Authors starting with S

- Sappho (612 BC - 570 BC) -

Ancestry: Greece

Sappho was an Ancient Greek poetess, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the canonical list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life. The bulk of her poetry, which was well-known and greatly admired throughout antiquity, has been lost, but her immense reputation has endured through surviving fragments. The adjectives deriving from her name and place of birth (sapphic and lesbian) came to be associated with the love of one woman for another.

The only contemporary source which refers to Sappho's life is her own body of poetry, and scholars are skeptical of biographical readings of it. Later biographical traditions, from which all more detailed accounts derive, have also been cast into doubt.