Fragments

A Novel of Sappho

von Daniel Gallantine

158 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Sappho is the eighth life in the Ancient Civilisations series. The greatest lyric poet of the ancient world. Almost everything she wrote is lost. What survives is enough.

She was called the Tenth Muse by Plato. She was the greatest lyric poet of antiquity by any critical measure the ancient world applied. She wrote poetry of such force and precision that fragments have survived two and a half thousand years of neglect, censorship, and the literal destruction of papyrus; yet those fragments are still read today because nothing written before or since sounds quite like them.

Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos in the seventh century BC, led or participated in a community of women devoted to poetry and music, and wrote about love, longing, jealousy, desire, and the gods with a directness and a sensory precision that her contemporaries could not match. She was revered in antiquity and obscured in later centuries, with her work largely lost, her life mythologised, and her name given new meanings by later ages. What remains is approximately one complete poem and fragments of several hundred more.

This powerfully imagined novel reconstructs the world she inhabited and the art she made: the specific culture of archaic Lesbos, the thiasos (the community of women in which the poetry was composed and performed), the specific quality of the love she wrote about, and the deliberate artistic intelligence behind poetry that her contemporaries heard as the voice of the Muses. It also engages honestly with what is not known: her life is as fragmentary as her poems, and it finds in that fragmentary quality something true about the experience of a female artist whose work has been partially lost to a tradition that did not always value what she made.

A novel about one of history's most remarkable artistic minds, and about what survives when most of the evidence is gone.

Fragments is the eighth novel in the Ancient Civilisations series.

• ISBN: 9798190303872
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 13.08.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Amazon Digital Services LLC - Kdp