Unfortunately we know little of Sappho herself, and about that little there is doubt. Even the ancient lives of Sappho are lost. If we had Chamaeleon’s work on Sappho,[26] or the exegesis of Sappho and Alcaeus[27] by Callias of Mytilene, or the book on Sappho’s metres by Dracon of Stratonicea, we should not be left so in the dark; but all these have perished or, what comes to the same thing, are undiscovered. Like Homer, Sappho gives us almost no definite information about herself, and we must depend on late lexicographers, commentators, and imitators. Villainous stories arose about her and gathered added vileness till they reached a climax in the licentious Latin of Ovid, especially as seen in Pope’s translation of the epistle of Sappho to Phaon.
Sappho came of a noble family belonging to an Aeolian colony in the Troad. Though Suidas gives eight possibilities for the name of Sappho’s father, the most probable is Scamandronymus, a good Asia Minor name vouched for by Herodotus, Aelian and other ancient writers and now confirmed by a recently discovered papyrus.[28] He was rich and noble and probably a wine-merchant. He died, according to Ovid,[29] when Sappho’s eldest child was six years of age.
Her mother’s name, says Suidas, was Cleïs.[30] Commentators assume that she was living when Sappho began to write poetry because of the reference to “mother” in the “Spinner in Love”; but this may be an impersonal poem. According to the Greek custom of naming the child after a grandparent the poetess called her only daughter Cleïs.
The poetess had three brothers, Charaxus, Larichus, who held the aristocratic office of cup-bearer in the Prytaneum to the highest officials of Mytilene, and, according to Suidas, a third brother, Eurygyius,[31] of whom nothing is known.
Athenaeus tells us that the beautiful Sappho often sang the praises of her brother Larichus; and the name was handed down in families of Mytilene, for it occurs in a Priene inscription[32] as the name of the father of a friend of Alexander who was named Eurygyius. This shows the family tradition and how descendants of Sappho’s family attained high ranks in Alexander’s army.
Charaxus, the eldest brother as we now know, “sailed to Egypt and as an associate with a certain Doricha spent very much money on her,” according to the recently found late papyrus biography. Charaxus had strayed from home about 572 and sailed as a merchant to Naucratis, the great Greek port colony established in the delta of the Nile under conditions similar to those of China’s treaty-ports. There he was bartering Lesbian wine, Horace’s _innocentis pocula Lesbii_, for loveliness and pleasures, when he fell in love with and ransomed the beautiful Thracian courtesan, the world-renowned _demi-mondaine_. She was called Doricha by Sappho according to the Augustan geographer, Strabo, but Herodotus names her Rhodopis, rosy-cheeked,[33] and evidently thought she had contributed to Delphi[34] the collection of _obeliskoi_ or iron spits, the small change of ancient days before coin money was used to any great extent. Herodotus, the only writer preserved before 400 B.C. who gives us any details about Sappho tells the story and how the sister roundly rebuked her brother in a poem. Some four hundred years later Strabo, adding a legend which recalls that of Cinderella, repeats the story and it is retold by Athenaeus after another two hundred years. In our own day it has slightly influenced William Morris in the _Earthly Paradise_. Except for archaeology, however, we should never have heard Sappho’s own words. About 1898 the sands of Egypt gave up five mutilated stanzas of this poem which scholars had for many a year longed to hear, but the beginnings of the lines are gone and only a few letters of the last stanza remain. My own interest in Sappho dates from that very year when I wrote for Professor Edward Capps, then of the University of Chicago, a detailed seminary paper on _The Nereid Ode_, and for the twenty-five years since I have been gathering material about Sappho. We must be careful not to accept as certainly Sappho’s, especially the un-Sapphic idea of the last stanza, the restorations of Wilamowitz, Edmonds, and a host of other scholars, who have changed their own conjectures several times. Wilamowitz goes so far as to think that the words apply to Larichus, but most critics have restored them with reference to Charaxus. I give a version which I have based on Edmonds’ latest and revised text,[35] taking a model from the stanza used by Tennyson in his _Palace of Art_.