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The Laughter of Aphrodite : A Novel About Sappho of Lesbos by Peter Green, Peter Green is a work of literary fiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Laughter of Aphrodite : A Novel About Sappho of Lesbos about?

Best-selling classicist Peter Green recreates the life and times of the Greek lyric poet Sappho in this beautifully conceived, sharply detailed work of historical imagination. We meet Sappho at the age of fifty, when she is shaken by her fatal and final love affair of Phaon. She narrates her own story from the vantage point of self-questioning middle age, and her candid meditations make intimate, engrossing reading. Only fragments of Sappho’s poetry survive. In imagining Sappho’s life Green found his task "rather like that of an archaeologist reassembling some amphora from hundreds of shards, of which more than half are missing." Yet, in his synthesis of historical evidence and ebullient invention, Green produces a seamless, moving, and persuasive portrait. He recreates Sappho’s life by interweaving her surviving poetry into the narrative, not as quotations, but as her own imagined speeches and thoughts. Sappho’s life spanned one of the most exciting periods in Greek history. Green’s novel, full of details about daily life on ancient Lesbos, draws the reader into the political and social climate of her world: the civil strife accompanying the transition from aristocracy to mercanti

Who reads The Laughter of Aphrodite : A Novel About Sappho of Lesbos?

Author

Peter Green, Peter Green

Publisher

University of California Press

Published

1965

Language

EN

ISBN

9780520203402

Category

work of literary fiction

Subjects

Fiction, Literary Fiction, Romance

Rating

3.67 / 5 (41 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14