Poets from ancient Lesbos

thumb|right|Kalpis painting of Sappho by the [[Sappho Painter ( 510BC)|alt=Vase painting of a woman holding a lyre.]]

thumb|Alcaeus and Sappho, Attic red-figure calathus, c. 470 BC, [[Staatliche Antikensammlungen (Inv. 2416)]]

thumb|A citharede Terpander ( Terpandros), of Antissa in Lesbos, was a Greek poet and citharede who lived about the first half of the 7th century BC. He was the father of Greek music and through it, of lyric poetry, although his own poetical compositions were few and in extremely simple rhythms. He simplified rules of the modes of singing of other neighboring countries and islands and formed, out of these syncopated variants, a conceptual system. Though endowed with an inventive mind, and the commencer of a new era of music, he attempted no more than to systematize the musical styles that exis

Lesches () is a semi-legendary early Greek poet and the reputed author of the Little Iliad. According to the usually accepted tradition, he was a native of Pyrrha in Lesbos, and flourished about 660 BC (others place him about 50 years earlier). Proclus refers to him as "Lesches of Mytilene". Mytilene and Lesbos are names of the same Greek island used interchangeably.

Greek epigrammatist and ambassador in Rome