Almost none of Sappho's poetry survives complete -- what remains exists mostly as fragments, some preserved by ancient quotation, others recovered from actual papyrus scraps excavated from the sands of Egypt.
Sappho was one of the most celebrated poets of the ancient Greek world, but almost nothing of her original work survives intact -- her poetry was lost as a complete body of work sometime in late antiquity, and what remains today exists almost entirely as fragments: lines quoted by later grammarians illustrating a point of meter, or scraps of actual papyrus recovered from an Egyptian rubbish heap at Oxyrhynchus, where the dry climate preserved discarded documents for two thousand years. This Oedio pairs one such fragment -- an actual 2,000-year-old piece of the papyrus itself -- with a 1907 scholarly edition presenting the surviving fragments alongside their English translation.