Sappho

c. 630–570 BCE

Sappho of Mytilene on Lesbos was counted by the ancients the tenth Muse. Her nine books of songs in the Aeolic dialect — hymns, wedding-songs, and poems of love and parting addressed to the women of her circle — were lost in late antiquity; one complete poem, the hymn to Aphrodite, and some two hundred fragments survive in quotations and on papyrus.