One of the great Greek poets, certainly the greatest early lyric poet, and one of the few known female writers of the Ancient world, Sappho was born sometime between 630 and 612 BC on the Greek island of Lesbos, in either Eressos or Mytilini.  She was an aristocrat whose father, Skamandronymous, was a wine merchant; she was orphaned at the age of six, and eventually married a merchant in another prosperous family.  Her wealth afforded her with the opportunity to live her life as she chose, and she chose to spend it writing on Lesbos, with a brief exile in Sicily.  Physically contrary to the female ideal of the time (she was reportedly dark-haired and of medium height), she openly acknowledged her homosexuality in her verse and life; but seventh century Lesbos was an enlightened cultural center with a strong intellectual and cultural life and a markedly less misogynistic patriarchy than the Greek norm.  

Sappho's lyric poetry, so called because it was performed with musical accompaniment (usually a lyre), is written in an aeolic dialect in a variety of meters, one of which is named after the poet (Sapphic).  The poems mainly deal with love from many perspectives, and the directness, intensity, and intimacy of her poetic voice greatly impressed her contemporaries as well as later classical writers, including Plato (who famously called her 'the tenth muse), Catullus, Ovid, and Horace. 

Sappho's poetry was collected in the third and second centuries BC but was ignored by medieval scholars.  It was rediscovered in the late nineteenth century, and the first modern collection of her poetry was published in 1925.  Only fragments survive of the original nine complete volumes of papyrus rolls, which were destroyed by neglect, natural processes, and possibly censorship.

At the end of Sappho's life, coins of Lesbos were minted with her image. Upon hearing one of her songs, Solon, an Athenian ruler, lawyer, and a poet himself, asked that he be taught the song "Because I want to learn it and die."