Ancient Greek & Roman
Sappho
Sappho was a Greek lyric poet from the island of Lesbos, active around the turn of the 7th to 6th century BC. Ancient critics ranked her among the very greatest poets; Plato is said to have called her the "Tenth Muse."
Almost none of her work survives complete. What remains — quotations in later grammarians, and a few papyrus scraps recovered from Egypt — comes down to us as fragments, some no more than a phrase, prized for their directness of feeling and technical mastery of the Aeolic dialect and sapphic metre.
The fragments gathered here follow Henry Thornton Wharton’s 1885 literal prose translation, the edition that first made Sappho’s surviving words accessible to English readers in their entirety.
Poems (164)
- Fragment 1
- Fragment 2
- Fragment 3
- Fragment 4
- Fragment 5
- Fragment 6
- Fragment 9
- Fragment 10
- Fragment 11
- Fragment 12
- Fragment 13
- Fragment 14
- Fragment 15
- Fragment 16
- Fragment 17
- Fragment 18
- Fragment 19
- Fragment 20
- Fragment 21
- Fragment 22
- Fragment 23
- Fragment 25
- Fragment 26
- Fragment 27
- Fragment 28
- Fragment 29
- Fragment 30
- Fragment 31
- Fragment 32
- Fragment 33
- Fragment 34
- Fragment 35
- Fragment 36
- Fragment 37
- Fragment 38
- Fragment 39
- Fragment 40
- Fragment 41
- Fragment 42
- Fragment 43
- Fragment 44
- Fragment 45
- Fragment 46
- Fragment 47
- Fragment 48
- Fragment 50
- Fragment 51
- Fragment 52
- Fragment 53
- Fragment 54
- Fragment 55
- Fragment 56
- Fragment 57
- Fragment 58
- Fragment 60
- Fragment 61
- Fragment 62
- Fragment 64
- Fragment 65
- Fragment 66
- Fragment 67
- Fragment 68
- Fragment 69
- Fragment 70
- Fragment 71
- Fragment 72
- Fragment 74
- Fragment 75
- Fragment 76
- Fragment 77
- Fragment 78
- Fragment 79
- Fragment 80
- Fragment 81
- Fragment 82
- Fragment 83
- Fragment 84
- Fragment 85
- Fragment 86
- Fragment 87
- Fragment 88
- Fragment 89
- Fragment 90
- Fragment 91
- Fragment 92
- Fragment 93
- Fragment 94
- Fragment 95
- Fragment 96
- Fragment 97
- Fragment 98
- Fragment 99
- Fragment 101
- Fragment 102
- Fragment 104
- Fragment 105
- Fragment 106
- Fragment 109
- Fragment 110
- Fragment 111
- Fragment 112
- Fragment 113
- Fragment 114
- Fragment 115
- Fragment 116
- Fragment 117
- Fragment 118
- Fragment 119
- Fragment 120
- Fragment 121
- Fragment 129
- Fragment 130
- Fragment 132
- Fragment 133
- Fragment 136
- Fragment 146
- Fragment 148
- Fragment 149
- Fragment 150
- Fragment 151
- Fragment 153
- Fragment 155
- Fragment 156
- Fragment 168
- Fragment 170
- Book VI, 269
- Book VII, 489
- Book VII, 505
- To the Queen of Love (Way)
- To a Beloved One (Way)
- The Moon and Stars (Way)
- My Garden (Way)
- Invocation to Aphrodite (Way)
- To her maiden-friends, or, as some critics hold, to the Muses (Way)
- A Vision of Aphrodite (Way)
- To one false in love (Way)
- To the Muse of Lyric Song (Way)
- Self-restraint when angered (Way)
- Alcaeus and Sappho (dialogue quoted by Aristotle) (Way)
- A last word at parting (Way)
- Leto and Niobe (Way)
- To Atthis the inconstant, who had forsaken her for Andromeda (Way)
- The torments of love (Way)
- Sappho to her Girl-friends. She playfully satirizes the foibles of some of them (Way)
- A Lament for Adonis (Way)
- Sonnet to Dica, the fair and wise (Way)
- "He Cometh not," she said (Way)
- To a Rich Vulgarian (Way)
- Leda and the Swan's Egg (Way)
- To a youth who wooed a woman older than himself (Way)
- "I canna min' my wheel, mither." (Way)
- To a Girl in a Garden (Way)
- The Death of Adonis (Way)
- Fragment-poem 26 (Way)
- An Epithalamium (Way)
- On one consecrated to holy service, who died young (Fragment 118) (Way)
- On a girl who died on the eve of her marriage (Fragment 119) (Way)
- On one whose days were labour and sorrow (Fragment 120) (Way)
- Satiric skit on a gigantic hall-porter (Fragment 98) (Way)
- To Anactoria (Way)
- A Bitter Word
- The Beloved Presence
- Hesper
- Out of Reach