S1E01 Transcript: Fragment 16

Diane Rayor: “Ἔρος δηὖτέ μ’ ὀ λυσιμέλης δόνει, γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον.”

Ellie Brigida: Welcome to Sweetbitter, a podcast where we investigate the truth and controversies surrounding Sappho’s life, the Isle of Lesbos, and her relevance today. We’re your hosts, Ellie Brigida…

Leesa Charlotte: …and Leesa Charlotte.

EB: This episode, we’ll be taking you back to what life was like on the Isle of Lesbos–specifically, what life was like for women and the role music played in society.

LC: As we do each episode, we’re going to start off with one of Sappho’s fragments, chosen by our resident poet, Alyse. Hello, Alyse.

Alyse Knorr: Hi. So for this episode, y’all, I’ve chosen for you Fragment 16. And here it is, read by one of our guests, Chris Mason, who Leesa and I got to interview earlier this year.

Chris Mason: “Some say horses with soldiers. Some say soldiers on foot. Some say sailing ships are what is most beautiful on the black earth. I say it’s whatever we love.” She says, “Think about Helen, the world’s most beautiful woman. She left her noble husband, and sailed to Troy. Not even her children or her beloved parents, remember, could dissuade her. And I’m thinking about Anaktoria, who is gone.”

EB: So Alyse, tell us a little bit about why you chose this poem for our first episode.

AK: Well, today’s episode is about the Island of Lesbos, which is where Sappho lived 2,500 years ago, during the Archaic Greek period of world history. And I chose this poem for this episode because it really encapsulates, really well I think, the values of Archaic Greek society, the ways that this is a society that really values military power and war and ships and armies, because they’re kind of in a transitional period where they’re expanding their influence around the Aegean. This poem also shows how Sappho’s writing is truly revolutionary within this context, because she, as she says, in this poem, doesn’t care at all about that kind of violent power or attitude toward what’s meaningful. What she cares about is love. And that pretty much captures Sappho in a nutshell.

EB: I love that. That’s also, I feel like, why we can all relate to her so much as women who–I’m like some women care about wanton power–but I would say, most of us just care about love. We just want to love, just like Sappho.

AK: I mean, even within the literary culture of Sappho’s time, right, you have to remember that like, okay, there’s Homer and Homer writes about wars of how the Trojan War and about the, sort of, aftermath of the Trojan War in The Odyssey. So for Sappho, even within a literary tradition alone, to be writing about like, hey, guess what, you know what doesn’t matter? Ships and the military. What does matter is the person I love. It’s truly a revolutionary thing.

LC: So Alyse and I spoke to Chris about the music he’s written for Old Songs, some of which you just heard, along with his reading of the poem. So Old Songs is composed of him and Mark Jickling and Liz Downing, and they translate Archaic Greek poems from seventh to fourth century BC, and put them to music, many of which are Sappho poems. Just a casual hobby that they have.

AK: Yeah, they’re amazing. It’s also just like, it really represents the way that you can’t just read Sappho. She’s meant to be sung, she was always meant to be sung. And so, when Chris Mason in Old Songs, when they approach translating Sappho, one of the things they do is they repeat lines from her work, almost like a chorus for a song. So they’ll repeat one line over and over again, and we asked them about that in the interview, and I thought his answer was really instructive.

Chris Mason: The one freedom we allow ourselves is to repeat lines.

AK: Mm.

CM: The reason we do that is singers around the world, and they sing a song, they just tend to repeat lines. It could be a chorus or just could be, just really enjoying repeating a line. With our fragments, we repeat them, you know, two or three or four times, but then with  a longer song, we may repeat a stanza a couple times.

AK: Like you mentioned, it makes it feel more like a chorus in a pop song or something. It makes it a song more about her feelings and about Anaktoria rather than the kind of more general, abstract statements about love and–because that poem, I love that poem, and one of the reasons I love it is ’cause it feels like a send up of this masculine, patriarchal, it’s-all-about-war kind of society. She’s liberating Helen, Helen gets to make her own choices in that poem rather than be a prisoner. But when I think of that poem, those are the main–I think about these like, big picture issues, rather than Anaktoria, and so that translation, that song, like really calls her attention back down to the personal occasion for the poem for her.

EB: Thank you Alyse, for elaborating on the repetition and the way that Sappho was used in music and still is used in music today. It’s very, very cool. For this particular episode, we’re talking about Sappho, her life on the Isle of Lesbos, and what life was like for women during that time.

LC: I was lucky enough to talk to Marguerite Johnson, who is a professor of Classics at the University of Newcastle in Australia, like me. I mean, I’m not from the University of Newcastle, but I am Australian.

EB: You are?

LC: I am! The trick is in the accent. She’s a cultural historian working on sexuality and gender in the ancient Mediterranean and has published on Sappho extensively, so I’m going to let her take it from here.

Marguerite Johnson: I think on the Island of Lesbos in the Archaic Age, the women seem to have had a significantly freer life than a lot of their contemporaries on the Greek mainland. And of course, Sappho was from an aristocratic family. So this is an aristocratic women’s world, where women seem to have a lot of contact with each other. And there’s lots of theories as to why they have contact with each other, with Sappho, a school teacher, which is just a crazy idea. It’s trying to normalize what men of the 18th and 19th centuries wanted to normalize, because her poetry made them really uncomfortable. So they tried to make her a school mistress and then they said, ‘Oh, maybe she’s with these other women as part of a religious or female cult,’ which we know were widespread in the ancient world, but I just think it was a social–a series of social contacts and friendships that we don’t need to put any other sort of limitations on. And Anaktoria belonged to that circle of friends, and she clearly was an individual Sappho had intense feelings for, and she appears in Fragment 16. And, you know, that’s one of Sappho’s most famous poems. When Sappho is missing Anaktoria, she daydreams about Anaktoria, and she says, in lines 17 to 20, “I would prefer to gaze upon her lovely walk, and the glowing sparkle of her face, than all the chariots of the Lydians and their armies.” So what she is saying is, Anaktoria is no longer there. She misses her, and Sappho was a genius at zooming in on individual features, very minute features. So she evokes the way Anaktoria walked, so you can imagine the sway of her hips. And she says her face glows and it sparkles–evokes this idea of a complexion, a beautiful Mediterranean, sun-kissed complexion. And she is evoking the beauty of a woman’s world, but to men, what is important, often, is chariots and armies and the battlefield. That’s what they regard as the most precious thing on earth. But for Sappho, she says, “It’s what you love.” And the thought of what I love reminds me of Anaktoria. So Anaktoria really holds a place in Sappho’s heart. And what is interesting about some of the women she expresses the most intense desire for in her memory, some of these women have left and they may have been married off and had to go and then live with the family of their husbands. So a lot of her poetry is about distant love and separation. And that’s because there were women ultimately caught in a male’s world, where if they were sent off to be married to secure family, you know, bonds or business deals between families, they had to go. Yeah, Anaktoria is a character who appears a few times in her poetry and means a lot to her, as does Atthis. Atthis is another persona in Sappho’s poems who Sappho talks about a lot. And again, in one of the famous Atthis poems, she talks about being away from Atthis, that Atthis has left, and that’s Fragment 94, and she’s daydreaming about Atthis. She says, you know, she remembers gentle Atthis with desire, and that’s quite revealing for Sappho, that there is an element of desire when she thinks about this friend of hers. So she’s playing with the most gentle of sexuality and sensuality.

LC: We’ll hear more about Fragment 94 in the next episode, but for now, let’s talk more about the Isle of Lesbos. So Lesbos is the largest of the Aegean islands, which is situated on the eastern fringes of the Greek-speaking world.

EB: And I really love this quote from William Barnstone, who is one of Sappho’s translators. I feel like it really just sets the scene of what Lesbos was like, so I’m gonna read it for you. Can I read it for you, Leesa?

LC: Oh my god, please do.

EB: Alright, here we go a dramatic reading: “An island of grains, grapes, redolent orchards, and salt flats, spotted with five coastal cities that each commanded its harbor from a rocky Acropolis. Greece is a country of light and sea rock, its source of beauty in too little farmland, and shows off its precious valleys and plains of fertile land, along with its many hills and mountains, which are often terraced for wheat and olive trees up to their steep tops. Lesbos was unusual in having largely tillable terrain, along with its salt flats, dry hills, then-wooded, and a 3000-foot mountain called Olympus, after the traditional abode of the gods in Thessaly. It was known in ancient times for its grains, fruit trees, and above all, the large valleys of live groves. In 2,600 years, the island has probably changed very little in its village architecture and landscape.”

LC: Wow. I just feel like I’m listening to a soothing, like, meditation. Like, that could be my, just laying down and you’re painting a real picture for me of what Lesbos was like.

EB: Or a tourism commercial for Lesbos, I want to go.

LC: Oh my goodness.

EB: I want to take a trip.

LC: They need more lesbians in Lesbos, I think.

EB: Yes. But let’s talk about Lesbos then.

LC: Yes, so the Aeolic Greeks settled in Lesbos in 11th century BC, and Sappho lived there five generations after Homer. So as the kind of picture you painted said, it had a thriving religious, economic, and artistic culture. It was well connected to the rest of the Mediterranean, and super famous for poetic tradition. So it considered itself the very foundation of Greek song, so I guess it’s sort of, like, the Tennessee of Ancient Greece.

EB: The Nashville of Ancient Greece. I love it. Yes, I really love that, and Sappho was just the best poet and singer in ancient Nashville.

LC: She was Taylor Swift, obviously.

EB: I love that so much. Well, I love that too, because there’s this quote from Barnard that says: “Sappho’s world seemed as modern to her as ours does to us, and just about as troubled.”

LC: And, boy, is ours trouble.

EB: Yes. But she lived during a period of great change when Greek cities including Lesbos were trying to colonize non-Greek areas.

LC: Mhm.

EB: We talked about that a little bit with the poem, right, the war and the horses in the military. There was also an expansion of trading activity at this time and a time of internal political changes, when the supremacy of the established aristocracy was being challenged throughout the Greek world. Sounds familiar, huh?

LC: Absolutely. Absolutely.

EB: Yes.

LC: All it is is–okay, so I’m just going to bring Battlestar Galactica into this for a minute. All of this has happened before, all of it will happen again. Seriously.

EB: Yep. It’s just a side constant cycle of humans. In her specific city, she lived in Mytilene, was in a turbulent time during Sappho’s lifetime. There was power struggle between different aristocratic families, rapid succession of tyrants, lots of plotting and counter-plotting. And that’s from Williamson.

LC: Also like, there was some really cool things happening. So there was the invention of coin money, a study of precise moments in personal life, and lyric poets like Sappho, and there was the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet to Greece, which is really cool.

EB: So Alyse and I were absolutely floored to talk with Diane Rayor. She’s an incredible woman, and so passionate about Sappho, which is amazing. And we spoke to Diane about Sappho, and we really could have talked to her all day. If you’re not familiar with Diane, she’s one of the leading translators of Sappho’s work, and a professor in the Classics department at the Grand Valley State University in Michigan. Here’s what she said about Mytilene.

Diane Rayor: They talk about Mytilene as kind of the main big city, as far as big cities were then, right? We don’t know for sure whether Sappho was born there or not, but her poems and Alcaeus’s talk about Mytilene as sort of the happening spot.

LC: So while Lesbos was in Ancient Greece, there were some differences between Lesbos and the mainland. Marguerite had some interesting things to say about this.

MJ: Lesbos, you know, it’s a fascinating place, because while it’s regarded as a Greek island, Lesbos is, in fact, what we would call Asian Greek. So, it’s quite close to Turkey, and in fact, it has that mixture of the Mediterranean world with the culture speaking as an ancient Greek of Asia Minor, so what we would call now the Middle East. So it has a combination of Mediterranean and Eastern tradition. And I think Sappho is a product of that. It seems to have been, and this may have been because of the proximity to Turkey and the fact that it was an island, so it had a sense of geographical autonomy and uniqueness in terms of the mix of cultures. It had an autonomy that enabled this, what seems to be quite a unique culture to have flourished in the Archaic Age, where women were respected and treated far better than what we can ascertain was the case in other parts of Greece, particularly mainland Greece. Now Sappho came from an aristocratic family. She was educated, she knew Homer. She knew poetry that existed and was popular before she began to compose her own. She was trained in musical instruments and public competition. So she had an excellent education. She was educated, which, after the Archaic Age, really becomes a novelty in Greece, for women. It was very rare Greek women were educated, and she has this unique life. It seems to be an island where women were treated with far more respect, and it was a far more egalitarian culture at the time she was writing. So it was the perfect environment to have produced a genius like Sappho. I think she would have been a bit of a snob. I think that she’s quite dismissive of some women in her poetry and she’s quite snobbish about these women. So she has this aristocratic value system inscribed on her outlook on the world. But women seem to have moved freely and to have enjoyed the company of other women. They don’t seem to have been under the watchful eye of their guardians, their male guardians, as much as happens in the mainland and accentuates, as I said, the Greek women become less free as the centuries progress, not the other way around. We also know that Mytilene, the capital city of Lesbos, was a place where there was civil unrest, and we know that at some point, there had been such political unrest that Sappho and her family seemed to have gone into exile. And while we think, at times, she’s an erotic poet predominantly, we also can read some of her fragments as indirectly, indicating a wide knowledge of the internal civil strife and political to-and-froing on the island, and that she was more politically aware than people give her credit for. So she was part of the faction fight, her family was involved in factional politics. She did spend an extended time away from Mytilene, away from Lesbos. So, tumultuous times as well.

DR: From what we see in Sappho’s poetry, the emphasis is not on marrying the girls off young to make sure that there’s legitimate heirs, which is what you get in 5th century Athens. And so, you have a different agenda, and it seems like there’s a great deal more freedom. Now, there’s so much that I just don’t know–partly, I don’t know, partly, we, as scholars, don’t know about life then in Ancient Greece in general, not necessarily in warrior Sparta. In general, poetry, music was super important. It was a part of young men’s lives, they would be expected to learn that. Certainly on the Island of Lesbos, you get the sense that there are people, not just Sappho, other women, certainly, that were playing the lyre, being able to perform. You’d be in choruses, where you would be expected to be able to sing and dance. So singing, dancing, playing music was part of community life from the wee little ones all the way through. And so that’s for men and women. Picture an oral culture where this is how things are remembered and communicated, in general, is not through writing, but through poetry.

LC: We’re going to take a quick break. We’ll be back in a minute.

LC: So this might be a good time to bring our resident poet back to clarify a few things for us. Alyse, tell us more about women’s lives in Ancient Greece, and how Sappho’s life was so different.

AK: Well, based on the little information we have from historical sources, we know that Ancient Greece was a pretty sex-segregated and an age-segregated place. So unmarried young women would hang out together a lot because women were excluded from the world of men and war and public life.

LC: Sounds terrible.

EB: Yeah, I’m like also, when you say “hung out,” what do we mean by that?

AK: Totally.

LC: Just gals being pals.

AK: Women’s lives were pretty severely restricted. They couldn’t be educated or move freely or conduct business. I mean, on the Island of Lesbos, they actually regarded women more highly, and women on the Island of Lesbos, where Sappho was, had more freedom of movement during Sappho’s time than in other parts of Greece, and may have been less sexually inhibited. Generally speaking, in Ancient Greece, an aristocratic woman’s job was to get married, and have warrior sons who would inherit the family name and wealth and glory. And so marriage contracts were very transactional between men, and women were sort of valued like property and could create alliances between families. And it meant that marriage was a big deal and preparation for marriage was a big deal. So when women were hanging out together–young, unmarried women–they were kind of hanging out together like preparing for marriage, and they would sing their songs together and they would be together in close community, and it’s–one of the theories is that Sappho would have run a school for young women and other theories that Sappho might have played for some of the symposia some of the like secret hang-out gatherings of young women at the time. But that’s–yeah, that’s where you see Sappho becoming a poet of women and for women, in addition to, for her broader community at religious festivals and things like that.

EB: So since in Ancient Greece, the goal was to get married–we know Sappho writes a lot about women–but was she married? Did she have a husband? Was the purpose of Sappho to have a son or a daughter?

AK: Well, we don’t really know because the only biographical information we have about Sappho is from her own poems, and then from historical sources written about her in the hundreds and thousands of years after her death, which distort things and created a character out of her for comedies, and caricatured things and changed things up. But we know from her poems–her poems do mention a daughter named Cleis, which is thought to be the same name as her mother. And so there’s no mention of a husband in any of her poems, but there is mention of a daughter. And so one would think that being an aristocratic woman, she might have had a husband. Of course, that doesn’t mean she also wasn’t hanging out with and having sex with women and dating women and she has mentioned of her girlfriends in many of her poems. I guess the thing to remember about Sappho is just that she was both a public poet doing these kinds of singing at festivals with choirs of girls, dancing and singing at festivals for Artemis or Aphrodite, religious festivals, and weddings, right, she sang a lot of weddings. But also there’s a thought that she was performing in more intimate settings, in more informal occasions, like the symposia, which was this kind of sex-segregated drinking party where you, if you’re an aristocratic Greek person, reaffirmed your sense of belonging in your community, in your group and your culture. So Sappho was just both this very private poet and this very public poet, which is really interesting, I think.

EB: So let’s talk a little bit about the role of music at these symposiums, these absolute ragers, in Ancient Greece.

AK: The thing that’s really important to remember is that during Sappho’s lifetime, writing and literacy were in very limited use. And so all of cultural life in Ancient Greek, the cultures, values, history, even its information about nature and the arts, was encoded in an oral tradition, and transmitted to future generations via oral recitation and song. And so, music in Ancient Greece is everything. Music is an enormous part of life in Ancient Greece, at formal occasions, festivals, religious ceremonies, but also informal ones when they were hanging out together playing their drinking games, being together in the symposia. So music is very communal, and poetry in Ancient Greece sort of played the role of public communication, almost a magic-like ritual. People, upperclass people in Sappho’s time, just knew music really well and knew lots of songs. And there just isn’t any kind of distinction between the sacred and the secular in Ancient Greece the way we have today. Human activity in Ancient Greece had a sacred dimension, and that was encoded in music and that was experienced in music. That’s why you might have, in a Sappho sexy love poem like Fragment 1, “Ode to Aphrodite,” this religious dimension at the same time. So there’s sexiness and eroticism and religion and spirituality all at the same time. And that’s music in Ancient Greece.

EB: “Take Me to Church,” basically.

AK: Totally, yeah.

EB: I love–well, I love that too, because I don’t think that’s that much different from our own time. Like if you think about kids in kindergarten, I will sing in kindergartens. We are learning through music. They can’t read, or some of them can read. But most of the time they can’t read. They’re processing all of this orally, AU through their ears.

LC: I also still count the alphabet every time I need to get to like–

EB: Exactly. A, B, C, D, right? Everyone–that A, B, C, D, E, F, G–

LC: I know, every time. Who doesn’t do that?

EB: –that is an example of oral tradition of education. It’s really not that different.

AK: When you add up everything that we know about women’s roles in Ancient Greece, and then the role that Sappho played with music in her community, it’s just incredible that she became the kind of star that she was as a musician in Ancient Greece. And actually, we talked to Marguerite Johnson about that, and she had a lot of really interesting things to say about Sappho’s poetry and how it would have been performed in her time.

MJ: Because I stress to my students that Sappho’s poetry was not meant to be read in a Penguin translation or on a computer screen. It was meant to be heard. It was sung and it was accompanied by instruments. And so the idea of reading it off the page quietly is just so antithetical to the concept of poetry to the Ancient Greeks. So the fact that stuff is out there you can listen to is really authentic, and it’s in keeping with the intentions behind the compositions.

CM: I also want to say that we have no idea what her music sounded like. We know that she played the Varvatos lyre, tortoiseshell lyre with seven strings, and that she played it, sang in modes. But when you think about if you saw a picture of a guitarist, and then knew that that guitarist played in a minor key, I mean, that could be jazz or pop or Irish music or Brazilian music, you know, it’s just–at the same time we think that hearing her word sung as a song, your brain processes song different than it processes open poetry.

EB: So I feel like now is a good time to talk about one of the gayest things that Sappho did.

LC: Okay, which is?

EB: She invented the plectrum, which, for those of you who don’t know, is what you use to strum a guitar if your nails are short, for reasons.

LC: Oh, yes, I don’t know what any of those reasons would be.

EB: I don’t know why you need to keep your nails short.

LC: No reason.

EB: No reason. But it’s basically the modern-day equivalent of a pick that you’d use to play a guitar.

LC: That’s wild. I didn’t know that Sappho could get gayer, but here we are.

EB: Here we are.

LC: But actually, if Sappho was walking down the street today, she would find us pretty barbaric, right?

EB: Why would you say we’re barbarians to Sappho?

LC: In Ancient Greece, everybody had numerous physical and intellectual skills of a really high order and high polish, like they couldn’t sing poetry off the top of their heads. And we live in this really specialized environment now. And like I say this as a generalist, so I don’t know, maybe Sappho would be down with me.

EB: I’m sure Sappho would be down with you.

LC: I just really feel like I’m born in the wrong time, you know? This kind of specialized world is really not what they were used to. It was sort of more of what the slaves did. So they were fit for only a few simple chores. They were badly educated in most areas, and then just really good at one thing, which is sort of what we glorify now, which is kind of wild.

EB: That’s so interesting. It’s like the idea of the Renaissance man, like that was in the Renaissance fever, it was like, you’re skilled at so many different things. But yeah, we’re very, very far from that now. Be really, really amazing at just one thing, and that’s your whole purpose in life. But that’s very interesting.

LC: Yeah, it’s not what I’m about. They were also really–they had a better relationship than we do with nature. Because they believe that having a good relationship with nature somehow meant they were kindred of the gods.

EB: 

Yeah, there’s also this sense of, everything has its spirituality, right? There’s the god of war. There’s the god of love. There’s the god of nature, like there’s the god of wine, right?

LC: Mm.

EB: Everything that was involved in their life had some sort of divine purpose.

LC: I mean, I don’t know about you, but I pray to the god of wine.

EB: Yes, I mean–that still exists now. But we have to remember, for them, the carnal, the physical, the earthly, and the spiritual–they work together.

LC: Yeah.

EB: So, not in a lot of Western traditions where the spiritual is detached from the bodily worlds. It all came together.

LC: Absolutely. But the one thing that was different from our society in terms of education is that the people in the Isle of Lesbos weren’t a particularly literate society. And I think Diane’s gonna expand on that a little bit more in the next quote.

Diane Rayor: When you talk about Homer, then things weren’t written down, and they would have had to been remembered and recited and all that. I think there’s pretty good agreement that Sappho would have written her poetry down, her songs down, or certainly that somebody who is listening to the performance would have written them. But we don’t have anything that survives from her time. However, because she was so popular, you know, there would have been people in her audience, I mean, you know, I’m kind of making this up, but not totally, okay? There would have been people in her audience who would perform that for somebody else, right? They would learn it, or maybe she would have written it down and given it to them, but they would have performed it because we know that centuries after, people were still asking for Sappho’s songs to be performed. That’s why I was joking about cover songs, right? Because respectable poet musicians would need to be able to perform a Sappho when asked.

LC: So yeah, next time you’re out just, like, request a Sappho and see what happens.

EB: Yes. Do you play any Sappho? When next time you’re in an Uber, they’re like, “What do you want to listen to?” “Um, do you have any Sappho on Spotify? Thank you.” Sappho’s work is so influential today, which we’ll cover more in later episodes. But for now, here’s a small taste of what’s to come on Sweetbitter.

Marguerite Johnson: Well, you know, the Greeks are famous, or infamous, for inventing homosexuality, which is what they’re accused of, or praised for, depending on what value system you have.

Diane Rayor: Sexuality is different in the ancient world. Well, we certainly can call the poetry queer. Whether Sappho herself is lesbian, you know, that’s a modern use of it. Some people want to say, well, this is a persona. It’s not talking about real people in her life. She was performing for her people, but when she was composing and performing, all of it was for the people she knew. So putting them in her poetry, and her girlfriends and everybody else, it makes sense, right? So although some people want to say, right, the brother poem isn’t really talking about her brother, I don’t know why we need to go there.

Marguerite Johnson: And he turned to me, you know, which is probably every male’s dream, in relation to female-attracted females. You know, you just haven’t met the right man.

LC: Thanks for listening to Sweetbitter. Our next episode will be released on the 29th of October. As always, stick around until the end of the podcast to hear our original song for Fragment 16, written and performed by us.

EB: If you enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe, rate, and review us. It really helps us to get to new listeners, or if you have the means, you can support us on Patreon. If you sign up before November 1st, you’ll get a free Sweetbitter tote bag. We’ll be releasing bonus content, including extra episodes and song downloads.

LC: You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at @sweetbitterpod or contact us on our website sweetbitterpodcast.com

EB: Sweetbitter is an independent production by me, Ellie Brigida, Alyse Knorr, and Leesa Charlotte. Our artwork is by Istela Illustrated. Music is by Lyre ‘n’ Rhapsody. Special thanks to Chris Mason and Old Songs, Marguerite Johnson, and Diane Rayor for sharing their love of Sappho with us.

LC: You can follow Marguerite on Twitter at @mmj722. Diane has revised her book, “Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works.” Look out for it in paperback and audiobook in early 2021.

EB: And now, our original song for Fragment 16.