04 Sappho: The Tenth Muse w/ Andromache Karanika
Ancient Greece Declassified
Dr. Lantern Jack
4.8 • 587 Ratings
🗓️ 21 November 2016
⏱️ 46 minutes
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Summary
Sappho is one of the first song-writers we know of in history, partly because she was one of the first singers to write down her songs, in around 600BC. We still know about her because she was considered the best song-writer for about a thousand years after her death. While best known as a singer of female desire, her lyrics were so powerfully felt by men and women across the centuries that she became known as the tenth muse, joining the ranks of the 9 divine muses – the goddesses of art and inspiration. But after a millennium of celebrity status, Sappho's works were almost completely lost. Of the nine volumes of her songs that once graced the shelves of libraries at Alexandria and elsewhere, only a few pages survive today – most of it scattered bits and fragments of different songs.
Andromache Karanika, professor of classics at the University of California Irvine has written extensively on Sappho and early Greek poetry. She joins us to talk about the tenth muse, her life, and works, and why they were lost.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, thanks for tuning in to ancient Greece, Declassified. |
| 0:14.1 | Episode 4, Sappho, the 10th Muse. |
| 0:24.6 | You're about to hear some lyrics from a pop song. Some of you will recognize it right away because it's by a very famous singer-songwriter. |
| 0:29.6 | We're talking Beatles-level famous. |
| 0:32.6 | If you don't recognize it, see if you can at least guess from its style and theme what |
| 0:38.2 | decade it's from. |
| 0:39.8 | Here we go. |
| 0:42.0 | And that sweet laugh makes the heart in my chest jitter, for when I glance your way, |
| 0:47.3 | my words dissolve in thin air. |
| 0:50.4 | My tongue breaks into silence while a flame runs through my skin. A darkness fills my eyes. I hear a buzzing |
| 0:58.0 | from within. As you may or may not have guessed, the songwriter in question is Sappho. As for the |
| 1:06.3 | decade, she lived 260 decades ago. She's one of the first songwriters we know of in history, |
| 1:13.7 | partly because she was one of the first singers to write down her songs in around 600 BC. |
| 1:19.5 | We still know about her because she was considered the best songwriter for like a thousand years after her death. |
| 1:26.5 | Think of your favorite singer or band today. |
| 1:29.0 | Can you imagine them still being popular in the year 3016? |
| 1:33.9 | When's the last time you heard music that's hundreds of years old? |
| 1:38.6 | Later in this episode, you will hear a song that's almost three millennia old. |
| 1:45.0 | Now, in the previous episodes, we talked about how 500 years before Sappho, the civilizations |
| 1:50.7 | around the Mediterranean had suffered a collapse so cataclysmic that the knowledge of writing |
| 1:56.3 | was lost, in some places for hundreds of years. |
| 2:00.7 | During the ensuing dark ages in Greece, only a faint |
... |
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