ABSTRACT
Sappho was a famous lyric poetess. She was born, apparently from an aristocratic family, in about 630 BC on the Greek island of Lesbos. Sappho was the most renowned poetess of Greece and Rome. She was highly regarded in antiquity, included in the canon of the nine major Greek lyric poets and referred to as a tenth Muse (traditionally there were nine Muses, patron goddesses of verse and song, who were themselves supremely skilled musicians). To judge from what has survived, her writing was predominantly personal and erotic, and was passionate and moving, so that it has a great emotional impact; but it also has the intellectual appeal of melodiousness, subtlety and elegance. She influenced a wide variety of subsequent authors, including Baudelaire, Byron, Catullus, Durrell, H. D., Horace, Pound, Rilke, Swinburne and Verlaine. Sappho also composed marriage-songs for performance at weddings on Lesbos.
