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furnishes us with the most extreme example of what happens when any author is read. An interpretation does not filter out versions of history to distill some inalienable truth; it duplicates the past into the present. Like science-fiction attempts to clone an extinct species, the ancient DNA is fused into a contemporary cell and fostered in some suitable matrix. The reader re-creates the writer into his or her own world.
    With an author like Sappho, most of whose nine books of poems have been lost, the very lack of a tangible text encourages her imaginative resurrection. Like a figure in a hall of mirrors, she is distorted, refracted, skewed, and twisted by the reader’s particular curvature. The bare bones of her biography are fleshed out with numerous myths, wishes, and archetypes, as well as some outright oddities. According to the
Suda,
she invented the plectrum.
    Some fragments of a play called
The Girl from Leukas,
by the comic playwright Menander, display one of the earliest and most persistent of the legends about Sappho: that she committed suicide by flinging herself from a cliff because of her unrequited love for a ferryman called Phaon.
    Sappho had written poems in the persona of the deity of love, Aphrodite, lamenting being spurned by the beautiful Phaon. In a curious instance of back-reading, based on the presumption that a female poet first could not impersonate, and second was irredeemably solipsistic, the imagined words of the goddess of love became the autobiographical outpourings of Sappho herself. Another tradition asserted that her husband was called Cercylas of Andros, and this union persists in some encyclopedias, even though, since the name means “Mr. Cock from Mansville,” it is most likely an invention of the comedians.
    The Latin poet Ovid frequently recommended reading Sappho’s poetry to those who would become adept at courtship (and told those seeking alleviation from romance to strenuously avoid her). She was the pinnacle of female accomplishment in poetry and, as such, is the only nonlegendary heroine in his
Heroides
(although this may be a typically knowing wink). Ovid’s Sappho, supposedly writing to Phaon, “burns like Etna,” and her songs will be known throughout the whole world. When Seneca satirized ludicrous speculations in his
Epistles to Lucilius,
he wryly typified such endeavors as being like trying to find the birthplace of Homer, or resolve whether or not Sappho was a prostitute. Nonetheless, the joke was taken seriously by subsequent scholars.
    In the Renaissance, the blame for the disappearance of Sappho’s poems was put on the church. Tatian, in the second century C.E., had referred to her as an erotomaniac, and it seemed apposite that a work which kindled the flames of love should itself be committed to the fire. At some point before the fall of Constantinople, the actual poems were eradicated.
    But Sappho herself continued to be a byword for the female poet. In the eighteenth century she was a bluestocking, presiding over a coterie of acolytes. In the nineteenth, Christina Rossetti imagined her “living unloved, to die unknown / unwept, untended and alone,” a neurotic, suffocated martyr. The Modernists, such as Ezra Pound and H.D., made a virtue of necessity, and imitated the terse shards of what remained; and the postmodernists, not to be outdone, preferred the beauties of the blanks, gaps [ . . . ], and absences. Sappho was the laureate of the torn, the fissured, and the cavity.
    Despite this parade of projections, in
The Book of Lost Books,
Sappho could be considered one of the lucky ones.

    These scansion marks are practically the whole legacy of Telesilla of Argos. They represent the verse form, called the Telesillean, which she invented; a few scraps of her own verse survive, and a larger number of examples by male authors. She supposedly encouraged resistance to Spartan expansionism. Tatian informs us she was “silly” and