and
the unstressed syllables taking the place of the short ones.
These tend to be very personal, passionate, and emotional poems,

(15:19):
and they're simultaneously very simple and elegant. During Sappho's lifetime,
poetry was also believed to be magical, so poetry was
thought to be able to influence or shape reality. So
Sappho's poetry was considered to be beautiful and melodic and powerful.
But we have unfortunately very little of this poetry today,

(15:40):
and even less of it in the form of complete poems.
The vast majority of what we have is just short fragments,
and some of these fragments are from damaged pieces of
writing material or pieces of clay pots. Others are quotations
from other people's surviving work. For example, Cassius Longinus quoted
forcedas by Sappho in On the Sublime, which was published

(16:03):
around one hundred CE today, out of those ten thousand
or so lines that we think that Sappho wrote, we
have roughly six hundred and fifty lines of poetry remaining.
That is spread out across about two hundred and fifty fragments.
And of those six hundred and fifty lines, fewer than
a third of them are even complete lines of poetry.

(16:24):
A lot of them are partial lines. Six of the
fragments are longer and more substantive, but still not entirely intact,
and one of those longer fragments is the Brother's poem
that we mentioned earlier, which is missing only its first
few stanzas only one of Sappho's poems is believed to
be complete today, and that is the Ode to Aphrodite.

(16:45):
Different collections of Sappho's poetry use different numbering systems to
keep up with all of these fragments, but most of
the time Ode to Aphrodite, sometimes translated as Him or
Prayer to Aphrodite, is number one. Here's the beginning of
Ode to Aphrodite, translated by T. W. Higginson in eighteen
seventy one quote beautiful throned immortal Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus beguiler,

(17:09):
I implore THEE weigh me not down with weariness and anguish.
Oh Thou most holy, come to me now, if ever thou,
in kindness hearkenest my words. And in the poem, Aphrodite
does come and says, who has harmed thee? Oh, my
poor Sappho. Though now he flies erelong, he shall pursue thee,

(17:29):
fearing thy gifts. He too, in turn, shall bring them loveless.
Today tomorrow he shall woo thee, though thou should spurn him.
Another of the longer fragments is the one that was
quoted in On the Sublime, which we mentioned earlier, and
it describes the speaker's response to sitting across from a
woman that the poem is addressing. This is usually interpreted

(17:50):
as Sappho herself describing her own response to the woman
that she's facing, but that's not really clear here. It
is as translated by John Addington's Simmons in eighteen eighty three,
Peer of the Gods, he seemeth to me the blissful
man who sits and gazes at THEE before him close
besides these sits, and in silence hears THEE silverly speaking,

(18:14):
laughing love's low laughter. Oh this, this only stirs the
troubled heart in my breast to tremble. For should I
but see thee a little moment? Straight? Is my voice hushed? Yeay,
my tongue is broken, and through and through me neath
the flesh impalpable, fire runs tingling nothing see mine eyes

(18:36):
and our noise of roaring waves in my ear sounds.
Sweat runs down in rivers. A tremor seizes all my limbs,
and paler than grass in autumn, caught by pains of
menacing death, eye falter lost in the love trance. But
almost all the fragments are not nearly so long as this.
Here is an example, Sweet mother, I cannot weave my

(19:00):
broken as I am by longing for a boy at
soft aphrodite's will. One that we think from a wedding
poem goes neither honey nor bee for me. I don't
know why I love that. I do too, neither of
the above. Another fragment just says shot with a thousand hues,

(19:20):
and one reads and I flutter like a child after
her mother, and one fragment is simply the words you
burn me. Sappho's fragments can be really evocative, and then
combined with her pretty mysterious biography, they can just be beguiling.
But the fact that they're so fragmented and scattered makes
her work really difficult to study. We have a sense

(19:43):
that she wrote lots of love poems, and that she
wrote lots of poems for people's weddings. Her work seems
to carry a lot of affection as well, including physical
affection for men and women, but we don't necessarily have
the greatest sense of what the whole body of her
work is like. There's some guesswork going on, especially since
some of the fragments are so short that were not

(20:05):
even one hundred percent short that Sappho really wrote them.
And we'll get into why there's so little of Sappho's
work left today to study after we have another sponsor break.
As far as we know, during her lifetime and at

(20:26):
least for a while afterwards, Sapo was deeply respected and
admired as a poet and a person. Plato, who lived
roughly two hundred years after she did, wrote quote some
say the muses are nine, but how carelessly look at
the tenth Sapho from Lesbus. It doesn't seem as though
her contemporaries really questioned her character in any way. I mean,

(20:48):
after all, she was getting a lot of commissions to
write poetry for people's weddings, and that doesn't seem like
it would be happening if she were socially reviled. But
in the century since then have interpreted Sappho in vastly
different ways. In the words of Holt and Parker quote,
every age creates its own Sappho, and many of these

(21:09):
creations have imagined Sapho as being, at least in the
morality of the time, deviant or depraved. Some of these
shifts are thanks to her being from the island of Lesbos.
While she was living, Lesbus was considered to be a
place full of passion and poetry and sensuality, although also
with a lot of political turmoil and infighting, which is

(21:31):
why Sappho and her family may have fled at some point.
Possibly see R. Haines, who we quoted at the top
of the show, described it this way quote. The Aeolians
of Lesbos were a vigorous and gifted race, brave in war,
enterprising and trade, vehement and politics, eminent in poetry and music.
But within a few centuries after her death, prevailing opinion

(21:54):
of the island of Lesbus had shifted. That tendency toward
passion and wealth moved more into perceived hedonism and excess.
Lesbus went from being thought of as a place of
beauty and refinement to one of licentiousness and corruption. The
Greek word lesbiasen, meaning acting like someone from Lesbus, became

(22:15):
associated with impurity and one specific sex act, that being fallatio.
It wasn't just about the island, though eventually this also
extended to Sappho herself. Greek comedy tended to be in
one way or another satirical, although the exact nature and
the primary targets of the satire shifted over time in

(22:36):
the sort of history of Greek comedy, and starting a
couple of centuries after she died, Sappho became the target
of this satire. Her name was used for characters in
several Greek comedies, and those characters were usually depicted as
wanton and lustful and just excessively sexual with young men.

(22:56):
Society's understanding of relationships and gender roles shifts over time,
so it's certain that romantic and physical relationships were viewed
very differently on Lesbis in the seventh century BCE than
they are in various cultures today. But we know virtually
nothing about the details, and many of the authors who
have speculated about it have tried to draw conclusions based

(23:19):
on ancient Sparta, But our understanding of Spartan society is
also limited, and it was a completely different society from Lesbus,
located in a different part of Greece, and it flourished
starting two hundred years or so after Sappho's death. However,
we do know that same sex relationships became increasingly taboo

(23:40):
in parts of Europe in the centuries after Sappho lived,
so we don't really know how they were regarded while
she was living and where she was living, but we
do know that it became more and more taboo afterward,
and as that happened, the idea that Sappho was deviant
because of her lust for young men morphed into the
idea that she was devs because of her lust for

(24:01):
young women. The first reference to this that we know
about was written in the second or third century CE.
In the sixteenth century, humanist scholars claimed that Christian Church
officials had burned Sappho's work for this reason at least twice.
That Bishop Gregory Nesienzin of Constantinople had done so in
three eighty, followed by Pope Gregory the Seventh in ten

(24:24):
seventy three, but it's not clear whether these burnings actually happened,
especially since Bishop Gregory himself was known to quote from Sappho. Yes,
there's some conjecture that over the centuries two different Gregory's
were conflated together into this one person who supposedly did
this burning. Even if her work was burned by the

(24:45):
Church because of perceptions about Sappho's morality, that would not
account for so much of its loss. There were also
floods and accidental fires, and the aging of the material
that the poetry was recorded on, and fewer and they
were people speaking Aeolian Greek, meaning that there was less
and less demand for new copies of her work to

(25:06):
be printed or written or copied. Sappho didn't fade into
total obscurity, though we mentioned in our Christine de Pisan
episode that she's named in the Book of the City
of Ladies, which was written in fourteen oh five. By
the sixteenth century, though, what most people knew about Sappho
really came from Avid's heroities rather than from anything about

(25:28):
her actual biography or her work. By the eighteenth century,
even less of Sappho's poetry was known to the world
than the six hundred and fifty lines we have today.
In the words sapphok and lesbian had taken on entirely
different meanings than what they'd initially meant, which was basically
related to Sapho or related to the island of Lesbis.

(25:49):
Lesbian was first used in writing to describe a woman
who is physically or romantically involved with another woman in
seventeen thirty two, and saffok was used in association with
same sex, desire and relationships among women a few years later.
The first appearance of the word sapphik in writing was
in a seventeen sixty one translation of Plato, which read quote,

(26:11):
their affections tend rather to their own sex, and of
this kind are the Sapphic lovers. So by the Romantic
era in Europe, both Sappho and the island of Lesbus
had become inextricably connected to the idea of homosexuality among women,
which was also culturally very taboo and in some cases outlawed.

(26:32):
But in spite of that, in the nineteenth century, Sappho's
poetry experienced a surge and popularity. The Romantics found the
emotional depth of her poems and the fragments really appealing.
She started appearing in poems by people like Byron and Bodelaire,
although not necessarily in what we would call a favorable light. Then,

(26:53):
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a collection
of manuscripts was unearthed near the Egyptians city of Oxyrinchus,
drastically increasing the number of known Sappho fragments and giving
people way more of them to study and read. Running
alongside this increasing popularity was an attempt to reform Sappho's

(27:14):
image into something that wasn't contrary to nineteenth century morality.
In eighteen sixteen, Frederick Gottlin Welker published Sappho Freed from
a Prevailing Prejudice, which tried to reinterpret her poetry in
a way that minimized the homo eroticism of her work,
and this did start to shift people's opinions about Sappho.
But then in eighteen ninety five, Pierre Luis published Chansson

(27:38):
de Biltice, which was supposedly a collection of newly discovered
poems written by one of Sappho's female students, who was
named and the French pronunciation Bigtis. These were really a
work of poetic fiction. Though these poems were very erotic
and sensual, and although people really quickly figured out that
they were not really written by one of Sappho's students,

(27:59):
it it did reinforce the connection between Sapho and homosexual
relationships among women that Welker had been trying to minimize
in his earlier work, and that led to another effort
to try to reimagine Sappho's identity in nineteen thirteen, led
by Ulrich von Velamowitz. His Sapho and Somonodes drew from
Welker's eighteen sixteen work, and it depicted Sappho as a

(28:23):
spinsterish school marm. This work also really reinforced the idea
that Safo was a teacher at a formal school with
young women as her pupils, and this depiction is based
on his reinterpreting her poetry, not on historical research today
Sappho seems really intrinsically connected to the idea of lesbian,

(28:44):
which can describe a person's sexual orientation as well as
their political or social identity, and that connection was really
reinforced during the early years of the gay rights movement
in the United States, when it was still known as
the homophile movement. In nineteen fifty five, lesbian couples formed
the Daughters of Belitas that's spelled the same way as Billets,

(29:04):
which Tracy said earlier pronounced differently. They included activists Phyllis
Lyon and del Martin, who later became the first same
sex couple to get married in San Francisco, and it
began allowing same sex marriages in two thousand and four.
And this was part social club, part support group, part
education and advocacy organization. They named themselves the Daughters of

(29:26):
Belitus after that eighteen ninety five Chanson de Bilitice collection,
and by this point everyone knew in quotation marks that
the historic Sappho was a lesbian, So the name Belitus
let the organization connect itself to Sappho and signal to
potential members what the organization was for without needing to
publicly express who and what the organization was for. Because

(29:50):
of the social climate and in some cases the law,
just publicly declaring that this was an organization for lesbians
was not possible. In nineteen fifty five, the Daughters of
Belitas created a newsletter called The Latter, which developed a
national readership, and the organization itself became the first national
lesbian organization in the United States. And as time went on,

(30:12):
Sappho became increasingly present in the pages of The Latter,
which also had a poetry column called Saphistries. All of
this continued to reinforce that connection between Sappho and the
lesbian community. So that is Sappho. We know literally almost
nothing about her, And this whole story reminds me a
lot of Jenny Lynde, who was supposed to be just

(30:34):
the world's most incredible opera singer, but of whom we
have no recordings. Yeah, so take people we don't know. Yeah,
I think there's always that thing, right. We talked about
how there are many attempts to reinterpret and shift her
identity over time, and so it is like that trick
when you only have these tiny bits and fragments that

(30:55):
people can want a thing. So badly that they will
interpret it in whichever way mays them the most comfortable
with the material, or like aligns with their ideas of
this historical figure that we really have just the vaguest
smattering of information about. Yeah, well, and there's so many
of the things that we in theory know about her

(31:16):
are like, Okay, are these three brothers? Are those three
brothers her brothers and she mentioned them in her poetry?
Or have those names been picked to stand for her
brothers because those are names that appeared in her poetry.
It's sort of a chicken and egg situation where like
we don't really know which thing led to which, or
are they someone else's brothers? Right? Nothing to do with

(31:40):
her at all? Because it was a commission? Right? Was
this poem written in a someone else's voice, not Sappho's
personal expressions? Anyway, I love her and I think she's fascinating,
even though I know literally tiny amounts about any of it.
There you go. Thanks so much for joining us on

(32:06):
this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note,
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