Sappho of Lesbos (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE) was the most praised and highly regarded of all Greek lyric poets in antiquity. She was known as the “tenth Muse” and some ancient authors regarded her work as on par with that of Homer (the putative author of the Iliad and the Odyssey and most revered of all ancient Greek poets) himself. She produced an enormous body of poems, but, sadly, extremely little of her work has survived to the present day.
In the third century BCE, the Greek scholars working at the Great Library of Alexandria produced a standard text for all of Sappho’s poems that was divided into at least eight “books” or rolls of papyrus. Many scholars believe that the collection probably contained nine books for the nine Muses. Today, though, less than seven hundred lines of Sappho’s poetry are extant. Only one of her poems, Fragment 1 (known as the “Ode to Aphrodite”), has survived to the present day totally complete with no lacunae or parts missing. A few other poems have survived to the present day nearly complete, including Fragment 16 (the “Anaktoria Poem”), Fragment 31 (“Phainetai Moi”), Fragment 58 (the “Tithonos Poem”), and the “Brothers Poem.”
The most common explanation that people give for why so little of Sappho’s poetry has survived to the present day is that (supposedly) Christian authorities in late antiquity or the Middle Ages had all the collections of her poems rounded up and burned, because they were disgusted and horrified by how openly she describes her erotic desire for other women. This makes for a good story with clear villains. Unfortunately, it is probably not true. In reality, as I shall explain in this post, we have no evidence to support the idea that Christians went around burning Sappho’s poems. The real reasons why so little of her poetry has survived are far more complicated—and actually far more interesting.
Sappho’s homoerotic poetry
Today, Sappho’s reputation is that of an unabashed lesbian. The modern English word lesbian itself is derived from the name of her home island of Lesbos. Meanwhile, the word sapphic, which denotes a woman who is erotically attracted to other women (whether she is a lesbian or bisexual), is derived from her very name. In order to understand how ancient people understood Sappho’s poetry, however, we need to set her modern reputation aside.
As I discuss in much greater detail in this blog post I have written about Sappho’s sexuality and this other post I have written about the perception of same-gender-attracted women in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds more broadly, the ancient Greeks and Romans generally thought about sexuality not in terms of which gender (or genders) a person was erotically attracted to, but rather in terms of the role they took during sex.
No one in the ancient world ever thought of themself or anyone else as “gay,” “bi,” or “straight.” These are modern labels for modern identities that did not exist in the ancient world and that are products of the specific, historically and culturally contingent forces that have shaped the cultural and social landscape that we inhabit today.
Sappho definitely composed poems in which her artistic persona (who most likely represents a semi-fictionalized version of the poet herself) unabashedly and undeniably expresses her erotic desire for other women. She describes this desire in no uncertain terms in her surviving Fragments 1, 16, and 31. That being said, Sappho herself almost certainly did not see her erotic attraction to women as an identity and no one in the ancient world would have regarded her attraction to women as proof of her belonging to such an identity.
Furthermore, at least judging from the poems and fragments that have survived, Sappho’s work was never really sexually explicit. Her most sexually explicit surviving passage occurs in her Fragment 94, which is sometimes known as “Sappho’s Confession,” in which she seems to (very obliquely) allude to herself as having had sex with another woman. In the fragment, she portrays herself as trying to comfort her female lover, who is going away for some unspecified reason, by reminding her of all the good times they have had together. Then she says to her:
“‘. . . καὶ στρώμν[αν ἐ]πὶ μολθάκαν
ἀπάλαν πα . [ ] . . . ων
ἐξίης πόθο[ν ].’”
This means:
“‘. . . and on soft couches,
tender . . .
you assuaged your longing.’”
Although most scholars today agree that this line is a reference to the two women having had sex together, the way Sappho describes it is highly decorous, almost euphemistic. She leaves just enough ambiguity that a person who really does not want to believe that she had sex with women can still insist, without sounding totally ridiculous, that this passage is not alluding to anything sexual and that Sappho and the woman she is addressing are merely good friends.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic red-figure kalanthos by the Brygos Painter dating to c. 470 BCE, currently held in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen, depicting the lyric poets Alkaios (left) and Sappho (right) holding lyres and plectrums
Ancient audiences’ tendency to ignore or overlook the homoeroticism of Sappho’s poems
As bizarre as it may seem to people today in the twenty-first-century west who know Sappho as “the O.G. lesbian,” not a single author writing in the Greek language from the Archaic, Classical, or Hellenistic Eras other than Sappho herself ever makes any unambiguous, specific comment on the homoeroticism of her poetry. (The one possible exception to this is the lyric poet Anakreon of Teos in his Fragment 358, but, even there, he does not specifically mention Sappho by name.) For the most part, Greek audiences throughout these periods seem to have tacitly ignored this aspect of her work.
Sappho was an extremely popular character in Athenian comedies of the late fifth and fourth centuries BCE and the comic playwrights. Little is known about her role in these plays, since none of the plays featuring her as a character have survived to the present day and ancient authors whose works have survived tell us relatively little about her role in them. The information that has survived, however, suggests that these plays depicted her as passionately desiring various men, rather than women.
A popular apocryphal legend developed in this period, which is first attested by the Athenian comic playwright Menandros (lived c. 342 – c. 290 BCE) in a speech delivered by a temple servant in the opening scene of his fragmentary comedy The Leukadian Woman, which claims that Sappho fell madly in love with a young, extraordinarily beautiful ferryman named Phaon. According to the legend, Phaon abandoned Sappho and disrespected her. Thus, heartbroken, she killed herself by jumping off a cliff on the island of Leukadia into the sea.
ABOVE: Sappho, Phaon, and Amor, painted in 1809 by the French Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David, portraying Sappho in their arms of her (male) lover Phaon. The legend of Sappho and Phaon was at least equally as well known in antiquity as Sappho’s own poetry.
The Athenian comic playwrights’ portrayal of Sappho and the legend of her love for Phaon in particular had an enormously outsized influence on the Roman perception of her and her work. In fact, most people in the Roman Empire from the late first century BCE through late antiquity were probably more familiar with the legend of Sappho and Phaon than with anything that Sappho herself actually talks about in her own poems.
The famous Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (lived 43 BCE – c. 17 CE), who is better known in English simply as “Ovid,” composed a work known as the Heroïdes, which is a collection of pseudo-letters, each one composed in elegiac couplets in the voice of a famous woman from mythology and literature, addressed to a man whom she either has been in an erotic relationship with or wants to be in one with. The fifteenth letter in this collection is composed in the voice of Sappho, addressed to Phaon, and tells the story of their relationship.
The story of Sappho and Phaon is extensively referenced in other works of Roman-era literature. The Romans even made at least one artistic depiction of Sappho’s legendary suicide. An ancient painting of her leaping off the Leukadian cliff was discovered in the Porta Maggiore Basilica, a Pythagorean meeting house in the city of Rome that was built and used in the first century CE.
ABOVE: The Death of Sappho, painted in 1881 by Miguel Carbonell Selva, depicting Sappho about to dramatically leap off a cliff to her death at Cape Lafkada
Ancient outright denials of Sappho’s homoeroticism
The earliest surviving sources that expressly and unambiguously comment on Sappho’s homoeroticism come from authors who lived in the Roman Empire in the late first century BCE. Curiously, though, many or even most ancient authors who lived in the Roman Empire who comment on Sappho’s sexuality treat the claim that she had erotic relationships with other women as nothing more than a malicious slander and attempt to defend her from this “accusation” by insisting that all her relationships with other women were purely platonic.
Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1800 fr. 1, a papyrus fragment dating to the late second or early third century CE that was discovered at the site of Oxyrhynchos in Middle Egypt, provides a mini-biography of Sappho, which mentions:
“κ[α]τηγόρηται δ᾿ ὑπ᾿ ἐν[ί]ω[ν] ὡς ἄτακτος οὖ[σα] τὸν τρόπον καὶ γυναικε[ράσ]τρια.”
This means, in my own translation:
“She has been accused by some of having been irregular in her manner and a woman-lover.”
The Latin grammarian Pomponius Porphyrion, a commentator who may have flourished in around the late second century CE, comments on Horace’s Epistles 1.19.28 (on page 362 of Holder’s edition of the commentary):
“‘mascula’ autem ‘Saffo’, vel quia in poetico studio est <incluta>, in quo saepius viri, vel quia tribas diffamatur fuisse.”
This means:
“[Horace says] ‘masculine Sappho,’ either because she is famous for her poetic zeal, in which men are [famous] more often, or because she is defamed as a tribade [i.e., a masculine woman who takes the active, sexually dominant role in sex with other women].”
Thus, although Sappho is known today primarily for her erotic attraction to women, this is not how she was generally known in antiquity.
What early Christians thought of Sappho
Early Christians had mixed opinions of Sappho. On the one hand, some Christians absolutely despised her, regarding her as sexually unchaste and immodest. Most notably, the Syrian ascetic Christian apologist Tatianos (lived c. 120 – c. 180 CE) in his Oration to the Greeks 33 responds to pagan critics of early Christianity who ridiculed Christian men for supposedly allowing women to have too much influence in their religion.
In response to this accusation, Tatianos declares that Christian women are modest, sexually chaste, and wise. By sharp contrast, he declares that pagan men have paid wildly inappropriate honors to immodest and immoral women, naming fourteen female Greek poets, including Sappho, of whom pagan men had created sculptures.
Although Tatianos vituperatively condemns all fourteen female Greek poets whom he mentions, he saves arguably his most vicious criticisms for Sappho, roundly deploring her as a “ἑταίρα” (“courtesan”) and a “γύναιον πορνικὸν ἐρωτομανές, καὶ τὴν ἑαυτῆς ἀσέλγειαν ᾄδει” (“lust-crazed little whore woman who even sang about her own sexual depravity”). It is not clear whether, in saying this, Tatianos means to condemn Sappho for having promiscuous sexual relations with men, for having sexual relationships with women, or for some combination of both.
Whatever the case may be, not all early Christians agreed with Tatianos’s harshly negative assessment of Sappho. In fact, some educated Christians were actually enthusiastic readers and admirers of her work. The early Christian philosopher and theologian Clement of Alexandria (lived c. 150 – c. 215 CE), who was raised in an upper-class pagan Greek family and who received a thorough education in Greek philosophy and literature before he eventually converted to Christianity as an adult, quotes a line from Sappho in his Paidagogos 2.8.72.3 (i 201.21–3 Stählin), demonstrating that he was familiar with at least some of her work.
Later, in his Stromateis 4.19, Clement argues that women are equally capable of perfection as men. In support of this argument, he provides a very long list of famous and admirable women, among whom, at 4.19.122.4 (ii 302.17–18 Stählin), he includes Sappho, writing, as translated by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson:
“I omit, on account of the length of the discourse, the rest; enumerating neither the poetesses Korinna, Telesilla, Myia, and Sappho; nor the painters, as Irene the daughter of Kratinos, and Anaxandra the daughter of Nealkes, according to the account of Didymos in the Symposiakoi.”
Even long after Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire, Christian admirers of Sappho still continued to dismiss the claim that she ever had erotic relationships with women as nothing more than a malicious slander. The Souda, a Byzantine Roman encyclopedia compiled in the Greek language in around the tenth century CE, dismisses the claim as pure slander and insists that she was, in fact, a schoolmistress. (There is no contemporary or near contemporary evidence for the notion of Sappho as a schoolmistress, however.)
ABOVE: Imaginative portrayal of Clement of Alexandria by the French engraver André Thévet in his work Les Vrais Portraits Et Vies Des Hommes Illustres. (No one knows what Clement really looked like.)
Debunking the idea of Christians burning Sappho’s poetry
In any case, even if there were some early Christians who did believe that Sappho had affairs with women, the idea that early Christians gathered up collections of Sappho’s poetry and burned them is simply untrue. There is not a single ancient source that records anyone gathering up collections of Sappho’s poetry to be burned. In fact, the earliest known reference to the idea of people burning her poetry comes from the Italian Renaissance scholar Pietro Alcionio (lived c. 1487 – 1527), who claimed that the Byzantine emperor had ordered Sappho’s poems to be burned because of their frank treatment of sexual subjects.
The later Italian Renaissance scholar Gerolamo Cardano (lived 1501 – 1576) claimed, without evidence, that the eastern Church Father Gregorios Nazianzenos (lived c. 329 – 390 CE), the archbishop of Constantinople, had ordered for all Sappho’s writings to be burned because they were too explicitly sexual. Later, the French scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger (lived 1540 – 1609) claimed that Pope Gregory VII (lived 1015 – 1085) had ordered all of Sappho’s writings to be burned in the year 1073. Once again, however, Scaliger claimed this without evidence.
The only evidence we have to support the idea that Christians burned Sappho’s writings, then, is the testimony of a handful of Italian and French scholars who lived during the Renaissance. Since we have no references whatsoever to any burnings of Sappho’s writings from prior to the Renaissance, we therefore must conclude that the stories about church authorities having Sappho’s writings burned probably originated during the Renaissance among scholars who wanted to portray the earlier periods of Christian history as a backwards era of overweening oppression.
It is also interesting to notice that even the reason why Renaissance scholars claimed that Christians had burned Sappho’s poems is not because they expressed lesbian desires, but rather because they were perceived as too sexually explicit in a more general sense.
ABOVE: Portrait of Joseph Justus Scaliger, one of the Renaissance scholars responsible for propagating the legend that church authorities during the Middle Ages ordered Sappho’s writings to be burned
Why were so many of Sappho’s writings really lost?
The main reason why nearly all of Sappho’s poems have been lost is not because they were deliberately censored, but rather because of the dialect she wrote in. Sappho wrote exclusively in the Aeolic dialect of the Greek language, which contains numerous archaisms as well as innovations totally absent from the other dialects of the Greek language that were spoken at that time.
Many words in the Aeolic dialect have different pronunciations and spellings from what we find in the other Greek dialects. For instance, Sappho’s own name in the Aeolic dialect was actually Ψάπφω (Psápphō), but her name in most other dialects is Σαπφώ (Sapphṓ). Similarly, when the letter ⟨ζ⟩, probably representing the sound /dz/, occurs in most dialects, in the Aeolic dialect there is usually the digraph ⟨σδ⟩, representing the sound /sd/. In many cases, the Aeolic dialect preserved the archaic letter ⟨ϝ⟩, representing the /w/ sound, while many other Greek dialects lost this sound entirely. In the Aeolic dialect, the /h/ sound, which was retained in the Attic dialect, was lost.
Now, as it happened, the Aeolic dialect gradually died out over the course of the third through first centuries BCE. By around the second century BCE, most people in the Greek world spoke a standard dialect of Greek known as “Koine,” which comes from Greek meaning “Common.” Koine was largely derived from the Attic dialect, the dialect of the Greek language that was spoken in Athens in the fifth century BCE. It had very little influence from the Aeolic dialect.
By at least the second century CE, many readers of Greek literature found Sappho’s Aeolic dialect obscure, archaic, and difficult to understand. The writer Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (lived c. 124 – c. 170 CE), who lived in what is now northern Algeria at a time when it was ruled by the Roman Empire and wrote mostly in Latin, but was also fluent in both Koine and Attic Greek, specifically comments in his Apologia 9 (p. 10 Helm) that Sappho composed her verses “with such grace that she endears us to the strangeness of her tongue with the sweetness of her songs.” Further evidence that many people were struggling to understand Aeolic Greek comes from the fact that multiple scholars wrote commentaries on the subject.
For readers of Greek in later antiquity, trying to read the Aeolic Greek of Sappho and her contemporary Alkaios of Mytilene (lived c. 625 – c. 580 BCE) was a bit like trying to read the Middle English of Geoffrey Chaucer is for us today; the poetry was full of obscure, archaic words, unusual spellings, and strange grammar. If Sappho had been an Athenian who wrote in the Classical Attic dialect, you could bet we would have a lot more of her poetry today than we do now. Instead, though, she was a Lesbian who wrote in the Aeolic dialect.
ABOVE: Fictional portrait of the Roman writer Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis, who complained that Sappho’s Greek was bizarre and hard to read. (This is a fictional portrayal; no one knows what Apuleius really looked like, but, chances are, given his heritage in North Africa, he probably wasn’t lily white like he is portrayed here.)
There were, of course, plenty of other factors that played into the eventual loss of so many of Sappho’s poems. Literary tastes were changing as well. Lyric poetry in general was far less popular in late antiquity than it had been in earlier times. Instead, people in late antiquity were generally more interested in studying works of earlier rhetoric than works of earlier poetry. Many of the lyric poets whose writings had been the most studied in earlier times became less often studied. This meant that their writings were not being copied as often as they had been previously. Because their writings were not being copied as much, most of them were lost.
There was also a major shift in format during this time. In late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, people switched over from writing on papyrus scrolls to writing on parchment codices. This meant that any texts written on papyrus scrolls that were not copied over onto parchment codices were lost. Since this period in which the format shift took place happened to be a period when people found Sappho’s works particularly difficult to read and they were generally more interested in rhetoric than lyric poetry anyways, Sappho’s poems were less likely to be copied over onto parchment codices.
By the twelfth century, Sappho’s poetry had been almost completely lost. The Byzantine scholar and poet Ioannes Tzetzes (lived c. 1110 – 1180) lamented when discussing the Sapphic stanza that he would have to use other poets’ work as examples of the kind of stanza for which Sappho was most famous, since so little of her poetry had survived. (Tzetzes, by the way, was a Christian, which totally disproves the idea that all Christians in the Middle Ages hated Sappho.)
ABOVE: Photograph from a manuscript of Hesiodos of Askre’s Theogonia, with Ioannes Tzetzes’s commentary
The final proof
There is one final, very good piece of evidence that makes it clear that Sappho’s poetry was not specifically targeted for destruction by Christians. All we have to do is look at what else has survived and what else has not. For one thing, as it turns out, Christian scribes and monks preserved an awful lot of classical literature that is a whole heck of a lot more obscene than any of Sappho’s love poems.
For instance, Christians preserved all twelve volumes of the Epigrams written by the Roman poet Marcus Valerius Martialis (lived c. 38 – c. 104 CE), better known as “Martial.” Martial’s Epigrams is basically just a massive collection of obscene insults and witty retorts. Martial references all kinds of sex acts, including lesbian sex, pegging, gay anal sex, heterosexual anal sex, fellatio, cunnilingus, and many other specific sex acts that are a million times more explicit than anything we ever find in Sappho. Nevertheless, Christians preserved all his work.
You know what else Christians in the west preserved for us? A little work called the Priapeia, a collection of eighty anonymous Latin poems in honor of the pagan fertility god Priapos, who is portrayed in art with an absurdly large erect penis. The poems in the Priapeia are all unbelievably obscene poems written in extremely crude language that are basically about how much Priapos likes doing depraved sexual things to people with his ungodly massive penis.
The Priapeia contains explicit references to homosexual rape, masturbation, anal sex, cunnilingus, fellatio, irrumatio, bestiality, penis worship, pornography, a whole variety of sex positions, and prostitution. It is the most utterly un-Christian text imaginable and yet, for some reason, Christians preserved the whole collection—all eighty poems of it. The number of complete poems in the Priapeia is eighty times the number of complete poems we have of Sappho.
Meanwhile, in the Greek-speaking east, Christians preserved eleven complete comedies of the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE). Aristophanes’s comedies are absolutely full of rampant obscenity, sex jokes, potty humor, homosexual references, and all sorts of other very un-Christian things. Despite all of this, Christians not only preserved eleven of Aristophanes’s plays in their entirety, they even used Aristophanes’s plays as freaking school texts for small children to teach them about grammar!
There is no conceivable world in which Christians would specifically target Sappho’s mildly erotic poems for destruction while carefully preserving all the blatantly obscene works of Martial and the utterly depraved poems in honor of the phallic god in the Priapeia and using the bawdy plays of Aristophanes as school texts. If Christians were trying to destroy ancient texts that went against the teachings of their religion, then they were evidently quite extraordinarily incompetent at it, because they have preserved for us a tremendous wealth of obscene literature.
ABOVE: Fresco of the phallic god Priapos weighing his absurdly massive penis on a set of scales. Christians preserved the Priapeia, a collection of obscene epigrams in honor of the penis god that is a million times more obscene than anything we find in any of Sappho’s poems.
Furthermore, Sappho is actually one of the best-preserved authors for the genre in which she wrote. Vastly more of Sappho’s poetry has survived to the present day than has survived for the vast majority of the other archaic Greek lyric poets. For the vast majority of archaic Greek lyric poets, all that has survived of their work is their name and maybe a single line or a couple lines of their poetry.
For instance, there was a male lyric poet named Pythermos of Teos who probably lived sometime in around the sixth century BCE, not long after Sappho. All we have of his work is this one line:
“οὐδὲν ἦν ἄρα τἆλλα πλὴν ὁ χρυσός.”
Here is a translation of the line by M. L. West:
“Nothing else matters, it seems, apart from gold.”
Again, this one line is all we have of Pythermos’s work.
In around the fifth century BC, there was another female Greek lyric poet named Telesilla. We only have a total of four complete lines of her work. Two of them come from a hymn to the goddess Artemis, preserved through quotation by the writer Hephaistion in in his treatise On Meters:
“ἁ δ᾿ Ἄρτεμις, ὦ κόραι,
φεύγοισα τὸν Ἀλφεόν”
Here is M. L. West’s translation of these lines:
“Here is Artemis, maidens,
fleeing from Apheus.”
Here are the other two lines, which are from a hymn to the god Apollon and have been preserved through quotation by the later writer Athenaios of Naukratis in his dialogue Wise Men at Dinner:
“ἡ δὲ εἰς Ἀπόλλωνα ᾠδὴ
φιληλιάς,”
Here is my own translation of the poem:
“But the ode to Apollon
is the sun-loving song.”
This is all that has survived of Telesilla’s poetry—apart from a few single words referenced by grammarians as having been used in her poetry. People like Pythermos and Telesilla are far, far more representative of the vast majority of archaic Greek lyric poets than Sappho; extremely little work has survived at all from any of the archaic Greek lyric poets.
Honestly, what is astounding about Sappho is not the fact that so little of her poetry has survived, but the fact that so much of her poetry has survived. Just under seven hundred lines is really an absolutely stunning number of lines of hers to have survived, considering the dialect, genre, and time period in which she wrote. Indeed, the surviving lines of her poetry can actually give us something of an impression of her work, which is something we certainly cannot say for most of the other lyric poets. (Who can deduce the skill of a poet from a single line?)
Even today, new poems by Sappho are still turning up. The nearly complete text of the “Brothers Poem” was only published in 2014—just five years ago! Before that, in 2004, fragments were published that brought the previously extremely fragmentary “Tithonos Poem” to a state of near completion. It is extremely likely that there are even more fragments and perhaps even complete poems by Sappho lurking in the Egyptian deserts that may one day be uncovered.
ABOVE: Photograph of P. Sapph. Obbink, the papyrus fragment bearing the nearly complete text of the “Brothers Poem,” which was only rediscovered in 2014 (albeit under some rather sketchy and possibly illegal circumstances)
The texts early Christians really did destroy
Now, I want to be very clear: early Christians really did burn some texts; as far as we have reason to believe, though, they did not intentionally destroy the poems of Sappho. The texts that early Christians are known to have intentionally destroyed are texts that could have had some historical value, but probably didn’t have any serious literary value.
Most famously, the Book of the Acts of the Apostles 19:17–20 records that the people of the city of Ephesos in Asia Minor who converted to Christianity while Paul was preaching there gathered up any writings they had about magic and publicly burned them. Here is what the Book of Acts of the Apostles says, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):
“When this became known to all residents of Ephesus, both Jews and Greeks, everyone was awestruck; and the name of the Lord Jesus was praised. Also many of those who became believers confessed and disclosed their practices. A number of those who practiced magic collected their books and burned them publicly; when the value of these books was calculated, it was found to come to fifty thousand silver coins. So the word of the Lord grew mightily and prevailed.”
This particular account may be fictional, since much of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles is believed to be more-or-less historical fiction. Nonetheless, there is little doubt that early Christians at some point probably really did burn writings about magic. I don’t think anyone should lament the loss of such writings too greatly, though, since there is actually a great abundance of surviving ancient Greek and Roman magical writings and, quite frankly, they’re about as far away from great literature as it is possible to get.
Greco-Roman magical writings are mostly just full of weird rituals that are supposed to do things like make you sexually attractive, make your enemies suffer some horrible illness, tell you if someone is living or dead, and so forth. Here’s an example of a spell from the Kyranides, an ancient Greek collection of magical texts compiled in around the fourth century CE, as translated by J. C. McKeown in his book A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities:
“If you take some hairs from a donkey’s rump, burn them and grind them up, and then give them to a woman in a drink, she will not stop farting” (Kyranides 2.31).
I don’t really consider the loss of other texts like this one to be a particularly great tragedy. I mean, this stuff is admittedly rather amusing, but it’s certainly not quality literature.
ABOVE: The Preaching of Saint Paul at Ephesus, painted in 1649 by Eustache Le Sueur
In later times, there were other texts that Christians did deliberately burn in addition to esoteric writings like the ones discussed above. Most notably, Christians were notoriously fond of burning the sacred writings used by Christian sects that they deemed heretical.
If all the heterodox Christian writings that early Christians destroyed had been preserved, they would probably provide us with some valuable historical information about what heterodox Christian sects in antiquity believed. Nonetheless, if the numerous heterodox Christian writings that have survived are anything to judge by, the works that were destroyed were probably not writings of especially great literary merit.
Finally, Christians are also known to have burned copies of explicitly anti-Christian polemics written by pagan authors such as the Neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichos (lived c. 245 – c. 325 CE) and the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate (lived c. 332 – 363 CE). These polemics, if they were preserved, would be valuable historical sources for what the enemies of Christianity in antiquity were really saying, since most of what we know about the arguments posed by the enemies of Christianity in antiquity comes from Christian apologetic texts written in response to such critics.
On the other hand, you may notice one thing that early Christians don’t seem to have been particularly interested in destroying: ancient Greek literary texts. Although some Christian writers—most famously the Christian apologist Tertullianus (lived c. 155 – c. 240 CE)—harshly condemned Greek literature, by late antiquity, a general consensus had developed that Greek literature was worth preserving and studying.
Indeed, as I discuss in this article I have written, the Christian Byzantines are the ones most directly responsible for the copying and preservation of most ancient Greek literary works that have survived to the present day. The vast majority of ancient Greek texts that have survived to the present day are either known from manuscripts copied directly by the Byzantines themselves or from manuscripts copied from manuscripts copied by the Byzantines.
ABOVE: Julian the Apostate Presiding at a Conference of Sectarians, painted in 1875 by the English Academic painter Edward Armitage. Early Christians are known to have destroyed copies of anti-Christian polemics by authors such as Iamblichos and Julian the Apostate.
Conclusion
We have no evidence to indicate that Christians deliberately sought to destroy Sappho’s poetry. Furthermore, the fact that they manifestly did not target works of literature far more obscene than Sappho’s poems strongly indicates that they probably did not target her work for censorship.
It is far more likely that the reason why so few poems by Sappho have survived to the present day is because Sappho wrote in the Aeolic dialect, which made her plays challenging to read for later readers, and because archaic Greek lyric poetry in general was not very popular at the critical moment in late antiquity when people switched over from writing on papyrus scrolls to writing on parchment codices.
Nonetheless, it is actually astonishing how much of Sappho’s poetry has survived, since we have vastly more of her poetry than we have for the vast majority of other archaic Greek lyric poets. Unlike most archaic Greek lyric poets, we actually have at least one complete poem written by her; whereas, for most other archaic Greek lyric poets, we might be lucky just to have one or two lines.
