Sappho's Gift: The Poet and Her Community

Now available in English for the first time, Franco Ferrari's important Sappho's Gift: The Poet and Her Community offers extraordinary new insight into the life and works of Sappho, one of the ancient world's most brilliant poets. One of the very few women writers whose works have survived from antiquity, Sappho occupies a unique spot in literature in part because of her gender but more importantly because of the light she sheds on her time and place - Archaic Greece.

Ferrari's study begins with the fragmentary evidence about the poems provided by papyri, and moves on to consider Sappho's iconography, the types of poems and their occasions, and her audience, meaning both her immediate circle of companions as well as competing groups and people in the larger community.