Henry Thornton Wharton

ΣΑΠΦΩ

Portrait of Sappho

L. Alma Tadema pinxt.

J. Cother Webb fec.

SAPPHO

MEMOIR, TEXT, SELECTED
RENDERINGS, AND A
LITERAL TRANSLATION BY
HENRY THORNTON WHARTON
M.A. OXON

LONDON: JOHN LANE · THE
BODLEY HEAD · NEW YORK:
JOHN LANE COMPANY · 1908

Πάντα καθαρὰ τοῖς καθαροῖς.

First Edition. Fcap. 8vo. Pp. xii+190.

One Illustration. David Stott. 1885.

Second Edition. Fcap. 8vo. Pp. xvi+213.

Two Illustrations, David Stott. 1887.

Third Edition. Fcap. 8vo. Pp. xx+217.

Three Illustrations, John Lane. 1895.

Fourth Edition. Fcap. 8vo. Pp. xx+222.

Three Illustrations and Memoir of Mr.

Wharton. John Lane. 1898.

Fifth Edition. Fcap. 8vo. Pp. xxxii+217.

Three Illustrations and Memoir of Mr.

Wharton. John Lane. 1908.

Printed by Ballantyne & Co. Limited

Tavistock Street, London

PREFACE TO THIRD EDITION

I would fain have enriched this edition of my Sappho with some new words of the poetess, if only even to the slight extent which I reached in 1887; but, to the world's sorrow, that pleasure has been denied me. Still, we need not yet give up all hope, after the unexpected discovery of the unknown Mimiambi of Herondas, on a papyrus-roll used to stuff an Egyptian mummy-case, so few years ago (cf. The Academy, Oct. 11, 1890).

Neverthless, I can now present to the lovers of Sappho a good deal more than was heretofore in my power; in a new form, it is true, but with the same beautiful Greek type. And with this third edition I am enabled to give a reproduction, in photogravure, of the charming picture of Mitylene by the late Mr. Clarkson Stanfield, R.A., for which I am primarily indebted to Dr. R. Garnett, of the British Museum.

Since it was my privilege, if I may say so without arrogance, to introduce Sappho to English readers in the year 1885, in a form which they could understand, whether they knew any Greek or none, and in the entirety of every known word of hers, there has arisen a mass of literature upon the subject of the greatest lyrist of all time. To enumerate the pictures that have been painted, the articles and books and plays that have been written, which have appealed to the public in the last ten years, would be an almost impossible task. In my Bibliography I have endeavoured to give a reference to all that is of prominent and permanent interest, ranging from 'the postman poet,' Mr. Hosken, to the felicitous paraphrases—some fractions of which I have taken the liberty to quote in the text—of 'Michael Field' in her Long Ago.

The translation of the Hymn to Aphrodite, which was made for me by the late J. Addington Symonds, now appears in the amended form in which he finally printed it. Professor Palgrave has kindly allowed me to include some versions of his, made many years ago. The late Sir R. F. Burton made a metrical translation of Catullus, which has recently been published, and I am grateful to Lady Burton for allowing me to reprint his version of the Roman poet's Ode to Lesbia.

The only critical edition of the text of Sappho since that of Bergk—the text which I adopt—has been made by Mr. G. S. Farnell, headmaster of the Victoria College, Jersey; from which I have had considerable assistance.

As regards erudite scholarship, the investigations of Professor Luniak, of the Kazan University, deserve more attention than it is within the scope of my book to give them. I reviewed his essay in some detail in The Academy for July 19, 1890, p. 53. The criticisms upon it by Professor Naguiewski, in his disputation for the doctorate two years later, go far to prove that my appreciation of Sappho's character cannot be easily shaken. That rapturous fragment of Sophocles—

Ὦ θεοί, τίς ἆρα Κύπρις, ἢ τίς ἵμερος,

τοῦδε ξυνήψατο;

(O gods, what love, what yearning, contributed to this?) still remains to me the keynote of what Sappho has been through all the ages.

HENRY T. WHARTON.

'MADRESFIELD,' ACOL ROAD,

WEST HAMPSTEAD, LONDON, N.W.,

April 1895.

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION

The cordial reception which the first edition of my little book met with has encouraged me to make many improvements in this re-issue. Unforeseen delays in its production have also helped me to advance upon my first essay. Among other changes, I have been able to obtain a new fount of Greek type, which has to me a peculiar beauty. Unfamiliar though some of the letters may appear at first sight, they reproduce the calligraphy of the manuscripts of the most artistic period of the Middle Ages. This type has been specially cast in Berlin, by favour of the Imperial Government. In a larger size it is not unknown to English scholars, but such as I am now enabled to present has never been used before.

Last spring a telegram from the Vienna correspondent of the Times announced that some new verses of Sappho had been found among the Fayum papyri in the possession of the Archduke RÉnier. When the paper on his Imperial Highness' papyri was read before the Imperial Academy of Science by Dr. Wilhelm Ritter von Hartel on the 10th of March, it became evident that the remark was made, not in allusion to the Archduke's possessions, but to that portion of the Fayum manuscripts which had been acquired by the Imperial Museum in Berlin. The verses referred to were indeed no other than the two fragments which had been deciphered and criticised by the celebrated scholar, Dr. F. Blass, of Kiel, in the Rheinisches Museum for 1880; and further edited by Bergk in the posthumous edition of his Poetae Lyrici Graeci. I am now able, not only to print the text of these fragments and a translation of them, but also, through the courtesy of the Imperial Government of Germany, to give an exact reproduction of photographs of the actual scraps of parchment on which they were written a thousand years ago. Dr. Erman, the Director of the Imperial Egyptian Museum, kindly furnished me with the photographs; and the Autotype Company has copied them with its well-known fidelity.

Among many other additions, that which I have been able to make to fragment 100 is particularly interesting. The untimely death of the young French scholar, M. Charles Graux, who found the quotation among the dry dust of Choricius' rhetorical orations, is indeed to be deplored. Had he lived longer he might have cleared up for us many another obscure passage in the course of his studies of manuscripts which have not hitherto found an editor.

The publication of the memoir on Naukratis by the Committee of the Egypt Exploration Fund last autumn is an event worthy of notice, the town having been so intimately connected with Sappho's story. On one of the pieces of pottery found at Naucratis by Mr. Petrie occur the inscribed letters ΣΑΦ (pl. xxxiv., fig. 532), which some at first thought might refer to Sappho; but the more probable restoration is εἰ]ς Ἀφ[ροδίτην, 'to Aphrodite.'

Since the issue of my first edition, M. De Vries has published, at Leyden, an exhaustive dissertation upon Ovid's Epistle, Sappho to Phaon, which has caused me to modify some of my conclusions regarding it. Although Ovid's authorship of this Epistle seems to me now to be sufficiently vindicated, I still remain convinced that we are not justified in taking the statements in it as historically accurate.

It is curious also that a candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Erlangen offered, as his inaugural dissertation, in 1885, an account of 'Sappho the Mitylenean.' The author, Joacheim I. Paulidos, is a native of Lesbos. It is a pamphlet of sixty pages, written, not in modern, but in classical Greek. His opening sentence, Μία καὶ μόνη ἐγένετο Σαπφώ—'Sappho stands alone and unique,' comes near the meaning, but misses the polish of the phrase—gives his dominant tone; his acceptance of her character greatly resembles mine.

Since the years now and then bring to light some fresh verses of Sappho's, there is a faint hope that more may still be found. The rich store of parchments and papyri discovered in the Fayum has not all been examined yet. Indeed, among a few of these which were lost in the custom-house at Alexandria in 1881-2, M. Maspero, the renowned Director of Explorations in Egypt, thought he had detected the perfume of Sappho's art.

It is pleasing to see (cf. fragment 95) that our own Poet Laureate has again recurred, in his latest volume of poems, to a phrase from Sappho which he had first used nearly sixty years ago; and that he calls her 'the poet,' implying her supremacy by the absence of any added epithet.

I am indebted to many kind friends and distinguished scholars for much assistance. Among them I must especially thank Professor Blass, of Kiel. Notwithstanding the frequent recurrence of his name on my pages, I owe more to his cordial help and criticism than I can acknowledge here.

Little more than I have given is needed to prove how transcendent an artist Sappho was; but I cannot forbear concluding with an extract from a recent essay on poetry by Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton:—

'Never before these songs were sung, and never since, did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a cry like hers; and, from the executive point of view, in directness, in lucidity, in that high imperious verbal economy which only Nature can teach the artist, she has no equal, and none worthy to take the place of second.'

HENRY T. WHARTON.

39 ST. GEORGE'S ROAD,

KILBURN, LONDON, N.W.,

April 1887.

PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION

Sappho, the Greek poetess whom more than eighty generations have been obliged to hold without a peer, has never, in the entirety of her works, been brought within the reach of English readers. The key to her wondrous reputation—which would, perhaps, be still greater if it had ever been challenged—has hitherto lain hidden in other languages than ours. As a name, as a figure pre-eminent in literary history, she has indeed never been overlooked. But the English-reading world has come to think, and to be content with thinking, that no verse of hers survives save those two hymns which Addison, in the Spectator, has made famous—by his panegyric, not by Ambrose Philips' translation.

My aim in the present work is to familiarise English readers, whether they understand Greek or not, with every word of Sappho, by translating all the one hundred and seventy fragments that her latest German editor thinks may be ascribed to her:

Love's priestess, mad with pain and joy of song,

Song's priestess, mad with joy and pain of love.

Swinburne.

I have contented myself with a literal English prose translation, for Sappho is, perhaps above all other poets, untranslatable. The very difficulties in the way of translating her may be the reason why no Englishman has hitherto undertaken the task. Many of the fragments have been more or less successfully rendered into English verse, and such versions I have quoted whenever they rose above mediocrity, so far as I have been able to discover them.

After an account of Sappho's life as complete as my materials have allowed, I have taken her fragments in order as they stand in Bergk, whose text I have almost invariably followed. I have given (1) the original fragment in Greek, (2) a literal version in English prose, distinguished by italic type, (3) every English metrical translation that seems worthy of such apposition, and (4) a note of the writer by whom, and the circumstances under which, each fragment has been preserved. Too often a fragment is only a single word, but I have omitted nothing.

It is curious to note how early in the history of printing the literature of Sappho began. The British Museum contains a sort of commentary on Sappho which is dated 1475 in the Catalogue; this is but twenty years later than the famous 'Mazarin' Bible, and only one year after the first book was printed in England. It is written in Latin by Georgius Alexandrinus Merula, and is of much interest, apart from its strange type and contractions of words.

The first edition of any part of Sappho was that of the Hymn to Aphrodite, by H. Stephanus, in his edition of Anacreon, 8vo, 1554. Subsequent editions of Anacreon contained other fragments attributed to her, including some that are now known to be by a later hand. Fulvius Ursinus wrote some comments on those then known in the Carmina Novem Illustrium Feminarum published at Antwerp, 8vo, 1568. Is. Vossius gave an amended text of the two principal odes in his edition of Catullus, London, 4to, 1684.

But the first separate edition of Sappho's works was that of Johann Christian Wolf, which was published in 4to at Hamburg in 1733, and reprinted under an altered title two years later. Wolf's work is as exhaustive as was possible at his date. He gives a frontispiece figuring all the then known coins bearing reference to the poetess; a life of her—written, like the rest of the treatise, in Latin—occupies 32 pages; a Latin translation of all the quotations from or references to her in the Greek classics, and all the Latin accounts of her, together with the annotations of most previous writers, and copious notes by himself, in 253 pages; and the work is completed with elaborate indices.

The next important critical edition of Sappho was that of Heinrich Friedrich Magnus Volger, pp. lxviii., 195, 8vo, Leipzig, 1810. It was written on the old lines, and did not do much to advance the knowledge of her fragments. Volger added a 'musical scheme' which seems more curious than useful, and of which it is hard to understand either the origin or the intention.

But nothing written before 1816 really grasped the Sapphic question. In that year Welcker published his celebrated refutation of the long-current calumnies against Sappho, Sappho vindicated from a prevailing Prejudice. In his zeal to establish her character he may have been here and there led into extravagance, but it is certain that his searching criticism first made it possible to appreciate her true position. Nothing that has been written since has succeeded in invalidating his main conclusions, despite all the onslaughts of Colonel Mure and those few who sympathised with him.

Consequently the next self-standing edition of Sappho, by Christian Friedrich Neue, pp. 106, 4to, Berlin, 1827, embodying the results of the 'new departure,' was far in advance of its predecessors—not in cumbrous elaboration, but in critical excellence. Neue's life of the poetess was written in the light of Welcker's researches; his purification of the text was due to more accurate study of the ancient manuscripts, assisted by the textual criticisms published by Bishop Blomfield the previous year in the Cambridge Museum Criticum.

Since Neue's time much has been written about Sappho, for the most part in Latin or German. The final revision of the text, and collection of all that can now be possibly ascribed to her, was made by Theodor Bergk, in his Poetae Lyrici Graeci, pp. 82-140 of the third volume of the fourth edition, 8vo, Leipzig, 1882, which I have here, with rare exceptions, followed.

There is a noteworthy dissertation on her life by Theodor Kock, AlkÄos und Sappho, 8vo, Berlin, 1862, in which the arguments and conclusions of Welcker are mainly endorsed, and elaborated with much mythological detail.

Perhaps the fullest account of Sappho which has recently appeared is that by A. Fernandez Merino, a third edition of which was published at Madrid early last year. Written in Spanish, it discusses in an impartial spirit every question concerning Sappho, and is especially valuable for its copious references.

Professor Domenico Comparetti, the celebrated Florentine scholar, to whom I shall have occasion to refer hereafter, has recently done much to familiarise Italian readers with the chief points of Sapphic criticism. His enthusiasm for her character and genius is all that can be desired, but his acceptance of Welcker's arguments is not so complete as mine. Where truth must lie between two extremes, and evidence on either side is so hard to collect and estimate, it is possible for differently constituted minds to reach very different conclusions. The motto at the back of my title-page is the guide I am most willing to follow. But, after all, to use the words of a friend whom I consulted on the subject, 'whether the pure think her emotion pure or impure; whether the impure appreciate it rightly, or misinterpret it; whether, finally, it was platonic or not; seems to me to matter nothing.' Sappho's poetic eminence is independent of such considerations. To her,

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,

Whatever stirs this mortal frame,

All are but ministers of Love,

And feed his sacred flame.

Those who wish to learn more about Sappho than is here recorded will find a guide in the Bibliography which I have added at the end of the volume. My sole desire in these pages is to present 'the great poetess' to English readers in a form from which they can judge of her excellence for themselves, so far as that is possible for those to whom Aeolic Greek is unfamiliar. Her more important fragments have been translated into German, French, Italian, and Spanish, as well as English; but all previous complete editions of her works have been written solely by scholars for scholars. Now that, through the appreciation of Sappho by modern poets and painters, her name is becoming day by day more familiar, it seems time to show her as we know her to have been, to those who have neither leisure nor power to read her in the tongue in which she wrote.

I have not concerned myself much with textual criticism, for I do not arrogate any power of discernment greater than that possessed by a scholar like Bergk. Only those who realise what he has done to determine the text of Sappho can quite appreciate the value of his work. Where he is satisfied, I am content. He wrote for the learned few, and I only strive to popularise the result of such researches as his: to show, indeed, so far as I can, that which centuries of scholarship have succeeded in accomplishing.

The translations by Mr. John Addington Symonds, dated 1883, were all made especially for this work in the early part of that year, and have not been elsewhere published. My thanks are also due to Mr. Symonds for much valuable criticism.

The medallion which forms the frontispiece has been engraved by my friend Mr. John Cother Webb, after the head of Sappho in the picture by Mr. L. Alma Tadema, R.A., exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1881, as 'op. ccxxiii.,' and now in America. I trust that my readers will sympathise with me in cordial gratitude to both artist and engraver, to the one for his permission, to the other for his fidelity.

HENRY T. WHARTON.

39 ST. GEORGE'S ROAD,

KILBURN. LONDON, N.W.,

May 1885.

IN MEMORIAM

Mr. H. T. Wharton—known to book-lovers as 'Sappho Wharton'—died on August 22, 1895, after a lingering illness due to influenza, at his residence in West Hampstead; and he lies buried in the neighbouring cemetery of Fortune Green.

Henry Thornton Wharton was born in 1846 at Mitcham, in Surrey, of which parish his father was then vicar. His mother, who survives him, was a Courtenay, a cousin of the Earl of Devon. His elder brother, the author of Etyma Graeca and Etyma Latina, is a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford; a younger brother shares his taste for ornithology. He was educated as a day-boy at the Charterhouse, in its old Smithfield days; and after spending a short time in the classical department of King's College, he went up to Oxford in 1867, as a commoner of Wadham. That college had no more enthusiastic alumnus, and he will be greatly missed, both at the Gaudy and at the annual dinner in London. He graduated in 1871 with honours in natural science, and then joined the medical school at University College. On qualifying as M.R.C.S. in 1875, he settled down to general practice in West Hampstead. He never earned a large income; but his devotion to all his patients, and in particular his generosity to the poor, will cause his memory to be long held in honour.

The general public first heard of him in 1885, when he brought out his Sappho—memoir, text, selected renderings, and a literal translation (David Stott). The book met with an immediate success, partly because it supplied a want, and partly from the attractive form in which it was produced. A second edition was called for within two years; and this very summer a third, with additions, has been published by Mr. John Lane. The author spared no pains to make the volume worthy of its subject. Merely as a specimen of book-making, it has few rivals. The Royal Press of Berlin lent a fount of Greek type, which had never before been used in this country. Prof. Blass, of Kiel, gave his assistance in determining the obscure text of the fragments. Mr. John Addington Symonds contributed special metrical versions of all the longer pieces. Mr. John Cother Webb engraved for frontispiece the head of Sappho in Mr. Alma Tadema's famous picture, the original of which has since gone to America. Of Mr. Wharton's own work we must be content to praise the memoir, marked by good sense as well as erudition; and the bibliography, which includes the latest programs of Russian universities. The result is one of the rare books that give fresh life to an ancient author, and beget other good books, such, in this case, as Michael Field's Long Ago. It appeals alike to the scholar, the bibliophile, and the general public; and by it the author's name will be preserved, along with that of the immortal poetess, when far more notorious writers of the day are forgotten.

But Mr. Wharton was by no means a man of one book. Though he had got together a choice collection of English literature, his real interest lay in natural history. It would be difficult, indeed, to say to which of its branches he was most devoted. His knowledge of ornithology was based upon observation as much as upon books. His eye and ear were both highly trained, and he always made his learning subservient to nature. So, again, with regard to botany. While he did not despise the most technical details, it was his delight to accompany gatherings of autumn fungus-hunters, and to point out what was wholesome and what poisonous. He was one of the joint compilers of the official List of British Birds published by the B. O. U. (1883), his special task being to supervise and elucidate the Latin nomenclature; and he contributed a chapter on the local flora to a work entitled Hampstead Hill (1889).

So much, however, summarises only what Harry Wharton did, not what he was. His was one of the bounteous natures that radiate happiness wherever they go. Men, women, and children alike brightened in his genial presence. He led a blameless and a beneficent life. He never made an enemy and he never lost a friend. He ought to have been a contemporary of Charles Lamb. It is hard to realise—especially for one who has known and loved him for nearly thirty years—that we shall never see again that os honestum, never hear again that ringing laugh.

'God be with his soul! A' was a merry man.'

J. S. COTTON.

1895.

CONTENTS

Page
Preface to Third Edition		v
Preface to Second Edition		ix
Preface to First Edition		xv
In Memoriam		xxiii
Life of Sappho		1
I.	In Sapphic Metre	49
II.	In Dactylic Metre	87
III.	In Alcaic Metre	88
IV.	In Mixed Glyconic and Alcaic Metre	89
V.	In Choriambic Metre	90
VI.	In Various Metres	125
VII.	In the Ionic "A Minore" Metre	127
VIII.	Epithalamia, Bridal Songs	130
IX.	Epigrams	149
X.	Miscellaneous	152
The Fayum Fragments		181
Sappho to Phaon		187
Bibliography		199

ILLUSTRATIONS

Sappho	Frontispiece
Engraved by Mr. John Cother Webb, from a picture by Sir L. Alma Tadema, R.A.
Mitylene	To face page	1
The Fayum Fragments	"	181

Mitylene

LIFE OF SAPPHO

Sappho, the one great woman poet of the world, who called herself Psappha in her own Aeolic dialect (in fragments 1 and 59), is said to have been at the zenith of her fame about the year 610 B.C.

During her lifetime Jeremiah first began to prophesy (628 B.C.), Daniel was carried away to Babylon (606 B.C.), Nebuchadnezzar besieged and captured Jerusalem (587 B.C.), Solon was legislating at Athens, and Tarquinius Priscus, the fifth king, is said to have been reigning over Rome. She lived before the birth of Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, the religion now professed by perhaps almost a third of the whole population of the globe.

Two centuries have sufficed to obscure most of the events in the life of Shakspere; it can hardly be expected that the lapse of twenty-five centuries should have left many authentic records of the history of Sappho. Little even of that internal evidence, upon which biography may rely, can be gathered from her extant poems, in such fragmentary form have they come down to us. Save for the quotations of grammarians and lexicographers, no word of hers would have survived. Yet her writings seem to have been preserved intact till at least the third century of our era, for Athenaeus, who wrote about that time, applies to himself the words of the Athenian comic poet Epicrates in his Anti-LaÏs (about 360 B.C.), saying that he too—

Had learned by heart completely all the songs,

Breathing of love, which sweetest Sappho sang.

Scaliger says, although there does not seem to exist any confirmatory evidence, that the works of Sappho and other lyric poets were burnt at Constantinople and at Rome in the year 1073, in the popedom of Gregory VII. Cardan says the burning took place under Gregory Nazianzen, about 380 A.D. And Petrus Alcyonius relates that he heard when a boy that very many of the works of the Greek poets were burnt by order of the Byzantine emperors, and the poems of Gregory Nazianzen circulated in their stead. Bishop Blomfield (Mus. Crit. i. p. 422) thinks they must all have been destroyed at an early date, because neither Alcaeus nor Sappho was annotated by any of the later Grammarians. 'Few indeed, but those, roses,' as the poet Meleager said, are the precious verses the zeal of anti-paganism has spared to us.

Of Sappho's parents nothing is definitely known. Herodotus calls her father Scamandrōnymus; and as he wrote within one hundred and fifty years of her death there is little reason to doubt his accuracy. But Suidas, who compiled a Greek lexicon in about the eleventh century A.D., gives us the choice of seven other names. Her mother's name was Clēis. The celebrated Epistle known as that of Sappho to Phaon, of which I subjoin a translation by Pope in the Appendix, and which is commonly ascribed to Ovid,^[1] says Sappho was only six years old 'when the bones of her parent, gathered up before their time, drank in her tears'; this is supposed to refer to her father, because in fr. 90 she speaks of her mother as still alive.

She had two brothers, Charaxus and Larichus; Suidas indeed names a third, Eurygius, but nothing is known of him.

Larichus was public cup-bearer at Mitylene, an office only held by youths of noble birth (cf. fr. 139), whence it is inferred that Sappho belonged to the wealthy aristocratic class.

Charaxus was occupied in carrying the highly prized Lesbian wine to Naucrătis^[2] in Egypt, where he fell in love with a woman of great beauty, Dōrĭcha or Rhodōpis, and ransomed her from slavery for a great sum of money. Herodotus says she came originally from Thrace, and had once served Iadmon of Samos, having been fellow-slave with Aesop the fabulist. Suidas says Charaxus married her, and had children by her; but Herodotus only says that she was made free by him, and remained in Egypt, and 'being very lovely, acquired great riches for a person of her condition.' Out of a tenth part of her gains (cf. fr. 138) she furnished the temple of Apollo at Delphi with a number of iron spits for roasting oxen on. Athenaeus, however, blames Herodotus for having confused two different persons, saying that Charaxus married Doricha, while it was Rhodopis who sent the spits to Delphi. Certainly it appears clear that Sappho in her poem called her Doricha, but Rhodopis, 'Rosy-cheek,' was probably the name by which she was known among her lovers, on account of her beauty.

Another confusion respecting Rhodopis is that in Greece she was believed to have built the third pyramid; and Herodotus takes pains to show that such a work was far beyond the reach of her wealth, and was really due to kings of a much earlier date. Still the tale remained current, false as it undoubtedly was, at least till the time of Pliny (about 77 A.D.). It has been shown by Bunsen and others that it is probable that

The Rhodope that built the pyramid

was Nitocris, the beautiful Egyptian queen who was the heroine of so many legends; Mycerinus began the third pyramid, and Nitocris finished it.

Strabo and Aelian relate a story of Rhodopis which recalls that of Cinderella. One day, they say, when Rhodopis was bathing at Naucratis, an eagle snatched up one of her sandals from the hands of her female attendants, and carried it to Memphis; the eagle, soaring over the head of the king (whom Aelian calls Psammetichus^[3]), who was administering justice at the time, let the sandal fall into his lap. The king, struck with the beauty of the sandal and the singularity of the incident, sent over all Egypt to discover the woman to whom it belonged. The owner was found in the city of Naucratis and brought to the king; he made her his queen, and at her death erected, so the story goes, this third pyramid in her honour.

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

With all a lover's fervour,—and, as he

Deftly attuned the lyre, to madness stung

The Teian bard with envious jealousy.

For her Anacreon, charming lyrist, wooed,

And fain would win, with sweet mellifluous chime,

Encircled by her Lesbian sisterhood;

Would often Samos leave, and many a time

From vanquished Teos' viny orchards hie

To viny Lesbos' isle,—and from the shore,

O'er the blue wave, on Lectum cast his eye,

And think on bygone days and times no more.

(Translated by J. Bailey.)

Diphilus too, in his play Sappho, represented Archilochus and Hippōnax as her lovers—for a joke, as Athenaeus prudently remarks. Neither of these, however, was a contemporary of hers, and it seems quite certain that Anacreon, who flourished fully fifty years later, never set eyes on Sappho (cf. fr. 26).

How long she lived we cannot tell. The epithet γεραιτέρα, 'somewhat old,' which she applies to herself in fr. 75, may have been merely relative. The story about her brother Charaxus and Rhodopis would show she lived at least until 572 B.C., the year of the accession of Amāsis, king of Egypt, under whose reign Herodotus says Rhodopis flourished; but one can scarcely draw so strict an inference. If what Herodotus says is true, Sappho may have reached the age of fifty years. At any rate, 'the father of history' is more worthy of credence than the scandal-mongers. An inscription on the famous Parian marbles, a system of chronology compiled, perhaps by a schoolmaster, in the third century B.C. (cf. p. 17), says: 'When Aristocles reigned over the Athenians, Sappho fled from Mitylene and sailed to Sicily'; but the exact date is illegible, though it may be placed between 604 and 592 B.C. It is hardly safe to refer to this Ovid's assertion that she went to Sicily in pursuit of Phaon.

Balancing all the evidence, Fynes-Clinton, in his Fasti Hellenici, i. p. 225, takes the years 611-592 B.C. to be the period in which Sappho flourished.

That she was a native of Lesbos, an island in the Aegean sea, is universally admitted; and all but those writers who speak of a second Sappho say she lived at Mitylēnē, the chief city of the island. The existence of a Sappho who was a courtesan of Erĕsus, a smaller Lesbian city, besides the poetess of Mitylene, is the invention of comparatively late authors; and it is probably due to their desire to detach the calumnies, which the Comic poets so long made popular, from the personality of the poetess to whose good name her own contemporaries bore witness (cf. Alcaeus' address to her, p. 8).

Strabo, in his Geography, says: 'Mitylene [Μιτυλήνη or Μυτιληνη] is well provided with everything. It formerly produced celebrated men, such as Pittacus, one of the Seven Wise Men; Alcaeus the poet, and others. Contemporary with these persons flourished Sappho, who was something wonderful; at no period within memory has any woman been known who in any, even the least degree, could be compared to her for poetry.' Indeed, the glory of Lesbos was that Sappho was its citizen, and its chief fame centres in the fact of her celebrity. By its modern name Mitilene, under the dominion of the Turks, the island,

Where burning Sappho loved and sung,

is now mainly known for its oil and wine and its salubrity. In ancient times its wine was the most celebrated through all Greece; and Vergil refers to its vines, which trailed like ivy on the ground, while many authors testify to the exceptional wholesomeness of Lesbian wine. But the clue to Sappho's individuality can only be found in the knowledge of what, in her age, Lesbos and the Lesbians were; around her converges all we know of the Aeolian race. As Mr. Swinburne says—

'For a certain space of time,' writes Mr. J. Addington Symonds in his Studies of Greek Poets, first series, pp. 127 ff., 'the Aeolians occupied the very foreground of Greek literature, and blazed out with a brilliance of lyrical splendour that has never been surpassed. There seems to have been something passionate and intense in their temperament, which made the emotions of the Dorian and the Ionian feeble by comparison. Lesbos, the centre of Aeolian culture, was the island of overmastering passions; the personality of the Greek race burned there with a fierce and steady flame of concentrated feeling. The energies which the Ionians divided between pleasure, politics, trade, legislation, science, and the arts, and which the Dorians turned to war and statecraft and social economy, were restrained by the Aeolians within the sphere of individual emotions, ready to burst forth volcanically. Nowhere in any age of Greek history, or in any part of Hellas, did the love of physical beauty, the sensibility to radiant scenes of nature, the consuming fervour of personal feeling, assume such grand proportions did receive so illustrious an expression as they did in Lesbos. At first this passion blossomed into the most exquisite lyrical poetry that the world has known: this was the flower-time of the Aeolians, their brief and brilliant spring. But the fruit it bore was bitter and rotten. Lesbos became a byword for corruption. The passions which for a moment had flamed into the gorgeousness of Art, burnt their envelope of words and images, remained a mere furnace of sensuality, from which no expression of the divine in human life could be expected. In this the Lesbian poets were not unlike the ProvenÇal troubadours, who made a literature of Love; or the Venetian painters, who based their Art upon the beauty of colour, the voluptuous charms of the flesh. In each case the motive of enthusiastic passion sufficed to produce a dazzling result. But as soon as its freshness was exhausted there was nothing left for Art to live on, and mere decadence to sensuality ensued. Several circumstances contributed to aid the development of lyric poetry in Lesbos. The customs of the Aeolians permitted more social and domestic freedom than was common in Greece. Aeolian women were not confined to the harem like Ionians, or subjected to the rigorous discipline of the Spartans. While mixing freely with male society, they were highly educated, and accustomed to express their sentiments to an extent unknown elsewhere in history—until, indeed, the present time. The Lesbian ladies applied themselves successfully to literature. They formed clubs for the cultivation of poetry and music. They studied the art of beauty, and sought to refine metrical forms and diction. Nor did they confine themselves to the scientific side of Art. Unrestrained by public opinion, and passionate for the beautiful, they cultivated their senses and emotions, and developed their wildest passions. All the luxuries and elegances of life which that climate and the rich valleys of Lesbos could afford, were at their disposal: exquisite gardens, in which the rose and hyacinth spread perfume; river-beds ablaze with the oleander and wild pomegranate; olive-groves and fountains, where the cyclamen and violet flowered with feathery maidenhair; pine-shadowed coves, where they might bathe in the calm of a tideless sea; fruits such as only the southern sea and sea-wind can mature; marble cliffs, starred with jonquil and anemone in spring, aromatic with myrtle and lentisk and samphire and wild rosemary through all the months; nightingales that sang in May; temples dim with dusky gold and bright with ivory; statues and frescoes of heroic forms. In such scenes as these the Lesbian poets lived, and thought of Love. When we read their poems, we seem to have the perfumes, colours, sounds, and lights of that luxurious land distilled in verse. Nor was a brief but biting winter wanting to give tone to their nerves, and, by contrast with the summer, to prevent the palling of so much luxury on sated senses. The voluptuousness of Aeolian poetry is not like that of Persian or Arabian art. It is Greek in its self-restraint, proportion, tact. We find nothing burdensome in its sweetness. All is so rhythmically and sublimely ordered in the poems of Sappho that supreme art lends solemnity and grandeur to the expression of unmitigated passion.'

The story of Sappho's love for Phaon, and her leap from the Leucadian rock in consequence of his disdaining her, though it has been so long implicitly believed, does not seem to rest on any firm historical basis. Indeed, more than one epigrammatist in the Greek Anthology expressly states that she was buried in an Aeolic grave.^[4]

Still Phaon, for all the myths that cluster round his name, for his miraculous loveliness and his insensibility to love, may yet have been a real personage. Like other heroes, he may possibly have lived at a period long anterior to that of the traditions about him which have been handed down to us. He is said to have been a boatman of Mitylene (cf. fr. 140), who was endowed by Aphrodite with youth and extraordinary beauty as a reward for his having ferried her for nothing. Servius, who wrote about 400 A.D. (cf. p. 39), says she gave him an alabaster box of ointment, the effect of which was to make all women fall in love with him; and that one of these—he does not mention her name—threw herself in despair from the cliff of Leucas. Servius further states, on the authority of Menander, that the temple was founded by Phaon of Lesbos. Phaon's beauty and power of fascination passed into a proverb. Pliny, however, says he became the object of Sappho's love because he had found the male root of the plant called eryngo, probably our sea-holly, and that it acted like a love-charm. And when Athenaeus is talking about lettuces, as to their use as food and their anti-aphrodisiac properties, he says Callimachus' story of Aphrodite hiding Adonis under a lettuce is 'an allegorical statement of the poet's, intended to show that those who are much addicted to the use of lettuces are very little adapted for pleasures of love. Cratinus,' he goes on, 'says that Aphrodite when in love with Phaon hid him in the leaves of lettuces; but the younger Marsyas says that she hid him amid the grass of barley.'

Those fanciful writers who assert the existence of a second Sappho say that it was not the poetess who fell in love with Phaon, but that other Sappho on whom they fasten all the absurd stories circulated by the Comic writers. The tale runs that the importunate love of Sappho caused Phaon to flee to Sicily, whither she followed him. Ovid's Epistle, before mentioned (p. 3), is the foundation for the greater part of the legend. The inscription on the Parian marbles (cf. p. 9) also mentions a certain year in which 'Sappho sailed from Mitylene and fled to Sicily.' The chronicle, however, says nothing about Phaon, nor is any reason given for her exile; some have imagined that she was obliged to leave her country on political grounds, but there is no trace in her writings, nor does any report indicate, that she ever interested herself in politics.

Strabo, in his Geography already quoted (p. 10), says: 'There is a white rock which stretches out from Leucas to the sea and towards Cephallenia, that takes its name from its whiteness. The rock of Leucas has upon it a temple of Apollo, and the leap from it was believed to stop love. From this it is said that Sappho first, as Menander says somewhere, "in pursuit of the haughty Phaon, urged on by maddening desire, threw herself from its far-seen rocks, imploring thee [Apollo], lord and king."' The former promontory of Leucas is now separated from the mainland and forms one of the Ionian islands, known as Santa Maura, off the wild and rugged coast of Acarnania. The story of Sappho's having ventured the Leucadian leap is repeated by Ovid, and was never much doubted, except by those who believed in a second Sappho, till modern times. Still, it is strange that none of the many authors who relate the legend say what was the result of the leap—whether it was fatal to her life or to her love. Moreover, Ptolemy Hephaestion (about 100 A.D.), who, in the extant summary of his works published in the Myriobiblion of Photius, gives a list of many men and women who by the Leucadian leap were cured of the madness of love or perished, does not so much as mention the name of Sappho. A circumstantial account of Sappho's leap, on which the popular modern idea is chiefly founded, was given by Addison, relying to no small extent upon his imagination for his facts, 'with his usual exquisite humour,' as Warton remarks, in the 233rd Spectator, Nov. 27, 1711. 'Sappho the Lesbian,' says Addison, 'in love with Phaon, arrived at the temple of Apollo habited like a bride, in garments as white as snow. She wore a garland of myrtle on her head, and carried in her hand the little musical instrument of her own invention. After having sung a hymn to Apollo, she hung up her garland on one side of his altar, and her harp on the other. She then tucked up her vestments like a Spartan virgin, and amidst thousands of spectators, who were anxious for her safety and offered up vows for her deliverance, marched directly forwards to the utmost summit of the promontory, where, after having repeated a stanza of her own verses, which we could not hear, she threw herself off the rock with such an intrepidity as was never before observed in any who had attempted that dangerous leap. Many who were present related that they saw her fall into the sea, from whence she never rose again; though there were others who affirmed that she never came to the bottom of her leap, but that she was changed into a swan as she fell, and that they saw her hovering in the air under that shape. But whether or no the whiteness and fluttering of her garments might not deceive those who looked upon her, or whether she might not really be metamorphosed into that musical and melancholy bird, is still a doubt among the Lesbians. Alcaeus, the famous lyric poet, who had for some time been passionately in love with Sappho, arrived at the promontory of Leucate that very evening in order to take the leap upon her account; but hearing that Sappho had been there before him, and that her body could be nowhere found, he very generously lamented her fall, and is said to have written his hundred and twenty-fifth ode upon that occasion.'

It is to be noted in this connection that the part of the cliff of Santa Maura or Leukadi, known to this day as 'Sappho's Leap,' was used, even in historical times, as a place whence criminals condemned to death were thrown into the sea. The people used, it is said, to tie numbers of birds to the limbs of the condemned and cover them with feathers to break the force of their fall, and then send boats to pick them up. If they survived, they were pardoned.

Those modern critics who reject the whole story as fabulous derive it from the myth of the love of Aphrodite and Adonis, who in the Greek version was called PhaËthon or Phaon. Theodor Kock (cf. Preface, p. xvii) is the latest exponent of these views, and he pushes them to a very fanciful extent, even adducing Minos as the sun and Britomartis as the moon to explain the Leucadian leap. Certainly the legend does not appear before the Attic Comedy, about 395 B.C., more than two centuries after Sappho's death. And the Leucadian leap may have been ascribed to her from its having been often mentioned as a mere poetical metaphor taken from an expiatory rite connected with the worship of Apollo; the image occurs in Stesichorus and Anacreon, and may possibly have been used by Sappho. For instance, Athenaeus cites a poem by Stesichorus about a maiden named Calyca who was in love with a youth named Euathlus, and prayed in a modest manner to Aphrodite to aid her in becoming his wife; but when the young man scorned her, she threw herself from a precipice: and this he says happened near Leucas. Athenaeus says the poet represented the maiden as particularly modest, so that she was not willing to live with the youth on his own terms, but prayed that if possible she might become the wedded wife of Euathlus; and if that were not possible, that she might be released from life. And Anacreon, in a fragment preserved by Hephaestion, says, as if proverbially, 'Now again rising I, drunk with love, dive from the Leucadian rock into the hoary wave.'

Sappho 'loved, and loved more than once, and loved to the point of desperate sorrow; though it did not come to the mad and fatal leap from Leucate, as the unnecessary legend pretends. There are, nevertheless,' continues Mr. Edwin Arnold, 'worse steeps than Leucate down which the heart may fall; and colder seas of despair than the Adriatic in which to engulf it.'

Seeing that six comedies are known to have been written under the title of Sappho (cf. p. 37), and that her history furnished material for at least four more, it is not strange that much of their substance should in succeeding centuries have been regarded as genuine. In a later and debased age she became a sort of stock character of the licentious drama. The fervour of her love and the purity of her life, and the very fact of a woman having been the leader of a school of poetry and music, could not have failed to have been misunderstood by the Greek comedians at the close of the fifth century B.C. The society and habits of the Aeolians at Lesbos in Sappho's time were, as M. Bournouf (Lit. Grecq. i. p. 194) has shown, in complete contrast to those of the Athenians in the period of their corruption; just as the unenviable reputation of the Lesbians was earned long after the date of Sappho. 'It is not surprising,' writes Mr. Philip Smith, in his article SAPPHO in Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, 'that the early Christian writers against heathenism should have accepted a misrepresentation which the Greeks themselves had invented.' The licence of the Attic comedians is testified by Athenaeus' mention that Antiochus of Alexandria, a writer otherwise unknown, whose date is quite uncertain, wrote a 'Treatise on the Poets who were ridiculed by the Comic writers of the Middle Comedy'; and by the fact that a little before 403 B.C. a law was passed which enacted that no one was to be represented on the stage by name, μὴ δεῖν ὀνομαστὶ κωμῳδεῖν (cf. p. 38).

It was not till early in the present century that the current calumnies against Sappho were seriously inquired into by the celebrated scholar of GÖttingen, Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, and found to be based on quite insufficient evidence. Colonel Mure endeavoured at great length, both here and in Germany, to expose fallacies in Welcker's arguments; but the bitterness of his attack, and the unfairness of much of his reasoning, go far to weaken his otherwise acknowledged authority. Professor Comparetti has recently examined the question with much fairness and erudition, and, with the possible exception referred to above (p. 3, note), has done much to separate fiction from fact; but he does not endorse all Welcker's conclusions.

Sappho seems to have been the centre of a society in Mitylene, a kind of Æsthetic club, devoted to the service of the Muses. Around her gathered maidens from even comparatively distant places, attracted by her fame, to study under her guidance all that related to poetry and music; much as at a later age students resorted to the philosophers of Athens.

The names of fourteen of her girl-friends (ἑταῖραι) and pupils (μαθήτριαι) are preserved. The most celebrated was Erinna of Telos, a poetess of whose genius too few lines are left for us to judge; but we know what the ancients thought of her from this Epigram in the Greek Anthology:

Probably fr. 77 refers to her. Of the other poetess, Damophyla of Pamphylia, not a word survives; but Apollonius of Tyana says she lived in close friendship with Sappho, and made poems after her model. Suidas says Sappho's 'companions and friends were three, viz., Atthis, Telesippa, and Megara; and her pupils were Anagora of the territory of Miletus, Gongyla of Colophon, and Euneica of Salamis.' She herself praises Mnasidica along with Gyrinna (as Maximus Tyrius spells the name) in fr. 76; she complains of Atthis preferring Andromeda to her in fr. 41; she gibes at Andromeda in fr. 70, and again refers to her in fr. 58, apparently rejoicing over her discomfiture. Of Gorgo, in fr. 48, she seems to say, in Swinburne's paraphrase,

Anactoria's name is not mentioned in any fragment we have, although tradition says that fr. 2 was addressed to her; but Maximus Tyrius and others place her in the front rank of Sappho's intimates: 'What Alcibiades,' he says, 'and Charmides and Phaedrus were to Socrates, Gyrinna and Atthis and Anactoria were to the Lesbian.' Another, Dica, we find her (in fr. 78) praising for her skill in weaving coronals. And in fr. 86 a daughter of Polyanax is addressed as one of her maidens. The name is not preserved of her whom (in fr. 68) she reproaches as disloyal to the service of the Muses. The text of Ovid's Sappho to Phaon is so corrupt that we know not whom she is enumerating there of those she loved; even the name of her 'fair Cydno' varies in the MSS. Nor can we tell who 'those other hundred maidens' were whom Ovid (cf. p. 188) makes her say she 'blamelessly loved' before Phaon satisfied her heart. But the preservation of the names or so many of her associates is enough to prove the celebrity of her teaching.

Little more can be learnt about Sappho's actual life. In fr. 72 she says of herself, 'I am not one of a malignant nature, but have a quiet temper.' Antiphanes, in his play Sappho, is said by Athenaeus to have represented her proposing absurd riddles,^[5] so little did the Comic writers understand her genius. Fr. 79 is quoted by Athenaeus to show her love for beauty and honour. Compare also fr. 11 and 31 for his testimony to the purity of her love for her girl-friends: πάντα καθαρα τοῖς καθαροῖς, 'unto the pure all things are pure.'

Plato, in his Phaedrus, calls Sappho 'beautiful,' for the sweetness of her songs; 'and yet,' says Maximus Tyrius, 'she was small and dark,' une petite brunette,—'est etiam fusco grata colore venus':

The epithet 'beautiful' is repeated by so many writers that it may everywhere refer only to the beauty of her writings. Even Ovid seems to think that her genius threw any lack of comeliness into the shade—a lack, however, which, if it had existed, could not have escaped the derision of the Comic writers, especially since Homer (Iliad, ix. 129, 271) had celebrated the characteristic beauty of the women of Lesbos. The address of Alcaeus to Sappho, quoted on p. 8, shows the sweetness of her expression, even if the epithet ἰόπλοκος (violet-weaving) cannot be replaced by ἰοπλόκαμος (with violet locks), as some MSS. read. And Damocharis, in the Greek Anthology, in an Epigram on a statue of Sappho, speaks of her bright eyes showing her wisdom, and compares the beauty of her face to that of Aphrodite. To another writer in the Greek Anthology she is 'the pride of the lovely-haired Lesbians.' Anacreon, as well as Philoxenus, calls her 'sweet-voiced' (cf. fr. 1).

But though we know so little of Sappho's personal appearance, the whole testimony of the ancient writers describes the charm of her poetry with unbounded praise.

Strabo, in his Geography, calls her 'something wonderful' (θαύμαστόν τι χρῆμα), and says he knew 'no woman who in any, even the least degree, could be compared to her for poetry' (cf. p. 10).

Such was her unique renown that she was called 'The Poetess,' just as Homer was 'The Poet.' Plato numbers her among the Wise. Plutarch speaks of the grace of her poems acting on her listeners like an enchantment, and says that when he read them he set aside the drinking-cup in very shame. So much was a knowledge of her writings held to be an essential of culture among the Greeks, that Philodemus, a contemporary of Cicero, in an Epigram in the Greek Anthology, notes as the mark of an ill-informed woman that she could not even sing Sappho's songs.

Writers in the Greek Anthology call her the Tenth Muse, child of Aphrodite and ErÔs, nursling of the Graces and Persuasion, pride of Hellas, companion of Apollo, and prophesy her immortality. For instance, Antipater of Sidon says:

And Tullius Laurea:

And Piny̆tus:

And Plato:

Indeed, all the praises of the Epigrammatists are in the same strain; none but held her, with the poetess Nossis, 'the flower of the Graces.'

Many authors relate how the Lesbians gloried in Sappho's having been their citizen, and say that her image was engraved on the coins of Mitylene—'though she was a woman,' as Aristotle remarks. J. C. Wolf describes six extant coins which may presumably have been struck at different times in honour of her; he gives a figure of each on his frontispiece, but they have little artistic merit.

It is worthy of note that no coins bearing the name or effigy of Sappho have hitherto been discovered which were current before the Christian era, so that no conclusion drawn from inscriptions on them is of any historical importance. In the time of the Antonines, from which most of these coins seem to date, her name was as much sullied by traditions as it has been to the present day.

Some busts there are of her, but none seem genuine. Perhaps the best representation of what she and her surroundings might have been is given by Mr. Alma Tadema in his 'Sappho,' exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1881, which has been etched by Mr. C. O. Murray, and admirably photographed in various sizes by the Berlin Photographic Company; from the head of Sappho in this picture Mr. J. C. Webb has engraved the medallion which forms the frontispiece of this work.

A bronze statue of Sappho was splendidly made by Silanion, and stolen by Verres, according to Cicero, from the prytaneum at Syracuse. And Christodorus, in the Greek Anthology, describes a statue of her as adorning the gymnasium of Zeuxippus at Byzantium in the fifth century A.D. Pliny says that Leon, an artist otherwise unknown, painted a picture of her in the garb of a lutist (psaltria).

Numerous illustrations of her still exist upon Greek vases, most of which have been reproduced and annotated upon by Professor Comparetti (see Bibliography); but they are all in a debased style, and one would feel more content if one had not seen them.

Not only do we know the general estimate of Sappho by antiquity, but her praise is also often given in great detail. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, when he quotes her Ode to Aphrodite (fr. 1), describes at length the beauty of her style. Some of Demetrius' praise is quoted as fr. 124, but he also elaborately shows her command of all the figures and arts of rhetoric. What Longinus, Plutarch, and Aristoxenus thought of her I have summarised under fr. 2. The story of Solon's praise is given under fr. 137. And Plutarch in his Life of Demetrius, telling a story of Antiochus' (324-261 B.C.) being in love with Stratonīce, the young wife of his father, and making a pretence of sickness, says that his physician Erasistratus discovered the object of the passion he was endeavouring to conceal by observing his behaviour at the entrance of every visitor to his sick chamber. 'When others entered,' says Plutarch, 'he was entirely unaffected; but when Stratonice came in, as she often did, either alone or with Seleucus [his father, King of Syria], he showed all the symptoms described by Sappho, the faltering voice, the burning blush, the languid eye, the sudden sweat, the tumultuous pulse; and at length, the passion overcoming his spirits, he fainted to a mortal paleness.' The physician noted what Sappho had described as the true signs of love, and Plutarch touchingly relates how the king in consequence surrendered Stratonice to his son, and made them king and queen of Upper Asia.

Modern writers are not less unanimous than the ancients in their praise of Sappho. Addison prefixes this quotation from Phaedrus (iii. 1, 5), to his first essay on her (Spectator, No. 223): 'O sweet soul, how good must you have been heretofore, when your remains are so delicious!' 'Her soul,' he says, 'seems to have been made up of love and poetry. She felt the passion in all its warmth, and described it in all its symptoms.... I do not know,' he goes on, 'by the character that is given of her works, whether it is not for the benefit of mankind that they are lost. They are filled with such bewitching tenderness and rapture, that it might have been dangerous to have given them a reading.'

Mr. J. Addington Symonds says: 'The world has suffered no greater literary loss than the loss of Sappho's poems. So perfect are the smallest fragments preserved ... that we muse in a sad rapture of astonishment to think what the complete poems must have been.... Of all the poets of the world, of all the illustrious artists of all literatures, Sappho is the one whose every word has a peculiar and unmistakable perfume, a seal of absolute perfection and illimitable grace. In her art she was unerring. Even Archilochus seems commonplace when compared with her exquisite rarity of phrase.... Whether addressing the maidens, whom even in Elysium, as Horace says, Sappho could not forget; or embodying the profounder yearnings of an intense soul after beauty which has never on earth existed, but which inflames the hearts of noblest poets, robbing their eyes of sleep, and giving them the bitterness of tears to drink—these dazzling fragments

are the ultimate and finished forms of passionate utterance, diamonds, topazes, and blazing rubies, in which the fire of the soul is crystallised for ever.... In Sappho and Catullus ... we meet with richer and more ardent natures [than those of Horace and Alcaeus]: they are endowed with keener sensibilities, with a sensuality more noble because of its intensity, with emotions more profound, with a deeper faculty of thought, that never loses itself in the shallows of "Stoic-Epicurean acceptance," but simply and and exquisitely apprehends the facts of human life.'

And some passages from Swinburne's Notes on Poems and Reviews, showing a modern poet's endeavour to familiarise his readers with Sappho's spirit, can hardly be omitted. Speaking of his poem Anactoria, he says: 'In this poem I have simply expressed, or tried to express, that violence of affection between one and another which hardens into rage and deepens into despair. The keynote which I have here touched,' he continues, 'was struck long since by Sappho. We in England are taught, are compelled under penalties to learn, to construe, and to repeat, as schoolboys, the imperishable and incomparable verses of that supreme poet; and I at least am grateful for the training. I have wished, and I have even ventured to hope, that I might be in time competent to translate into a baser and later language the divine words which even when a boy I could not but recognise as divine. That hope, if indeed I dared ever entertain such a hope, I soon found fallacious. To translate the two odes and the remaining fragments of Sappho is the one impossible task; and as witness of this I will call up one of the greatest among poets. Catullus "translated"—or as his countrymen would now say "traduced"—the Ode to Anactoria—Εἰς Ἐρωμέναν: a more beautiful translation there never was and will never be; but compared with the Greek, it is colourless and bloodless, puffed out by additions and enfeebled by alterations. Let any one set against each other the two first stanzas, Latin and Greek, and pronounce.... Where Catullus failed, I could not hope to succeed; I tried instead to reproduce in a diluted and dilated form the spirit of a poem which could not be reproduced in the body.

'Now the ode Εἰς Ἐρωμέναν—the "Ode to Anactoria" (as it is named by tradition)—the poem ... which has in the whole world of verse no companion and no rival but the Ode to Aphrodite, has been twice at least translated or traduced.... To the best (and bad is the best) of their ability, they [Nicholas Boileau-DesprÉaux and Ambrose Philips] have "done into" bad French and bad English the very words of Sappho. Feeling that although I might do it better I could not do it well, I abandoned the idea of translation—ἑκὼν ἀέκοντί γε θυμῷ. I tried then to write some paraphrase of the fragments which the Fates and the Christians have spared us. I have not said, as Boileau and Philips have, that the speaker sweats and swoons at sight of her favourite by the side of a man. I have abstained from touching on such details, for this reason: that I felt myself incompetent to give adequate expression in English to the literal and absolute words of Sappho; and would not debase and degrade them into a viler form. No one can feel more deeply than I do the inadequacy of my work. "That is not Sappho," a friend once said to me. I could only reply, "It is as near as I can come; and no man can come close to her." Her remaining verses are the supreme success, the final achievement, of the poetic art.... I have striven to cast my spirit into the mould of hers, to express and represent not the poem but the poet. I did not think it requisite to disfigure the page with a footnote wherever I had fallen back upon the original text. Here and there, I need not say, I have rendered into English the very words of Sappho. I have tried also to work into words of my own some expression of their effect: to bear witness how, more than any other's, her verses strike and sting the memory in lonely places, or at sea, among all loftier sights and sounds—how they seem akin to fire and air, being themselves "all air and fire"; other element there is none in them. As to the angry appeal against the supreme mystery of oppressive heaven, which I have ventured to put into her mouth at that point only where pleasure culminates in pain, affection in anger, and desire in despair—they are to be taken as the first outcome or outburst of foiled and fruitless passion recoiling on itself. After this, the spirit finds time to breathe and repose above all vexed senses of the weary body, all bitter labours of the revolted soul; the poet's pride of place is resumed, the lofty conscience of invincible immortality in the memories and the mouths of men.' No one who wishes to understand Sappho can afford to neglect a study of the poem thus annotated by its author. As Professor F. T. Palgrave justly says, 'Sappho is truly pictorial in the ancient sense: the image always simply presented; the sentiment left to our sensibility.'

The Greek comedies relating to the history of Sappho, referred to on previous pages, were all written by dramatists who belonged to what is known as the Middle Comedy, two centuries after her time (404-340 B.C.). The comedy of that period was devoted to satirising classes of people rather than individuals, to ridiculing stock-characters, to criticising the systems and merits of philosophers and writers, to parodies of older poets, and to travesties of mythological subjects. The extent to which the licence of the comic writers of that age had reached may be judged from the passing of the law referred to on a previous page (p. 23)—μὴ δεῖν ὀνομαστὶ κωμῳδεῖν—though the practice continued under ill-concealed disguise. Writers of such a temper were obviously unfit to hand down unsullied a character like Sappho's, powerful though their genius might be to make their inventions seem more true than actual history—'to make the worse appear the better reason.'

Sappho was the title of comedies by Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiphănes, Dīphĭlus, Ephippus, and Timocles, but very little is known of their contents. Of those by Ameipsias and Amphis only a single word out of each survives. Athenaeus quotes a few lines out of those by Ephippus and Timocles, for descriptions of men of contemptible character. The same writer refers to that by Diphilus for his use of the name of a kind of cup (μετανιπτρίς) which was used to drink out of when men had washed their hands after dinner, and for his having represented Archilochus and Hipponax (cf. p. 9) as lovers of Sappho. Of that by Antiphanes (cf. p. 26), who was the most celebrated and the most prolific of the playwrights of the Middle Comedy, we have, again in Athenaeus, a longer passage preserved; but it is merely to show the poetess proposing and solving a wearisome riddle (γρῖφος), satirising a subtlety his grosser audience could not understand.

Besides these, Antiphanes and Plato (the Comic writer, not the philosopher) each wrote a play called Phaon. Of that by Antiphanes but three words remain. Plato's drama is several times quoted by Athenaeus, but only when he is discussing details of cookery—one passage obviously for the sake of its coarseness. Menander wrote a play called Leucadia, and Antiphanes one called Leucadius. Antiphanes' play furnishes Athenaeus with nothing but a catalogue of seasonings. Some lines out of Menander's Leucadia are quoted above (p. 17) from Strabo, and it is referred to by several authors for the sake of some word or phrase; Servius, commenting on Vergil's Aeneid, iii. 274, gives a prÉcis of Turpilius' Latin paraphrase of it, which is mentioned above, p. 16.

Such is our knowledge of the Comic accounts of Sappho's history. When we consider the general character of the Middle Comedy, written as it was to please the Athenians after their golden time had passed, it is not unreasonable to take accounts which seem to have originated in such treatment with somewhat more than diffidence.

But it is not only the Greek dramatists who have written plays on the story of Sappho. Two have appeared in English during the last few years, one of which, by the late Mrs. Estelle Lewis ('Stella'), has been translated into modern Greek by Cambourogio for representation on the Athenian stage. The most celebrated, however, and one of considerable beauty, is by John Lilly, 'the Euphuist'; it is called Sapho and Phao, and was acted before Queen Elizabeth in 1584. The whole is allegorical, Sapho being probably meant for Elizabeth, queen of an island, and Phao is supposed to be Leicester. Lilly makes his Sapho a princess of Syracuse, and takes other liberties—though not such as the Greeks did—with her history; strangely enough, however, he makes no reference to the Leucadian leap. 'When Phao cometh,' he makes Sapho soliloquise, 'what then? Wilt thou open thy love? Yea? No, Sapho, but staring in his face till thine eyes dazzle and thy spirits faint, die before his face; then this shall be written on thy tomb, that though thy love were greater than wisdom could endure, yet thine honour was such as love could not violate.' Venus is introduced as marring their mutual love, and Phao says: 'This shall be my resolution, wherever I wander, to be as I were kneeling before Sapho; my loyalty unspotted, though unrewarded.... My life shall be spent in sighing and wishing, the one for my bad fortune, the other for Sapho's good.'

In France, the first opera written by the late M. Charles Gounod was entitled Sapho. The libretto was by M. Emile Augier. It was first given at the AcadÉmie, April 16, 1851; and in Italian, as Saffo, at Covent Garden, Aug. 9, in the same year. It was reproduced in 1858, and again in the new Opera House, April 3, 1884. Each time both author and composer recast their work, which contains many brilliant scenes and melodies. The celebrated Madame de StaËl wrote a drama called Sapho, but it has been long forgotten. Alphonse Daudet's novel, Sapho, moeurs Parisiennes, of which a version dramatised by M. Belot was played for the first time at the Gymnase in Paris, December 18, 1885, bears no reference to the poetess beyond the sobriquet of the heroine. The most artistically finished tragedy of the German dramatist Grillparzer is his Sappho. It was produced at Vienna in 1819, and is still played at many of the principal German theatres. An inferior Italian translation of it received a high encomium from Lord Byron. It is best known to English readers by Miss Ellen Frothingham's faithful translation.

About forty years ago, however, Messrs. Thomas Constable & Co., of Edinburgh, had issued an earlier translation of the play by L. C. C. [i.e. Lucy Caroline Cumming]; and there are some others.

The Queen of Roumania, under her nom de guerre of 'Carmen Sylva,' is the most distinguished among living poets who have idealised the life of Sappho. But her poem under that title, published in her StÜrme, owes more to its rich poetic charm than to the actual facts of the Greek story; in it the Lesbian seems to live in the Germany of to-day.

Although so little of Sappho remains, her complete works must have been considerable. She seems to have been the chief acknowledged writer of 'Wedding-Songs,' if we may believe Himerius (cf. fr. 93); and there is little doubt that Catullus' Epithalamia were copied, if not actually translated, from hers. Menander the Rhetorician praises her 'Invocatory Hymns,' in which he says she called upon Artemis and Aphrodite from a thousand hills; perhaps fr. 6 is taken out of one of these. Her hymn to Artemis is said to have been imitated by Damophyla (cf. p. 24). She was on all sides regarded as the greatest erotic poet of antiquity; as Swinburne makes her sing of herself—

My blood was hot wan wine of love,

And my song's sound the sound thereof,

The sound of the delight of it.