Seven Ancient Greek Lyric Poets on Love and War: From Sappho to Simonides

Key facts

• Sappho of Lesbos lived c. 630–570 BC, composed around 10,000 lines of poetry (most lost), and was called the Tenth Muse by Plato.
• Sappho's Fragment 31 survives largely because the Roman poet Catullus adapted it in Latin in the 1st century BC.
• Archilochus of Paros (c. 680–645 BC) admits in On His Shield (Fragment 5) to abandoning his shield; the poem was banned in Sparta.
• Mimnermus (c. 630–600 BC) wrote Fragment 1 on old age, prompting Solon to reply urging him to wish to live to 80.
• Anacreon (c. 573–495 BC) tutored Polycrates of Samos, later moved to Athens, and legend says he died choking on a grape seed.
• Tyrtaeus wrote Fragments 10 and 11 as Spartan marching propaganda during the Second Messenian War, when enslaved helots revolted.
• Theognis of Megara (c. 6th century BC) has roughly 1,400 surviving lines and addresses the young aristocrat Cyrnus in Fragment 415.
• Simonides (c. 556–468 BC) wrote Go Tell the Spartans for the dead at Thermopylae and was the first poet to demand payment; Pliny the Elder credits him with adding omega, psi, xi, and eta to the Greek alphabet.