Word: sappho
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Writers in ancient times were fascinated by Sardis. According to legend, the city was founded by sons of Heracles after the Trojan War. In the Iliad, Homer writes of the city "beneath the snowy Tmolus in the rich land of Hyde." The poet Sappho laments that she cannot obtain the colorful Lydian hat of Sardis for her daughter Cleis. The historian Herodoturs relates that when Cyrus the Great captured Sardis for the Persians after a siege in 547 B.C., he ordered that the vanquished Croesus be burned alive on a funeral pyre. (Croesus survived when Apollo intervened by sending...
...tenth muse," Critic Andrew Lang called the spirit of forgery. She may be busier and more inventive than any of her nine sisters. Under her sway, the 19th century Frenchman Denis Vrain-Lucas fabricated more than 27,000 documents purportedly from the hands of Archimedes, Sappho, Judas Iscariot, Caesar, Charlemagne and others, overplaying his own hand only when he forged a letter in which Pascal took credit for discovering the law of gravity, rather than Newton. Joseph Cosey, the most prolific of American forgers, displayed meticulous attention to detail while adding to the extant records of U.S. history from Aaron...
...century B.C. Sappho foretold...
...poem was chosen as the epigraph for this splendid, pioneering collection of verse by women. Sadly, Sappho's fears of oblivion have proved valid. For each poet represented in this anthology there are uncounted others whose work has been diminished, dispersed or utterly lost. In A.D. 1073, virtually all existing copies of Sappho's work were burned in Rome and Constantinople, because the church perceived her lesbian love lyrics as a threat to Christian morality. In 12th century China the parents of Chu Shu-chen incinerated the body of the poet's work after her death...
...theme of her poetry and her life. Though critics complained that her "message became more important to her than [its] expression," when her Collected Poems appeared in 1978 they also praised her devotion to the dissident muse named in her first book, Theory of Flight (1935), as "Not Sappho, Sacco./ Rebellion pioneered among our lives...