Despite the subtitle’s implication, Sappho wasn’t the only woman writer in ancient Greece, but unlike them, her work and reputation remain as well known as many of her male contemporaries. Searching for Sappho contains new translations of all of her surviving work, fragments as well as full poems, revealing a person with a gift for condensing a world of emotions and ideas into a few well-chosen words. Philip Freeman uses Sappho’s poetry to construct a plausible and captivating outline of her life and as a window into the lives of women from her era who (as was true until recently in most societies) had few opportunities to express themselves.
