There is no charge to visit the Museum.
The life-sized marble sculpture depicts the poet lounging on a chair and wearing long robes and sandals.
The Museum's website (
visit link) provides more information about this sculpture:
"Sappho
Artist: Count Prosper d'Epinay (Port Louis, Mauritius,1836–1914 Paris)
Date: ca. 1895
Culture: French
Medium: Marble
Dimensions: Height: 65 3/8 in. (166.1 cm)
Classification: Sculpture
Credit Line: Lent by Count Prosper d'Epinay, 1897
Accession Number: O.L.97.IV
On view in Gallery 548"
Wikipedia (
visit link) adds:
"Sappho ... was a Greek lyric poet, born on the island of Lesbos. The Alexandrians included her in the list of nine lyric poets. She was born sometime between 630 and 612 BCE, and it is said that she died around 570 BCE, but little is known for certain about her life. The bulk of her poetry, which was well-known and greatly admired through much of antiquity, has been lost; however, her immense reputation has endured through surviving fragments...
Works
Sappho and her lyre
Alexandrian edition of Sappho's poetry[edit]
For more details on this topic, see Aeolic verse.
The Library of Alexandria collected Sappho's poetry into nine books, mostly based on their meter:
Book I, poems composed in the Sapphic stanza, 330 stanzas in all (Fragments 1–42);
Book II, poems composed in glyconic lines with dactylic expansion (Fragments 43–52);
Book III, poems in Greater Asclepiad distichs (Fragments 53–57);
Book IV, poems in distichs of a somewhat similar meter (Fragments 58–91);
Book V, probably consisting of poems in various three-line stanzas (Fragments 92–101);
Book VI (contents unknown);
Book VII (only two surviving lines in the same meter, Fragment 102);
Book VIII (see Fragment 103);
Book IX, epithalamia in other meters, including dactylic hexameter (Fragments 104–117)."