educate young girls, although those are uncertain.
She supposedly founded a school in Mytilene,
where she taught music,poetry, and etiquette.
Young women of this period were trained to fulfill
their proper social positions, and Sappho’s school,
if it existed, would have provided an emphasis on
poetry and music, considered the proper founda-
tion for educating young women.
Although much of her personal biography
may be conjecture, Sappho was very well known
as a poet and was the object of many honors.
For example, the residents of Syracuse were so
thrilled by Sappho’s visit that they erected a
statue honoring her. During her lifetime, coins
of Lesbos were minted with her image on one
side. Plato reportedly considered Sappho a great
poet, although that cannot be verified, and in the
period after her death, her poems were often
memorized and recited, and eventually copied
and read, as she inspired the many poets who
were familiar with her work. With the passage
of time, however, Sappho’s poetry disappeared
from common usage. Papyrus was replaced by
other materials, and her works were not rewritten
on the new material. Eventually Sappho’s poems
disappeared from public circulation, as did the little
information that was known about her life. Some
of her poems reappeared during the late Renais-
sance, when a new appreciation of Greek literature
led to an increased interest in the few preserved
examples of her work. But most of what is known
about Sappho and her compositions has resulted
from increased interest by scholars after some frag-
ments of Sappho’s poems were discovered in an
ancient Egyptian garbagesite unearthed during the
nineteenth century.
Poem Summary
Leave Crete and come to me now, to that holy
temple,
where the loveliness of your apple grove
waits for you and your altars smoulder
with burning frankincense;
there, far away beyond the apple branches,
cold streams 5
murmur, roses shade every corner
and, when the leaves rustle, you are seized
by a strange drowsiness;
there, a meadow, a pasture for horses, blooms
with all
the flowers of Spring, while the breezes blow 10
so gently...there... Cyprian goddess, take and pour
gracefully like wine into golden cups,
a nectar mingled with all the joy
of our festivities 15Poem Summary
Stanza 1
‘‘Fragment 2’’ opens with a call to the goddess
Aphrodite to leave Crete and come to the poet.
Although the goddess is not mentioned by name in
this first stanza, Sappho regarded Aphrodite as her
personal muse and addressed many of her poems
to the goddess. While Aphrodite was most often
associated with Cyprus, she was also associated
with Crete, and thus Sappho’s summoning of a
figure from that island is in keeping with the Sap-
phic tradition of prayingtoordirectingahymn
to her goddess. The temple to which the goddess
is summoned is not necessarily a formal building.
Instead, it is likely an altar created in a garden.
Despite the absence of a formal temple building,
the location is probably a formal setting for wor-
ship of the goddess, with an altar where incense
would be burning in anticipation of her arrival. In
the last line of the first stanza, Sappho mentions
that she is burning frankincense, which according
toGreekmythwasonewaytosummonAphro-
dite. Thus, the first line of the poem, with the
formal call to the goddess, and the fourth line of
the stanza, with mention of burning frankincense,
are both familiar calls to Aphrodite to come to
the poet.
In this first stanza the poet also tempts Aph-
rodite by telling her of the apple grove that awaits
her visit. Throughout the poem Sappho describes
an Edenic garden, but this is not the biblical
Garden of Eden. The Greeks worshipped many
gods, each designated to represent a specific need
in their lives. Aphrodite was the goddess of beauty
and love. In the first stanza here, the poet calls to
the goddess to come and entices her with promises
of lovely apple trees, a whole grove of which are
awaiting her arrival. Apples symbolize love and
weddings in Greek myth, and thus Sappho’s spe-
cific mention of the grove of apples suggests that
she is inviting Aphroditeto participate in a cele-
bration of a young woman’s leaving Sappho’s
circle, perhaps from a possible school, and prepar-
ing for marriage.Fragment 2