The Complete Poems

by Sappho

To the church mind, Sappho represented the culmination of moral laxity, and her work was treated with extreme disapproval. About 380 C.E., Saint Gregory of Nazianzos, bishop of Constantinople, ordered the burning of Sappho’s writings wherever found. She had already been violently attacked as early as 180 C.E. by the Assyrian ascetic Tatian: “Sappho was a whorish woman, love-crazy, who sang about her own licentiousness.”8 Then in 391 a mob of Christian zealots partially destroyed Ptolemy Soter’s classical library in Alexandria. The often repeated story of the final destruction of this famous library by the Arab general ‘Amr ibn al-‘Āṣ and Caliph ‘Umar I is now rejected by historians. Again we hear that in 1073 Sappho’s writings were publicly burned in Rome and Constantinople by order of Pope Gregory VII. Until late in the eleventh century, however, quotations from Sappho still appeared in the works of grammarians, suggesting that copies of her poems were still preserved. We will never know how many poems by Sappho were destroyed in April 1204 during the terrible pillage of Constantinople by the Venetian knights of the Fourth Crusade, or by the Ottoman Turks at the fall of Byzantium in 1453.