A dead poet is supposed to be finished. Sappho was — for about fifteen centuries she was fixed, a name and a heap of scraps. Then, twice, the ground gave her back. In 2004 a papyrus in Cologne restored most of a poem on growing old; in 2014 two more poems surfaced — one naming her brothers, connecting the verse to a life. Scrub the years below and watch the fragments rise. But one of these recoveries came to us through a crime, and this domain will not pretend otherwise.
The 2004 find is clean: fragments of the Old Age poem were read out of mummy cartonnage — waste papyrus recycled to wrap the dead — with an ordinary archaeological history. The 2014 find is not. The Brothers and Kypris poems were published by the Oxford papyrologist Dirk Obbink with a tidy provenance story — a private collection, an old auction lot — that did not survive scrutiny. The fragments are now entangled in the theft of papyri from the Egypt Exploration Society's Oxyrhynchus collection; Obbink was arrested in 2020 on suspicion of selling stolen pieces, and the paper trail he offered appears to have been fabricated. Almost every scholar accepts the text as genuinely Sappho — the Greek, the metre, the dialect all hold. But how it reached us may be looting, and a poem about a brother steering his ship home safe reaching us in the hold of a smuggler is a bitterness the poem didn't ask for. To recover a voice is a gift; to recover it through a wrong is a debt. This domain keeps the poem and keeps the asterisk.
Real: the 2004 Cologne (P.Köln) Old Age poem and the 2014 Obbink Brothers & Kypris poems are documented discoveries; the texts are widely accepted as genuine Sappho; the Obbink provenance scandal, the EES/Oxyrhynchus thefts, and his 2020 arrest are a matter of public record.
Flagged: the English here is my own plain gloss of the sense, never a copyrighted translation; some readings are still contested at the edges (marked […]). The provenance of the 2014 fragments remains disputed and disgraced — the ethical stain is real and is not softened here. To render both the gift and the debt is the honest work.