Writer-director Terrence Malick makes the character of Pocahontas in The New World (2005) deliver several lines from Sappho as her own thoughts and words. These quotations, in conjunction with allusions to Vergil and other sources, open narrative directions that enable Pocahontas to emerge within a film that begins as an epic of European exploration with her as the adventurer’s love interest as the film’s protagonist in her own right. Sappho’s words serve to imbue Pocahontas’ experience of passion and loss — otherwise reminiscent of the abandoned women of epic — with the validating authority of Sappho’s lyric voice.