Some time around the ninth century, Sappho's nine books were irrecoverably lost. We have some tantalising scraps, single lines and short quotations, but only one complete poem - the 'Ode to Aphrodite' (Fragment 1), which is quoted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. A few longish passages from other poems have been preserved in other authors: the most famous is Fragment 31 ('He seems to me equal to gods'), quoted at length in On the Sublime. Until the end of the 19th century, these two poems were practically all that was known from the work of the poet Plato called 'the tenth Muse'. Then, around the turn of the 20th century, some scraps of papyrus from an ancient rubbish tip at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt turned out to contain fragments of poetry - including substantial chunks of Sophocles, Euripides and Sappho. But even with these additions, we have only about 3 per cent of what she wrote. Reconstructing Sappho from what remains is like trying to get a sense of a whole Tyrannosaurus rex from one claw.

LRB 8 January 2004 | PDF Download