Great Lives: Sappho

Series 16, episode 0

Matthew Parris presents the biographical series in which his guests choose someone who has inspired their lives. Historian Bettany Hughes chooses the enigmatic Greek poet Sappho, who has been described as everything from a great intellectual to little more than a vamp. Hard facts about her life are in short supply - it is known that she lived on the island of Lesbos over two and half thousand years ago, and fragments of her poetry still survive, the best examples dealing with the language of desire, but whether she really was a lesbian (with a small l) is less clear. Bettany Hughes is as obsessed with who Sappho might be as with who the fragmentary evidence suggests she was