How Likely Is It That Scholars Will Find More of Sappho’s Lost Poems?

Sappho (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE) was a female early Greek lyric poet who flourished on the island of Lesbos, located just off the west coast of Asia Minor, and composed many poems in the Aeolic dialect of the Greek language. Her output was so prolific that the standard edition of her work in antiquity, which literary scholars working at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt produced in around the third century BCE, is thought to have spanned nine “books” or rolls of papyrus. Ancient audiences esteemed her as one of the greatest of all lyric poets, if not the greatest. She was known as the “Tenth Muse” and some even 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).

Sadly, nearly all of her poems have been lost. Only one poem, Fragment 1 (the “Ode to Aphrodite”) has survived to the present day totally complete. Only a handful of others—including Fragment 16 (the “Anaktoria Poem”), Fragment 31 (“Phainetai Moi”), Fragment 58 (the “Tithonos Poem”), and the “Brothers Poem”—are nearly complete. Most of what survives are tiny fragments of only a few lines or less. Nonetheless, today, many scholars of ancient literature regard Sappho’s more complete poems as among the greatest that have survived from antiquity. The fact that she is one of the very few female ancient Greek or Roman authors who have any works that have survived to the present day and the fact that she composed poems in which her female speaker openly discusses her erotic desire for other women have both further magnified contemporary interest in her work.

As a result of this, many people have wondered: How likely is it that more of Sappho’s poems will be recovered? To answer this question, in this post, I will discuss the history of how her work was transmitted in antiquity, how most of it became lost, how the parts that have survived have managed to survive, and, finally, how likely it is that someone will discover and publish any substantial material by her that is not currently known anytime in the next half century.

How Sappho’s poems were originally transmitted

Before I discuss the odds that more poems of Sappho will be discovered and published, I first need to discuss the history of her poems’ circulation and transmission that has resulted in the loss of the poems that have been lost and the survival of the poems that have survived. This history, of course, begins with Sappho herself.

Although scholars commonly speak of what Sappho composed as “poems,” this descriptor can be misleading; they’re actually song lyrics that were originally meant to be sung. Sappho is known to have composed two different kinds of song: monodic songs (which are meant for a single person to sing) and choral songs (which are meant for an entire chorus to sing). The majority of her songs are most likely monodic. She most likely originally performed at least the majority of these songs herself.

As I discuss in much greater depth in this post I wrote back in August 2021, the character “Sappho” who is the primary speaker in the majority of Sappho’s poems is most likely a fictionalized persona. Sappho the historical composer and performer of the songs may have based her lyric persona on herself, but we cannot assume that anything the character Sappho says about herself in the poems is necessarily true about the composer Sappho.

It is impossible to know whether Sappho herself ever wrote any of her poems down. Although writing was certainly well known in the Greek world in her time and there is very a high likelihood that she, as an aristocratic woman of her era, was probably literate, Greek literary culture in her time was still very oral and anecdotal evidence suggests that, for most of the Archaic Period, her poems primarily circulated through oral performance.

The earliest surviving Greek vase paintings of Sappho, which date to the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE, all depict her playing a barbitos (i.e., a kind of stringed lyre) and singing. None of them depict her holding a scroll or any other form of writing. Additionally, the late antique Greek anthologist Ioannes Stobaios (fl. c. fifth century CE) quotes a passage (test. 10) in his Anthologia 3.29.58 from the orator and historian Klaudios Ailianos (lived c. 175 – c. 235 CE), which reads as follows:

“Σόλων ὁ ᾿Αθηναῖος ᾿Εξηκεστίδου παρὰ πότον τοῦ ἀδελφιδοῦ αὐτοῦ μέλος τι Σαπφοῦς ᾄσαντος, ἥσθη τῷ μέλει καὶ προσέταξε τῷ μειρακίῳ διδάξει αὐτόν. ἐρωτήσαντος δέ τινος διὰ ποίαν αἰτίαν τοῦτο σπουδάσειεν, ὃ δὲ ἔφη ‘ἵνα μαθὼν αὐτὸ ἀποθάνω.’”

This means, in my own translation:

“Solon the Athenian, son of Exekestides, when his nephew sang a song of Sappho’s at a drinking party, enjoyed the song and ordered that the young man teach it to him. And, when someone asked him for what reason he was so eager for this, he replied: ‘So that, having learned it, I may die.’”

Solon was a contemporary of Sappho who probably lived to around 560 BCE, which puts the historical timing of this anecdote probably in around the late 560s BCE. This anecdote itself is most likely apocryphal, but it seems to preserve authentic memory of a time when Sappho’s poems mainly circulated orally.

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

Sappho’s poems in writing

By the late sixth century BCE, it was common for Greek people to read literary texts on scrolls made of a material known as papyrus, which was manufactured from the pith of the papyrus plant, a wetland sedge native to Egypt. Artistic evidence attests that, by at least the middle of the fifth century BCE, Sappho’s poems had been written down on papyrus scrolls and people at least in Athens were commonly reading them in this format.

From around 450 BCE or thereabouts onward, Attic (i.e., originating from Attica, the region of mainland Greece that included the city of Athens and its surrounding territories) red-figure vase paintings start to depict Sappho sitting in a chair reading her poems aloud from a roll of papyrus to an audience of women. This suggests that this is how many people in Athens by this time were encountering her work.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing an Attic red-figure hydria dating to around 450 BCE or thereabouts, currently held in the British Museum, depicting Sappho reading one of her poems aloud from a roll of papyrus

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic red-figure hydria dating to between c. 440 and c. 430 BCE, depicting Sappho reading one of her poems aloud from a roll of papyrus to an audience of three women, one of whom is holding a lyre

Under normal conditions of use and wear, a roll of papyrus has about the same average shelf life as modern acid paper. A single roll typically only lasts about fifty to a hundred years or so at most before it wears out and starts to seriously break down.

The printing press did not exist in the ancient Mediterranean world. Consequently, the only way that a person could make a copy of a literary text was by either copying the entire work onto a new roll of papyrus by hand themself, which was an extremely tedious and time-consuming task, or by having someone else copy it by hand for them, such as a slave or a paid professional scribe. If a person hired a professional scribe to copy a text that happened to be very long, then having it copied could be very expensive.

Because papyrus doesn’t last very long under normal conditions, in order for a text to survive, a person with means needed to have it copied onto a new roll of papyrus roughly every fifty to a hundred years or so. If no one was interested in reading a text, then no one would have it copied. Consequently, the copies of the text that were in existence would break down and disintegrate and, within the span of only a few generations, the text would be lost forever.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing papyrus plants growing near the city of Syracuse in Sicily

The Alexandrian standard edition

In 336 BCE, King Alexandros III, commonly known in English as “Alexander the Great,” ascended to the throne of the kingdom of Makedonia in northern Greece. Within the span of just over a decade, Alexandros conquered the entire Achaemenid Persian Empire, bringing all the lands from Greece to northern India under his dominion. Then, in June 323 BCE, he died suddenly in Babylon with no obvious heir.

Over the following decades, his empire quickly fragmented into smaller Greek kingdoms ruled by his generals and their respective successors, ushering in a long period of Greek cultural hegemony over the eastern Mediterranean known as the Hellenistic Era. Alexandros’s general Ptolemaios I Soter founded the Ptolemaic Kingdom, the longest-lasting of all the Hellenistic Kingdoms, which ruled Egypt for a little less than three centuries.

During this time, many thousands of Greeks settled in Egypt and, although the native Egyptian culture and language continued to flourish, those who were culturally Greek maintained a socially privileged status. From this period onward, anyone in Egypt who was of sufficient means who wanted to fit in and be accepted among the cultural elites spoke the Greek language and read works of Greek literature.

The early Ptolemaic kings themselves were outstanding supporters and patrons of Greek literature and literary scholarship. Ptolemaios I Soter founded the Mouseion, a temple to the Muses, which also functioned as an active research institute, as well as the famous Great Library of Alexandria, which was either next to or attached to the Mouseion. Both of these institutions most likely saw their completion during the reign of his son Ptolemaios II Philadelphos (ruled 284 – 246 BCE).

Eager to promote Alexandria’s reputation as an intellectual center, both Ptolemaios I and Ptolemaios II offered generous enticements to attract talented scholars from all over the Hellenistic world to come to Alexandria and work at the Mouseion.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bronze bust of Ptolemaios II Philadelphos, under whose reign the Mouseion and Library of Alexandria most likely saw their completion

Sometime in probably the first quarter of the third century BCE, the literary scholars who worked at the Mouseion and Library produced a standard edition of Sappho’s poems that most scholars today believe was nine “books” (i.e., rolls of papyrus) long. These books were of different lengths. The first book, which modern scholars believe was the longest, was 1,320 lines long, which is nearly as many lines as the average complete Greek tragedy or two complete books of one of the Homeric epics.

The poems of this collection were organized into books by meter, with each book containing only poems of a certain meter. The first book (which, as I mentioned, most scholars believe was the longest) contained only poems that were composed in Sapphic stanzas, book two contained only poems in dactylic pentameter, and so on. The poems in each book, in turn, were mainly organized in alphabetical order by their opening lines.

This standard edition of Sappho’s poems very quickly became extremely popular throughout the Greek-speaking world. No aristocratic gentleman (or gentlewoman)’s personal library was complete without it. Within a few generations or so of the Alexandrian standard edition’s production, there must have been thousands of complete copies of it housed in thousands of different libraries and personal collections all over the Mediterranean world.

By the end of the third century BCE, Sappho’s poems were apparently even widely known in Rome, most likely through the Alexandrian standard edition. The scholar Ariana Traill has demonstrated through her paper “Acroteleutium’s Sapphic Infatuation (Miles 1216–83)” (see full citation in works cited section at the end of this post) that the Roman comic playwright Plautus (lived c. 254 – c. 184 BCE) portrays his character Acroleutium as delivering and acting out a parody of Sappho’s Fragment 31 in his comedy Miles Gloriosus or The Swaggering Soldier 1216–83, which was most likely performed in Rome near the end of the third century BCE.

ABOVE: Illustration made in the nineteenth century by the German artist O. Van Corven depicting how he imagined the Library of Alexandria might have looked in its heyday

The decline of Sappho’s popularity in later antiquity

Sappho’s poems remained popular throughout the Roman Principate (lasted c. 27 BCE – c. 284 CE). In later antiquity, however, they began to fall out of popularity, most likely gradually, due to three main factors, which I discuss in much greater depth in this post I wrote in December 2019.

The first factor is that the entire genre of lyric poetry in general seems to have experienced a fall from popularity during this time. People rightly make a big deal of the fact that so little of Sappho’s corpus has survived, but, believe it or not, she’s actually one of the best preserved of all early Greek lyric poets. Substantially more of her work has survived than of some of the other canonical lyric poets such as Stesichoros, Ibykos, and Alkman.

Meanwhile, Sappho’s surviving corpus absolutely dwarfs the surviving corpora of the other female early Greek lyric poets whose poems were highly regarded in antiquity: Myrtis of Anthedon, Korinna of Tanagra, Praxilla of Sikyon, and Telesilla of Argos. Indeed, Telesilla’s entire extant corpus amounts to a grand total of only four lines. Even then, this is still more than we have for many lyric poets who are known to us only by name, since not even a single line of their work has survived.

ABOVE: Myrtis and Korinna with the Potter Agathon, painted by the German painter Ernest Stückelberg in 1897, depicting how he imagined two of the other female early Greek lyric poets who were admired in antiquity might have looked. (No one knows what either of them actually looked like.)

The second major factor that most likely contributed to the decline in the popularity of Sappho’s poetry in late antiquity is the fact that she composed all her poems in the Aeolic dialect, a regional dialect of Greek that has many unusual archaisms and innovations that are not found in other dialects.

Aeolic is especially very different from the Attic dialect, the dialect that people spoke in Athens and its surrounding areas. Many Athenians even in the Classical Period perceived the Aeolic dialect as very strange and sometimes difficult to understand. The Athenian philosopher Plato (lived c. 429 – c. 347 BCE), for instance, portrays his speaker Prodikos in his dialogue Protagoras 341c as calling Aeolic a “φωνῇ βαρβάρῳ” (“barbarian [i.e., foreign] language”).

Over the course of the third, second, and first centuries BCE, most people throughout the Greek world came to speak a dialect of Greek known as Koine. The name of this dialect means “Common” and it was mainly derived from the Attic dialect. Although Koine did have some influence from dialects other than Attic, it did not have much influence from Aeolic. As Koine became increasingly the dominant Greek dialect, the Aeolic dialect gradually died out.

When people in the Roman Empire learned to read Greek literature, they mainly learned using texts written in the Ionic and Attic dialects. Consequently, by at least the second century CE, many readers of Greek literature had come to perceive the Aeolic dialect as obscure, archaic, and difficult to understand compared to Ionic, Attic, or Koine.

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.”

Multiple ancient literary scholars also produced commentaries to help people understand the poems of Sappho and her contemporary, the male lyric poet Alkaios of Mytilene (lived c. 625 – c. 580 BCE), who also came from the island of Lesbos and composed his poems in the same dialect.

For readers of Greek literature in later antiquity, trying to read Sappho’s poems in the Aeolic dialect would have been a similar experience to a fluent speaker of Modern English today in the twenty-first century trying to read Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English. For such a reader, her poems would have been replete with obscure archaic words, unusual spellings, and strange grammar. For some people, such as Apuleius, the beauty of her poems made slogging through such difficult, archaic language worthwhile. For other people, though, it just wasn’t worth it.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the geographic distribution of the dialects that were spoken in Greece during the Classical Period. The areas where people mainly spoke Aeolic are shown in yellow.

The third and final factor in Sappho’s late antique reversal of fortune is the rise of Christianity. A popular legend that has been around since the Renaissance claims that late antique and/or medieval Christian authorities systematically rounded up Sappho’s poems and burned them, but, as I discuss in my post from December 2019 that I have already linked, there is no good historical evidence to substantiate this story and it is almost certainly false. Nonetheless, the rise of Christianity most likely did have some effect on the relative popularity of Sappho’s work in later antiquity.

Early Christians had varied opinions of Sappho’s work. Some early Christians, such as the Syrian ascetic Christian apologist Tatianos (lived c. 120 – c. 180 CE), absolutely detested her and everything she represented. In his Oration to the Greeks 33, Tatianos responds to pagan men who accused Christian men of allowing women to have too much influence in their religion.

In order to refute this charge, Tatianos declares that Christian women are modest, sexually chaste, and wise for recognizing the One True Faith and that Christian men do no wrong by allowing them to be followers of Christ. By sharp contrast, he declares that pagan men have awarded undue honors and adulation to women who are immodest and immoral, naming fourteen female Greek poets, including Sappho, that pagan men had honored through sculptures.

Although Tatianos condemns all the women he mentions, he saves his worst 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”).

Not all early Christians shared Tatianos’s negative opinion of Sappho. In fact, some early Christians, particularly those who came from more educated backgrounds, seem to have been enthusiastic readers and admirers of her work. For instance, 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 her authoritatively in his Paidagogos 2.8.72.3 and includes her on a list of famous and justly admired women in his Stromateis 4.19.122.4.

Nonetheless, despite the positive assessment of Christians like Clement, the fact that at least some literate Christians viewed Sappho’s work as incompatible with the moral teachings of their religion may have made some Christian readers less likely to want to read it.

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.)

The loss of Sappho’s corpus

By the fourth through sixth centuries CE, Sappho was a poet who composed in a genre that most people weren’t interested in reading, in a dialect that most people found strange and difficult to understand, and about content that at least some literate Christians perceived as immoral. Mainly as a result of these three factors, there were a lot fewer people interested in reading Sappho’s poems in this period than there had been in earlier centuries.

Unfortunately for Sappho, this specific period happened to be perhaps the most crucial era for a work to be copied in order for it to survive to the present day because it was during this era that two major concurrent format shifts took place. During this period, people gradually shifted over from reading literary texts on papyrus to reading them on parchment and also from reading on scrolls to reading on codices (i.e., books with pages that are bound together at the spine).

The good news about this transition is that parchment codices have a much longer average life expectancy than papyrus scrolls thanks to the fact that parchment is a generally more durable material than papyrus and the fact that the codex format tends to be more durable than the scroll format because reading the text does not involve rolling and unrolling the manuscript, which causes wear to the material. While a typical papyrus roll has a life expectancy of around fifty to a hundred years or so, a typical parchment codex can survive for hundreds or even thousands of years if its owners take good care of it and no unforeseeable disasters happen to befall it.

The bad news is that, after the format shift, all manuscripts that were written on scrolls and/or papyrus became seen as obsolete. Thus, if a text had not already been copied over from papyrus scrolls onto parchment codices by around the sixth century CE or so, then the odds that someone would regard it as worth copying were very slim and it would most likely be lost forever.

Partly as a result of this format shift, it was during this period from the third through sixth centuries CE that the largest number of ancient texts that were known in antiquity became lost forever.

ABOVE: Illustration from the Codex Amiatinus dating to c. 700 CE depicting an early medieval bookshelf containing around ten codices

Fortunately, for Sappho, matters were not totally bleak. Although she had many factors working against her, she still had one factor working in her favor: her reputation as one of the greatest of all ancient poets. There is no doubt that this reputation counted for something. In fact, evidence suggests that it may have buoyed the survival of her work for a time. Her complete corpus seems to have survived significantly longer than the corpus of many other lyric poets, including that of her contemporary Alkaios.

Sappho even actually made the jump from papyrus scrolls to parchment codices, however briefly. The latest surviving fragment of a manuscript of her work is P. Berol. 9722, a scrap of a parchment codex from Egypt dating to the sixth century CE, indicating that there were still complete editions of her work floating around at that time. If the printing press had been invented in the sixth century CE instead of the fifteenth, then her complete work might well have survived to the present day. Unfortunately, it was not so.

By the twelfth century CE, all Sappho’s poems—except, as I will discuss in moment, the ones that had already been preserved through quotation—had been lost. Evidence for this comes from the fact that the Byzantine Roman scholar and poet Ioannes Tzetzes (lived c. 1110 – 1180 CE) laments when discussing the Sapphic stanza that so little of her own poetry had survived that he would have to use poems by others as examples to illustrate the meter for which she of all poets was most famous.

ABOVE: Byzantine Roman manuscript illustration dating to the mid-tenth century CE depicting Matthew the Apostle with Byzantine-era scribal equipment

Dionysios of Halikarnassos’s preservation of Fragment 1 (the “Ode to Aphrodite”)

I have now covered the history of how the majority of Sappho’s poems came to be lost. Now I must explain how the poems of hers that have survived have done so. That way, we can assess whether more of her poems are likely turn up from the same sources. This assessment will have two parts, since Sappho’s surviving poems come from two different kinds of sources.

Many of Sappho’s poems that have survived have done so because ancient authors who had access to her complete or partial corpus quoted them in their own works. Later scribes throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, in turn, repeatedly copied these works. As a result, these poems are known to modern scholars through medieval manuscript copies.

One of the most important poems that have been preserved in this manner is Fragment 1 (the “Ode to Aphrodite”), the only one of Sappho’s poems that scholars know for certain is complete. Various pieces of evidence indicate that this was the first poem in the first “book” of the Alexandrian edition of her poems.

Although the papyri seem to indicate that the poems in each book of the Alexandrian edition were organized in alphabetical order by their opening lines, the scholar André Lardinois hypothesizes that the Alexandrian compilers may have intentionally placed Fragment 1 first out of alphabetical order as a “signature” or “name poem,” because it was one of Sappho’s few poems that included her own name (“Sappho’s Personal Poetry,” 167).

Fragment 1 has only survived to the present day in the complete state that it has because the Greek historian and rhetorician Dionysios of Halikarnassos (lived c. 60 – c. 7 BCE) quotes it in his essay De Compositione (On Literary Composition) 23 as a poetic example of a particular literary style which he calls the “γλαφυρὰ καὶ ἀνθηρὰ σύνθεσις” (“polished and flowery style”).

In the essay, Dionysios names the hexameter poet Hesiodos, the lyric poets Sappho, Anakreon, and Simonides, the tragic playwright Euripides, the historians Ephoros and Theopompos, and the orator Isokrates as specific examples of classic authors who composed in this particular style. To illustrate it, he quotes two examples: one poetic example and one prose example. The poetic example is Sappho Fragment 1. The prose example is the opening passage from Isokrates’s speech Areiopagitikos.

Most scholars believe that the reason Dionysios quotes Fragment 1 rather than one of Sappho’s other poems is simply because he was using a copy of the Alexandrian edition of her work and it happened to be the first poem in that collection.

ABOVE: Engraved illustration from the Ambrosian Codex showing how the artist imagined the Greek historian Dionysios of Halikarnassos might have looked. (No one knows what he really looked like.)

Longinos’s preservation of Fragment 31 (“Phainetai Moi”)

Fragment 31 seems to have been one of Sappho’s most widely known and admired poems in antiquity, especially in the Roman world. References and allusions to it abound in works of Roman literature to an extent that is unparalleled for any of her other surviving poems.

I’ve already mentioned that Plautus parodies this poem in his Miles Gloriosus. Probably writing over a century after Plautus, the Roman poet Lucretius (lived c. 99 – c. 55 BCE) echoes the wording of Fragment 31 while describing the physical symptoms of fear in his poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) 3.152–160. Around the same time, the Roman poet Catullus (lived c. 84 – c. 54 BCE) produced a loose translation of the poem into Latin, putting himself in the position of Sappho and his lover Lesbia in the position of Sappho’s beloved, in his Carmina 51.

Around a generation or so after Lucretius and Catullus, the Roman poet Horace (lived 65 – 8 BCE) echoes Fragment 31 while describing the physical symptoms of jealousy in his Carmina 1.13.5–8. Horace’s younger contemporary, the Roman poet Ovid (lived 43 BCE – c. 17 CE), portrays a fictionalized version of Sappho herself as echoing the fragment while describing the physical symptoms of her unrequited love for a ferryman named Phaon in his Heroïdes 15.111–112.

Despite all this attention that ancient authors give to it, the actual text of Fragment 31 has survived to the present day solely because the Roman-era writer Longinos happens to quote it in its near-entirety in his treatise On the Sublime 10.1–3, which he most likely wrote sometime in around the first century CE or thereabouts.

In this treatise, Longinos discusses the aesthetic notion of ὕψος (hýpsos), which is usually translated into English as “the sublime.” He defines this concept as the human capacity to feel and express ideas that are above ordinary human experience. Over the course of the work, he examines the works of over fifty different ancient authors through the lens of this concept, analyzing examples of what he considers both good and bad writing and focusing in particular on passages that he feels capture the concept of the sublime. He quotes Fragment 31 as one such example.

If Longinos hadn’t happened to have quoted this particular poem as an example, people today in the twenty-first century would have no idea that Fragment 31 ever existed and we wouldn’t be able to recognize all the allusions to it in Roman literature as allusions to anything at all. I always wonder how many other passages in surviving works of ancient literature are allusions to works by Sappho and other authors that modern scholars cannot recognize because the works they are referencing haven’t survived.

ABOVE: Title page and frontispiece of an English translation of Longinos’s On the Sublime by William Smith, printed in London in 1756

Shorter fragments preserved by Hephaistion, Maximos of Tyre, and others

Many shorter fragments of Sappho’s poems have also survived through quotation by later ancient authors in works that have been passed down through the medieval manuscript tradition. The grammarian Hephaistion, who lived in around the second century CE, quotes a large number of short passages of Sappho’s consisting of only a few lines in his Handbook on Meters—not so much for the sake of the content of passages themselves, but rather simply as examples to illustrate various poetic meters that Sappho composed in.

The Greek rhetorician Maximos of Tyre, who flourished in around the late second century CE and was an ardent admirer and defender of the Athenian philosopher Socrates (lived c. 470 – 399 BCE), quotes a large number of short fragments of Sappho that are preserved nowhere else in his Oration 18.9 in order to support a specific argument comparing her to Socrates.

In this oration, Maximos defends Socrates against the charge of having supposedly “corrupted the youth” by forming erotic relationships with young Athenian men. This defense has two parts. The first part argues that the original accusers who brought Socrates to court in the trial that resulted in him being executed never found fault with his love life, but instead brought him to court solely for other reasons. The second part argues that Socrates was far from the first person in Greek history to form and discuss erotic relationships in the way he did.

In support of this second argument, Maximos draws extended positive comparisons between the way Socrates dealt with erotic desire and relationships and the way revered ancient poets dealt with them. He starts out by comparing Socratic eros to Homeric eros throughout section eight. Then, in section nine, he compares the eros of Socrates to that of Sappho at great length, juxtaposing a long series of short quotes from Plato’s dialogues about Socrates and love with short quotes from Sappho’s poems in an effort to prove that the two were very much alike.

The fact that so little of Sappho’s work has survived and so many of her shorter fragments are preserved by an avowed Socrates fanboy who quoted them specifically to support an argument that she was just like Socrates puts modern scholars who want to understand her historical life and context in something of a strange position.

On the one hand, we have this ancient writer who argues for a close similarity between her and Socrates, and he gives us a bunch of quotes to support his argument. On the other hand, though, we know absolutely nothing about the context of most of these quotes other than what Maximos of Tyre tells us, so it is impossible for us to tell whether he is interpreting them fairly or taking them out of context and ignoring evidence that would contradict his thesis.

ABOVE: Photo from this auction lot showing the title page and frontispiece of a 1557 edition of Maximos of Tyre’s orations printed by Henri Estienne

The odds that someone will find currently unknown poems of Sappho in a medieval manuscript

Thus, a substantial number of Sappho’s poems and fragments have survived because later ancient authors quote them in works that have been passed down through the manuscript tradition. Sadly, though, the odds that someone will find a medieval manuscript that contains poems by Sappho that are not currently known are not especially high.

The main reason for this is because, for at least the past five hundred years, finding new ancient literary works has been something that could make a scholar’s whole career. As a result, scholars have repeatedly and thoroughly searched all the locations that are most likely to yield medieval manuscript copies of works of ancient literature.

Scholars do occasionally still identify previously unknown ancient texts from medieval manuscripts in known collections. When they do, though, it’s generally less a case of someone finding a work that was completely unknown and more a case of them realizing that a work that was previously known, but overlooked and assumed to be something boring, is actually much more interesting than people realized.

For instance, in April 2012, the scholar Marina Molin Pradel was cataloguing Greek manuscripts in the collection of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich when she took notice of Codex Monacensis Graecus 314, an immense manuscript dating to the eleventh or twelfth century CE containing a collection of twenty-nine Christian homilies on the Book of Psalms with no author’s name attached to them. To the untrained eye, these homilies looked unremarkable and indistinguishable from the literally tens of thousands of other Christian homilies preserved in late medieval manuscripts.

Pradel, however, realized that this manuscript contained the original-language Greek texts of four of five homilies on Psalm 36 by the eminent early Christian scholar, theologian, and church father Origenes of Alexandria (lived c. 185 – c. 253 CE) that had previously only been known through Latin translations. Upon more closely examining the other anonymous homilies in the collection, Pradel was able to conclusively identify them all as previously unknown homilies of Origenes. Lorenzo Perrone, a professor of early Christian literature at the University of Bologna verified and announced the new discovery.

This discovery greatly expanded the known corpus of Origenes’s surviving works. It gave scholars access to the original-language texts of four homilies that were previously only known through translations and added twenty-five additional, previously completely unpublished homilies to his corpus.

Nonetheless, this discovery was not totally new. Scholars already knew that the manuscript and the homilies it contained existed; they just didn’t realize that homilies were the work of Origenes because no one with enough specific expertise in early Christian literature had looked at them closely enough to identify their authorship.

ABOVE: Screenshot from the digital viewer on the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek website of the very first page of Codex Monacensis Graecus 314, which in 2012 was identified as containing a collection of twenty-nine homilies on the Book of Psalms by the church father Origenes of Alexandria

In sharp contrast to the homilies of Origenes, Sappho’s work is well known and distinctive enough that, if there were a medieval manuscript in a known collection somewhere containing her complete work or even just a significant portion of it, then someone would almost certainly have already recognized it as hers and published it long ago.

As I have already mentioned, Sappho composed all her poems that we know of in the Aeolic dialect, which is a relatively rare dialect that not a whole lot of other Greek authors composed in and that is significantly different from other dialects of Greek. Thus, if a scholar finds a manuscript containing a poem in Aeolic, the number of known authors that the writing could be from is not terribly huge.

Additionally, Sappho composed a large proportion of her poems, including the majority of her poems that have survived to the present day complete or nearly complete, in a distinctive meter known as Sapphic stanzas. Alkaios also composed many of his poems in this meter, but, aside from her and him, very few other popular Greek poets used it.

This means that, if someone discovers a poem in the Aeolic dialect and in Sapphic stanzas, there is a high likelihood that the poem in question is the work of either Sappho or Alkaios. The person could then use the content of the poem, if it is substantial, to identify which is them is more likely to be the author.

We also know the names of at least most of the characters who appear in Sappho’s “personal poetry”: Sappho herself, her brothers Charaxos and Larichos, her mother Kleïs, her daughter Kleïs, her female lovers Anaktoria, Atthis, and Gyrinno, the hetaira Doricha, etc. Most of these are all relatively uncommon names, so, if any of them show up in a fragmentary poem in the Aeolic dialect, especially if the poem is in Sapphic stanzas, that’s a strong clue that the poem is probably one of Sappho’s.

If there are any more of poems of Sappho preserved in medieval manuscripts, then they are most likely: 1) short or incomplete, 2) not obviously recognizable as hers (i.e., in the Aeolic dialect, but not in Sapphic stanzas and containing no mention of any of her well-known characters), and 3) buried without her name in an obscure, seemingly boring anthology somewhere.

Sources for Sappho’s surviving poems, part two: ancient papyri

Thankfully, medieval manuscripts are not the only source for Sappho’s poems. You may have noticed that, earlier, when I talked about how the ancient Greeks and Romans copied literary texts on papyrus scrolls, I said that papyrus typically doesn’t last very long “under normal conditions of use and wear”—but what if someone wasn’t using it? What if someone just took a roll of papyrus and left it someplace where no one would even touch it for a very long time?

Sadly, the climate of Greece is far too humid for a papyrus that has been left out to survive for thousands of years under normal circumstances. As a result of this, only one papyrus from ancient Greece has ever been found in Greece itself: the Derveni papyrus, a copy of a philosophical commentary on an Orphic poem. The commentary itself was originally written in around the late fifth century BCE and it was transcribed onto the Derveni papyrus sometime around 340 BCE.

Sometime in around the late fourth century BCE, a Makedonian nobleman had the papyrus laid on his funeral pyre. This pyre burned away the bottom parts of the scroll, but merely carbonized the top parts. These carbonized remains survived in the ground for over 2,200 years. Then archaeologists rediscovered them in 1962. The Derveni papyrus has since been published and has greatly expanded scholarly understanding of Greek religion and philosophy during the Classical Period.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing portions of the Derveni papyrus, which was copied sometime around 340 BCE and is the only papyrus from ancient Greece that anyone has ever found in Greece itself

Egypt: the land of ancient papyri

In order for non-carbonized papyrus to survive, it basically needs to be out in the middle of the desert, someplace where it never rains. The problem is that, although there are many deserts in the Mediterranean world, in most cases, very few people lived in close proximity to them, meaning that, most of the time, papyrus was highly unlikely to end up there.

There is really only one place in the entire Mediterranean world where large numbers of people lived in close proximity to extremely arid desert and that place is Egypt. Egypt was able to support a large population because the annual floods of the Nile River made the lands along it extremely fertile and able to support crops. At the same time, it almost never rains in Egypt and all the lands away from the Nile are extremely arid desert, which is perfect for preserving papyri. As a result of this, nearly all the ancient papyri that anyone has ever discovered have been found in Egypt.

As I have already discussed, the Greek Ptolemaic Kingdom ruled Egypt for nearly three hundred years. Eventually, in 30 BCE, the Roman Empire annexed the Ptolemaic Kingdom, but the Greek language and culture still retained a highly privileged status in Egypt, even under Roman domination.

The Romans, in turn, ruled Egypt for the rest of antiquity (although they did briefly lose control of it a few times) until the Rashidun Caliphate finally conquered it, a conquest which it began in 639 and completed in 646 CE. In total, the period when Egypt was under first Ptolemaic and then Roman rule lasted for about nine and a half centuries. Throughout the majority of this time, for roughly six hundred years, from the third century BCE through the third century CE, Sappho’s work was at the height of its ancient popularity.

ABOVE: Satellite photograph from NASA showing Egypt from space. Notice that all the areas along the Nile and in the Nile Delta are extremely green and lush, while everything else is extremely arid desert.

The beginning of the rediscovery of Sappho’s lost poems

Now let’s fast forward over a thousand years to the late nineteenth century. By this point, scholars had thoroughly and repeatedly searched every known monastery library and collection of medieval manuscripts on the planet for copies of ancient Greek and Roman texts and it was gradually becoming apparent that those collections were already picked over. At the same time, western colonial imperialism was at its height, Egypt was under British occupation, and the field of archaeology was gradually emerging.

At this time, pieces of ancient papyrus and parchment manuscripts bearing ancient Greek and Roman texts were turning up on the Egyptian antiquities market. These included older, more reliable manuscripts of texts that western scholars already had access to through the medieval manuscript tradition as well as manuscripts of new texts that hadn’t been passed down through medieval copying.

The first major modern expansion to Sappho’s known corpus came from one of these manuscripts: P. Berol. 9722, the same badly-damaged scrap of a sixth-century CE Egyptian parchment codex that I mentioned earlier. Somehow or another, a German vice-consul acquired this piece of parchment and donated it to the Egyptian Museum of Berlin in 1896. It bears the texts of what are now numbered as Sappho’s Fragments 92–97. The German ancient historian Wilhelm Schubart published these fragments for the first time in 1902.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing P. Berol. 9722 side 1

Grenfell and Hunt’s excavation of the Oxyrhynchos Papyri

Even before P. Berol. 9722 ever turned up, early western archaeologists already realized that, if they wanted ancient manuscripts, they could go to Egypt to find them. Thus, from 1896 to 1907, the British archaeologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt employed hundreds of unglorified and very poorly compensated native Egyptian workers (including some child laborers) to excavate the garbage dump of the Greek city of Oxyrhynchos in Middle Egypt in what is now the Minya Governorate. They struck (figurative) gold.

In the course of these excavations, Grenfell and Hunt’s workers are estimated to have excavated at least half a million fragments of ancient papyri dating to the Hellenistic and Roman eras that people of Oxyrhynchos had simply thrown away over the course of centuries. The majority of these papyri are in the Greek language, but some are in other languages, including some in Egyptian, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, or Aramaic.

ABOVE: Photograph from the Egypt Exploration Society showing the British papyrologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell (left) and Arthur Surridge Hunt (right) sitting outside their tent c. 1896

The overwhelming majority of the Oxyrhynchos papyri are what papyrologists call “sub-literary” in character; they are the remains of everyday documents and ephemera, such as personal letters, wills, contracts, sales records, leases, court records, inventory lists, shopping lists, and even homework assignments.

An estimated ten percent or so of the papyri, however, are the remains of literary texts. Many of these are from texts that have been passed down through the medieval manuscript tradition complete, such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, Herodotos’s Histories, Plato’s dialogues, et cetera. Many of them, however, are from texts that haven’t been passed down through the medieval manuscript tradition at all and that were previously only known from references by later ancient authors or, in some cases, weren’t even known to have existed at all.

Sadly, the overwhelming majority of the Oxyrhynchos papyri are extremely fragmentary and full of lacunae (i.e., places where damage to the fragment has left a gap in the text). Many of them are only tattered pieces smaller than a person’s fingernail. In many cases, the writing on them is also worn and faded, sometimes to the point of total illegibility.

Over the course of the past century and a quarter since Grenfell and Hunt began their excavations at Oxyrhynchos, scholars have carefully pieced together, transcribed, and published well over five thousand of the papyri that they discovered. These, however, represent just over one percent of the Oxyrhynchos papyri that remain in academic collections all around the world.

The overwhelming majority of the papyri are still sitting to this day in academic storage rooms unpublished. There are simply far too few scholars with sufficient specialized training in papyrology to sort through them all.

ABOVE: Photograph from the Egypt Exploration Society showing a group of native Egyptian workers employed by Grenfell and Hunt excavating papyrus fragments from the trash heap of Oxyrhynchos in around the year 1903

More previously unknown poems of Sappho from the Oxyrhynchos Papyri

Grenfell and Hunt may not have done much physical excavating themselves, but they personally published some of the earliest of the major expansions to Sappho’s corpus. In 1914, they published Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1231 in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, volume ten.

This papyrus consists of a series of fifty-six fragmentary pieces from a single papyrus roll dating to the second century CE, which originally bore at least the second half of the first book of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho’s poems. The pieces of this roll preserve the texts of what are now numbered as Fragments 15, 16, 17, and 18.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1231, bearing the texts of several previously unknown poems of Sappho

That same year and in the same volume, Grenfell and Hunt also published Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1232, which bears the text of Fragment 44, a long poem in glyconic meter with double dactylic expansion that describes the wedding of the Trojan prince Hektor and his wife Andromache. Fragment 44 is the longest of all Sappho’s surviving fragments, but the text as we have it is still thought to be far from complete.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1232, bearing the extant text of Sappho Fragment 44, which describes the wedding of Andromache and Hektor

Sappho’s known, published corpus continued to grow substantially over the course of the twentieth century. As a result of this, by the end of the century, her corpus was several times the size it was at the beginning. Although what we possess now is still only a minute fraction of her work that was known in antiquity, scholars today have access to far more of it and generally possess a far better understanding of what we do have than what anyone had a century and a quarter ago. Some of the most exciting and significant new discoveries, however, have taken place just in the past two decades.

In 2004, Martin Gronewald and Robert Daniel, a pair of professors at the University of Cologne, published P.Köln XI 429, a set of three fragments of a single papyrus scroll dating to the early third century BCE that was held in their university’s papyrus collection. Combined with an earlier-published fragment from Oxyrhynchos, this papyrus brought Sappho’s “Tithonos Poem” or “Old Age Poem” (which is numbered as part of Fragment 58) to near completion.

The discovery and publication of this papyrus was exciting news not just for classicists, but for the public in general, and it received significant coverage in mainstream news outlets.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the Cologne Papyrus, published in 2004, which brought Sappho’s “Tithonos Poem” to near completion

Scholars did not have long to discuss and dissect this now-nearly-complete poem before another major discovery came hot on its heels. Only a decade later, in 2014, Dirk Obbink, Simon Burris, and Jeffrey Fish (the first a professor at the University of Oxford and the latter two professors at Baylor University) published a set of five previously-unknown fragments of probably a single papyrus scroll, most likely dating to the third century CE.

The largest and most complete of these fragments is P. Sapph. Obbink, which bears the nearly complete text (most likely everything except the opening stanza) of a poem by Sappho that was previously almost completely unknown, which scholars have dubbed the “Brothers Poem” because it contains the only in-name mentions of Sappho’s brothers Charaxos and Larichos anywhere in her extant corpus. The same fragment also preserves the first nine lines of another poem by Sappho that was previously completely unknown, which scholars have dubbed the “Kypris Poem,” since it begins with an invocation of the goddess Aphrodite by her epithet “Kypris.”

The publication of this new papyrus was met with just as much fanfare and popular press coverage as that of the Cologne Papyrus a decade earlier. Unfortunately, unlike the Cologne Papyrus, which came from a provenanced academic collection, the excitement of the publication of 2014 papyri has been marred by their murky provenance.

Although no one seriously disputes the papyri’s authenticity and most scholars agree that such papyri would be nearly impossible even for a highly seasoned expert to forge, most now believe that Obbink’s original account of their provenance is a fabrication invented to cover up the fact that the papyri are, in fact, recently looted and illegally exported from Egypt.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing P. Sapph. Obbink, published in 2014, bearing the nearly complete text of the “Brothers Poem” and nine lines of the “Kypris Poem”

The odds that someone will find some significant amount of new material

Now that we’ve covered all of this background, we can finally assess the likelihood that people will discover more of Sappho’s poems. This assessment has two parts. First, the odds that someone sometime in the next fifty years or so will find, recognize, and publish some significant amount of new material (by which I mean four complete lines or more) by Sappho that is not currently known are extremely high. This is due to a combination of four factors.

The first factor is the sheer amount of material that we know is missing. The corpus of Sappho’s poems that circulated in antiquity was extremely large and only a tiny percentage of this corpus has survived. The odds of finding some material from this corpus that is not currently known are much higher than they would be if the missing portion of her corpus were small.

The second factor is that any currently unknown works of ancient Greek or Roman literature that turn up will most likely come from papyri discovered in Egypt that date to the Hellenistic or Roman periods. It just so happens that we know Sappho’s work was extremely popular in precisely this time and place.

The third factor is that previously unknown fragments of Sappho’s work have continued showing up every few decades or so, even as recently as 2014, which is a strongly encouraging sign that we haven’t already found everything that there is to find. The fourth and final factor is that Sappho’s work is distinctive enough that, if someone happens to find some of it, there’s a strong likelihood that someone will recognize that it’s her work.

The odds that someone will find a huge chunk of Sappho’s lost poems

This brings us to the second part of our assessment. At this point, some readers may be wondering: what are the odds of someone finding more than just a significant piece of Sappho’s poetry? How likely is it that someone will find, say, all nine books of the Alexandrian edition? What about a single complete book, or even just a huge chunk of her work (as in more than ten complete or nearly complete poems)?

Unfortunately, the odds of this happening are extremely low. Even in the extremely arid environment of the Egyptian desert, papyrus generally does not preserve well, especially not for thousands of years. The vast majority of the ancient papyri that archaeologists have uncovered are in the form of tiny, worn and tattered fragments.

That being said, it is not impossible that there might still be a scroll or collection of scrolls out there somewhere bearing a large portion or all of Sappho’s work. Very rarely, once in a lifetime, someone does discover a complete or nearly complete copy of a work of ancient literature that was previously thought to have been lost forever.

In perhaps the most dramatic instance of this, sometime between 329 and 322 BCE, the Greek philosopher Aristotle of Stageira (lived 384 – 322 BCE) or one of his students wrote a long treatise On the Constitution of the Athenians, which ancient authors reference, but which was not passed down through the medieval manuscript tradition and was thought to have been lost forever until the late nineteenth century.

Then, in 1879, two leaves of a papyrus codex unexpectedly turned up in the Faiyum bearing portions of the treatise. These leaves were published the following year and, the year after that, the German philologist Theodor Bergk identified that they were from the Aristotelian On the Constitution of the Athenians.

A far more impressive discovery came in 1890, when an American missionary in Egypt purchased a set of four remarkably intact papyrus rolls that the owner of an estate near the city of Hermopolis had apparently commissioned sometime between 78 and c. 100 CE bearing the nearly complete text of the treatise. The British philologist E. A. Wallis Budge quickly acquired the rolls for the British Museum. They are now held in the British Library and are known collectively as British Library Papyrus 131. (You can view the full digitized manuscript here.) The British classicist Frederic G. Kenyon published the first edition of the now-nearly-complete text of On the Constitution of the Athenians in January 1891.

Thus, in the span of just twelve years, the Aristotelian On the Constitution of the Athenians went from being thought totally lost to nearly complete. This rediscovery was something of a godsend for scholars of ancient Greek history, since the treatise provides extensive and invaluable information about the history and government of the city-state of Athens that is found in no other source. In addition, it also provides reliable early attestation of information that was previously only known from much later, less reliable sources.

For roughly the past 130 years, the Aristotelian On the Constitution of the Athenians—a work which scholars believed for centuries had been totally lost and which was recovered only through the astounding, unexpected discovery of a nearly complete manuscript—has been one of the most important sources of information about Athenian political and social history.

ABOVE: Screenshot showing just a couple of sections of the much longer British Library Papyrus 131, which is the sole surviving source for the nearly complete text of the Aristotelian On the Constitution of the Athenians

If there is one ancient author who—to borrow the phrase of my friend from Quora Steve Theodore—has won the “papyrus sweepstakes,” it’s the Athenian comic playwright Menandros (lived c. 342 – c. 290 BCE). Despite the fact that he was possibly the most popular and revered of all comedic playwrights during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, his work fell out sharply of popularity in late antiquity. As a result, not a single one of his plays was passed down through the medieval manuscript tradition.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the state of Menandros’s work was virtually identical to that of Sappho’s work. All that scholars at that time knew of him were the meager passages that later ancient authors happened to preserve through quotation in works that had been passed down. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, multiple major papyrus discoveries radically changed this situation.

The first major breakthrough came in 1905 when the French archaeologist Gustave Lefebvre unexpectedly discovered a large number of leaves from a papyrus codex copied in the fifth century CE, which is known today as the “Cairo Codex” (P. Cairensis 43227), at Aphroditopolis (present-day Kom Ishqâw) in Egypt. These leaves contained substantial portions of Menandros’s comedies Epitrepontes (The Men at Arbitration), Heros (The Hero), Peirikeiromene (The Girl with the Cropped Hair), Samia (The Girl from Samos), and a fifth play which remains unidentified, all of which were previously thought to have been completely lost. He published his edition of these leaves in 1907.

Then, in 1956, the ultrawealthy Swiss banker and antiquities collector Martin Bodmer somehow acquired on the dark antiquities market an unprovenanced papyrus codex that was copied in the third century CE and used in antiquity as a schoolbook. This codex, which is known today as the “Bodmer Codex,” contains more of Menandros’s Samia than was found in the Cario Codex, the virtually complete text of his comedy Dyskolos (known The Grouch or The Bad-Tempered Man), and about half of his comedy Aspis (The Shield).

The Swiss classicist Victor Martin, a professor at the University of Geneva, published the virtually complete text of Dyskolos from the Bodmer Codex in 1958 as Papyrus Bodmer IV, but left the texts of Samia and Aspis from that manuscript unpublished.

ABOVE: Digitized scan from the Bodmer Lab website showing page fourteen of the Bodmer Menandros Codex, which dates to the third century CE

In 1964, the scholars Alain Blanchard and André Bataille published substantial previously unpublished fragments of Menandros’s Sikyonioi (The Sikyonians) from pieces of a different, badly mutilated papyrus manuscript dating to the third century BCE that the French Egyptologist Pierre Jouguet had discovered in 1901 stuffed inside of mummies in a Hellenistic necropolis in the Faiyum. Five years later, in 1969, the scholars Colin Austin and Rodolphe Kasser published the texts of Samia and Aspis from the Bodmer Codex as Papyrus Bodmer XXV and XXVI respectively.

Over the course of the past roughly half century, scholars have recovered even more previously unknown pieces of Menandros’s work from more recent papyrus discoveries, including, most recently, new substantial fragments of Epitrepontes. As a result of all these amazing discoveries, as I discuss in this blog post I wrote in June 2021, we now have the virtually complete text of Dyskolos, the majority of Epitrepontes and Samia, about half of Aspis and Perikeiromene, and smaller portions of a bunch of other plays, including Sikyonioi, Misoumenos, and Heros.

Thus, in less than a century, Menandros went from being an author whose work was known solely from scattered quotations by later ancient authors to having one complete play, two mostly complete plays, and bunch of partial plays, making him one of only five ancient Greek playwrights who have any plays that have survived to the present day complete or nearly complete.

There are scholars today who specialize in studying Menandros. Some universities offer entire courses solely on his work. Both Penguin Classics and Oxford World’s Classics have a full volume dedicated to translations of his surviving plays. These are realities that no one 120 years ago would have ever predicted.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust on display in the Museo Chiaramonti in the Vatican Museums, intended to represent the ancient Athenian comic playwright Menandros, based on an earlier Greek bust dating to the fourth century BCE

Conclusion

It is not totally impossible that, somewhere out there, there might be an ancient manuscript containing a very large portion of Sappho’s poems, perhaps buried in an as-yet-unexcavated Hellenistic or Roman-era Egyptian trash heap, stuffed inside a mummy in a Hellenistic necropolis, or sitting unidentified in some Swiss banker’s shady unprovenanced private collection.

Nonetheless, we shouldn’t get our hopes too high. Most likely there are still some undiscovered fragments out there, but they are probably only fragments: parts of poems, with maybe a few complete or nearly complete poems scattered here and there. That being said, for an ancient author whose work is so unique and yet so poorly attested as Sappho, even a few more fragments could significantly revise our understanding of both her work itself and the historical context in which she lived.

Works cited

• Lardinois, André. “Sappho’s Personal Poetry.” In The Cambridge Companion to Sappho, edited by P. J. Finglass and Adrian Kelly, 163–174. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
• Traill, Ariana. “Acroteleutium’s Sapphic Infatuation (Miles 1216–83).” The Classical Quarterly 55, no. 2 (2005): 518–33. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4493354.