What If Sappho's Complete Works Survived?

The Actual History

Sappho of Lesbos, who lived around 630-570 BCE, stands as one of the most renowned yet enigmatic figures in literary history. Ancient critics placed her among the greatest lyric poets, with Plato famously calling her the "Tenth Muse." Her work was collected into nine books in the Alexandrian Library, comprising approximately 10,000 lines of poetry. Yet today, only a tiny fraction of her output survives—one complete poem ("Ode to Aphrodite"), another nearly complete work ("Fragment 31"), and roughly 650 fragments, many consisting of just a few words or a single line.

This devastating loss occurred through a complex series of historical circumstances:

Material Fragility: Sappho's works were originally preserved on papyrus scrolls, a medium vulnerable to decay, especially in the humid climate of the Mediterranean.
Selective Copying: As the transition from scrolls to codices (book form) occurred in late antiquity, decisions about which classical works to preserve were made by copyists with particular cultural, religious, and literary priorities. Sappho's poetry, with its focus on personal emotions and sometimes homoerotic themes, was often not prioritized.
Byzantine Selection: Byzantine scholars and educators further narrowed the classical canon, generally favoring works that aligned with Christian values or offered clear moral instruction. Much of Sappho's poetry, with its celebrations of desire and beauty, did not fit these criteria.
Religious Censorship: Some early Christian authorities specifically condemned Sappho's work for its homoerotic content. The 11th-century Pope Gregory VII reportedly ordered her works burned.
Fourth Crusade: The sack of Constantinople in 1204 CE during the Fourth Crusade led to the destruction of many Byzantine libraries and their classical manuscripts, potentially including surviving copies of Sappho's work.

Despite these losses, Sappho's cultural impact has been enormous. Her poetry pioneered the expression of personal emotion and subjective experience in Western literature. Her frank explorations of desire—particularly female desire—broke new ground. Her technical innovations, including the Sapphic stanza, influenced poetic form for millennia. Even in fragments, her vivid imagery and emotional intensity have inspired countless poets, from ancient Rome to the modern day.

Sappho's identity has also been continuously reinterpreted. Her apparent romantic interest in women led to the terms "lesbian" and "sapphic" entering modern vocabulary. Yet historical understanding of her sexuality has been complicated by changing conceptions of sexual identity across cultures and time periods. Throughout history, scholars, moralists, and artists have alternately celebrated, condemned, censored, or reinterpreted Sappho according to their own cultural values regarding gender, sexuality, and literary merit.

The loss of most of Sappho's work represents one of the most significant gaps in Western literary heritage. The fragments that remain tantalize with their brilliance, suggesting the magnitude of what has been lost. Occasional discoveries, like the "Brothers Poem" found on papyrus in 2014, offer hope that more of her work might someday be recovered, while simultaneously underscoring how much remains missing.

This historical context raises an intriguing counterfactual question: What if Sappho's complete works had survived? How might Western literature, attitudes toward female authorship, and understanding of sexuality have developed differently if her full poetic corpus had been preserved through the ages?

The Point of Divergence

What if Sappho's complete works had survived? In this alternate timeline, let's imagine that around 500-550 CE, during the reign of Emperor Justinian I, a different set of decisions regarding classical preservation takes place.

Perhaps in this scenario, a wealthy and influential Byzantine noblewoman—let's call her Theodora Philologos (not to be confused with the empress)—establishes a private library dedicated to preserving works by and about women from the classical world. A scholar herself with access to imperial resources, Theodora commissions multiple complete copies of Sappho's nine books of poetry from older manuscripts still extant in Constantinople and Alexandria.

These carefully produced codices include scholarly commentaries that contextualize Sappho's work within Greek literary tradition, emphasizing her technical brilliance, historical importance, and the religious elements in her poetry (such as her hymns to Aphrodite and other deities). This framing helps present Sappho as a cultural treasure worth preserving despite aspects of her work that might otherwise have troubled Byzantine Christian sensibilities.

When Theodora dies around 560 CE, she bequeaths her library to a convent known for its scriptoria and educational mission. The nuns, recognizing the literary and historical value of the collection, continue to preserve and selectively copy these works, including Sappho's complete poetry. While access to these texts is limited, their continuous presence in this institutional setting ensures their survival through the tumultuous centuries that follow.

During the 9th-century Byzantine revival of classical learning under the Macedonian dynasty, Sappho's complete works—now rare but intact—are rediscovered by court scholars. Recognized for their literary merit, new copies are made for the imperial library. When Greek scholars flee Constantinople before and after its fall to the Ottomans in 1453, they bring these manuscripts to Italy, where they cause a sensation among Renaissance humanists.

The first printed edition of Sappho's complete works appears in Venice around 1495, making her full corpus widely available to European readers for the first time. While some of her more explicit poems cause controversy, Renaissance appreciation for classical learning ensures that her works—like those of Catullus and Ovid, which contain similarly provocative material—become part of the Western literary canon.

This seemingly modest change—the preservation of one poet's complete works—creates ripples that significantly alter the development of Western literature, attitudes toward female authorship, and cultural understanding of gender and sexuality over the centuries that follow.

Immediate Aftermath

Byzantine Literary Culture

The immediate impact of Sappho's preserved works would have been felt in Byzantine intellectual circles:

Female Literary Models: The presence of Sappho's complete works would have provided Byzantine women with a female literary model of unquestioned excellence, potentially inspiring more women to write poetry despite social constraints.
Poetic Influence: Byzantine poets might have incorporated Sapphic forms, themes, and techniques into their own work, potentially creating a more direct line of influence from ancient Greek lyric to medieval Greek poetry.
Commentary Tradition: Byzantine scholars would have produced commentaries on Sappho's work, analyzing her language, imagery, and cultural context, potentially developing more nuanced approaches to female-authored texts.
Educational Use: Selections from Sappho might have been included in Byzantine educational curricula alongside male poets, providing students with a more diverse range of classical models.

Renaissance Reception

When Sappho's complete works reached Renaissance Italy, they would have had significant impact:

Humanist Enthusiasm: Renaissance humanists would have celebrated the recovery of a complete corpus from a poet known to have been highly esteemed in antiquity, potentially placing Sappho more centrally in the classical canon they were reconstructing.
Female Humanists: Women humanists like Laura Cereta, Cassandra Fedele, and Isotta Nogarola might have found in Sappho a powerful precedent for female intellectual and creative expression, potentially strengthening their position in Renaissance literary culture.
Poetic Imitation: Renaissance poets, who frequently imitated classical models, would have had access to Sappho's complete range of forms, themes, and techniques, potentially incorporating these into their own poetry and creating a stronger Sapphic influence in Renaissance verse.
Translation Projects: Sappho's works would have been translated into Latin and vernacular languages, making her poetry accessible to readers without Greek and further extending her influence.

Literary Development

The content and themes of Sappho's complete works would have influenced literary evolution:

Lyric Tradition: With access to Sappho's full range of lyric forms and techniques, the development of lyric poetry in European languages might have followed different patterns, potentially incorporating more of her distinctive approaches to rhythm, imagery, and emotional expression.
Love Poetry: Sappho's nuanced explorations of desire, longing, jealousy, and admiration would have provided poets with sophisticated models for expressing these emotions, potentially creating more complex traditions of love poetry.
Female Subjectivity: Sappho's expression of experiences from a female perspective would have provided a counterbalance to the predominantly male viewpoints in classical literature, potentially creating more space for female subjectivity in Western literary traditions.
Occasional Poetry: Sappho's poems for weddings, religious festivals, and other occasions would have offered models for occasional poetry, potentially influencing how poets approached these conventional subjects.

Cultural Attitudes

Perceptions of gender and sexuality might have been subtly influenced:

Female Creativity: The undeniable excellence of Sappho's complete works might have made it harder to dismiss women's creative potential, potentially moderating some historical arguments about women's intellectual and artistic limitations.
Homoeroticism: Sappho's frank expressions of desire for women would have provided a classical precedent for female homoeroticism, potentially creating more nuanced historical discussions of same-sex attraction.
Women's Communities: Sappho's descriptions of female communities and relationships might have provided historical models for women's educational and social organizations, potentially influencing how such communities were conceptualized.
Religious Expression: Sappho's religious poetry, including hymns to goddesses, might have provided models for female religious expression, potentially influencing traditions of women's devotional writing.

Long-term Impact

Literary Canon Formation

Over centuries, the presence of Sappho's complete works would have influenced how the Western literary canon developed:

Female Inclusion: With Sappho firmly established as a canonical poet of the first rank, it might have been more difficult to exclude women from literary canons on the basis of gender alone, potentially leading to greater recognition of female authors throughout literary history.
Lyric Prominence: The lyric genre, with its emphasis on personal emotion and subjective experience, might have gained greater prominence earlier in Western literary history, potentially accelerating the development of poetic forms focused on individual expression.
Critical Approaches: Literary critics would have developed more sophisticated tools for analyzing female-authored texts and expressions of female desire, potentially creating more nuanced critical traditions around these topics.
Anthology Representation: Literary anthologies and educational curricula might have included more works by women earlier in their development, potentially creating a more gender-balanced approach to literary education.

Poetic Traditions

The development of poetry across European languages would have been influenced:

Formal Innovation: Sappho's varied metrical forms, including but not limited to the Sapphic stanza, would have provided poets with a wider range of classical models, potentially encouraging greater formal experimentation.
Emotional Expression: Sappho's techniques for conveying intense emotion through concrete imagery and physical symptoms might have more strongly influenced how poets approached emotional expression, potentially creating richer traditions of embodied emotional writing.
Nature Imagery: Sappho's distinctive use of natural imagery to evoke emotional states might have more profoundly influenced European poetic traditions, potentially creating different conventions for nature poetry.
Fragmentary Aesthetics: Ironically, without the actual fragmentation of Sappho's work, the aesthetic of the poetic fragment that became important in modernist poetry might have developed differently, potentially following other models or emerging later.

Gender and Sexuality Discourse

Cultural understanding of gender and sexuality might have evolved differently:

Female Desire: Sappho's frank expressions of desire from a female perspective might have provided a continuous counterpoint to male-authored representations of female sexuality, potentially creating more nuanced cultural discussions of women's desires.
Same-Sex Attraction: The presence of Sappho's complete works might have ensured that female homoeroticism remained a recognized part of Western cultural heritage, potentially moderating some historical periods' silence on this topic.
Classical Precedent: When 19th-century sexologists began developing modern concepts of sexual identity, they might have had a richer classical source in Sappho's complete works, potentially creating more nuanced early formulations of lesbian identity.
Feminist Recovery: The 20th-century feminist project of recovering women's writing would have taken a different form with Sappho's works already firmly in the canon, perhaps focusing more on other overlooked female authors or on reinterpreting rather than simply recovering Sappho.

Educational Practices

How literature was taught would have been affected:

Women in Curriculum: With Sappho established as an essential classical poet, educational curricula might have included female authors more consistently throughout history, potentially creating different expectations about the gender balance of literary study.
Greek Language Study: The desire to read Sappho in the original might have provided additional motivation for Greek language study, particularly among women, potentially increasing female participation in classical education.
Comparative Approaches: Teachers might have developed more comparative approaches pairing Sappho with male poets like Catullus and Horace who were influenced by her work, potentially creating more integrated understandings of poetic tradition.
Performance Traditions: Sappho's works, originally composed for musical performance, might have encouraged more attention to the performative aspects of lyric poetry, potentially creating stronger traditions of poetry as oral/aural experience rather than purely textual artifact.

Artistic Inspiration

Visual and performing arts would have drawn different inspiration:

Visual Representations: Artists would have had Sappho's complete works as inspiration for visual representations, potentially creating a richer iconography of Sappho and the themes from her poetry throughout art history.
Theatrical Adaptations: Sappho's life and work might have inspired dramatic treatments earlier and more frequently, potentially creating a tradition of plays, operas, or other performances centered on her poetry and biography.
Musical Settings: Composers would have had Sappho's complete poetic corpus to set to music, potentially creating a rich tradition of Sapphic musical settings from the Renaissance onward.
Film and Media: In the modern era, filmmakers and other media creators would have had access to Sappho's complete works as source material, potentially leading to more and different representations of Sappho and her themes in contemporary media.

Scholarly Traditions

Academic approaches to literature would have developed differently:

Philological Methods: Scholars would have applied philological methods to Sappho's complete works rather than focusing on reconstructing fragments, potentially developing different textual analysis techniques.
Biographical Approaches: With more autobiographical content potentially available in her complete works, scholarly approaches to Sappho's biography might have developed differently, perhaps with less speculation and more textual evidence.
Queer Studies: When queer theory emerged in the late 20th century, scholars would have had Sappho's complete works as a major classical reference point, potentially creating different theoretical approaches to pre-modern sexuality.
Reception Studies: The study of how Sappho was received throughout history would have tracked different patterns of influence, censorship, and reinterpretation, potentially revealing different cultural attitudes toward female authorship and same-sex desire.

Modern Literary Movements

More recent literary developments might have taken different forms:

Romantic Movement: Romantic poets' emphasis on emotional intensity and personal expression might have drawn more explicitly on Sapphic models, potentially creating stronger connections between Romanticism and classical lyric traditions.
Modernist Poetry: Modernist poets like H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), who historically claimed Sappho as an important influence even with only fragments available, might have developed different poetic approaches with access to her complete works.
Feminist Literature: Feminist writers of the 20th century might have engaged differently with Sappho as a predecessor, perhaps focusing more on reinterpreting her established work rather than recovering and reclaiming her lost voice.
LGBTQ+ Literature: Writers exploring LGBTQ+ themes would have had a more complete classical reference point in Sappho's works, potentially creating different lineages and traditions of queer literature.

Expert Opinions

Dr. Elena Pappas, Professor of Ancient Greek Literature at the University of Athens, suggests:

"Had Sappho's complete works survived, the most profound impact would have been on our understanding of female literary traditions. The Western conception of literary history has been fundamentally shaped by the absence of female voices, creating a narrative where women writers appear as exceptions rather than participants in continuous traditions. With Sappho's complete corpus preserved as a foundational text, we might have developed a very different understanding of literary history—one that recognized parallel male and female traditions extending back to antiquity. This alternative literary history might have acknowledged different themes, forms, and approaches in women's writing without treating them as derivative of or secondary to men's work. The recovery projects of feminist literary criticism in the 20th century might have taken very different forms, perhaps focusing less on establishing the basic legitimacy of female authorship and more on analyzing the complex interrelationships between male and female literary traditions across centuries. Our entire conceptual framework for understanding literary development might be fundamentally different."

Dr. Marcus Antonius, Historian of Classical Reception at the University of Bologna, notes:

"The practical implications of Sappho's complete works surviving would have been enormous for how sexuality was understood in Western culture. Historically, female homoeroticism has been more easily erased or denied than male homosexuality—there were no female equivalents to the trials of Oscar Wilde or the visibility of male homosexual subcultures in many historical periods. With Sappho's complete works continuously available, this erasure would have been more difficult to maintain. Her poetry would have provided a constant classical reference point for female same-sex desire, making it harder to claim such feelings were merely a modern aberration. When sexologists like Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis began developing concepts of sexual identity in the 19th century, they might have had a richer classical source to draw upon, potentially developing more nuanced early formulations of lesbian identity. Religious and moral condemnations of female homosexuality would have had to contend with the inconvenient fact that one of the most celebrated classical poets wrote openly about such desires. The entire historical trajectory of how female same-sex attraction was conceptualized, discussed, and regulated might have followed a different path."

Professor Zhang Wei, Comparative Literature Scholar at Beijing University, observes:

"We must consider how Sappho's preserved works might have influenced cross-cultural literary exchange. When European powers established global colonial networks, they exported their literary canons and values. A Western canon that included Sappho's complete works as a foundational text might have created different patterns of influence and exchange with other literary traditions. For instance, classical Japanese women's literature, with works like Murasaki Shikibu's 'Tale of Genji' and Sei Shōnagon's 'Pillow Book,' might have been recognized earlier as parallels to Western women's writing rather than treated as exotic curiosities. Similarly, the female-authored love poetry traditions in various cultures might have been more readily acknowledged and studied comparatively. The global history of women's writing might have been understood more as parallel developments across cultures rather than as a primarily Western feminist recovery project later applied to other traditions. This might have created more balanced cross-cultural literary exchange and recognition, potentially moderating some of the Eurocentrism that has characterized comparative literature as a discipline."