There is a surprising amount of information about how Sappho's work was received in ancient Greece. This is surprising because she never wrote down any of her work. She performed her compositions to music, and so they were memorized and later sung. Sappho lived at the cusp between the ending of the oral tradition and the beginning of the written word. Shortly after her death, a Greek alphabet was devised, and her poems were written down, gathered together, and collected into nine papyrus books. For the next three hundred years, Sappho's work was studied and copied and passed around on papyrus, and it continued to inspire other poets, who both quoted from her and imitated her work. By the third century b.c. , Sappho was recognized as a great lyric poet. Then her work virtually disappeared. Sappho herself continued to be well known because she became...