Sappho
Ancient Greek poetWikipedia
311
MENTIONS
142
EPISODES
128
PODCASTS
Search complete. 311 mentions across 142 episodes found for "Sappho".
Sep 12, 2026
Pete QuiñonesGUEST
Hirschfeld, who was Jewish and gay, was a pioneer for rights and liberation in Berlin's thriving LGBT community.
Pete QuiñonesGUEST
He founded the Institute in 1919 after beginning his career as an activist in 1896 with his pamphlet Sappho and Socrates about a gay man who took his own life after he felt he was being coerced into straight marriage.
Pete QuiñonesGUEST
So that's pretty much what they were dealing with.
Pete QuiñonesGUEST
Jewish
Kate ListerHOST
And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review, and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts.
Kate ListerHOST
Coming up, we have got episodes on how to create the look of Marie Antoinette and one on Scotland's 16th century Sappho, all coming your way.
Kate ListerHOST
If you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt@historyhit.com.
Kate ListerHOST
This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
Martin GiesenNARRATOR
only the clearness and roundness and finish and tournure of the language as to the first i willingly submit to your better judgment for i am not worthy to form an opinion having only attended to the rhetorical manner and i was doubting whether this could have been defended even by lysias himself I thought, though I speak under correction, that he repeated himself two or three times, either from want of words or from want of pains, and also he appeared to me ostentatiously to exult in shewing how well he could say the same thing in two or three ways.
Martin GiesenNARRATOR
nonsense socrates what you call repetition was the especial merit of the speech for he omitted no topic of which the subject rightly allowed and i do not think that any one could have spoken better or more exhaustively there i cannot go along with you ancient sages men and women who have spoken and written of these things would rise up in judgment against me if out of complaisance i assented to you who are they and where did you hear any thing better than this i am sure that i must have heard but at this moment i do not remember from whom perhaps from Sappho the fair, or Anacreon the wise, or possibly from a prose-writer.
Martin GiesenNARRATOR
Why do I say so? Why, because I perceive that my bosom is full, and that I could make another speech as good as that of Lucius, and different.
Martin GiesenNARRATOR
now i am certain that this is not an invention of my own who am well aware that i know nothing and therefore i can only infer that i have been filled through the ears like a pitcher from the waters of another though i have actually forgotten in my stupidity who was my informant that is grand but never mind where you heard the discourse or from whom let that be a mystery not to be divulged even at my earnest desire only as you say promise to make another and better oration equal in length and entirely new on the same subject and i like the nine archons will promise to set up a golden image at delphi not only of myself but of you and as large as life you are a dear golden ass if you suppose me to mean that lysias has altogether missed the mark and that i can make a speech from which all his arguments are to be excluded the worst of authors will say something which is to the point who for example could speak on this thesis of yours without praising the discretion of the non-lover and blaming the indiscretion of the lover these are the commonplaces of the subject which must come in for what else is there to be said and must be allowed and excused the only merit is in the arrangement of them for there can be none in the invention but when you leave the common places then there may be some originality i admit that there is reason in what you say and i too will be reasonable and will allow you to start with the premise that the lover is more disordered in his wits than the non-lover if in what remains you make a longer and better speech than lysias and use other arguments then i say again that a statue you shall have of beaten gold and take your place by the colossal offerings of the cupselids at olympia in earnest is the lover because to tease him i lay a finger upon his love and so phaedrus you really imagine that i am going to improve upon the ingenuity of lysias there i have you as you had me and you must just speak as you best can do not let us exchange tout quoque as in a farce or compel me to say to you as you said to me i know socrates as well as i know myself and he was wanting to speak but he gave himself airs rather i would have you consider that from this place we stir not not until you have unbosomed yourself of the speech for here are we all alone and i am stronger remember
John DanversHOST
The patterns that arise from this motion are endlessly unique, yet bound together as a unified whole.
John DanversHOST
In the work of other poets and artists, for instance Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Cy Twombly, we encounter poetry and artworks as pictures of mind, layered histories woven out of diverse threads.
John DanversHOST
In their poetry and pictures, histories of observation and imagination are woven together and externalized in forms we can see and read.
John DanversHOST
as if past and future, history and imagination, are condensed into a vibrant present.
John DanversHOST
Another poet, the American Ezra Pound, suggests a similar thought when he says, All ages are contemporaneous in the mind.
John DanversHOST
I cry out.
John DanversHOST
My voices answer.
John DanversHOST
For Duncan, the making of poetry is a dialogue between voices, most of them in his own mind, but also voices of other writers and people he has met, both living and dead.
Mark HarringtonNARRATOR
Read no poetry of the softer sort.
Mark HarringtonNARRATOR
Never open your copy of Sappho or Tobolus.
Mark HarringtonNARRATOR
Who can read Gollus and stay cool of heart? My poems, too, have something of that art.
Mark HarringtonNARRATOR
this were impartiality itself for the physician to warn the patient from his publications were there not another class of patients who would find something of an advertisement here The treatment of your rival is the hardest part of the cure.
speaker_2NARRATOR
How far this desirable result can be obtained by the use of the volume now before us is perhaps open to question, but it must be admitted that its anonymous compiler has done his work very conscientiously, nor will we quarrel with him for the fact that he constantly repeats the same quotation twice over.
speaker_2NARRATOR
No doubt it was difficult to find in Mr. Austen's work three hundred and sixty-five different passages really worthy of insertion in an almanac, and besides our climate has degenerated of late there is no reason at all why a motto perfectly suitable for february should not be equally appropriate when august has set in with its usual severity for the misprints there is less excuse even the most uninteresting poet cannot survive bad editing prefixed to the calendar is an introductory note from the pen of mr william sharp written in that involved and affected style which is mr sharp's distinguishing characteristic and displaying that intimate acquaintance with Sappho's lost poems, which is the privilege only of those who are not acquainted with Greek literature.
speaker_2NARRATOR
As a criticism it is not of much value, but as an advertisement it is quite excellent.
speaker_2NARRATOR
Indeed, Mr.
Martin GiesenNARRATOR
Ancient sages, men and women, who have spoken and written of these things, would rise up in judgment against me, if out of complaisance I assented to you.
Martin GiesenNARRATOR
Who are they, and where did you hear any thing better than this? i am sure that i must have heard but at this moment i do not remember from whom perhaps from Sappho the fair, or Anacreon the wise, or possibly from a prose-writer.
Martin GiesenNARRATOR
Why do I say so? Why, because I perceive that my bosom is full, and that I could make another speech as good as that of Lucius, and different." now i am certain that this is not an invention of my own who am well aware that i know nothing and therefore i can only infer that i have been filled through the ears like a pitcher from the waters of another though i have actually forgotten in my stupidity who was my informant that is grand but never mind where you heard the discourse or from whom let that be a mystery not to be divulged even at my earnest desire only as you say promise to make another and better oration equal in length and entirely new on the same subject and i like the nine archons will promise to set up a golden image at delphi not only of myself but of you and as large as life you are a dear golden ass if you suppose me to mean that lysias has altogether missed the mark and that i can make a speech from which all his arguments are to be excluded the worst of authors will say something which is to the point who for example could speak on this thesis of yours without praising the discretion of the non-lover and blaming the indiscretion of the lover these are the common places of the subject which must come in for what else is there to be said and must be allowed and excused the only merit is in the arrangement of them for there can be none in the invention but when you leave the common places then there may be some originality i admit that there is reason in what you say and i too will be reasonable and will allow you to start with the premise that the lover is more disordered in his wits than the non-lover if in what remains you make a longer and better speech than lysias and use other arguments then i say again that a statue you shall have of beaten gold and take your place by the colossal offerings of the cupselids at olympia how profoundly in earnest is the lover because to tease him i lay a finger upon his love and so phaedrus you really imagine that i am going to improve upon the ingenuity of lysias there i have you as you had me and you must just speak as you best can do not let us exchange tout quoque as in a farce or compel me to say to you as you said to me i know socrates as well as i know myself and he was wanting to speak but he gave himself airs rather i would have you consider that from this place we stir not not until you have unbosomed yourself of the speech for here are we all alone and i am stronger remember
speaker_0ADVERTISER
Your night in just got legendary.
Jenna SeeryHOST
First of all, just the idea of how much is lost, how much we would, we just don't know.
Jenna SeeryHOST
Like, I mean y- you start talking about Sappho in one of your essays and just the idea of how, how little we know about certain aspects of her writing, her career.
Jenna SeeryHOST
There are so many works that are lost.
Jenna SeeryHOST
And the idea that you're working in languages that most people really have no fundamental understanding of, and that we still have some gaps I think in what we, we may ever know.
Emily WilsonGUEST
I can't...
Emily WilsonGUEST
Like, you know, I, I, I have no living interlocutors.
Emily WilsonGUEST
So there's this very tricky reliance on the tools of scholarship, on dictionaries, commentaries, on looking at all of the extant texts and trying to reconstruct what might a archaic Greek listener to the lyrics of Sappho have been thinking when this phrase was first sung.
Emily WilsonGUEST
And then all of these other gaps, which I get into a little bit in the Sappho essay, but also in some of the others 'cause I talk about a lot of different ancient performance genres including epic as well as lyric and drama.
Becky CookNARRATOR
Young pupils with richly endowed minds flocked to her from all countries and formed a kind of woman's college.
Becky CookNARRATOR
There can be no doubt that these young women were impelled to seek the society of Sappho from disgust with the low drudgery and monotonous routine to which a woman's life was sacrificed, and they were anxious to rise to something nobler and better.
Becky CookNARRATOR
Can there be any doubt that the unfortunate citizen wives of Athens, bound by law to their homes, envied the brilliant careers of the stranger women, and sought all possible means of freedom? and can there be any doubt that they acquiesce to the practice of infanticide as a means to that end otherwise how could the custom of destroying infants have been so thoroughly embedded in that jurisprudence the thought and the very core of athenian civilization as to the spartan women aristotle says that they ruled their husbands and owned two-fifths of the land surely had they not approved of infanticide for some very strong reasons of their own they would have abolished it Athens and Sparta must be regarded as giving very strong indications that the Grecian women not only approved of family limitation by the destruction of unwanted children, but that at least part of their motive was personal freedom.
Becky CookNARRATOR
In Rome, an avowedly militaristic nation, living by conquest of weaker states, all sound children were saved, but the weakly or deformed were drowned.
Sara CenturyGUEST
... at a certain point...
Sara CenturyGUEST
I mean, the Sappho, Xena goes, "I have to get Gabrielle this poem from Sappho for her birthday.
Sara CenturyGUEST
It's her favorite poem."
Khaliden NasHOST
[laughs]
speaker_2SOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
I had Sappho jot something down for you.
Renée O'ConnorSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
Oh, Sappho wrote a poem for me? I don't believe it.
speaker_2SOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
Xena.
Renée O'ConnorSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
There's a moment when I look at you and no speech is left in me.
132 more episodes mention Sappho.
Create an account to see the whole feed, search across every transcript, and follow the entities you care about.