Chronology
Every drafted work, year by year, alongside the events of the author's life. Runs of consecutive letters are folded into groups so you can skim past them or expand to read.
600 BC
Sappho is born around 630 BC on Lesbos, the rich, Aeolic-speaking island off the coast of Lydia — an age of aristocratic feud and exile (her countryman Alcaeus set the same politics to verse from banishment). For a circle of women and girls she wrote wedding songs, love songs, and invocations of Aphrodite, in Aeolic Greek and in metres so distinctively hers that one bears her name. Alexandrian scholars gathered her into nine books; what reached us is barely a single complete poem, the rest a field of quotations and torn papyrus.
poem The Major Poems 600 BC599 BC
The years of song on Lesbos — wedding hymns sung at the threshold and the bridal chamber, with their refrains and their teasing of bridegroom and doorkeeper. Almost nothing here can be dated; the sequence that follows simply walks the Alexandrian edition book by book.
poem The Epithalamia — Wedding Songs 599 BC598 BC
Book One of the Alexandrian edition: the poems in the Sapphic stanza, the metre that carried her most famous work. What survives are fragments — opening lines, quoted stanzas, words saved by grammarians.
poem Fragments of Book One 598 BC597 BC
Book Two, in Aeolic dactyls: among its remains is the invitation to Aphrodite to come to a blossoming orchard, one of the loveliest of the fragments.
poem Fragments of Book Two 597 BC596 BC
Books Three and Four, gathered here together: fragments in other metres, increasingly battered, many surviving only as single quoted lines.
poem Fragments of Books Three and Four 596 BC595 BC
Book Five: the papyrus fragments, including the poem on facing death without regret and the catalogue of remembered garlands and perfumes — much recovered, much lost to the gaps in the roll.
poem Fragments of Book Five 595 BC594 BC
The Brothers Poem and the Kypris Poem — recovered from papyrus only in 2004 and 2014, the most recent additions to the corpus: a sister's anxiety over a brother's voyage, and an address to Aphrodite on the pain of love.
poem The Brothers Poem and the Kypris Poem 594 BC593 BC
Fragments of no assignable book, the epigrams and the dubia, and the single words preserved only because a lexicographer or grammarian — Athenaeus, Pollux, the Etymologicum Magnum — quoted them as specimens of her Aeolic: the scrapings at the bottom of the tradition.
poem Fragments of Uncertain Book, with the Epigrams and Dubia 593 BC