Sappho

Sappho has been constructed as many things: proto-feminist, lesbian icon and even - by the Victorians - chaste headmistress of a girls'' finishing school. Yet ironically, as Page DuBois shows, the historical poet herself remains elusive. We know that Sappho''s contemporary Alcaeus described her as ''violet, pure, honey-smiling Sappho''; and that the rhetorician and philosopher Maximus of Tyre saw ...