She composed songs for choral and solo performance on a wide range of themes but is best known for amatory songs focusing on adolescent females. A native of the island of Lesbos, she resided in its largest city, Mytilene. Little of certainty is known about her life. Sappho was born sometime between 630 and 617 BCE and died around 570. This is a new translation of her surviving poetry. The surviving texts consist of a lamentably small and fragmented body of lyric poetry - among them poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation and remembrance - that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato called the tenth Muse. Little remains today of her writings, which are said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some 500 years after her death. More or less 150 years after Homer's Iliad, Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, west off the coast of what is present Turkey.
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