HoP 500a Marguerite Johnson on Sappho
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What is the purpose of this special 500‑episode episode and who is the guest?
Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. This is a special episode. It's the first of five episodes to celebrate reaching the 500-episode milestone. And to mark this occasion, we're going to be retracing our steps to cover a few topics I skipped over when I was doing previous series of the podcast. So we're going way back to antiquity in several cases, and that's what we're going to do right now. I'm being joined by Marguerite Johnson, who is a professor of classics at the University of Queensland in Australia, and she's going to speak to us about Sappho.
an early Greek poet who lived around the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers. So actually Sappho should have been one of the first 10 episodes, but she wasn't because I skipped her. And I'm very grateful to Marguerite for helping me to correct this oversight. Welcome to the podcast.
Thank you, Pasha.
So as I say, I did not cover Sappho when doing early Greek philosophy. To be honest, when I was doing the first maybe series of the whole project, I had a much less kind of expansive and capacious approach to the whole thing. So I just thought, oh, I'll start with the Presocratics and didn't think about too much what I might do alongside that. And so the listeners won't have heard anything about Sappho earlier. They have probably heard of her, but nonetheless, I think it would be good to start by introducing her to the listeners. So when did she live? Who was she?
Sappho is the first extant female poet we have in the Western canon. She's an archaic Greek poet.
When did Sappho live and what do we know about her life and background?
So she's writing lyric and not the grand epics of her predecessors, the Homeric poets. So it's personal lyric poetry, not always personal, but they're short poems. She's from the Greek island of Lesvos, possibly born in Oresos in the southwest part of the island. Maybe, however, she was born in the capital of Lesvos, Mytilene. So when looking at a female poet in the North Aegean, which is really interestingly miles or around about 36 kilometers from Turkey. So very, very close. You can stand in Mytilene and look at Turkey across the Aegean. Thessaloniki was founded, if she's born in a restless, around about the eighth century BCE. If I was said to have been born circa 620 BCE, give and take a few years.
So toward the end of the seventh century BCE. dies around about 570 BCE. And she composes in Aeolic dialect. So it's a dialect spoken on the island and in some other locations in Greece. So on the mainland, you've got Boeotia and also Thessaly. And this Aeolic dialect is noted by linguistics to be a little bit archaic in the meaning of old-fashioned. So what remains of a poetry when you read it, it's quite difficult Greek. We don't have that much biographical detail, Peter. The most credible information, and people always say you should be careful of this, but I think the most credible information comes from references in her own poetry. She mentions she has a daughter, Cleus, and she also mentions she has brothers.
So she doesn't say this, but clearly she was married at some point. Although in what survives of her lyrics, don't mention is ever made of her husband. Certainly the child, but not the husband. Her brothers are mentioned, one of him really quite disparagingly, Apparently this was because from what we can get from the poem, what remains of it, he has a liaison with a woman and Sappho is really not approving of this liaison. So I think there's a little bit of a snobbish element and that's because she clearly comes from a well-off family. Most likely scholars think a wealthy merchant family. Now, what is really unusual is she clearly receives an excellent education, especially for a female. Now, that doesn't mean she had an education that we can relate to.
She would have been educated in the works of the Homeric poets. And keep in mind, this would have been still an oral tradition.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the purpose of this special 500‑episode episode and who is the guest?
0:08–1:48
2
When did Sappho live and what do we know about her life and background?
1:48–9:35
3
How many of Sappho’s poems survive and why are they so fragmentary?
9:35–20:41
4
What themes does Sappho explore in her lyric poetry, especially love and Eros?
20:41–32:25
5
What are the most recent discoveries of Sappho’s fragments, including the ‘Brother’s Poem’?
32:25–40:17
6
Why does the ancient writer Maximus of Tyre compare Sappho to Socrates?
40:17–48:40
7
How has Sappho been received in modern scholarship and feminist thought?
48:40–49:45