Sappho (630–580 BCE) was born on Lesbos, where, apart from a few years of exile on Sicily, she spent her life. She had a daughter and several brothers (one exasperated her through an affair with a courtesan), and led choruses of young women, many of whom her poems address. Like her contemporary Alcaeus, she wrote in the local dialect of Lesbos and was canonized in antiquity as one of the Lyric Nine. The Sapphic stanza bears her name.