Sappho
3 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Sappho. All 3 are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
saf'o, a Greek lyric poet who flourished about 600 B. C. According to all accounts she was a native of Mitylene in the island of Lesbos, where she spent her life. She was a woman of noble birth. One brother was a cupbearer; another a wealthy merchant. Her home was the center of a coterie of literary women, the earliest association of the kind known. Of nine volumes of lyric poems by Sappho, all but an ode to Aphrodite and a few fragments are lost. A brilliant hummingbird with a long, forked tail has been named Sappho in her honor. Among the ancients Sappho enjoyed a unique renown. She was called "The Poetess," as Homer was called "The Poet." Aristotle quoted without question a judgment which placed her in the same rank as Homer. Plato, in the Phaedrus, mentioned her as the tenth Muse. Solon, hearing one of her poems, prayed that he might not see death till he had learned it. Strabo speaks of her genius with religious awe. Longinus cites her love-ode as a specimen of poetical sublimity. The epigrammatists call her Child of Aphrodite and Eros, nursling of the Graces and Persuasion, pride of Hellas, peer of Muses, companion of Apollo. Nowhere is a hint whispered that her poetry was aught but perfect. As far as we can judge, these praises were strictly just. Of all the poets of the world, of all the illustrious artists of all literatures, Sappho is the one whose every word has a peculiar and unmistakable perfume, a seal of absolute perfection and inimitable grace."--Symonds.
1000 Classical Characters (1900)
Celebrated for her beauty and poetical talents, was born at Lesbos about 600 years before Christ. She became enamored of Phaon , a youth of Mitylene; but he not reciprocating her passion, she threw herself into the sea from the rock of Leucadia. alludes to her fatal leap in his Evenings in Greece: "The very spot where Sappho sung Her swan-like music, ere she sprung (Still holding in that fearful leap, By her loved lyre) into the deep, And, dying, quenched the fatal fire, At once, of both her heart and lyre." Moore
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a renowned Greek lyric poet; born in the island of Lesbos about 612 B. C. She wrote nine books of poems, but besides some small fragments of her poems we have in complete form only a "Hymn to Aphrodite" and an "Ode to a Beautiful Girl."
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The romance that fills the 1900 entry -- Sappho's unrequited love for Phaon and her leap from the Leucadian rock -- is now treated as legend, probably invented by Athenian comedy centuries after her death, and no serious scholar cites it as biography. What has genuinely grown is the text itself: papyri recovered from Egyptian rubbish heaps and mummy casing have added substantially to the "few fragments" of 1910, including the near-complete "Tithonus" poem on old age published in 2004 and the "Brothers Poem" published in 2014, which names the wealthy merchant brother Charaxos the older entries mention. Collier's 1921 count of one complete hymn plus scraps still roughly holds -- the Hymn to Aphrodite remains the only certainly whole poem -- but readers now have far more of her than Symonds did. The other large shift is in reception: the frank homoerotic content of poems such as fragment 31 (Collier's "Ode to a Beautiful Girl"), passed over in silence or veiled by these accounts, is central to how Sappho is read and translated today, and the name of her island supplies the modern word for it.
Written for this edition, 2026.