Abstract: At this remove, it strikes us as implausible that the author of Principia Mathematica also penned Notes on Early Church History and the Moral Superiority of the 'Barbarians' to the Romans.And how likely is it, we think, that the poet of the Iliad would in addition compose the coarsely comic Margites?We like our authors classifiable, even monotonic.So it seems surprising, if not disturbing, that the Sappho of poems 1, 2, 16, 31, 94 and other expressions of exquisite longing and imagination might also have composed verses of forthright criticism in the style of iambos, the genre associated with mockery and abuse.1Yet several testimonia and at least a few poetic fragments afford a glimpse of this other side of Sappho.I shall argue here that the newest Sappho poem, on "the brothers," draws from, and may even in antiquity have been considered a specimen of, iambic poetics.For the suggestion, I shall rely on its structure and rhetorical strategy while adducing comparative evidence from a more readily recognizable Greek iambist.Finally, I shall propose that poems like our newly found composition-maybe even this very poem-affected the Roman reception of Sappho through hints that she could be, when she wished, an artist of verbal abuse.