She is a woman, but also an aristocrat; a Greek, but one turned toward Asia; a poet who writes as a philosopher before philosophy; a writer who speaks of sexual

To know all we know about Sappho is to know little. Her poetry, dating from the seventh century B.C.E., comes to us in fragments, her biography as speculation.

While sifting through trash in her flooded New Orleans home, Ruth Salvaggio discovered an old volume of Sappho's poetry stained with muck and mold. In her effor

Sappho has been constructed as many things: proto-feminist, lesbian icon and even - by the Victorians - chaste headmistress of a girls' finishing school. Yet ir