Generally regarded by the scholars of all ages as one of the greatest lyric poets of ancient Greece, and hailed as the Tenth Muse by Plato, Sappho was born probably around 620 BC to an aristocratic family, living on the Greek island of Lesbos, located in the northeastern Aegean Sea. Born during a great cultural flowering in the area, she was greatly admired for the beauty of her writing style and for her ability to impress readers with her lively sense of personality. The most common subject of her work was love, along with the strong emotions it generates, like passion, jealousy, affection, and hatred.

In her poetry, love is the other name of passion, an inescapable power, the desire and sensual emotion, the nostalgic memory of the enigmatic attachment that is faded in distant. Her poems, written to be sung accompanied by music, were recited accompanied by a lyre, which heightened their emotional impact. She innovated the form of poetry through her first-person narration and by refining the lyric meter, which is today known as Sapphic meter. Due to the popularity of her works in lyric poetry, she was honoured in statuary, coinage and pottery, centuries after her death.

Little is known about Sappho's life for certain, but legends about her are abound, many of which having been repeated for centuries. In all probability, her birthplace was Mytilene, the main city on the island of Lesbos, where she lived most of her life, with the exception of her family’s brief exile in Sicily shortly after 600 BC, due to the family’s involvement in the conflicts between political elites of Lesbos in that period.

Although the available ancient sources record ten different names for Sappho's father, the earliest and most commonly attested name for him is Scamandronymus, who died when she was six, as mentioned in Ovid’s Heroides. Legend says, her mother was Cleïs, and she had three brothers, namely Eurygios, Larichos, and Charaxos. It is considered that prominence of her family in the political and cultural life of Lesbos facilitated her education and proficiency in music, poetry, and dance.

It is said that Sappho was married to a wealthy man from the island of Andros, named Cercylas, and they had a daughter named Cleïs, who is referred to in two fragments. Nevertheless, Sappho spent most of her adult life in the city of Mytilene on Lesbos, where she ran an academy for unmarried young women, which was devoted to the cult of Aphrodite and Eros, and earned great prominence as a dedicated teacher and poet.

According to Menander, a Greek dramatist and the best-known representative of Athenian New Comedy, Sappho committed suicide by jumping off the Leucadian cliffs, as her heart was broken by Phaon, a young mythical boatman of Mytilene. However, modern scholars consider the story of Sappho's leap a myth, which was perhaps originated from one of her non-biographical poems in a first person narrative.

Sappho headed an academy of unmarried women, where unmarried young girls of wealthy families were educated, especially for marriage. They were taught several performing arts, like singing, dancing, poetry recitation, along with proper social graces, and were also initiated into grace and elegance for seduction and love. Sappho was a devotee of Aphrodite and the goddess was the tutelary divinity and inspiration of the thiasos, the academy for the group of the unmarried women, where Sappho was her intermediary with the girls. Practically, the practice of homoeroticism within the thiasos, the usual term for the female community or the academy of unmarried women, played a role in the context of initiation and education.

Although Sappho was revered as a bold and autonomous woman, and became a symbolic figure for feminist movements across history, three centuries after her death the writers of the New Comedy branded Sappho as immensely promiscuous and lesbian, and even the modern term lesbian was originated from Sappho of Lesbos. However, despite the earliest surviving sources explicitly discuss Sappho's homoeroticism came from the Hellenistic period, Sappho's poetry did not provide any conclusive evidence that she described herself as having sex with women. Even the Suda, a combination dictionary and encyclopedia compiled by Byzantine scholars in the 10th century AD, records that Sappho was maliciously accused of having sexual relationships with her female pupils. However, although Pope Gregory ordered to burn her work in 1073 on the ground of immorality, most of her works had been lost long before that time, simply because they were not translated, as Sappho wrote in the Aeolic Greek dialect, which was difficult for the Latin writers, well versed in Attic and Homeric Greek, to translate.

Best known for her love poems, most of which were written to be sung, accompanied by lyre, and thus giving birth to the word lyric poetry, Sappho provided a rare window into the lives and experiences of women during that era. Probably, she wrote around 10,000 lines of poetry, which were first collected into nine volumes around the third century BC. But unfortunately, only some fragments of her poems have survived intact, which were principally used as quotations, found in the works of other authors, until the nineteenth century, when in 1898, scholars unearthed papyri, containing fragments of her poems. After that, in 1814, archaeologists discovered papier-mâché coffins made from scraps of paper, containing more verse fragments attributed to Sappho, among which only approximately 650 lines of her poetry still survive, of which just one poem, the Ode to Aphrodite, is complete. Although some of the other fragments are incomplete or damaged, they offer a glimpse into the poetic genius of Sappho.

Sappho’s poetry is known for its intimate portrayal of personal experience and relationships, and with great skill she captured the beauty of love, describing the sights, sounds, and sensations of the world around her, using vivid imagery and melodic language. As a result, her attitudes towards love, desire, and beauty attracted a great deal of attention, both positive and negative. She celebrated the life-changing power of love, and her poetry explored the physical and emotional appeal of both men and women, detailing and emphasising the erotic aspects of physical beauty, pushing aside the prevailing boundaries of societal norms. She also celebrated the beauty and emotional power of same-sex love in her poetry, which contains vivid and passionate descriptions of women, suggesting a deeply personal and intimate connection with her subject matter. Her poems also reflected a sense of melancholy or longing, suggesting that true peace and happiness of soul lies only in the experience of beauty and love. Her appreciation for the natural world was another important aspect of her poetry. Nevertheless, while the reception of Sappho's poetry through the past 100 years has been extremely positive, she remains an historical, as well as an enigmatic important figure in debates about sexuality and gender.