Considered by the Greeks as their greatest lyric poet, Sappho has long been the bane of translators. Most of her poems are emotional and personal, more in the form of colloquy than soliloquy: they are usually dialogues between Sappho and her friends, forthright attacks on her enemies, or exasperated exchanges with Aphrodite, the omnipotent and pitiless goddess who was both her enemy and friend. But Sappho also composed more impersonal songs for girls' choruses to sing at weddings or festivals in honor of Aphrodite. Even in the little we have left to us, a unique and fascinating woman comes to life, and gives us in flashes of vivid comment and description the very feminine world she lived in twenty-five hundred years ago.