Suidas says Sappho 'married one Cercōlas, a man of great wealth, who sailed from Andros, and,' he adds, 'she had a daughter by him, named Cleïs.' In fr. [85] (cf. fr. [136]) Sappho mentions this daughter Claïs by name, and Ovid, in the Epistle already alluded to, also refers to her. But the existence of such a husband has been warmly disputed, and the name (Pēnifer) and that of his country (Virīlia) are conjectured to have been invented in ribaldry by the Comic poets; certainly it was against the custom of the Greeks to amass wealth in one country and go to seek a wife in a distant island. Some authorities do not mention Andros, one of the islands of the Cyclades, but state that Sappho's family belonged to an Aeolian colony in the Troad.
The age in which Sappho flourished is mainly determined by concurrent events. Athenaeus makes her contemporary with Alyattes the father of Croesus, who reigned over Lydia from 628 to 570 B.C. Eusebius mentions her in his Chronicle for the year 604 B.C. Suidas says she lived about the 42nd Olympiad (612-609 B.C.), in the time of the poets Alcaeus, Stēsichŏrus, and Pittăcus. Her own verses in fr. [28] are said to have been written in answer to those of Alcaeus addressing her—
Ἰόπλοκ' ἄγνα μελλιχόμειδε Σάπφοι,
θέλω τι ϝείπην, ἀλλά με κωλύει αἴδως,
'Violet-weaving, pure, soft-smiling Sappho, I want to say something, but shame deters me' (cf. p. [24]). Athenaeus says that Hermesiănax, in an elegy (cf. fr. [26]), spoke of Sappho as beloved by Anacreon, and he quotes from the third book of some elegiac poetry by Hermesianax, 'A Catalogue of things relating to Love,' these lines of his:
And well thou knowest how famed Alcaeus smote
Of his high harp the love-enlivened strings,
And raised to Sappho's praise the enamoured note,
'Midst noise of mirth and jocund revellings:
Aye, he did love that nightingale of song