Sappho: Love & Life on Lesbos with Margaret Mountford

This remote rocky corner of the Aegean Sea

is largely forgotten by history,

except for one thing.

The poet who gave birth to the Western romantic tradition.

But she and this island are remembered now

mainly as a cultural curiosity.

Today, Sappho exists only on the fringe of our consciousness.

It's down to her that this island, Lesbos,

has given its name to a whole aspect of human sexuality.

But in the past she was remembered not as a gay icon,

but as a prostitute, a priestess,

a school mistress, even as a tragic heroine,

who hurled herself off a cliff for love of a man.

And all this rests on just a few fragile fragments

of verse rescued from the desert.

After thousands of years of slanders and obscurity,

the real Sappho may be about to re-emerge

thanks to 21st-century science

and dramatic archaeological discoveries.

We're reading lines that haven't been read for thousands of years.

To reignite centuries of smouldering controversy.

She had her opinion and she wanted to say it.

A heady cocktail of music, sex and religion.

This sometimes turns same-sex couples

into the ancient equivalent of suicide bombers.

But at its heart,

a real woman and her family,

in a time of personal and political turmoil.

I want to piece together the jigsaw

to get a picture of what Sappho was like.

A real woman who still speaks to us

from 600 years before Christ.

Why have HER name and HER words resonated through the ages?

What was so special about Sappho?

In February 2014, a Greek text written in Roman Egypt

briefly made headlines around the world.

No-one apart from a small group of scholars has seen it

since the third century AD.

-So, this is it. It's in Greek, but it comes from Egypt.

-It is.

Probably would have been taken there from Alexandria

by someone who retired or bought property and settled in the Faiyum.

And then, eventually, it wore out,

and it was reused to make a kind of cardboard out of the pieces of it.

This manuscript dates back to around 200 AD.

An anonymous collector landed it

on the desk of papyrologist Dirk Obbink in 2012,

unaware of what it contained.

When the small pieces were humidified

they immediately started to peel off

and the first thing you could see underneath

were the ends of the first three lines.

The letters that my eye first focused on

was the second to last word of the first line,

"Charaxon" - that's a man's name -

followed by the verb "elthein"

in the spelling of the dialect of the island Lesbos

in the late seventh century.

The only person we know in Greek antiquity

who had the name "Charaxos"

was the brother of the poetess Sappho from the island of Lesbos.

And she was famous in antiquity,

much-loved and widely read,

and imitated and slandered,

but her poetry didn't survive.

What did you feel like when you realised what this was?

Well, it knocked my socks off.

HE READS IN ANCIENT GREEK

'..But you always chatter on about Charaxos

'coming home with his ship full, well, that's for Zeus...'

What Dirk has discovered is the most complete poem

to emerge in centuries by the first female writer

in Western history, Sappho.

'..That Charaxos bring his ship back home safely to port and find us...'

Written about 600 BC,

in it, Sappho talks to someone close to her,

a sister maybe, or her mother,

-about the fate of her two brothers.

-'..Simply leave it to the gods...'

First, there's Charaxos, away at sea.

'..If that's the way Zeus wills...'

and then there's the younger one, Larichos,

still struggling to grow up.

'..And thus, if Larichos would raise his head,

'if only he might one day be a man,

'the deep and dreary draggings of our souls...'

This is not just a long-lost work of ancient literature,

but a window into the life of one of its most enigmatic personalities.

By any standards, an extraordinary find.

It has already started to send shock waves

way beyond the dreaming spires of academia.

For a papyrologist,

making this discovery is a bit like finding the Holy Grail.

But actually, it's much more than that.

Because the question it promises to help solve,

"Who was Sappho?",

has been at the heart of a vexed debate for centuries.

The works of the Greeks have shaped the way we think today.

So, Sappho, antiquity's foremost female poet,

has been critical in shaping our perception of women.

Ever since her work was first read, this question,

"What was a woman doing writing powerful,

"personal poetry in a man's world?",

has always been about more than just Sappho.

For centuries, what you have to say about Sappho

has been code for what you have to say about women in general

and particularly, about women who aren't afraid to speak their mind.

So, how did such a distant, unknown figure

have such an impact on the world we live in today?

Her voice seems to be personal and that draws people in.

Makes them feel as though she's speaking directly to them.

She set up certain kinds of imagery which has come down to us

through the centuries and which has become hugely important in all kinds

of popular culture and in any number of pop songs you care to mention.

The silver moon, blonde hair, but above all, the symptoms of desire.

The stuttering in the throat,

the going hot and cold all over, in the presence of the beloved.

And she didn't really look like this, did she?

-SHE LAUGHS

-Erm, I don't think so.

No, this is a 19th-century idea of Sappho.

Here she is, she's exotic, she's erotic,

she's wearing these thin, gauzy draperies

that leave nothing to the imagination,

her breasts are exposed.

And she's sullen and brooding,

this gaze looking down throughout.

But what's interesting about this picture

is that it offers us the key attributes of who Sappho is.

So, she's definitely a woman, she's got her lyre,

which very often appears in images of Sappho.

She's by the sea, she's alone.

And by the time we get to that period of history,

Sappho has become a bit of a vamp.

Over centuries of gender wars,

Sappho has been endlessly re-cast -

dangerous, emancipated woman,

a high-class whore,

an uptight schoolmistress,

and a feminist icon.

On the one hand, women consistently claim her as a model,

as an intellectual woman.

But on the other hand,

those who want to cut women in general down to size,

point to her...um...

unfortunate sexual practices.

The point about Sappho is that,

because we have so little of her work,

because we know so little of her life,

she simply becomes this kind of empty space

where you can paint in whatever it is that you want

from your political, cultural or social needs

and she fills up those imperatives.

When actually, there's only you and there's no Sappho there at all.

Or so one might think. But with the recent revelations,

there's more truth there than it appears.

To start to find her, we need to strip away those years of mythology,

which have built up around her.

That process started much closer to Sappho's time than ours,

in Ancient Greece itself.

Athens is, today, the capital of the Greece,

but 25 centuries ago, it was the foremost

of hundreds of independent city states -

going through an unparalleled cultural revolution.

In the museum there, evidence still survives

as to the esteem in which classical Greeks held the poet Sappho.

Yes, you can see it here.

There's S-A-P-P

and there's another letter there.

It has to be Sappho. And she's accompanied by several other ladies.

There's one here who's actually bestowing a crown on her head.

As if she's won a competition?

Yes! The city is bestowing the crown for being the best poet

or the best poetess on the figure of Sappho.

Most of this kind of pot, made in Athens,

with the red figures on the black slip, have goddesses on,

like Aphrodite or Athena.

Or they have nymphs or muses,

but supernatural, religious creatures.

Here we have an actual HISTORICAL person with a name.

And this is really path-breaking

and is really testimony to just how important she was

in the Athenian imagination and the Athenian cultural sphere.

Sappho is the only historical woman ever to have been depicted

on an Ancient Greek vase.

And that's all the more extraordinary given that when this was painted,

Sappho was long dead from an island far away.

This vase is 440BC.

This is an Athenian vase from the great democratic classical

period of Athens, the famous period of philosophers and playwrights.

But she's actually living and working around 600BC.

So, this is more than a century and a half

since Sappho herself was working.

This vase is showing us that a poet who is from Lesbos,

which is an island way over the other side of the Aegean Sea -

in fact, it's just a few miles off the Turkish coast -

has got a reputation far away,

a long sailing ship ride in the ancient world

from the great city of Athens in the fifth century.

So, her reputation had spread.

Do you think they'd have thought Sappho was exotic

coming from this eastern island?

Oh, definitely. Lesbos had a very particular reputation.

Firstly, for producing very beautiful women.

They also had a very interesting accent,

which will have sounded almost Oriental to Athenians.

But the most interesting thing is that they really

were supposed to be the sexiest people in the entire Greek world.

In fact, the word "to do a lesbian",

is actually the Ancient Greek for giving someone...a...blowjob.

That's not quite what we associate Sappho with now, is it?

It really isn't, but that's what the Ancient Greeks did

and very definitely they associated it

with a woman doing a blowjob on a man.

-So, sex tourism capital of the Aegean, possibly?

-Absolutely.

As far back as 450 BC,

Sappho had a reputation for strange sexuality

that was bound up with that of her exotic eastern island.

A Lesbian is, in fact, an inhabitant of Lesbos,

the third largest island in the Greek archipelago -

one of the richest islands of the Ancient Aegean.

The reason for the other modern meaning of Lesbian

is the fact that this was the birthplace of the poet Sappho.

Ancient authors wrote biographies of Sappho.

They agree she came from this island,

but they don't agree on much else.

Her father was called Simon or Eumenus,

or Eerigyius or Ecrytus

or Semos or Camon or Etarchus,

or Scamandronymous.

They also tell us that she was married to a very wealthy man

called Cercylas who traded from Andros.

Which seems helpful until you realise

that the comic poets invented this

and it means "Prick" from "Man-Island".

In Sappho's poems, she seems to refer to a daughter, Cleis.

So, she may have been a wife and mother,

but what has excited and amazed generations of readers

is what she has to say about the other women around her.

"And on soft beds, delicate you quenched your desire.

"Pacing far away, her gentle heart devoured by powerful desire.

"She remembers slender Atthis.

"Weeping she left me."

For most historical figures,

we're used to knowing facts.

But for Sappho, we know very little about how she lived,

who she was, what she did.

But what we do know about her are her feelings,

what she was passionate about, the women she loved -

Atthis, Megara, Telesippa, Mika.

'He seems to me an equal of the gods

'Whoever gets to sit across from you

'And listen to the sound of your sweet speech so close to him...'

In this poem, you think she's in love with a man,

but it turns out she's in love with the girl he's sitting next to.

'Oh, it makes my panicked heart go fluttering in my chest

'For the moment I catch sight of you there's no speech left in me

'But tongue gags. All at once...'

It's because of poetry like this that we now

think of Sappho as homosexual.

And Lesbos has become a global by-word for gayness in women,

with Sappho, the iconic first Lesbian.

The place of Sappho's birth was Eressos in the far west.

It's one of the most beautiful spots on the whole island.

In the summer, it thrives on a tourist industry

built around Sappho.

And every year, women flock from Europe and America

to enjoy the women-only nudist beaches,

the pick-up opportunities,

and the free bohemian atmosphere.

When I arrived, it was the off-season,

but the most dedicated expats and local converts agreed to meet me

for a drink and a chat in the famous Tenth Muse bar.

ALL LAUGH AND CHATTER

So, she's got a fan club here, has she?

The lesbians probably think about her as their,

you know, guru, let's say, yeah.

The starter of the movement, I'm saying, generally speaking.

But someone else can approach her because of the fact

she was a great poetess, you know?

Because of her talent, and her contribution and everything.

So, everybody, depends what they want to have.

Here has a lot of artistic people drawn into here.

And maybe that's the spirit of Sappho what keeps them here!

Maybe she's like, "Stay here, stay!"

So, Sappho in effect started it?

Was the... Was the catalyst?

She was the first woman ever

that had the courage to stand up and say,

"Listen, I'm feeling this.

"I don't give a damn about what you're saying. I feel this.

"And I'm going to say it." And she said it in the most beautiful way.

After I read Sappho,

I felt that there was somebody behind me.

She was my great-great-great-grandmother

and she was feeling the same things with me.

And that was an amazing thing in a way!

Great-great-great-great-great-great- grandmother!

Great-great-great-great-great, yeah!

You can say that, but she was... She was feeling the same things.

This is the most recent vision of Sappho, the lesbian icon.

But is this modern idea of her just as much an anachronism

as the 19th-century vamp or the Edwardian schoolmistress?

James Davidson has literally written the book on Greek love -

and it's a culture that defies our categories

of lesbian, gay and straight.

Here was have frottage, between the thighs,

surrounded by people in the gymnasium.

-See, two of them...

-Yes.

-..in public.

People with wreaths, a kind of dancer, even.

Is this a reflection of reality? Or is this just a...

Just some artist putting a whole load of things together

to make a pretty pot.

Societies are strange, you know, societies do strange things

and this is a really peculiar cultural phenomenon.

Instead of Greek homosexuality,

I sometimes think it should be called Greek homo-besottedness,

because it's always so over-the-top, it's always so extreme.

And that seems to be almost a unique phenomenon.

In Thebes, an army unit was created entirely of lovers.

In Athens, love affairs could become political alliances.

For men, gay love wasn't just personal preference,

it was often the glue which held society together.

So, do you think she was following male practice

in writing poetry like that or do you think she was a groundbreaker?

The female version is much more difficult to discover.

Sappho is, you know, as ancient critics say,

she is a "thaumaston chrema",

she's a wonderful, amazing thing, she's a phenomenon.

There's no question about that.

But any kind of genius still follows on the culture of their time.

What we were told is that, in Sparta,

women had relationships just like the men.

Because we've even got a poem which is a maiden chorus

in which the girls are flirting with each other

while they're performing a ritual.

But I think what's interesting about this whole phenomenon

of Greek love - Greek homosexuality for men and women -

is that seems to be...

a kind of cultural and social institution.

They're using it as a way of social cohesion to break out

of family groups to establish, if you like, to establish a community,

so that an army of lovers is also,

is an army which breaks out of clan groupings and tribal groupings

and unites the whole polis.

There's no doubt that Sappho was in love with women,

but she wasn't a lesbian in our terms.

In her culture, homosexual feelings and practices

were an important part of life

in mainstream heterosexual society,

and she is our best evidence that this was also true of women.

So, it seems, to understand Sappho,

we need to abandon our own preconceptions

and build up a picture from the evidence alone.

The problem is that, for a long time,

there hasn't been very much evidence to go on.

For centuries, we had no such thing as a text of Sappho,

because none had been handed down to us from the ancient world.

Maybe all those monks and Islamic scholars who copied out the works

of antiquity, didn't want to spend months of their time,

not to mention expensive ink and vellum, reproducing love poetry,

written by a possible degenerate in a strange eastern Greek dialect.

So, how did we know anything of her work, you may ask?

Well, we found bits of it quoted by ancient authors.

But not in anthologies of ancient poetry -

in grammar books,

analysing the dialect and the verse metre on Lesbos.

'The Aeolic dactylic tetrameter acatalectic is as follows...'

'Sappho has composed a line which includes two...'

'And "sphi" "to them" is used in Aeolic...'

'Once again, Love, that loosener of limbs,

'bitter-sweet and inescapable...'

It's like finding a gold necklace in a heap of rubbish,

this is the first time in Western literature

that anyone has defined love as

"limb-loosening", "bitter-sweet", "irresistible".

This is the birth of our Western tradition of love poetry

and we find it in a handbook

on the Aeolic dactylic tetrameter acatalectic.

These short quotations by other authors

were all anyone knew of Sappho until the 19th century,

when everything started to change.

In 1896, two British archaeologists,

Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt,

were excavating what looked like unpromising rubbish mounds

in the small ancient town of Oxyrynchus in Egypt.

They soon realised that what they were finding beneath their feet

were piles and piles of papyrus,

thrown away by the Greeks who lived there.

When these were shipped back to Oxford they revealed shopping lists,

accounts, personal letters and, most excitingly,

lost works of Greek literature -

including fragments of unknown poems by Sappho.

'She who surpassed all human kind in beauty...'

'Sing of the bride with shapely feet, she could not remember...'

'Some say foot soldiers, others call a fleet...

'But I say, it's whatever you love... '

Since 1896, scholars have gone through 100 of the boxes

that came back from Oxyrynchus.

There are still 700 left to decipher.

So, at this rate, we'll be finished in seven centuries' time.

Today, though, we at least have technology to help with the task.

Where we're at with data visualisation,

with very simple tools that allow us to see fragments like this.

But not in a static way.

We can actually manipulate them, move them around

and it actually allows for great freedom.

So, with delicate pieces of papyrus like this,

we don't actually have to physically touch them

and you know, beat them up.

We can just do this visually and it helps preserve the fragments.

You can do that even if you haven't got

all the pieces of papyrus, where you are, can't you?

Yes, yes. That's even better.

So, you could be sitting anywhere around the world

and still working on your reconstruction of Sappho.

It's an almost impossible jigsaw,

not least because we only have a fraction of the pieces.

So, a big part of the job

is guessing what might have been in the gaps.

But every now and then, new archaeological discoveries emerge

which replace our guesswork with the real thing.

In the early 2000s there was a new discovery from Cologne,

this is the so-called "Cologne Sappho Papyrus".

What's specific about this fragment is that

where the fragment from Oxyrhynchus breaks off on all these lines,

the Cologne fragment fills them out for us.

Can see the pairing of the same exact lines, here?

For the longest time, we just had this word for fawns,

and originally it was more thinking

that the girl's dancing around like a fawn.

But what the Cologne papyrus showed us is that, it was quite different.

It was about Sappho, you know, her knees are old

and so they don't carry her quite the same way.

Whereas once before, they were very nimble

and she danced like a fawn.

So, we now know she's talking about old age, really,

and not being able to dance around like fawns,

like young deer, any more.

I have some sympathy with that.

We're reading lines that haven't been read for thousands of years.

And, in this case, you know, it's not just any poet,

it's a female poet, it's a woman's voice.

And, you know, her voice has been emanating

very silently and quietly for decades, centuries.

And the more fragments we find, the louder her voice becomes.

Piece by piece, fragment by fragment,

we are building up a picture of the real Sappho.

Not young and sexy here, but ageing with bad knees.

And there's another blow to our image of Sappho,

the confessional Lesbian writer.

These written documents all date to centuries after her death.

In Sappho's day, writing was new-fangled technology.

Poetry was something to be learned by heart and sung out loud.

MAN SINGS

Everybody forgets that Ancient Greek poetry was actually sung music.

Armand d'Angour has used ancient evidence

to reconstruct what the new brothers poem

might originally have sounded like.

The first line where it says... HE SPEAKS IN ANCIENT GREEK

..you hear my voice going up and down

and if we then apply them to this scale system, the Mixolydian Scale,

HE PLAYS SCALE

So it goes something like... HE SINGS IN ANCIENT GREEK

HIS VOICE FADES

WOMAN'S VOICE SINGS MELODY IN ANCIENT GREEK

This other-worldly music was, to Greeks,

the chief appeal of Sappho. Both these words and this tune

would have spread through the Greek world orally

long before they were written down.

People are much more likely to remember a song

than a poem, aren't they?

The Muses, who were the goddesses of poetry and song and dance were...

In myth, the Nine Muses were the daughters of Mnemosyne which means "Memory".

This must have been the most marvellous music as well as poetry.

I think there's every reason to think that she was one

of the great poets of the ancient world

and must have been a wonderful musician.

Sappho wasn't a writer, she was a singer-songwriter.

It's a revelation that shifts your perspective completely.

It sets our quest off in a new direction.

What kind of woman could be a singer in Ancient Lesbos?

In the Ancient Greek societies we know anything about,

it was quite something for a woman to perform music in public.

Sappho isn't just the earliest Greek female poet we know of,

she's practically the only one.

And in historical times,

respectable Greek women were supposed to stay at home.

We even know that, in Crete, if a man raped a woman in her own home,

he was fined a thousand staters,

if he raped her in the street, the fine was reduced by 50%.

By being out, effectively,

she was asking for it.

The only women men would have seen singing and dancing

would have been like this woman here,

playing the flute, wearing sexy see-through garments,

at an all-male drinking party.

A prostitute, basically.

Sappho might not have been a lesbian,

but she might have been some kind of Geisha or courtesan.

In Germany, one expert went through her work piece-by-piece

to pick out all of the names of girls Sappho loved

and others she hated, with surprising results.

Apparently, there were four kinds of names.

Some are ethnic names like Atthis, which means she comes from Athens.

Or they're abstract nouns like Peace or Justice.

Or nicknames like "Gyrinno" which means "tadpole",

or "Doricha", "gift lover",

and there are names from mythology like "Andromeda" and "Gorgo".

The theory is that those names

are not far from modern porn-star names

like Houston or Fantasy.

And even the name Sappho, or should I say "Psapfo", is a strange word.

It's not Greek at all.

So, what's going on here?

The term Sappho uses for her friends, "hetaira", "companions",

is the one later Greeks used for courtesans

or high-class prostitutes.

So, is this what we're missing?

Was Sappho leading a band of go-go dancers,

who offered a little more than just titillating songs,

or are we yet again being misled

by other people's prejudice?

We have to remember that Sappho lived at a specific time and place

with its own distinctive culture.

And there, it seems there were other venues for a performer

than an all-male drinking party.

Lesbos, way back in 600 BC, was a different place

from the classical world of later centuries.

The island still glimmers

with haunting natural beauty,

and to an ancient poet,

that was evidence for the presence of the divine.

Sappho is full of images of the natural world that surrounded her -

roses, honey, clover, chervil and moonlight over the briny sea.

We can still see all of that today,

but for her, that whole natural world was populated by gods.

Gods were everywhere and gods are everywhere in her poetry.

For a go-go girl, Sappho seems surprisingly obsessed with religion.

The heart of her sacred landscape was known literally as the middle -

Messa - an idyllic spot in the heart of the countryside

where worshippers would come together

from all four corners of Lesbos.

I went there with Cathy Morgan,

director of the British School at Athens.

It creates the impression of having two colonnades around...

Local archaeologist Ioannis Kourtzellis

showed us what remains of the ancient temple

to three of the great Olympian Gods.

And it's good he did, because you need to look carefully

to see the remains of the building that Sappho might have known.

-Quite narrow, as well.

-Yes, yes.

So, these columns that we can see now were later.

They weren't here in archaic times,

they're the classical one about 300 years after Sappho.

Yes, definitely.

-And then a stone wall inside that.

-Definitely, yes.

And then, behind it is the later building, which is much bigger.

When Sappho was alive,

all that was here was a tiny, chapel-sized building -

now dwarfed by the monumental temple built later.

In her time, the building itself was an afterthought.

What mattered was this holy piece of land set aside for the gods

and the island-wide festivals that regularly took place here.

I imagine a Greek festival

with all these colours and blood

and wealth being sacrificed and social business going on

as being a kind of mixture of state funeral, Woodstock...

SHE LAUGHS Whichever you like to call it!

The sort of nice, bleached view of a Greek sanctuary

that sometimes we have, it's completely alien.

Yes, we think of people in wafting in spotless white garments

-and white marble buildings.

-Completely bloodstained!

-Exactly.

And you mentioned song and performance.

Is it possible that Sappho, that a woman like Sappho

might have had a role performing at a ceremony here?

Very likely, actually.

We do have visual evidence of lines of women dancing and performing.

So, dance, presumably song and music attached to it.

And her songs might have been sung

-by her leading a chorus, is that possible?

-Perfectly possible, yes.

Far from the seedy drinking parties of Athens,

it may be at these raucous countryside festivals

where we should imagine Sappho performing,

possibly with other girls from the community.

Which isn't quite our idea of a sort of paid singer

and maybe paid is the wrong term, as well.

These rituals are a reminder of what society is,

what it feels like. So, paying someone else to come in and perform,

perhaps, but it's a little bit different

from the occasion in the festival

where the women of the community come and sing their song.

It's almost like dances in Greek villages nowadays.

In the new poem, Sappho entrusts the fate of her brother

to the King of the Gods, Zeus.

She asks to be sent to pray to his Queen, the Goddess Hera,

and hopes for another god or "daimon" to give them relief

from their troubles, most probably Dionysus, the God of Wine.

Wouldn't it have gone better

if she was singing these words here at the sanctuary to those three gods

rather than just at some late night men's drinking party?

This all starts to make sense.

Sappho may have performed her songs here in front of people

from all over the island of Lesbos.

Maybe she even made her name here.

Far from a showgirl,

Sappho may have been renowned for performing at religious events.

For some people, this has been a chance to pigeon-hole her once more.

A priestess, possibly of the Goddess of Love, Aphrodite.

But do you have to be a priestess to sing religious songs?

When I was in Eressos, I was lucky enough

to be invited to a real big, fat, Greek wedding.

MUSIC AND CHATTER

And this is one kind of religious occasion

where we can be pretty sure Sappho performed.

A whole book of the Complete Works of Sappho

is devoted to wedding songs.

There's the ones for the hen night

"Virgins, celebrate all night,

"let's get all the unmarried men your age

"so we'll get less sleep than the nightingale."

And then there's the ones when the groom is coming -

"Hymenaios! Hymenaios!

"Here comes the groom like Ares..." - that's the God of War -

"..and he's larger than even a big man!"

And then, perhaps sadly, the wedding night itself -

remember the bride might be only 12 years old

and getting married to someone more than twice her age.

"Virginity! Virginity! Where have you gone?"

and the chorus singing, "We've gone, never to return!"

ALL CHATTER AND CLAP

-I have to leave for..

-To change!

-That's too beautiful not to wear!

-But too big! I can't dance!

Religious celebrations the world over

are also an excuse for a knees-up,

I can picture Sappho at an evening like this,

the best singer-songwriter anyone knew.

She could muster a hymn to the gods in the day,

and a party tune for the celebrations as the night drew on.

I don't think we need to pigeon-hole Sappho as a priestess

any more than a prostitute.

Singing about love and singing to the gods

were just natural things for a poet to do.

And now, the discovery of a new poem

is opening up another side to her life - her family.

'But you always chatter on about Charaxos coming home

'with his ship full

'Well, that's for Zeus...'

What's the real story behind this poem?

Someone's nagging Sappho about the need for her brother

to come back with a full ship.

Our best guess is that's her mother.

There's no mention of a father anywhere.

Her other brother is little more than a child.

He's serving wine to the grown-ups in the town hall.

And if Charaxos blows it all on fast women in Egypt,

the family fortunes may well depend on Sappho.

The family were most likely landowners

in the small town of Eressos,

but at some point, Sappho moved east

to the island's largest city, Mytilene.

Today, a huge fortress occupies the site of Sappho's city.

And on the horizon is a reminder why.

The coast of Asia only six miles away.

In recent centuries, political tensions with Turkey

have turned this narrow strait into a tensely watched frontier.

But in Sappho's time, the people across the water

were trading partners, not enemies.

Although sailing the Aegean did have its dangers.

"You keep chattering that Charaxos must come with his ship full."

And I wonder how many women from Mytilene

stood somewhere like this,

gazing out to sea looking for a son or a brother or a husband

and some of them may have prayed, too,

although probably not all to Queen Hera.

But think how much greater the anxiety must have been in 600 BC,

with no proper maps, no letters home.

And people like Charaxos were sailing right to the edge

of the then-known world.

And many of them didn't return.

But the ones that did come back transformed the society

and the culture here on Lesbos.

'Headscarves, fragrant purple

'Monassus sent you from Phocaea

'Valuable gifts...'

Sappho's poems tell of a world in which sailors

were coming back to Lesbos with tantalising, exotic goods.

'A decorated slipper.

'A lovely piece of Lydian work...'

'Robe, saffron, Phrygian purple

'Embroidered headbands from Sardis...'

These pieces are fantastic, they're really beautiful.

I mean, look at how fine those designs are.

These treasures of the British Museum

give us a sense of the Eastern luxuries Sappho might have known.

Yes, this beautiful jewellery comes from a number of different graves

from the end of the seventh century BC in Kamiros Rhodes.

So, not far from Lesbos, and about the time Sappho was alive.

-Yes.

-So, when Sappho writes about a headband for her daughter,

she might have been thinking about something like this piece here.

That's right. If she was extremely wealthy,

it might have been a gold piece like this.

Alternatively, she might have had something from textile.

Would they have been made in Greece or imported?

There were probably made locally,

but the representation of this winged goddess

with the beautiful little lions either side

is a motif that you get from the Near East.

What's this little figure here?

It's an Egyptian faience bottle for perfumes.

So, it's not too farfetched to think of Sappho

sitting putting on perfume from something like that,

and maybe fastening her cloak or her dress with something like that?

Of course.

'This finery all comes from a time when Greeks

'were reaching across the Mediterranean

'as traders and colonists.

'And Charaxos, it seems, may have been headed for Egypt.'

We understand, from a number of different sources,

that he was trading wine with Egypt

and the major trading port of Egypt at this time was Naucratis.

And this was the port where all traders,

including our friends from Lesbos, would have come.

Now, this settlement was settled around the time of Sappho's birth

and we find lot of Greek objects,

including those that the Greek traders dedicated to their deities.

And these two here came from Lesbos.

And this one here mentions a dedication

from someone from Mytilene.

-Ah. That might have been Charaxos.

-Well, who knows? Potentially.

Charaxos was one of thousands of young men across Greece

setting out with the produce of their family farm -

gambling on making a profit

in places like Naucratis -

the ancient equivalent

of Hong Kong or Dubai.

Sappho would have had no way of knowing

what had become of her brother and the family's precious cargo.

But incredibly, we do.

By an extraordinary coincidence,

the historian Herodotus

mentions him in a passage about a high-class courtesan

called Rhodopis - "Rosy Face".

Well, what he actually says is,

"Rhodopis, our heroine for the moment, came to Egypt.

"She arrived and she worked there as a prostitute

"and then she was freed for a great sum of money

"by a man from Mytilene, called Charaxos,

"son of Scamandronymus, who was the brother of Sappho the poetess."

But he was a bit of a bad boy.

I think, he spent pretty much all of his liquid cash on freeing her.

And do we know what Sappho thought of that?

Herodotus says in a poem,

Sappho abused her brother immensely.

And I think Sappho was not happy with the way her brother

was both spending his money, which was in a way, her money,

on freeing what she probably would have called a tart.

So, instead of returning to Mytilene with a profit for the family,

Charaxos blew everything on this romance with Rosy Face,

and when he got back, Sappho angrily confronted him

in a song which hasn't survived.

So, she wasn't taking the moral high ground, probably,

-it was a business issue?

-I wonder... It could have been both.

Was she a respectable married woman with a child

and therefore, was ripping...

really ripping into a feckless brother who should have settled down

and got married to a nice Mytilenean girl? One doesn't know about that.

This finally makes sense of the new poem we've discovered.

Sappho must have sung a series of songs about her brother.

The one we have found is set early on in the story.

She's telling her mother not to get her hopes up about Charaxos.

Then later, she sang one to Charaxos himself,

berating him for leaving the family without a penny.

It's a tragic domestic soap opera -

far removed from the Lesbian romances

we've come to expect from Sappho.

And it shows us the real problems a woman faced in 600 BC.

And in Oxford, there's intriguing evidence

that the problems she faced weren't just financial, but political.

This stone was purchased in 1627, by Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel,

who was a prominent courtier of Charles I,

but also a prominent grand tourist and art collector.

And this is actually the oldest historical record

we have from Ancient Greece.

It is a crude list of dates,

originally set up on the island of Paros,

telling key events of Greek history

from 1580 to 263 BC.

It's very difficult to read now because the letters

have got so worn over time.

But what this bit actually says is...

SHE READS IN ANCIENT GREEK

Excuse my awful accent.

But what that means is that a certain period of time had elapsed

since Sappho sailed from Mytelene to Sicily fleeing.

The rest of the section gives us more information so we can date it,

but what's interesting is that word "fugusa",

which I've translated as "fleeing",

but which really suggests that she was sent into exile.

The discovery of this stone was like a bolt from the blue.

From it, we learn in a few faint carvings,

that Sappho was exiled from her home city to the island of Sicily,

about a week's sail away.

Then all is silence.

So, not only was Sappho bankrupted by her brother,

she fell foul of the authorities enough to be sentenced to exile.

To find out why,

we need to go back to the turbulent world of Sappho's Mytilene.

So, James, what was Mytilene like when Sappho was alive?

-What was going on here?

-Amazingly, we actually have

evidence from one of her contemporaries.

Someone called Alcaeus.

He was writing maybe ten or 20 years before Sappho's time.

And he describes a world which was actually very politically disturbed,

lots of faction fighting, endless coups

and counter coups and people trying to establish tyrannies.

Alcaeus, like Sappho,

wrote about passionate homosexual love affairs -

but for him, that was partly about bonding

with his fellow conspirators.

Quite a party, really. Would Sappho have been part of that scene at all?

One thing is that some of the papyri are revealing more and more

about the way that maybe Sappho and her friends

could be involved also in these family politics

because some of the names that we hear in Alcaeus

and the faction of Alcaeus and his brothers

also crop up in some of the papyri of Sappho.

I've got one here, it concerns someone called Mika.

"That I shall not allow you, you chose the friendship

"of ladies of the house of Penthilos"

and that house of Penthilos seems to be one of the original

very old aristocratic families that starts all the faction fighting.

So that's a tiny clue to indicate

that the women and Sappho's ladies

are also involved with the faction fighting.

So, when she's complained that Mika's left, it isn't just

that she's left her for another woman or another man,

she's crossed over to the enemy, she's gone to the other side.

That seems to be the case, yes, so just as with Alcaeus

underneath the romantic

and the loving, hot, erotic poetry,

there seems to be some kind of politics of alliance going on.

Whose side are you on? You used to be my lover, used to love me,

and now you've gone over to the other side.

Women are of course more subtle than men - we know that, don't we?

SOME women are more subtle!

This is a completely new perspective on the love affairs of Sappho.

That behind all of that talk of love was political alliance-making.

And Sappho must have allied with the wrong side to end up in exile.

Bankrupted, exiled,

each step in this tale takes us further

from the other-worldly Sappho of romantic cliche.

We're uncovering, I feel,

not a dreamer, but a prominent figure on the island of Lesbos.

A celebrated performer at its great festivals and gatherings.

A woman heading up one of its great families

in the absence of her brothers.

A player in the island's cut-throat political struggles.

But this truth about her was slowly clouded by the mists of time

and we've replaced it with the image of a poetess we wanted to see.

And nowhere is this truer than with the story of Sappho's death.

Of course, a passionate, tragic poet

had to come to a passionate, tragic end.

And legend has it that Sappho killed herself

by leaping from the cliff of Lefkas.

At some point in history, a tragic love story grew up

about Sappho and a man called Phaon

that ended with her suicide on the white cliff of Lefkas -

far off in western Greece.

It's ironic, isn't it,

that a woman whose poetry is so full of love for other women,

goes down in history as having leapt to her death for love of a man.

Well, it's rubbish, of course.

The story is that, she was worked among her girls

and then she fell in love with this handsome young man called Phaon.

Who, in fact, had been an old ferry man

but was translated and made youthful by Aphrodite.

And Sappho falls in love with him,

deserts all her girls and runs after him.

And he's not interested and so she throws herself off

the cliff off the cliff of Leucadia. You know, as you do.

For centuries Sappho's Leap

has been the most common image associated with her.

But this melodramatic suicide story

is a fiction shaped in large part

by the antipathy of male elites towards powerful women.

-So, she's overreached herself in a number of ways, then?

-Absolutely.

She's writing poetry, she's claiming a public role,

she's speaking about women

and all of this is out there and it has a political content

as far as other viewers are concerned.

So, this is why that has to be taken back

and she has to be consumed with feeling.

She has to be put back into a classic feminine role

which is sexualised, and then she has to die.

-And that's the end.

-The end!

So, she throws herself off the cliff.

And this picture of Sappho killing herself becomes hugely prevalent.

Just at this moment when women are beginning to claim rights

to education to employment, to the custody of their children, so...

-This is what happens to you?

-Yes, if you go down that route,

this is what will happen.

This reshaping of Sappho's story

by male artists began in Ancient Greece itself.

But at some time, Sappho actually became a figure of fun, didn't she?

Yes, absolutely. It's really strange that this poetess

becomes a sort of grotesque comic role.

In fact, several playwrights wrote comedies about her.

If there was any one place that reshaped Sappho's reputation

it was here, the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens,

where, a century after Sappho,

the world's first plays were performed.

Ancient Greek comedies are all played by male actors

in front of male audiences.

But they liked to see men in transvestite roles.

And it seems as though Sappho was played very ugly, very small,

and the Ancient Greeks didn't like short women.

Very dark skinned, and she did all sorts of strange things.

She seems to have fancied men often younger than her

and she's very randy and rather desperate.

And I think it's a response in the fifth century, in Athens,

which was the kind of society where female sexuality

wasn't something that was allowed to be talked about in public.

And respectable women, it certainly it wasn't recognised

that they had any kind of sex life or sexual experience.

So, it's in that context that an educated,

in fact, aristocratic woman, with a public sex drive

has to be made funny, burlesque and comic.

It's the only way that a patriarchal male society can cope with her.

Because otherwise they feel threatened by her?

They genuinely would feel threatened by her.

And they don't want their women to have a role model like her?

They certainly don't, so she's got to be small, dark,

hideous, ugly and a figure of fun.

As the mythologised Sappho grew in popularity,

so the real Sappho's influence slowly waned.

And by the eighth century AD,

the last books of her works had been consigned to the dust heap.

But now, 2,600 years after her death,

she is finally re-emerging from obscurity.

We know that the family fortune

was blown by Charaxos on his rosy-faced courtesan -

and maybe one day we will know if Larichos

ever did grow up to become a man,

and what became of Sappho's daughter Cleis.

And we may never know what actually became of the poet herself.

But Sappho knew that she would have the last word.

She wasn't afraid to say about people that she didn't like.

"But when you die you will lie there.

"And afterwards there will never be any recollection of you

"or any longing for you.

"Unseen in the house of Hades,

"you will go to and fro among the shadowy corpses."

But of herself she wrote,

"And if you judge me by the divine Muses,

"you will know that I escaped the gloom of Hades

"and that no day will ever dawn

"that does not speak the name of Sappho, the lyric poet."

And so far, she's been right.