honorthegods:Sappho by Jean-Jacques Pradier, 1852, Musée d’OrsayPlato named her the Tenth Muse. She
honorthegods:Sappho by Jean-Jacques Pradier, 1852, Musée d’OrsayPlato named her the Tenth Muse. She was numbered among then Nine Lyric Poets, acclaimed and studied by scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria. Strabo said of her, “In the whole of history I can think of no other woman who can even remotely match her as a poet.”Lyric poetry was sung in performance, and Sappho is credited for the invention of a new type of lyre, the pectis. Her poems are mainly concerned with the lives of women, and speak of love, friendship, and domestic happiness. Stobaeus related that when Solon of Athens, a politician, lawyer, and poet himself, heard his nephew sing a song of Sappho’s, he liked it so much that he asked the boy to teach it to him. When someone asked him why, he said: “So that I may learn it, then die.”Evidence suggests that Sappho was honored with hero-cult, including sacrifices and feast days, in Mytilene on Lesbos, and at Syracuse, where a statue of her, carved by Silanion in the fourth century BC, was described by Cicero as “…so perfect, so gracious, so meticulously finished.”. -- source link