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Drift off to sleep learning about Sappho of Lesbos, the greatest lyric poet of the ancient world, the only woman in the Alexandrian canon of nine, and the origin of the word "lesbian", and the astonishing story of how the small surviving portion of her work came back to us out of an Egyptian rubbish dump.
Sappho was born around 630 BCE at Eresos or Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, into a wealthy family probably involved in the wine trade. She had brothers named Charaxus and Larichus, may have had a daughter named Cleis, and was exiled to Sicily around 600 BCE, an event recorded on the Parian Marble and very nearly the only documented fact of her life. She composed songs to be sung to the lyre, and she turned Greek poetry inward, away from epic and toward the first-person experience of desire, jealousy and longing. Plato is said to have called her the tenth Muse; Mytilene minted coins with her face for nine hundred years after her death. The scholars of Alexandria collected her work into nine books, roughly ten thousand lines. Almost all of it was lost, not burned, as legend claims, but simply left uncopied as papyrus decayed and her Aeolic dialect fell out of fashion. By the nineteenth century only one complete poem survived, alongside fragments quoted by ancient grammarians. Then in 1897 Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt began excavating the thirty-foot rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, and Sappho started coming back, from ancient garbage, and from cartonnage, the recycled wastepaper packed around the dead. Today we have perhaps five percent of what she wrote. It was enough. She gave us the word "sweetbitter" for love, and one four-word fragment that turned out to be a correct prediction: someone, in time to come, will remember us.
This story is told twice: first at a natural, comfortable pace, then again more slowly with longer pauses to guide you gently into sleep. Let the wind turn the olive leaves silver. Let the lamps burn low. Let the apple stay on the highest branch.
🌙 Perfect for: lesbian history, Sappho, ancient Greece, classical poetry, LGBTQ+ history bedtime stories, sleep meditation, insomnia relief, calm narration
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Related episodes:
- Catullus and the Poets of Rome
- The Face in Every City: Hadrian and Antinous
- Sacred Band of Thebes
- Emily Dickinson and Susan Gilbert's World of Words
"Someone, in time to come, will remember us." — Sappho, fragment 147
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