Sappho.Translated by Stanley Lombardo Poems and fragments

In Antiquity decent women were supposed to work in the kitchen and to raise their children, nothing more, but there were exceptions. More or less 150 years after Homer's Iliad, Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, west off the coast of what is Turkey today.. (She went in exile for a short period due to political upheavel).

Sappho was already famous in Antiquity. Plato called her the tenth Muze and someone said her poetry was "as refreshing as a morning breeze".

Some of the best poems of Sappho are those that describe her loneliness.

(#62)

"But if you are my friend,

Go to a younger woman's bed,

For I will not endure an affair

In which I am older than the man."

(#73)

"The moon has set,

And the Pleiades

Midnight

The has gone by

I sleep alone."