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Title: Sappho: Memoir, text, selected renderings, and a literal translation

Author: Henry Thornton Wharton

Release date: June 25, 2018 [eBook #57390]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Keith Edkins, Turgut Dincer and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
        book was produced from images made available by the
        HathiTrust Digital Library.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SAPPHO: MEMOIR, TEXT, SELECTED RENDERINGS, AND A LITERAL TRANSLATION ***




Produced by Keith Edkins, Turgut Dincer and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from images made available by the
HathiTrust Digital Library.)





Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
[=a] [)a] etc. represent vowels with macrons or breves respectively. In the
representations of metre - represents heavy and v a light syllable, with =
undetermined (breve and macron in the printed work).

       *       *       *       *       *




[Greek: SAPPHÔ]

[Illustration]

  L. Alma Tadema     J. Cother Webb
          pinxt.               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




  [Greek: Panta kathara tois katharois.]

  _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--

  [Greek: Ô theoi, tis ara Kupris, ê tis himeros,]
  [Greek: toude xynêpsato?]

(_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
[Greek: SAPH] (pl. xxxiv., fig. 532), which some at first thought might
refer to Sappho; but the more probable restoration is [Greek: ei]s
Aph[roditên], '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, [Greek: Mia
kai monê egeneto Sapphô]--'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

[Illustration]


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
Scamandr[=o]nymus; 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 Cl[=e]is. 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
Naucr[)a]tis[2] in Egypt, where he fell in love with a woman of great
beauty, D[=o]r[)i]cha or Rhod[=o]pis, 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 Cerc[=o]las, 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
(_P[=e]nifer_) and that of his country (_Vir[=i]lia_) 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,
St[=e]sich[)o]rus, and Pitt[)a]cus. Her own verses in fr. 28 are said to
have been written in answer to those of Alcaeus addressing her--

  [Greek: Ioplok' agna mellichomeide Sapphoi,]
  [Greek: thelô ti weipên, alla me kôlyei aidôs,]

'Violet-weaving, pure, soft-smiling Sappho, I want to say something, but
shame deters me' (cf. p. 24). Athenaeus says that Hermesi[)a]nax, 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 Hipp[=o]nax
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 [Greek: geraitera],
'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
Am[=a]sis, 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 Mityl[=e]n[=e], the chief city of the island. The
existence of a Sappho who was a courtesan of Er[)e]sus, 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 [[Greek: Mitylênê] or [Greek:
Mytilênê]] 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--

  Had Sappho's self not left her word thus long
        For token,
  The sea round Lesbos yet in waves of song
        Had spoken.

'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.'

  And Sappho with that gloriole
      .    .    .    .    .
  Of ebon hair on calmëd brows--
  O poet-woman, none forgoes
  The leap, attaining the repose!
        (MRS. E. B. BROWNING.)

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, [Greek: mê dein onomasti kômôdein] (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 ([Greek: hetairai]) and pupils
([Greek: mathêtriai]) 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_:

  These are Erinna's songs: how sweet, though slight!--
    For she was but a girl of nineteen years:--
  Yet stronger far than what most men can write:
    Had Death delayed, whose fame had equalled hers?
                                   (J. A. SYMONDS.)

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,

  I am weary of all thy words and soft strange ways.

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: [Greek: panta kathara tois katharois], '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 small dark body's Lesbian loveliness
  That held the fire eternal.
                             (SWINBURNE.)

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 [Greek: ioplokos] (violet-weaving) cannot be replaced
by [Greek: ioplokamos] (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' ([Greek:
thaumaston ti chrêma]), 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:

  Does Sappho then beneath thy bosom rest,
  Aeolian earth? That mortal Muse, confessed
  Inferior only to the choir above,
  That foster-child of Venus and of Love;
  Warm from whose lips divine Persuasion came,
  Greece to delight, and raise the Lesbian name.
    O ye who ever twine the three-fold thread,
  Ye Fates, why number with the silent dead
  That mighty songstress whose unrivalled powers
  Weave for the Muse a crown of deathless flowers?
                              (FRANCIS HODGSON.)

And Tullius Laurea:

  Stranger, who passest my Aeolian tomb,
  Say not 'The Lesbian poetess is dead';
  Men's hands this mound did raise, and mortal's work
  Is swiftly buried in forgetfulness.
  But if thou lookest, for the Muses' sake,
  On me whom all the Nine have garlanded,
  Know thou that I have Hades' gloom escaped:
  No dawn shall lack the lyrist Sappho's name.

And Pin[)y]tus:

  This tomb reveals where Sappho's ashes lie,
  But her sweet words of wisdom ne'er will die.
                               (LORD NEAVES.)

And Plato:

  Some thoughtlessly proclaim the Muses nine;
  A tenth is Lesbian Sappho, maid divine.
                         (LORD NEAVES.)

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 Straton[=i]ce, 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

  Which still, like sparkles of Greek fire,
  Burn on through Time, and ne'er expire,

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--[Greek: Eis
Erômenan]: 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 [Greek: Eis Erômenan]--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--[Greek: hekôn aekonti ge thymô]. 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)--[Greek: mê dein onomasti
kômôdein]--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, Antiph[)a]nes,
D[=i]ph[)i]lus, 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
([Greek: metaniptris]) 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
([Greek: griphos]), 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.

Epigrams and Elegies, Iambics and Monodies, she is also reported to have
written. Nine books of her lyric Odes are said to have existed, but it is
uncertain how they were composed. The imitations of her style and metre
made by Horace are too well known to require more than a passing reference.
Some of his odes have been regarded as direct translations from Sappho;
notably his _Carm._ iii. 12, _Miserarum est neque amori dare ludum neque
dulci_, which Volger compares to her fr. 90. Horace looked forward to
hearing her in Hades singing plaintively to the girls of her own country
(_Carm._ ii. 13, 14[6]), and in his time

  Still breathed the love, still lived the fire
  To which the Lesbian tuned her lyre.
                             (_Carm._ iv. 9. 10.)

Athenaeus says that Chamaeleon, one of the disciples of Aristotle, wrote a
book about Sappho; and Strabo says Callias of Lesbos interpreted her songs.
Alexander the Sophist used to lecture on her; and Dracon of Stratonica, in
the reign of Hadrian, wrote a commentary on her metres.

She wrote in the Aeolic dialect, the form of which Bergk has restored in
almost every instance. The absence of rough breathings, the throwing back
of the accent, and the use of the digamma ([Greek: W]) and of many forms
and words unknown to ordinary Attic Greek, all testify to this. Three idyls
ascribed to Theocr[)i]tus (cf. fr. 65) are imitations of the dialect,
metre, and manner of the old Aeolic poets; and the 28th, says Professor
Mahaffy, 'is an elegant little address to an ivory spindle which the poet
was sending as a present to the wife of his physician friend, Nikias of
Cos, and was probably composed on the model of a poem of Sappho.'

Her poems or [Greek: melê] were undoubtedly written for recitation with the
aid of music; 'they were, in fact,' to quote Professor Mahaffy again, 'the
earliest specimens of what is called in modern days the _Song_ or _Ballad_,
in which the repetition of short rhythms produces a certain pleasant
monotony, easy to remember and easy to understand.'

What Melic poetry like Sappho's actually was is best comprehended in the
light of Plato's definition of _melos_, that it is 'compounded out of three
things, speech, music, and rhythm.'

Aristox[)e]nus, as quoted by Plutarch, ascribes to her the invention of the
Mixo-Lydian mode. Mr. William Chappell thinks the plain meaning of
Aristoxenus' assertion is merely that she sang softly and plaintively, and
at a higher pitch than any of her predecessors. All Greek modes can be
exhibited by means of our diatonic scale--by the white keys, for example,
omitting the black ones, of our modern pianofortes; the various modes
having been merely divisions of the diatonic scale into certain regions
each consisting of one octave. The ecclesiastical Mixo-Lydian mode,
supposed to be similar to the Greek mode of the same name, is the scale of
our G major without the F# or leading note. It was called in the early
Christian Church 'the angelic mode,' and is now known as the Seventh of the
ecclesiastical or Gregorian modes. The more celebrated instances of the use
of this mode in modern church music are Palestrina's four-part motet _Dies
sanctificatus_, the Antiphon _Asperges me_ as given in the Roman Gradual,
and the Sarum melody of _Sanctorum meritis_ printed in the Rev. T.
Helmore's _Hymnal Noted_. The subjoined example of it is given in Sir
George Grove's _Dictionary of Music and Musicians_:--


[Illustration]


together with a technical description of its construction.

Sappho is said by Athenaeus, quoting Menaechmus and Aristoxenus, to have
been the first of the Greek poets to use the P[=e]ktis ([Greek: pêktis]), a
foreign instrument of uncertain form, a kind of harp (cf. fr. 122), which
was played by the fingers without a plectrum. Athenaeus says the Pektis was
identical with the Mag[)a]dis, but in this he was plainly wrong, for Mr.
William Chappell has shown that any instrument which was played in octaves
was called a Magadis, and when it was in the form of a lyre it had a bridge
to divide the strings into two parts, in the ratio of 2 to 1, so that the
short part of each string gave a sound just one octave higher than the
other. Sappho also mentions (in fr. 154) the Bar[=o]mos or Barmos, and the
Sarb[)i]tos or Barb[)i]tos, kinds of many-stringed Lesbian lyres which
cannot now be identified.

As to the metres in which Sappho wrote, it is unnecessary to describe them
elaborately here. They are discussed in all treatises on Greek or Latin
metres, and Neue has treated of them at great length in his edition of
Sappho. Suffice it to say that Bergk has as far as possible arranged the
fragments according to their metres, of which I have given
indications--often purposely general--in the headings to the various
divisions. The metre commonly called after her name was probably not
invented by her; it was only called Sapphic because of her frequent use of
it. Its strophe is made up thus:

  - v - = - v v - v - =
  - v - = - v v - v - =
  - v - = - v v - v - =
        - v v - =

Professor Robinson Ellis, in the preface to his translation of Catullus,
gives some examples of Elizabethan renderings of the Sapphic stanza into
English; but nothing repeats its rhythm to my ear so well as Swinburne's
_Sapphics_:

  All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,
  Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,
  Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron
              Stood and beheld me.

With such lines as these ringing in the reader's ears, he can almost hear
Sappho herself singing

  Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,
  Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity,
              Hearing, to hear them.

In the face of so much testimony to Sappho's genius, and in the presence of
every glowing word of hers that has been spared to us, those 'grains of
golden sand which the torrent of Time has carried down to us,' as Professor
F. T. Palgrave says, there is no need for me to panegyrise the poetess whom
the whole world has been long since contented to hold without a parallel.
What Sappho wrote, to earn such unchallenged fame, we can only vainly long
to know; what still remains for us to judge her by, I am willing to leave
my readers to estimate.




I

IN SAPPHIC METRE


1

  [Greek: Poikilothron', athanat' Aphrodita,]
  [Greek: pai Dios, doloploke, lissomai se]
  [Greek: mê m' asaisi mêt' oniaisi damna,]
          [Greek: potnia, thymon;]
  [Greek: alla tuid' elth', aipota katerôta]
  [Greek: tas emas audôs aioisa pêlui]
  [Greek: eklyes, patros de domon lipoisa]
          [Greek: chrysion êlthes]
  [Greek: arm' ypozeuxaisa; kaloi de s' agon]
  [Greek: ôkees strouthoi peri gas melainas]
  [Greek: pykna dineuntes pter' ap' ôranô aithe-]
          [Greek: ras dia messô.]
  [Greek: aipsa d' exikonto; ty d', ô makaira,]
  [Greek: meidiasais' athanatô prosôpô,]
  [Greek: êre', otti dêute pepontha kôtti]
          [Greek: dêute kalêmi,]
  [Greek: kôtti moi malista thelô genesthai]
  [Greek: mainola thymô; tina dêute Peithô]
  [Greek: mais agên es san philotata, tis s', ô]
          [Greek: Psapph', adikêei?]
  [Greek: kai gar ai pheugei, tacheôs diôxei,]
  [Greek: ai de dôra mê deket' alla dôsei,]
  [Greek: ai de mê philei, tacheôs philêsei]
          [Greek: kôuk etheloisa.]
  [Greek: elthe moi kai nyn, chalepan de lyson]
  [Greek: ek merimnan, ossa de moi telessai]
  [Greek: thymos imerrei, teleson; sy d' auta]
          [Greek: symmachos esso.]

_Immortal Aphrodite of the broidered throne, daughter of Zeus, weaver of
wiles, I pray thee break not my spirit with anguish and distress, O Queen.
But come hither, if ever before thou didst hear my voice afar, and listen,
and leaving thy father's golden house camest with chariot yoked, and fair
fleet sparrows drew thee, flapping fast their wings around the dark earth,
from heaven through mid sky. Quickly arrived they; and thou, blessed one,
smiling with immortal countenance, didst ask What now is befallen me, and
Why now I call, and What I in my mad heart most desire to see. 'What Beauty
now wouldst thou draw to love thee? Who wrongs thee, Sappho? For even if
she flies she shall soon follow, and if she rejects gifts shall yet give,
and if she loves not shall soon love, however loth.' Come, I pray thee, now
too, and release me from cruel cares; and all that my heart desires to
accomplish, accomplish thou, and be thyself my ally._


A HYMN TO VENUS.

  O Venus, beauty of the skies,
  To whom a thousand temples rise,
  Gaily false in gentle smiles,
  Full of love-perplexing wiles;
  O goddess, from my heart remove
  The wasting cares and pains of love.

  If ever thou hast kindly heard
  A song in soft distress preferred,
  Propitious to my tuneful vow,
  O gentle goddess, hear me now.
  Descend, thou bright immortal guest,
  In all thy radiant charms confessed.

  Thou once didst leave almighty Jove
  And all the golden roofs above;
  The car thy wanton sparrows drew,
  Hovering in air they lightly flew;
  As to my bower they winged their way
  I saw their quivering pinions play.

  The birds dismissed (while you remain)
  Bore back their empty car again:
  Then you, with looks divinely mild,
  In every heavenly feature smiled,
  And asked what new complaints I made,
  And why I called you to my aid?

  What frenzy in my bosom raged,
  And by what cure to be assuaged?
  What gentle youth I would allure,
  Whom in my artful toils secure?
  Who does thy tender heart subdue,
  Tell me, my Sappho, tell me who?

  Though now he shuns thy longing arms,
  He soon shall court thy slighted charms;
  Though now thy offerings he despise,
  He soon to thee shall sacrifice;
  Though now he freeze, he soon shall burn,
  And be thy victim in his turn.

  Celestial visitant, once more
  Thy needful presence I implore.
  In pity come, and ease my grief,
  Bring my distempered soul relief,
  Favour thy suppliant's hidden fires,
  And give me all my heart desires.
                    AMBROSE PHILIPS, 1711.


TO THE GODDESS OF LOVE.

  O Venus, daughter of the mighty Jove,
  Most knowing in the mystery of love,
  Help me, oh help me, quickly send relief,
  And suffer not my heart to break with grief.

  If ever thou didst hear me when I prayed,
  Come now, my goddess, to thy Sappho's aid.
  Orisons used, such favour hast thou shewn,
  From heaven's golden mansions called thee down.

  See, see, she comes in her cerulean car,
  Passing the middle regions of the air.
  Mark how her nimble sparrows stretch the wing,
  And with uncommon speed their Mistress bring.

  Arrived, and sparrows loosed, hastens to me;
  Then smiling asks, What is it troubles thee?
  Why am I called? Tell me what Sappho wants.
  Oh, know you not the cause of all my plaints?

  I love, I burn, and only love require;
  And nothing less can quench the raging fire.
  What youth, what raving lover shall I gain?
  Where is the captive that should wear my chain?

  Alas, poor Sappho, who is this ingrate
  Provokes thee so, for love returning hate?
  Does he now fly thee? He shall soon return;
  Pursue thee, and with equal ardour burn.

  Would he no presents at thy hands receive?
  He will repent it, and more largely give.
  The force of love no longer can withstand;
  He must be fond, wholly at thy command.

  When wilt thou work this change? Now, Venus free,
  Now ease my mind of so much misery;
  In this amour my powerful aider be;
  Make Phaon love, but let him love like me.
                                     HERBERT, 1713.


HYMN TO VENUS.

  Immortal Venus, throned above
  In radiant beauty, child of Jove,
  O skilled in every art of love
    And artful snare;
  Dread power, to whom I bend the knee,
  Release my soul and set it free
  From bonds of piercing agony
    And gloomy care.
  Yet come thyself, if e'er, benign,
  Thy listening ears thou didst incline
  To my rude lay, the starry shine
    Of Jove's court leaving,
  In chariot yoked with coursers fair,
  Thine own immortal birds that bear
  Thee swift to earth, the middle air
    With bright wings cleaving.
  Soon they were sped--and thou, most blest,
  In thine own smiles ambrosial dressed,
  Didst ask what griefs my mind oppressed--
    What meant my song--
  What end my frenzied thoughts pursue--
  For what loved youth I spread anew
  My amorous nets--'Who, Sappho, who
    'Hath done thee wrong?
  'What though he fly, he'll soon return--
  'Still press thy gifts, though now he spurn;
  'Heed not his coldness--soon he'll burn,
    'E'en though thou chide.'
  --And saidst thou thus, dread goddess? Oh,
  Come then once more to ease my woe:
  Grant all, and thy great self bestow,
    My shield and guide!
            JOHN HERMAN MERIVALE, 1833.


HYMN TO APHRODITE.

  Golden-throned beyond the sky,
  Jove-born immortality:
  Hear and heal a suppliant's pain:
  Let not love be love in vain!

  Come, as once to Love's imploring
  Accents of a maid's adoring,
  Wafted 'neath the golden dome
  Bore thee from thy father's home;

  When far off thy coming glowed,
  Whirling down th' aethereal road,
  On thy dove-drawn progress glancing,
  'Mid the light of wings advancing;

  And at once the radiant hue
  Of immortal smiles I knew;
  Heard the voice of reassurance
  Ask the tale of love's endurance:--

  'Why such prayer? And who for thee,
  Sappho, should be touch'd by me;
  Passion-charmed in frenzy strong--
  Who hath wrought my Sappho wrong?

  '--Soon for flight pursuit wilt find,
  Proffer'd gifts for gifts declined;
  Soon, thro' long reluctance earn'd,
  Love refused be Love return'd.'

  --To thy suppliant so returning,
  Consummate a maiden's yearning:
  Love, from deep despair set free,
  Championing to victory!
             F. T. PALGRAVE, 1854.


  Splendour-throned Queen, immortal Aphrodite,
  Daughter of Jove, Enchantress, I implore thee
  Vex not my soul with agonies and anguish;
        Slay me not, Goddess!
  Come in thy pity--come, if I have prayed thee;
  Come at the cry of my sorrow; in the old times
  Oft thou hast heard, and left thy father's heaven,
        Left the gold houses,
  Yoking thy chariot. Swiftly did the doves fly,
  Swiftly they brought thee, waving plumes of wonder--
  Waving their dark plumes all across the aether,
        All down the azure.
  Very soon they lighted. Then didst thou, Divine one,
  Laugh a bright laugh from lips and eyes immortal,
  Ask me, 'What ailed me--wherefore out of heaven
        'Thus I had called thee?
  'What it was made me madden in my heart so?'
  Question me, smiling--say to me, 'My Sappho,
  'Who is it wrongs thee? Tell me who refuses
        'Thee, vainly sighing.'
  'Be it who it may be, he that flies shall follow;
  'He that rejects gifts, he shall bring thee many;
  'He that hates now shall love thee dearly, madly--
        'Aye, though thou wouldst not.'
  So once again come, Mistress; and, releasing
  Me from my sadness, give me what I sue for,
  Grant me my prayer, and be as heretofore now
        Friend and protectress.
                          EDWIN ARNOLD, 1869.


  Beautiful-throned, immortal Aphrodite,
  Daughter of Zeus, beguiler, I implore thee,
  Weigh me not down with weariness and anguish
        O thou most holy!

  Come to me now, if ever thou in kindness
  Hearkenedst my words,--and often hast thou hearkened--
  Heeding, and coming from the mansions golden
        Of thy great Father,

  Yoking thy chariot, borne by the most lovely
  Consecrated birds, with dusky-tinted pinions,
  Waving swift wings from utmost heights of heaven
        Through the mid-ether;

  Swiftly they vanished, leaving thee, O goddess,
  Smiling, with face immortal in its beauty,
  Asking why I grieved, and why in utter longing
        I had dared call thee;

  Asking what I sought, thus hopeless in desiring,
  Wildered in brain, and spreading nets of passion--
  Alas, for whom? and saidst thou, 'Who has harmed thee?
        'O my poor Sappho!

  'Though now he flies, ere long he shall pursue thee;
  'Fearing thy gifts, he too in turn shall bring them;
  'Loveless to-day, to-morrow he shall woo thee,
        'Though thou shouldst spurn him.'

  Thus seek me now, O holy Aphrodite!
  Save me from anguish; give me all I ask for,
  Gifts at thy hand; and thine shall be the glory,
        Sacred protector!
                         T. W. HIGGINSON, 1871.


  O fickle-souled, deathless one, Aphrodite,
    Daughter of Zeus, weaver of wiles, I pray thee,
  Lady august, never with pangs and bitter
        Anguish affray me!

  But hither come often, as erst with favour
    My invocations pitifully heeding,
  Leaving thy sire's golden abode, thou camest
        Down to me speeding.

  Yoked to thy car, delicate sparrows drew thee
    Fleetly to earth, fluttering fast their pinions,
  From heaven's height through middle ether's liquid
        Sunny dominions.

  Soon they arrived; thou, O divine one, smiling
    Sweetly from that countenance all immortal,
  Askedst my grief, wherefore I so had called thee
        From the bright portal?

  What my wild soul languished for, frenzy-stricken?
    'Who thy love now is it that ill requiteth,
  Sappho? and who thee and thy tender yearning
        Wrongfully slighteth?

  Though he now fly, quickly he shall pursue thee--
  Scorns he thy gifts? Soon he shall freely offer--
  Loves he not? Soon, even wert thou unwilling,
        Love shall he proffer.'

  Come to me then, loosen me from my torment,
  All my heart's wish unto fulfilment guide thou,
  Grant and fulfil! And an ally most trusty
        Ever abide thou.
                MORETON JOHN WALHOUSE, in _The
                Gentleman's Magazine_, 1877.


  Glittering-throned, undying Aphrodite,
  Wile-weaving daughter of high Zeus, I pray thee,
  Tame not my soul with heavy woe, dread mistress,
        Nay, nor with anguish!

  But hither come, if ever erst of old time
  Thou didst incline, and listenedst to my crying,
  And from thy father's palace down descending,
        Camest with golden

  Chariot yoked: thee fair swift-flying sparrows
  Over dark earth with multitudinous fluttering,
  Pinion on pinion, thorough middle ether
        Down from heaven hurried.

  Quickly they came like light, and thou, blest lady,
  Smiling with clear undying eyes didst ask me
  What was the woe that troubled me, and wherefore
        I had cried to thee:

  What thing I longed for to appease my frantic
  Soul: and Whom now must I persuade, thou askedst,
  Whom must entangle to thy love, and who now,
        Sappho, hath wronged thee?

  Yea, for if now he shun, he soon shall chase thee;
  Yea, if he take not gifts, he soon shall give them;
  Yea, if he love not, soon shall he begin to
        Love thee, unwilling.

  Come to me now too, and from tyrannous sorrow
  Free me, and all things that my soul desires to
  Have done, do for me, queen, and let thyself too
        Be my great ally!
                      J. ADDINGTON SYMONDS, 1893.


Besides these complete versions--many others there are, but these are by
far the best--compare the following stanza out of Akenside's _Ode on Lyric
Poetry_ (about 1745):--

  But lo, to Sappho's melting airs
    Descends the radiant queen of Love:
  She smiles, and asks what fonder cares
    Her suppliant's plaintive measures move:
  Why is my faithful maid distressed?
  Who, Sappho, wounds thy tender breast?
  Say, flies he?--Soon he shall pursue.
    Shuns he thy gifts?--He soon shall give.
    Slights he thy sorrows?--He shall grieve,
  And soon to all thy wishes bow.

And Swinburne's paraphrase--

  For I beheld in sleep the light that is
  In her high place in Paphos, heard the kiss
  Of body and soul that mix with eager tears
  And laughter stinging through the eyes and ears:
  Saw Love, as burning flame from crown to feet,
  Imperishable, upon her storied seat;
  Clear eyelids lifted toward the north and south,
  A mind of many colours, and a mouth
  Of many tunes and kisses; and she bowed,
  With all her subtle face laughing aloud,
  Bowed down upon me, saying, 'Who doth thee wrong,
  Sappho?' but thou--thy body is the song,
  Thy mouth the music; thou art more than I,
  Though my voice die not till the whole world die;
  Though men that hear it madden; though love weep,
  Though nature change, though shame be charmed to sleep.
  Ay, wilt thou slay me lest I kiss thee dead?
  Yet the queen laughed from her sweet heart and said:
  'Even she that flies shall follow for thy sake,
  And she shall give thee gifts that would not take,
  Shall kiss that would not kiss thee' (yea, kiss me)
  'When thou wouldst not'--when I would not kiss thee!
                                 _Anactoria_, p. 67 f.

And his--

  _O thou of divers-coloured mind,[7] O thou_
  _Deathless, God's daughter subtle-souled_--lo now,
  Now to the song above all songs, in flight
  Higher than the day-star's height,
  And sweet as sound the moving wings of night!
  _Thou of the divers-coloured seat_--behold
  Her very song of old!--
  _O deathless, O Gods daughter subtle-souled!_
             *    *    *    *    *
  _Child of God, close craftswoman, I beseech thee;_
  _Bid not ache nor agony break nor master,_
          _Lady, my spirit._
                 _Songs of the Spring-tides_: On the Cliffs.

As well as Frederick Tennyson's--

  Come to me; what I seek in vain
  Bring thou; into my spirit send
  Peace after care, balm after pain;
      And be my friend.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing at Rome about 25 B.C., quotes this,
commonly called _The Ode to Aphrodite_, as a perfect illustration of the
elaborately finished style of poetry, showing in detail how its grace and
beauty lie in the subtle harmony between the words and the ideas. Certain
lines of it, though nowhere else the whole, are preserved by Hephaestion
and other authors.


2

  [Greek: Phainetai moi kênos isos theoisin]
  [Greek: emmen ônêr, ostis enantios toi]
  [Greek: izanei, kai plasion ady phôneu-]
        [Greek: sas hypakouei]
  [Greek: kai gelaisas imeroen, to moi man]
  [Greek: kardian en stêthesin eptoasen;]
  [Greek: hôs gar euidon brocheôs se, phônas]
        [Greek: ouden et' eikei;]
  [Greek: alla kam men glôssa eage, lepton d']
  [Greek: autika chrô pyr ypadedromaken,]
  [Greek: oppatessi d' ouden orêm', epirrom-]
        [Greek: beisi d' akouai.]
  [Greek: a de midrôs kakcheetai, tromos de]
  [Greek: paisan agrei, chlôrotera de poias]
  [Greek: emmi, tethnakên d' oligô 'pideuês]
        [Greek: phainomai [alla].]
  [Greek: alla pan tolmaton, [epei kai penêta].]


_That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy presence, and hears
close to him thy sweet speech and lovely laughter; that indeed makes my
heart flutter in my bosom. For when I see thee but a little, I have no
utterance left, my tongue is broken down, and straightway a subtle fire has
run under my skin, with my eyes I have no sight, my ears ring, sweat pours
down, and a trembling seizes all my body; I am paler than grass, and seem
in my madness little better than one dead. But I must dare all, since one
so poor_ ...

The famous imitation of this ode by Catullus, li., _Ad Lesbiam_--

  Ille mi par esse deo videtur,
  Ille, si fas est, superare divos,
  Qui sedens adversus identidem te
      Spectat et audit
  Dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis
  Eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,
  Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi
       *    *    *    *    *
  Lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
  Flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
  Tintinant aures, gemina teguntur
      Lumina nocte--

is thus translated by Mr. W. E. Gladstone:--

  Him rival to the gods I place,
    Him loftier yet, if loftier be,
  Who, Lesbia, sits before thy face,
    Who listens and who looks on thee;

  Thee smiling soft. Yet this delight
    Doth all my sense consign to death;
  For when thou dawnest on my sight,
    Ah, wretched! flits my labouring breath.

  My tongue is palsied. Subtly hid
    Fire creeps me through from limb to limb:
  My loud ears tingle all unbid:
    Twin clouds of night mine eyes bedim.


and recently by the late Sir R. F. Burton:--

  Peer of a god meseemeth he,
  Nay, passing gods (an that can be!),
  Who all the while sits facing thee,
        Sees thee and hears
  Thy low sweet laughs which (ah me!) daze
  Mine every sense, and as I gaze
  Upon thee, Lesbia, o'er me strays
       .    .    .    .    .    .
  My tongue is dulled, my limbs adown
  Flows subtle flame; with sound its own
  Rings either ear, and o'er are strown
      Mine eyes with night.

----

  Blest as the immortal gods is he,
  The youth who fondly sits by thee,
  And hears and sees thee all the while
  Softly speak and sweetly smile.

  'Twas this deprived my soul of rest,
  And raised such tumults in my breast;
  For while I gazed, in transport tost,
  My breath was gone, my voice was lost:

  My bosom glowed; the subtle flame
  Ran quick through all my vital frame;
  O'er my dim eyes a darkness hung;
  My ears with hollow murmurs rung.

  In dewy damps my limbs were chilled;
  My blood with gentle horror thrilled;
  My feeble pulse forgot to play;
  I fainted, sank, and died away.
                 AMBROSE PHILIPS, 1711.

  Thy fatal shafts unerring move,
  I bow before thine altar, Love
  I feel thy soft resistless flame
  Glide swift through all my vital frame.

  For while I gaze my bosom glows,
  My blood in tides impetuous flows;
  Hope, fear, and joy alternate roll,
  And floods of transports whelm my soul.

  My faltering tongue attempts in vain
  In soothing murmurs to complain;
  My tongue some secret magic ties,
  My murmurs sink in broken sighs.

  Condemned to nurse eternal care,
  And ever drop the silent tear,
  Unheard I mourn, unknown I sigh,
  Unfriended live, unpitied die.
    SMOLLETT, in _Roderick Random_, 1748.


  Blest as the immortal gods is he,
  The youth whose eyes may look on thee,
  Whose ears thy tongue's sweet melody
      May still devour.
  Thou smilest too?--sweet smile, whose charm
  Has struck my soul with wild alarm,
  And, when I see thee, bids disarm
      Each vital power.
  Speechless I gaze: the flame within
  Runs swift o'er all my quivering skin;
  My eyeballs swim; with dizzy din
      My brain reels round;
  And cold drops fall; and tremblings frail
  Seize every limb; and grassy pale
  I grow; and then--together fail
      Both sight and sound.
                JOHN HERMAN MERIVALE, 1833.


  Peer of gods he seemeth to me, the blissful
  Man who sits and gazes at thee before him,
  Close beside thee sits, and in silence hears thee
        Silverly speaking,
  Laughing love's low laughter. Oh this, this only
  Stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble!
  For should I but see thee a little moment,
        Straight is my voice hushed;
  Yea, my tongue is broken, and through and through me
  'Neath the flesh impalpable fire runs tingling;
  Nothing see mine eyes, and a noise of roaring
        Waves in my ear sounds;
  Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes
  All my limbs, and paler than grass in autumn,
  Caught by pains of menacing death, I falter,
        Lost in the love-trance.
                          J. ADDINGTON SYMONDS, 1883.

Compare Lord Tennyson:--

      I watch thy grace; and in its place
    My heart a charmed slumber keeps,
      While I muse upon thy face;
    And a languid fire creeps
      Through my veins to all my frame,
  Dissolvingly and slowly: soon
      From thy rose-red lips _my_ name
  Floweth; and then, as in a swoon,
    With dinning sound my ears are rife,
      My tremulous tongue faltereth,
      I lose my colour, I lose my breath,
      I drink the cup of a costly death
    Brimmed with delicious draughts of warmest life.
    I die with my delight, before
      I hear what I would hear from thee.
                                   _Eleänore_, 1832.

And--

  Last night, when some one spoke his name,
  From my swift blood that went and came
  A thousand little shafts of flame
  Were shiver'd in my narrow frame.--_Fatima_.[8]

And with line 14, Swinburne's--

  Paler than grass in summer.--_Sapphics_.

and--

  Made like white summer-coloured grass.
                               _Aholibah_.

Longinus, about 250 A.D., uses this, _The Ode to Anactoria_, or _To a
beloved Woman_, or _To a Maiden_, as tradition variously names it, to
illustrate the perfection of the Sublime in poetry, calling it 'not one
passion, but a congress of passions,' and showing how Sappho had here
seized upon the signs of love-frenzy and harmonised them into faultless
phrase. Plutarch had, about 60 A.D., spoken of this ode as 'mixed with
fire,' and quoted Philoxenus as referring to Sappho's 'sweet-voiced songs
healing love.'


3

  [Greek: Asteres men amphi kalan selannan]
  [Greek: aips apykryptoisi phaennon eidos,]
  [Greek: oppota plêthoisa malista lampê]
        [Greek: gan [epi pasan]]
  - v - v [Greek: arguria] - v - v ;

_The stars about the fair moon in their turn hide their bright face when
she at about her full lights up all earth with silver._

  Planets, that around the beauteous moon
  Attendant wait, cast into shade
    Their ineffectual lustre, soon
  As she, in full-orbed majesty arrayed,
    Her silver radiance pours
    Upon this world of ours.
                          J. H. MERIVALE.


    The stars around the lovely moon
    Their radiant visage hide as soon
    As she, full-orbed, appears to sight,
  Flooding the earth with her silvery light.
                                  ? FELTON.


  The stars about the lovely moon
  Fade back and vanish very soon,
  When, round and full, her silver face
  Swims into sight, and lights all space.
                     EDWIN ARNOLD, 1869.


  Stars that shine around the refulgent full moon
  Pale, and hide their glory of lesser lustre
  When she pours her silvery plenilunar
      Light on the orbed earth.
                            J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.


'As the stars draw back their shining faces when they surround the fair
moon in her silver fulness.'        F. T. PALGRAVE.

Quoted by Eustathius of Thessalonica, late in the twelfth century, to
illustrate the simile in the _Iliad_, viii. 551:--

  As when in heaven the stars about the moon
  Look beautiful.
                                  TENNYSON.

Julian, about 350 A.D., says Sappho applied the epithet _silver_ to the
moon; wherefore Blomfield suggested its position here.


4

  [Greek: Amphi de psychron keladei di' usdôn]
  [Greek: malinôn, aithyssomenôn de phyllôn]
  [Greek: kôma katarrei]

_And round about the_ [breeze] _murmurs cool through apple-boughs, and
slumber streams from quivering leaves._

  Through orchard-plots with fragrance crowned
    The clear cold fountain murmuring flows;
  And forest leaves with rustling sound
    Invite to soft repose.
                              J. H. MERIVALE.

  All around through branches of apple-orchards
  Cool streams call, while down from the leaves a-tremble
        Slumber distilleth.
                          J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

Professor F. T. Palgrave says:--

'We have three lines on a garden scene full of the heat and sleep of the
fortunate South:--

'"Round about the cool water thrills through the apple-branches, and sleep
flows down upon us in the rustling leaves."

'If there were any authority,' he adds in a note, 'I should like to
translate "through the _troughs_ of apple-wood." That Eastern mode of
garden irrigation gives a much more defined, and hence a more Sappho-like,
image than "through the boughs."'

  From the sound of cool waters heard through the green boughs
          Of the fruit-bearing trees,
          And the rustling breeze,
  Deep sleep, as a trance, down over me flows.
                    FREDERICK TENNYSON, 1890.

Cited by Hermogenes, about 170 A.D., as an example of simple style, and to
show the pleasure given by description. The fragment describes the gardens
of the nymphs, which Demetrius, about 150 A.D., says were sung by Sappho.
Cf. Theocritus, _Idyl_ vii. 135: 'High above our heads waved many a poplar,
many an elm-tree, while close at hand the sacred water from the Nymph's own
cave welled forth with murmurs musical' (A. Lang). And Ovid, _Heroïd._, xv.
157--

  A spring there is whose silver waters show, etc.--

(cf. Pope's translation, _infra_, p. 194) probably refers to it.


5

  - v - v - v v [Greek: Elthe Kypri]
  [Greek: chrysiaisin en kylikessin abrôs]
  [Greek: symmemigmenon thaliaisi nektar]
        [Greek: oinochoeusa.]

_Come, goddess of Cyprus, and in golden cups serve nectar delicately mixed
with delights._

      Come, Venus, come
  Hither with thy golden cup,
    Where nectar-floated flowerets swim.
  Fill, fill the goblet up;
    These laughing lips shall kiss the brim,--
      Come, Venus, come!
                   ANON. (_Edin. Rev._, 1832).


                Kupris, hither
  Come, and pour from goblets of gold the nectar
  Mixed for love's and pleasure's delight with dainty
          Joys of the banquet.
                                J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

Athenaeus, a native of Naucratis, who flourished about 230 A.D., quotes
these verses as an example of the poets' custom of invoking Aphrodite in
their pledges. Applying them to himself and his fellow-guests, he adds the
words [Greek: toutoisi tois hetairois emois ge kai sois]. Some scholars
believe that Sappho actually wrote--

  [Greek: taisde tais emais etaraisi kai sais],

  _For these my companions and thine._

Aphrodite was called Cypris, 'the Cyprian,' because it was mythologically
believed that when she rose from the sea she was first received as a
goddess on the shore of Cyprus (_Homeric Hymns_, vi.). Sappho seems to be
here figuratively referring to the nectar of love.


6

  [Greek: Ê se Kypros kai Paphos ê Panormos.]

_Or Cyprus and Paphos, or Panormus_ [holds] _thee._

  If thee Cyprus, or Paphos, or Panormos.
                    J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

From Strabo, about 19 A.D. Panormus (Palermo) in Sicily was not founded
till after Sappho's time, but it was a common name, and all seaports were
under the special protection of Aphrodite.


7, 8

  [Greek: Soi d' egô leukas epi bômon aigos]
  - v - v - v v - v - v
  [Greek: kapileipsô toi] v v - v - v ;

_But for thee will I_ [lead] _to the altar_ [the offspring] _of a white
goat ... and add a libation for thee._

Adduced by Apollonius of Alexandria, about 140 A.D., to illustrate
similarities in dialects. The fragment is probably part of an ode
describing a sacrifice offered to Aphrodite.


9

  [Greek: Aith' egô, chrysostephan' Aphrodita,]
  [Greek: tonde ton palon lachoên.]

  _This lot may I win, golden-crowned Aphrodite._

From Apollonius, to show how adverbs give an idea of prayer.


10

  [Greek: Ai me timian epoêsan erga]
  [Greek: ta spha doisai.]

  _Who gave me their gifts and made me honoured._

From Apollonius, to illustrate the Aeolic dialect. Bergk thinks this
fragment had some connection with fr. 68, and perhaps with fr. 32. It seems
to refer to the Muses.


11

  - v - v - [Greek: Tade nyn etairais]
  [Greek: tais emaisi terpna kalôs aeisô.]

  _This will I now sing deftly to please my girl-friends._

Quoted by Athenaeus to prove that freeborn women and maidens often called
their girl associates and friends [Greek: etairai] (_Hetaerae_), without
any idea of reproach.


12

  - v - v - v v [Greek: Ottinas gar]
  [Greek: eu theô, kênoi me malista sinnon-]
        [Greek: tai.] v v - v ;

  _For they whom I benefit injure me most._

From the _Etymologicum Magnum_, a dictionary which was compiled about the
tenth century A.D.


13

  - v - v - v [Greek: Egô de kên' ot-]
        [Greek: tô tis eratai.]

  _But that which one desires I ..._

From Apollonius, to illustrate the use of the verb [Greek: eraô]. Bergk now
reads [Greek: eratai] instead of [Greek: eratai] as formerly, on the
analogy of [Greek: diakêtai] and [Greek: dynamai] in the Fayum fragments.


14

  [Greek: Tais kalais ymmin [to] noêma tômon]
        [Greek: oi diameipton.]

  _To you, fair maids, my mind changes not._

From Apollonius, to show the Aeolic use of [Greek: ymmin] for [Greek:
hymin], 'to you.'


15

  - v - v - v [Greek: Egôn d' imauta]
        [Greek: touto synoida.]

  _And this I feel in myself._

From Apollonius, to show Aeolic accentuation.


16

  [Greek: Taisi [de] psychros men egento thymos,]
  [Greek: par d' ieisi ta ptera.] - v - v


_But their heart turned cold and they dropt their wings._

In Pindar, _Pyth._ i. 10, the eagle of Zeus, delighted by music, drops his
wings, and the Scholiast quotes this fragment to show that Sappho says the
same of doves.


17

  - v - v - v [Greek: kat' emon stalagmon;]
  [Greek: Ton d' epiplazontes amoi pheroien]
        [Greek: kai meledônais.]

_According to my weeping: it and all care let buffeting winds bear away._

  Him the wanderer o'er the world
    Far away the winds will bear,
        And restless care.
              FREDERICK TENNYSON.

From the _Etymologicum Magnum_, to show that the Aeolians used [Greek: z]
in the place of [Greek: ss]. [Greek: Amoi] is a guess of Bergk's for
[Greek: anemoi], 'winds.'


18

  [Greek: Artiôs m' a chrysopedillos Auôs.]

  _Me just now the golden-sandalled Dawn ..._

  Me but now Aurora the golden-sandalled.
                    J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

Quoted by Ammonius of Alexandria, at the close of the fourth century A.D.,
to show Sappho's use of [Greek: artiôs].


19

  - v - v - v v [Greek: Podas de]
  [Greek: poikilos maslês ekalypte, Lydi-]
        [Greek: on kalon ergon.]

_A broidered strap of fair Lydian work covered her feet._

Quoted by the Scholiast on Aristophanes' _Peace_, 1174; and also by Pollux,
about 180 A.D. Blass thinks the lines may have referred to an apparition of
Aphrodite.


20

  - v - v [Greek: Pantodapais memigme-]
        [Greek: na chroiaisin.]

  _Shot with a thousand hues._

Quoted by the Scholiast on Apollonius of Rhodes, i. 727, in speaking of
Jason's double-folded mantle having been reddish instead of flame-coloured.
Some think, however, that Sappho here refers to Iris, _i.e._ the rainbow.


21

  ... [Greek: Emethen d' echeistha lathan]

  _Me thou forgettest_.

From Apollonius, as is also the following, to show the Aeolic use of
[Greek: emethen] for [Greek: emou], 'of me.'


22

  - v - v - v v [Greek: Ê tin' allon]
  [Greek: [mallon] anthrôpôn emethen philêstha.]

  _Or lovest another more than me._

23

  [Greek: Ou ti moi ymmes.]

  _Ye are nought to me._

Quoted by Apollonius, as is also the following fragment, to show that
[Greek: hymeis] was in Aeolic [Greek: ymmes] 'you.'


24

  [Greek: As thelet' ymmes.]

  _While ye will._

25

  [Greek: Kai pothêô kai maomai] v - v

  _I yearn and seek ..._

From the _Etymologicum Magnum_, to show that the Aeolians used [Greek:
pothêô] for [Greek: potheô], 'I yearn.'


26

  [Greek: Keinon, ô chrysothrone Mous', enispes]
  [Greek: hymnon, ek tas kalligynaikos esthlas]
  [Greek: Têios chôras hon aeide terpnôs]
        [Greek: presbys agauos.]

_O Muse of the golden throne, raise that strain which the reverend elder of
Teos, from the goodly land of fair women, used to sing so sweetly._

  O Muse, who sitt'st on golden throne,
  Full many a hymn of dulcet tone
    The Teian sage is taught by thee;
  But, goddess, from thy throne of gold,
  The sweetest hymn thou'st ever told
    He lately learned and sang for me.
                              T. MOORE.


Athenaeus says 'Hermesianax was mistaken when he represented Sappho and
Anacreon as contemporaries, for Anacreon lived in the time of Cyrus and
Polycrates [probably 563-478 B.C.], but Sappho lived in the reign of
Alyattes the father of Croesus. But Chamaeleon, in his treatise on Sappho,
asserts that according to some these verses were made upon her by
Anacreon:--

  "Spirit of Love, whose tresses shine
  Along the breeze in golden twine,
  Come, within a fragrant cloud
  Blushing with light, thy votary shroud,
  And on those wings that sparkling play
  Waft, oh waft me hence away!
    Love, my soul is full of thee,
  Alive to all thy luxury.
  But she, the nymph for whom I glow,
  The pretty Lesbian, mocks my woe,
  Smiles at the hoar and silvery hues
  Which Time upon my forehead strews.
    Alas, I fear she keeps her charms
  In store for younger, happier arms."'
                             T. MOORE.


Then follows Sappho's reply, the present fragment. 'I myself think,'
Athenaeus goes on to say, 'that Hermesianax is joking concerning the love
of Anacreon and Sappho, for Diphilus the comic poet, in his play called
_Sappho_, has represented Archilochus and Hipponax as the lovers of
Sappho.'


Probably the whole is spurious, for certainly Sappho never saw Anacreon:
she must have died before he was born. Even Athenaeus says that it is clear
to every one that the verses are not Sappho's.




II

IN DACTYLIC METRE


27

  [Greek: Skidnamenas en stêthesin orgas]
  [Greek: mapsylakan glôssan pephylachthai.]

_When anger spreads through the breast, guard thy tongue from barking
idly._

  When through thy breast wild wrath doth spread
    And work thy inmost being harm,
  Leave thou the fiery word unsaid,
          Guard thee; be calm.
                           MICHAEL FIELD, 1889.

Quoted by Plutarch, in his treatise _On restraining anger_, to show that in
wrath nothing is more noble than quietness. Blass thinks that Bergk is
wrong in his restoration of the verses; he considers their metre choriambic
(like fr. 64, ff.), and reads them thus:

  = = [Greek: skidnamenas stêthesin orgas pephylagmena] (?)
  [Greek: glôssan mapsylakan] - v v - - v v - v -

He compares fr. 72 with them.




III

IN ALCAIC METRE


28

  [Greek: Ai d' êches eslôn imeron ê kalôn,]
  [Greek: kai mê ti weipên glôss' ekyka kakon,]
  [Greek: aidôs ke s' ou kichanen oppat',]
  [Greek: all' eleges peri tô dikaiôs.]

_Hadst thou felt desire for things good or noble, and had not thy tongue
framed some evil speech, shame had not filled thine eyes, but thou hadst
spoken honestly about it._


THE LOVES OF SAPPHO AND ALCAEUS.

  _Alcaeus_.--I fain would speak, I fain would tell,
            But shame and fear my utterance quell.

  _Sappho_.--If aught of good, if aught of fair
            Thy tongue were labouring to declare,
            Nor shame should dash thy glance, nor fear
            Forbid thy suit to reach my ear.
            ANON. (_Edin. Rev._, 1832, p. 190).

Aristotle, in his _Rhetoric_, i. 9, about 330 B.C., says 'base things
dishonour those who do or wish them, as Sappho showed when Alcaeus said--

  [Greek: ioplok' agna mellichomeide Sapphoi,]
  [Greek: thelô ti weipên, alla me kôluei aidôs.]

"_Violet-weaving, pure, softly-smiling Sappho, I would say something, but
shame restrains me_"' (cf. _supra_, p. 8), and she answered him in the
words of the present fragment.

Blass (_Rhein. Mus._ 1879, xxix. p. 150) believes that these verses also
are Sappho's, not Alcaeus'. Certainly they were quoted as Sappho's by Anna
Comnena, about 1110 A.D., as well as by another writer whom Blass refers
to. Blass would read the last line [Greek: peri ô dikaiôs] ([Greek:
'dikaiôs]) = [Greek: peri hou edikaious], _about that which thou didst
pretend_.



IV

IN MIXED GLYCONIC AND ALCAIC METRE


29

  [Greek: Stathi kanta philos ...]
  [Greek: kai tan ep' ossois ampetason charin.]

_Stand face to face, friend ... and unveil the grace in thine eyes._

Athenaeus, speaking of the charm of lovers' eyes, says Sappho addressed
this to a man who was admired above all others for his beauty. Bergk thinks
it may have formed part of an ode to Phaon (cf. fr. 140), or of a bridal
song; and A. Schoene suspects that it was possibly addressed to Sappho's
brother. The metre is quite uncertain.




V

IN CHORIAMBIC METRE


[This is a very unsatisfactory category. Some of the fragments, _e.g_.
30-43, are in Aeolian dactyls, wherein the second foot is always a dactyl;
44-49 are Glyconics; 50-54 are in the Ionic _a majore_ metre; some others
are Asclepiads, etc. But where so much is uncertain, it seems to be the
simplest way to group them thus.]


30

  [Greek: Chryseoi d' erebinthoi ep' aionôn ephuonto.]

  _And golden pulse grew on the shores._

Quoted by Athenaeus, when he is speaking of vetches.


31

  [Greek: Latô kai Nioba mala men philai êsan etaipai.]

  _Leto and Niobe were friends full dear._

Quoted by Athenaeus for the same reason as fr. 11. Compare also fr. 143.


32

  [Greek: Mnasesthai tina phami kai ysteron ammeôn.]

  _Men I think will remember us even hereafter._

Compare Swinburne's--

          Thou art more than I,
  Though my voice die not till the whole world die.

and--

  Memories shall mix and metaphors of me.

and--

  I Sappho shall be one with all these things,
  With all high things for ever.
                                     _Anactoria_.

Dio Chrysostom, the celebrated Greek rhetorician, writing about 100 A.D.,
observes that Sappho says this 'with perfect beauty.'

To illustrate this use of [Greek: phami], Bergk quotes a fragment preserved
by Plutarch, which may have been written by Sappho:

  .  .  .  .  .   [Greek: egô phami ioplokôn]
  [Greek: Moisan eu lachemen.]

_I think I have a goodly portion in the violet weaving Muses._


33

  [Greek: Êraman men egô sethen, Atthi, palai pota.]

  _I loved thee once, Atthis, long ago._

  _I loved thee_,--hark, one tenderer note than all--
  _Atthis, of old time, once_--one low long fall,
  Sighing--one long low lovely loveless call,
  Dying--one pause in song so flamelike fast--
  _Atthis, long since in old time overpast--_
  One soft first pause and last.
  One,--then the old rage of rapture's fieriest rain
  Storms all the music-maddened night again.
      SWINBURNE, _Songs of the Springtides_, p. 57.

Quoted by Hephaestion, about 150 A.D., as an example of metre. The verse
stood at the beginning of the first ode of the second book of Sappho's
poems, which Hephaestion says was composed entirely of odes in this metre:
thus,

= = - v v - v v - v v - v = ;


34

  [Greek: Smikra moi pais emmen ephaineo kacharis.]

_A slight and ill-favoured child didst thou seem to me._

Quoted by Plutarch; and by others also.

Bergk thinks it is certain that this fragment belongs to the same poem as
does the preceding, judging from references to it by Terentianus Mauris,
about 100 A.D., and by Marius Victorinus, about 350 A.D.


35

  [Greek: Alla, mê megalyneo daktyliô peri.]

  _Foolish woman, pride not thyself on a ring._

Preserved by Herodian the grammarian, who lived about 160 A.D.


36

  [Greek: Ouk oid' otti theô; duo moi ta noêmata.]

  _I know not what to do; my mind is divided._

Quoted by the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus, about 220 B.C.


37

  [Greek: Psauên d' ou dokimoim' oranô dysi pachesin.]

  _I do not think to touch the sky with my two arms._

Quoted by Herodian. Cf. Horace, _Carm._ I. i. 36, _Sublimi feriam sidera
vertice_,--

  My head, exalted so, will touch the stars,

which some think a direct translation of this line of Sappho's.

  Old Horace? 'I will strike,' said he,
    'The stars with head sublime.'
            TENNYSON, _Tiresias_, 1885.


38

  [Greek: Ôs de pais peda matera pepterygômai.]

  _And I flutter like a child after her mother._

  Like a child whose mother's lost,
  I am fluttering, terror-tost.
                   M. J. WALHOUSE.

  After my mother I flew like a bird.
                 FREDERICK TENNYSON.

Quoted in the _Etymologicum Magnum_ as an example of Aeolic. It may have
related to a sparrow, and been imitated by Catullus, 3, 6 ff.:

  Sweet, all honey: a bird that ever hailed her
  Lady mistress, as hails the maid a mother.
  Nor would move from her arms away: but only
  Hopping round her, about her, hence or hither
  Piped his colloquy, piped to none beside her.
                               ROBINSON ELLIS.


39

  [Greek: Êros angelos imerophônos aêdôn.]

  _Spring's messenger, the sweet-voiced nightingale._

    The dear good angel of the spring,
  The nightingale.
      BEN JONSON, _The Sad Shepherd_, Act ii.

    The tawny sweetwinged thing
  Whose cry was but of Spring.
      SWINBURNE, _Songs of the Springtides_, p. 52.

Quoted by the Scholiast on Sophocles, _Electra_, 149, 'the nightingale is
the messenger of Zeus, because it is the sign of Spring.'


40

  [Greek: Eros daute m' o lysimelês donei,]
  [Greek: glykypikron amachanon orpeton.]

_Now Love masters my limbs and shakes me, fatal creature, bitter-sweet._

  Lo, Love once more, the limb-dissolving King,
  The bitter-sweet impracticable thing,
  Wild-beast-like rends me with fierce quivering.
                    J. ADDINGTON SYMONDS, 1883.

Compare--

  O Love, Love, Love! O withering might!
                       TENNYSON, _Fatima_.

  O bitterness of things too sweet!
              SWINBURNE, _Fragoletta_.

  Sweet Love, that art so bitter.
      SWINBURNE, _Tristram of Lyonesse_.

and the song in _Bothwel_, act i. sc. 1:--

  Surely most bitter of all sweet things thou art,
  And sweetest thou of all things bitter, love.

Quoted by Hephaestion. Cf. fr. 125.


41

  [Greek: Atthi, soi d' emethen men apêchtheto]
  [Greek: phrontisdên, epi d' Andromedan potê.]

_But to thee, Atthis, the thought of me is hateful; thou flittest to
Andromeda._

Quoted by Hephaestion together with fr. 40, but it seems to be the
beginning of a different ode.


42

  [Greek: Eros daut' etinaxen emoi phrenas,]
  [Greek: anemos kat' oros drysin empesôn].

_Now Eros shakes my soul, a wind on the mountain falling on the oaks._

  Love shook me like the mountain breeze
  Rushing down on the forest trees.
                    FREDERICK TENNYSON.

  Lo, Love once more my soul within me rends,
  Like wind that on the mountain oak descends.
                         J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

Quoted by Maximus Tyrius, about 150 B.C., in speaking of Socrates exciting
Phaedrus to Bacchic frenzy when he talked of love.


43

  [Greek: Ota pannychos asphi katagrei].

  _When all night long_ [sleep] _holds their_ [eyes].

Quoted by Apollonius to show the Aeolic form of [Greek: sphi]. Bergk thinks
that Sappho may have written--

            [Greek: oppat' [aôros],]
  [Greek: ota pannychos asphi katagrei],

therefore I translate it so.


44

  [Greek: Cheiromaktra de kangonôn]
  [Greek: porphyra ...]
  [Greek: kai tauta men atimaseis,]
  [Greek: epemps' apy Phôkaas]
  [Greek: dôra timia kangonôn.]

_And purple napkins for thy lap ... (even these wilt thou despise) I sent
from Phocaea, precious gifts for thy lap._

Quoted by Athenaeus out of the fifth book of Sappho's _Songs to Aphrodite_,
to show that [Greek: cheiromaktra] were cloths, handkerchiefs, for covering
the head. But the whole passage is hopelessly corrupt.


45

  [Greek: Age dê chely dia moi]
  [Greek: phônaessa genoio.]

  _Come now, divine shell, become vocal for me._

Quoted by Hermogenes and Eustathius, of Sappho apostrophising her lyre.


46

  [Greek: Kapalais hypothymidas]
  [Greek: plektais amp' apala dera.]

  _And tender woven garlands round tender neck_

From Athenaeus.


47

  [Greek: Gellôs paidophilôtera.]

_Fonder of maids than Gello._

Quoted as a proverb by Zenobius, about 130 A.D.; said of those who die an
untimely death, or of those whose indulgence brings ruin on their children.
Gello was a maiden who died in youth, whose ghost, the Lesbians said,
pursued children and carried them off.


48

  [Greek: Mala dê kekorêmenas]
  [Greek: Gorgôs.]

  _Of Gorgo full weary._

  I am weary of all thy words and soft strange ways.
                            SWINBURNE, _Anactoria_.

Quoted by Choeroboscus, about the end of the sixth century A.D., to show
that the Aeolic genitive ended in [Greek: -ôs]. Maximus Tyrius mentions
this girl Gorgo along with Andromeda (cf. fr. 41) as beloved by Sappho.


49

  [Greek: Brentheiô basilêiô.]

  _Of a proud_ (or _perfumed_, or _flowery_) _palace._

Athenaeus says Sappho here mentions the 'royal' and the 'brentheian'
unguent together, as if they were one and the same thing; but the reading
is very uncertain.


50

  [Greek: Egô d' epi malthakan]
  [Greek: tylan spoleô melea.]

  _But I upon a soft cushion dispose my limbs._

From Herodian.


51

  [Greek: Kê d' ambrosias men kratêr ekekrato,]
  [Greek: Ermas d' elen olpin theois oinochoêsai.]
  [Greek: kênoi d' ara pantes karchêsia t' êchon]
  [Greek: kaleibon, arasanto de pampan esla]
  [Greek: tô gambrô.]

_And there the bowl of ambrosia was mixed, and Hermes took the ladle to
pour out for the gods; and then they all held goblets, and made libation,
and wished the bridegroom all good luck._

The first two lines are quoted by Athenaeus to show that in Sappho Hermes
was cupbearer to the gods; and in another place he quotes the rest to
illustrate her mention of _carch[=e]sia,_ cups narrow in the middle, with
handles reaching from the top to the bottom. Lachmann first joined the two
fragments. The verses appear to belong to the _Epithalamia._


52

  [Greek: Dedyke men a selanna]
  [Greek: kai Plêiades, mesai de]
  [Greek: nyktes, para d' erchet' ôra,]
  [Greek: egô de mona kateudô].

_The moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, the time is going by,
and I sleep alone._

  The silver moon is set;
    The Pleiades are gone;
  Half the long night is spent, and yet
    I lie alone.
                        J. H. MERIVALE.

  The moon hath left the sky;
    Lost is the Pleiads' light;
    It is midnight
  And time slips by;
  But on my couch alone I lie.
          J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

Quoted by Hephaestion as an example of metre.


53

  [Greek: Plêrês men ephainet' a selanna,]
  [Greek: ai d' hôs peri bômon estathêsan.]

_The moon rose full, and the women stood as though around an altar._

Quoted by Hephaestion as an example of Praxilleian verses, _i.e._ such as
the Sicyonian poetess Praxilla (about B.C. 450) wrote in the metre known as
the Ionic a majore trimeter brachycatalectic. Blass thinks that the lines
are part of the same poem as that to which the succeeding fragment belongs.


54

  [Greek: Krêssai ny pot' ôd' emmeleôs podessin]
  [Greek: ôrcheunt' apalois amph' eroenta bômon]
  [Greek: poas teren anthos malakon mateisai.]

_Thus at times with tender feet the Cretan women dance in measure round the
fair altar, trampling the fine soft bloom of the grass._

Mr. Moreton J. Walhouse thus combines the previous fragment with this:--

  Then, as the broad moon rose on high,
  The maidens stood the altar nigh;
    And some in graceful measure
      The well-loved spot danced round,
    With lightsome footsteps treading
      The soft and grassy ground.

Quoted by Hephaestion as an example of metre, vv. 1 and 2 in one place and
v. 3 in another; Bergk says Santen first joined them.


55

  [Greek: Abra dêute pachêa spola alloman.]

  _Then delicately in thick robe I sprang._

From Herodian, as an illustration of the Aeolic dialect. Bergk attributes
this to Sappho, but Cramer and others think that Alcaeus wrote the line.


56

  [Greek: Phaisi dê pota Lêdan yakinthinôn]
  [Greek: [yp' antheôn] pepykadmenon]
  [Greek: eurên ôion.]

  _Leda they say once found an egg hidden under hyacinth-blossoms._

From the _Etymologicum Magnum_, Athenaeus, and others. Bergk thinks fr. 112
may be continuous with this, thus--

  [Greek: eurên ôion ôiô]
  [Greek: poly leukoteron] - v v - v -

since Athenaeus quotes fr. 112 after fr. 56. It is uncertain what flower
the Greeks meant by 'hyacinth'; it probably had nothing in common with our
hyacinth, and it seems to have comprised several flowers, especially the
iris, gladiolus, and larkspur.


57

  [Greek: Ophthalmois de melais nyktos aôros.]

  _And dark-eyed Sleep, child of Night._

From the _Etymologicum Magnum_, to show that the first letter of [Greek:
aôros] = [Greek: ôros], 'sleep,' was redundant.


57A

  [Greek: Chrysophaê therapainan Aphroditas.]

  _Aphrodite's handmaid bright as gold._

Philodemus, about 60 B.C., in a MS. discovered at Herculaneum, says that
Sappho thus addresses [Greek: Peithô], _Persuasion_. The MS. is, however,
defective, and Gomperz, the editor, thinks from the context that Hecate is
here referred to. Cf. frr. 132, 125. (Bergk formerly numbered this fr.
141.)


58

  [Greek: Echei men Andromeda kalan amoiban.]

  _Andromeda has a fair requital._

Quoted by Hephaestion together with the following, although the lines are
obviously out of different odes. Probably each fragment is the first line
of separate poems.


59

  [Greek: Psapphoi, ti tan polyolbon Aphroditan?]

  _Sappho, why_ [celebrate] _blissful Aphrodite?_

60

  [Greek: Deute nyn, abrai Charites, kallikomoi te Moisai.]

  _Come now, delicate Graces and fair-haired Muses._

  Come hither, fair-haired Muses, tender Graces,
      Come hither to our home.
                            FREDERICK TENNYSON.

Quoted by Hephaestion, Attilius Fortunatianus (about the fifth century
A.D.), and Servius, as an example of Sappho's choriambic tetrameters.


61

  [Greek: Parthenon adyphônon].

  _A sweet-voiced maiden._

From Attilius Fortunatianus.


62

  [Greek: Katthnaskei, Kytherê', abros Adônis, ti ke theimen;]
  [Greek: Kattyptesthe korai kai katereikesthe chitônas.]

_Delicate Adonis is dying, Cytherea; what shall we do? Beat your breasts,
maidens, and rend your tunics._

Quoted by Hephaestion, and presumed to be Sappho's from a passage in
Pausanias, where he says she learnt the name of the mythological personage
Oetol[)i]nus (as if [Greek: oitos Linou], 'the death of Linus'), from the
poems of Pamph[=o]s, a mythical poet of Attica earlier than Homer, and so
to her Adonis was just like Oetolinus. The Linus-song was a very ancient
dirge or lamentation, of which a version (or rather a late rendering,
apparently Alexandrian) has been preserved by a Scholiast on Homer
(_Iliad_, xviii. 569), running thus: 'O Linus, honoured by all the gods,
for to thee first they gave to sing a song to men in clear sweet sounds;
Phoebus in envy slew thee, but the Muses lament thee.' A charming example
of what the Linus-song was in the third century B.C., remains for us in
Bion's _Lament for Adonis_.

The dirge was chiefly sung by the Greek peasants at vintage-time, and so
may have arisen from a mythical personification of Apollo, as the burning
sun of summer suddenly slaying the life and bloom of nature. It is said to
have been of Phoenician origin, and to have derived its name from the words
_ai le nu_, 'woe is us,' which may have been the burden of the song. The
word [Greek: ailinos], so frequent a refrain in the mournful choral odes of
the Greek tragic poets, seems to indicate that the personality of Linus was
the invention of a time when the meaning of the burden had been forgotten.


63

  [Greek: Ô ton Adônin.]

  _Ah for Adonis!_

From Marius Plotius, about 600 A.D. It seems to be the refrain of the ode
to Adonis. Cf. fr. 108.

  Ah for Adonis! So
  The virgins cry in woe:
  Ah, for the spring, the spring,
  And all fleet blossoming.
            MICHAEL FIELD, 1889.


64

  [Greek: Elthont' ex oranô porphyrian [echonta] perthemenon]
                               [Greek: chlamyn.]

  _Coming from heaven wearing a purple mantle._

        From heaven he came,
  And round him the red chlamys burned like flame.
                                   J. A. SYMONDS.

  _He came from heaven in purple mantle clad._
                               FREDERICK TENNYSON.

Quoted by Pollux, about 180 A.D., who says that Sappho, in her ode to Eros,
out of which this verse probably came, was the first to use the word
[Greek: chlamys], a short mantle fastened by a brooch on the right
shoulder, so as to hang in a curve across the body.


65

  [Greek: Brodopachees agnai Charites, deute Dios korai.]

  _Come, rosy-armed pure Graces, daughters of Zeus._

Theocritus' _Idyl 28_, _On a Distaff_, according to the argument prefixed
to it, was written in the dialect and metre of this fragment. And
Philostr[)a]tus, about 220 A.D., says 'Sappho loves the rose, and always
crowns it with some praise, likening to it the beauty of her maidens; she
likens it also to the arms of the Graces, when she describes their elbows
bare.' Cf. fr. 146.


66

  - v - [Greek: O d' Areus phaisi ken Aphaiston agên bia.]

  _But Ares says he would drag Hephaestus by force._

From Priscian, late in the fifth century A.D.


67

  - v - v v - - v v - [Greek: Polla d' anarithma]
                  [Greek: potêria kalaiphis.]

  _Many thousand cups thou drainest._

Quoted by Athenaeus when descanting on drinking-cups.


68

  [Greek: Katthanoisa de keiseai pota, kôu mnamosyna sethen]
  [Greek: esset' oute tot' out' ysteron; ou gar pedecheis brodôn]
  [Greek: tôn ek Pierias, all' aphanês kên Aida domois]
  [Greek: phoitaseis ped' amaurôn nekyôn ekpepotamena.]

_But thou shalt ever lie dead, nor shall there be any remembrance of thee
then or thereafter, for thou hast not of the roses of Pieria; but thou
shalt wander obscure even in the house of Hades, flitting among the shadowy
dead._

  In the cold grave where thou shalt lie
  All memory too of thee shall die,
  Who in this life's auspicious hours
  Disdained Pieria's genial flowers;
  And in the mansions of the dead,
  With the vile crowd of ghosts, thy shade,
  While nobler spirits point with scorn,
  Shall flit neglected and forlorn.
                                 ? FELTON.

  Unknown, unheeded, shalt thou die,
    And no memorial shall proclaim
  That once beneath the upper sky
    Thou hadst a being and a name.

  For never to the Muses' bowers
    Didst thou with glowing heart repair,
  Nor ever intertwine the flowers
    That fancy strews unnumbered there.

  Doom'd o'er that dreary realm, alone,
    Shunn'd by the gentler shades, to go,
  Nor friend shall soothe, nor parent own
    The child of sloth, the Muses' foe.
                     REV. R. BLAND, 1813.

  Thee too the years shall cover; thou shalt be
  As the rose born of one same blood with thee,
  As a song sung, as a word said, and fall
  Flower-wise, and be not any more at all,
  Nor any memory of thee anywhere;
  For never Muse has bound above thine hair
  The high Pierian flowers whose graft outgrows
  All Summer kinship of the mortal rose
  And colour of deciduous days, nor shed
  Reflex and flush of heaven about thine head, _etc_.
                     SWINBURNE, _Anactoria_.

  Woman dead, lie there;
  No record of thee
  Shall there ever be,
  Since thou dost not share
  Roses in Pieria grown.
  In the deathful cave,
  With the feeble troop
  Of the folk that droop,
  Lurk and flit and crave,
  Woman severed and far-flown.
          WILLIAM CORY, 1858.

  Thou liest dead, and there will be no memory left behind
  Of thee or thine in all the earth, for never didst thou bind
  The roses of Pierian streams upon thy brow; thy doom
  Is writ to flit with unknown ghosts in cold and nameless gloom.
                                             EDWIN ARNOLD, 1869.

  Yea, thou shalt die,
  And lie
    Dumb in the silent tomb;
  Nor of thy name
  Shall there be any fame
    In ages yet to be or years to come:
  For of the flowering Rose,
  Which on Pieria blows,
    Thou hast no share:
  But in sad Hades' house,
  Unknown, inglorious,
    'Mid the dim shades that wander there
    Shalt thou flit forth and haunt the filmy air.
                             J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

  When thou fallest in death, dead shalt thou lie, nor shall thy memory
  Henceforth ever again be heard then or in days to be,
  Since no flowers upon earth ever were thine, plucked from Pieria's
      spring,
  Unknown also 'mid hell's shadowy throng thou shalt go wandering.
                                     ANON., _Love in Idleness_, 1883.

From Stobaeus, about 500 A.D., as addressed to an uneducated woman.
Plutarch quotes the fragment as written to a certain rich lady; but in
another work he says the crown of roses was assigned to the Muses, for he
remembered Sappho's having said to some unpolished and uneducated woman
these same words. Arist[=i]des, about 150 A.D., speaks of Sappho's
boastfully saying to some well-to-do woman, 'that the Muses made her blest
and worthy of honour, and that she should not die and be forgotten;' though
this may refer to fr. 10.


69

  [Greek: Oud' ian dokimoimi prosidoisan phaos aliô]
  [Greek: essesthai sophian parthenon eis oudena pô chronon]
  [Greek: toiautan.]

_No one maiden I think shall at any time see the sunlight that shall be as
wise as thou._

  Methinks no maiden ever
    Will live beneath the sun
  Who is as wise as thou art,--
    Not e'en till Time is done.

Quoted by Chrysippus. It is probably out of the same ode as the preceding.


70

  [Greek: Tis d' agroiôtis toi thelgei noon,]
  [Greek: ouk epistamena ta brake' elkên epi tôn sphyrôn?]

_What country girl bewitches thy heart, who knows not how to draw her dress
about her ankles?_

  What country maiden charms thee,
    However fair her face,
  Who knows not how to gather
    Her dress with artless grace?

Athenaeus, speaking of the care which the ancients bestowed upon dress,
says Sappho thus jests upon Andromeda. Three other authors quote the same
lines.


71

  [Greek: Êrôn exedidax' ek Gyarôn tan tanysidromon.]

  _I taught Hero of Gyara, the swift runner._

Quoted by Choeroboscus, to show the Aeolic accusative.


72

  - v [Greek: Alla tis ouk emmi palinkotôn]
  [Greek: organ, all' abakên tan phren' echô] v -

  _I am not of a malignant nature, but have a quiet temper._

Quoted in the _Etymologicum Magnum_ to show the meaning of [Greek: abakês],
'childlike, innocent.'


73

  - v [Greek: Autar oraiai stephanêplokeun.]

  _But charming_ [maidens] _plaited garlands._

Quoted by the Scholiast on Aristophanes _Thesmophoriazusae_ 401, to show
that plaiting wreaths was a sign of being in love.


74

  - v - [Greek: Su te kamos therapôn Eros.]

  _Thou and my servant Love._

Quoted by Maximus Tyrius to show that Sappho agreed with Diotima when the
latter said to Socrates (Plato, _Sympos._, p. 328) that Love is not the
son, but the attendant and servant, of Aphrodite. Cf. fr. 132.


75

  [Greek: All' eôn philos ammin [allo]]
    [Greek: lechos arnyso neôteron;]
  [Greek: ou gar tlasom' egô xynoikên]
    [Greek: neô g' essa geraitera.]

_But if thou lovest us, choose another and a younger bed-fellow; for I will
not brook to live with thee, old woman with young man._

From Stobaeus' _Anthology_, and Apostolius.


76

  [Greek: Eumorphotera Mnasidika tas apalas Gyrinnôs.]

  _Mnasidica is more shapely than the tender Gyrinno._

Quoted by Hephaestion as an example of metre (cf. p. 24).


77

  [Greek: Asaroteras oudam' ep', ô ranna, sethen tychoisa.]

  _Scornfuler than thee, Eranna, have I nowhere found._

Quoted by Hephaestion with the foregoing. The MSS. do not agree; perhaps
[Greek: ô ranna] is an adjective, for [Greek: ô erateinê], _O lovely--_.


78

  [Greek: Sy de stephanois, ô Dika, perthesth' eratais phobaisin,]
  [Greek: orpakas anêtoio synerrais' apalaisi chersin;]
  [Greek: euanthesin ek gar peletai kai charitos makairan]
  [Greek: mallon proterên; astephanôtoisi d' apystrephontai.]

_Do thou, Dica, set garlands round thy lovely hair, twining shoots of dill
together with soft hands: for those who have fair flowers may best stand
first, even in the favour of Goddesses; who turn their face away from those
who lack garlands._

  Here, fairest Rhodope, recline,
  And 'mid thy bright locks intertwine,
  With fingers soft as softest down,
  The ever verdant parsley crown.
  The Gods are pleased with flowers that bloom
  And leaves that shed divine perfume,
  But, if ungarlanded, despise
  The richest offered sacrifice.
                               J. H. MERIVALE.

  But place those garlands on thy lovely hair,
  Twining the tender sprouts of anise green
  With skilful hand; for offerings and flowers
  Are pleasing to the Gods, who hate all those
  Who come before them with uncrowned heads.
                                 C. D. YONGE.

  Of foliage and flowers love-laden
    Twine wreaths for thy flowing hair,
  With thine own soft fingers, maiden.
    Weave garlands of parsley fair;

  For flowers are sweet, and the Graces
    On suppliants wreathed with may
  Look down from their heavenly places,
    But turn from the crownless away.
                   J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

Mr. J. A. Symonds has also thus expanded the lines into a sonnet (1883):--

  Bring summer flowers, bring pansy, violet,
    Moss-rose and sweet-briar and blue columbine;
    Bring loveliest leaves, rathe privet, eglantine,
  Brown myrtles with the dews of morning wet:
  Twine thou a wreath upon thy brows to set;
    With thy soft hands the wayward tendrils twine;
  Then place them, maiden, on those curls of thine,
  Those curls too fair for gems or coronet.

  Sweet is the breath of blossoms, and the Graces,
    When suppliants through Love's temple wend their way,
  Look down with smiles from their celestial places
    On maidens wreathed with chaplets of the may;
  But from the crownless choir they hide their faces,
    Nor heed them when they sing nor when they pray.

Athenaeus, quoting this fragment, says:--'Sappho gives a more simple reason
for our wearing garlands, speaking as follows ... in which lines she
enjoins all who offer sacrifice to wear garlands on their heads, as they
are beautiful things and acceptable to the Gods.'


79

  [Greek: Egô de philêm' abrosynan, kai moi to lampron]
  [Greek: eros] v [Greek: aeliô kai to kalon lelonchen.]

_I love delicacy, and for me Love has the sun's splendour and beauty._

In speaking of perfumes, Athenaeus, quoting Clearchus, says:--'Sappho,
being a thorough woman and a poetess besides, was ashamed to separate
honour from elegance, and speaks thus ... making it evident to everybody
that the desire of life that she confessed had brilliancy and honour in it;
and these things especially belong to virtue.'


80

  [Greek: Kam men te tylan kaspoleô.]

  _And down I set the cushion._

Quoted by Herodian, along with fr. 50.


81

  [Greek: Ô ploutos aneu seu g' areta 'st' ouk asinês paroikos]
  [Greek: [ê d' ex amphoteron krasis eudaimonias echei to akron].]

_Wealth without thee, Worth, is no safe neighbour_ [_but the mixture of
both is the height of happiness_].

  Wealth without virtue is a dangerous guest;
  Who holds them mingled is supremely blest.
                             J. H. MERIVALE.

From the Scholiast on Pindar. The second line appears to be the gloss of
the commentator, though Blass believes it is Sappho's.




VI

IN VARIOUS METRES


82

  [Greek: Auta de sy Kalliopa.]

  _And thou thyself, Calliope._

Quoted by Hephaestion when he is analysing a metre invented by Archilochus.


83

  [Greek: Dauois apalas etaras]
  [Greek: en stêthesin] - v v - .

  _Sleep thou in the bosom of thy tender girlfriend._

From the _Etymologicum Magnum_. Blass thinks that the proper place for this
fragment is among the _Epithalamia._


84

  [Greek: Deuro dêute Moisai, chrysion lipoisai.]

  _Hither now, Muses, leaving golden_ ...

Quoted by Hephaestion as an example of a verse made of two Ithyphallics.


85

  [Greek: Esti moi kala pais, chrysioisin anthemoisin]
  [Greek: empherên echoisa morphan, Klêis' agapata,]
  [Greek: anti tas egô oude Lydian paisan oud' erannan.]

_I have a fair daughter with a form like a golden flower, Cleïs the
beloved, above whom I_ [prize] _nor all Lydia nor lovely_ [Lesbos]....

  I have a child, a lovely one,
  In beauty like the golden sun,
  Or like sweet flowers of earliest bloom;
  And Claïs is her name, for whom
  I Lydia's treasures, were they mine,
  Would glad resign.
                           J. H. MERIVALE.

  A lovely little girl is ours,
    Kleïs the beloved,
    Kleïs is her name,
  Whose beauty is as the golden flowers.
                    FREDERICK TENNYSON.

Quoted and elaborately scanned by Hephaestion, although Bergk regards the
lines as merely trochaic.


86

              [Greek: Polla moi tan]
  [Greek: Pôlyanaktida paida chairên.]

  _All joy to thee, daughter of Polyanax._

From Maximus Tyrius. It seems to be addressed to either Gorgo or Andromeda.




VII

IN THE IONIC _A MINORE_ METRE


87

  [Greek: Za d' elexaman onar Kyprogenêa.]

  _In a dream I spake with the daughter of Cyprus._

_I.e._ Aphrodite. From Hephaestion.


88

  [Greek: Ti me Pandionis ô ranna chelidôn?]

  _Why, lovely swallow, daughter of Pand[=i]on,_ [weary] _me?_

From Hephaestion, who says Sappho wrote whole songs in this metre. [Greek:
Ô ranna] is Is. Vossius' emendation; [Greek: ôrana] is the ordinary
reading, which Hesychius explains as perhaps an epithet of the swallow
'dwelling under the roof.'

  Ah, Procne, wherefore dost thou weary me?
  Thus flitting out and flitting in ...
  Tease not the air with this tumultuous wing.
                         MICHAEL FIELD, 1889.


89

  [Greek: ... Amphi d' abrois lasiois eu we pykassen.]

  _She wrapped herself well in delicate hairy ..._

From Pollux, who says the line refers to fine closely-woven linen.


90

  [Greek: Glykeia mater, outoi dynamai krekên ton iston,]
  [Greek: pothô dameisa paidos bradinan di' Aphroditan.]

_Sweet Mother, I cannot weave my web, broken as I am by longing for a boy,
at soft Aphrodite's will._

  [As o'er her loom the Lesbian maid
    In love-sick languor hung her head,
  Unknowing where her fingers strayed
    She weeping turned away and said--]

  'Oh, my sweet mother, 'tis in vain,
    I cannot weave as once I wove,
  So wildered is my heart and brain
    With thinking of that youth I love.'
                   T. MOORE, _Evenings in_
                         _Greece_, p. 18.

  Mother, I cannot mind my wheel;
    My fingers ache, my lips are dry:
  Oh, if you felt the pain I feel!
    But oh, who ever felt as I?
     W. S. LANDOR, _Simonidea_, 1807.

  Sweet mother, I can spin no more,
  Nor ply the loom as heretofore,
      For love of him.
                FREDERICK TENNYSON.

  Sweet mother, I the web
    Can weave no more;
  Keen yearning for my love
    Subdues me sore,
  And tender Aphrodite
    Thrills my heart's core.
              M. J. WALHOUSE.

Cf. Mrs. John Hunter's 'My mother bids me bind my hair,' etc.

From Hephaestion, as an example of metre.




VIII

EPITHALAMIA, BRIDAL SONGS


91

  [Greek: Ipsoi dê to melathron]
      [Greek: Ymênaon]
  [Greek: aerrete tektontes andres;]
      [Greek: Ymênaon]
  [Greek: gambros erchetai isos Areui,]
      [Greek: [Ymênaon]]
  [Greek: andros megalô poly meizôn;]
      [Greek: [Ymênaon]]

_Raise high the roof-beam, carpenters. (Hymenaeus!) Like Ares comes the
bridegroom, (Hymenaeus!) taller far than a tall man. (Hymenaeus!)_

  Artists, raise the rafters high!
    Ample scope and stately plan--
  Mars-like comes the bridegroom nigh,
    Loftier than a lofty man.
    ANON., _Edinb. Rev._, 1832, p. 109.

  High lift the beams of the chamber,
        Workmen, on high;
  Like Arés in step comes the Bridegroom;
  Like him of the song of Terpander,
        Like him in majesty.
                    F. T. PALGRAVE, 1854.

Quoted by Hephaestion as an example of a _mes-hymnic_ poem, where the
refrain follows each line. The hymenaeus or wedding-song was sung by the
bride's attendants as they led her to the bridegroom's house, addressing
Hymen the god of marriage. The metre seems, says Professor Mahaffy (_Hist.
of Class. Greek Lit._, i., p. 20, 1880), to be the same as that of the
Linus song; cf. fr. 62.


92

  [Greek: Perrochos, ôs ot' aoidos o Lesbios allodapoisin.]

_Towering, as the Lesbian singer towers among men of other lands._

Quoted by Demetrius, about 150 A.D. It is uncertain what 'Lesbian singer'
is here referred to; probably Terpander, but Neue thinks it may mean the
whole Lesbian race, from their pre-eminence in poetry.


93

  [Greek: Oion to glykymalon ereuthetai akrô ep' ysdô]
  [Greek: akron ep' akrotatô; lelathonto de malodropêes,]
  [Greek: ou man eklelathont', all' ouk edynant' epikesthai.]

_As the sweet-apple blushes on the end of the bough, the very end of the
bough, which the gatherers overlooked, nay overlooked not but could not
reach._

        --O fair--O sweet!
  As the sweet apple blooms high on the bough,
  High as the highest, forgot of the gatherers:
        So thou:--
  Yet not so: nor forgot of the gatherers;
  High o'er their reach in the golden air,
        --O sweet--O fair!
                     F. T. PALGRAVE, 1854.

Quoted by the Scholiast on Hermogenes, and by others, to explain the word
[Greek: glykymalon], 'sweet-apple,' an apple grafted on a quince; it is
used as a term of endearment by Theocritus (_Idyl_ xi. 39), 'Of thee, my
love, my sweet-apple, I sing.' Himerius, writing about 360 A.D., says:
'Aphrodite's orgies we leave to Sappho of Lesbos, to sing to the lyre and
make the bride-chamber her theme. She enters the chamber after the games,
makes the room, spreads Homer's bed, assembles the maidens, leads them into
the apartment with Aphrodite in the Graces' car and a band of Loves for
playmates. Binding her tresses with hyacinth, except what is parted to
fringe her forehead, she lets the rest wave to the wind if it chance to
strike them. Their wings and curls she decks with gold, and drives them in
procession before the car as they shake the torch on high.' And
particularly this: 'It was for Sappho to liken the maiden to an apple,
allowing to those who would pluck before the time to touch not even with
the finger-tip, but to him who was to gather the apple in season to watch
its ripe beauty; to compare the bridegroom with Achilles, to match the
youth's deeds with the hero's.' Further on he says: 'Come then, we will
lead him into the bride-chamber and persuade him to meet the beauty of the
bride. O fair and lovely, the Lesbian's praises appertain to thee: thy
play-mates are rosy-ankled Graces and golden Aphrodite, and the Seasons
make the meadows bloom.' These last words especially--

  [Greek: Ô kala, ô chariessa.]

  _O fair, O lovely ..._

seem taken out of one of Sappho's hymeneal odes, although they also occur
in Theocritus, _Idyl_ xviii. 38.


94

  [Greek: Oian tan yakinthon en ouresi poimenes andres]
  [Greek: possi katasteiboisi, chamai d' epiporphyrei anthos.]

_As on the hills the shepherds trample the hyacinth under foot, and the
flower darkens on the ground._

Compare Catullus, xi. 21-24:--

  Think not henceforth, thou, to recall Catullus'
  Love; thy own sin slew it, as on the meadow's
  Verge declines, un-gently beneath the ploughshare
      Stricken, a flower.
                             (ROBINSON ELLIS.)

And Vergil, _Aeneid_, ix. 435, of Euryalus dying:--

  And like the purple flower the plough cuts down
  He droops and dies.

  Pines she like to the hyacinth out on the path by the hill top;
  Shepherds tread it aside, and its purples lie lost on the herbage.
                                                EDWIN ARNOLD, 1869.


ONE GIRL.

(_A combination from Sappho._)

I.

  Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough,
  A-top on the topmost twig,--which the pluckers forgot, somehow,--
  Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now.

II.

  Like the wild hyacinth flower which on the hills is found,
  Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound,
  Until the purple blossom is trodden into the ground.
                                            D. G. ROSSETTI, 1870;

in 1881 he altered the title to _Beauty_. (_A combination from Sappho._)

Quoted by Demetrius, as an example of the ornament and beauty proper to a
concluding sentence. Bergk first attributed the lines to Sappho.


95

  [Greek: Wespere, panta pherôn, osa phainolis eskedas' auôs,]
  [Greek: phereis oin, pheres aiga, phereis apy materi paida.]

_Evening, thou that bringest all that bright morning scattered; thou
bringest the sheep, the goat, the child back to her mother._

Thus imitated by Byron:--

  O Hesperus, thou bringest all good things--
    Home to the weary, to the hungry cheer,
  To the young bird the parent's brooding wings,
    The welcome stall to the o'erlaboured steer;
  Whate'er of peace about our hearthstone clings,
    Whate'er our household gods protect of dear,
  Are gathered round us by thy look of rest;
  Thou bring'st the child too to its mother's breast.
                                  _Don Juan_, iii. 107.

And by Tennyson:--

  The ancient poetess singeth, that Hesperus all things bringeth,
  Smoothing the wearied mind: bring me my love, Rosalind.
  Thou comest morning or even; she cometh not morning or evening.
  False-eyed Hesper, unkind, where is my sweet Rosalind?
                                    _Leonine Elegiacs_, 1830-1884.

  Hesperus brings all things back
  Which the daylight made us lack,
  Brings the sheep and goats to rest,
  Brings the baby to the breast.
                 EDWIN ARNOLD, 1869.

  Hesper, thou bringest back again
    All that the gaudy daybeams part,
  The sheep, the goat, back to their pen,
    The child home to his mother's heart.
               FREDERICK TENNYSON, 1890.

  Evening, all things thou bringest
    Which dawn spread apart from each other;
  The lamb and the kid thou bringest,
    Thou bringest the boy to his mother.
                       J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

  Hesper, whom the poet call'd the Bringer home of all good things.
      TENNYSON, _Locksley Hall Sixty Years After_, 1886.

From the _Etymologicum Magnum_, where it is adduced to show the meaning of
[Greek: auôs], 'dawn.' The fragment occurs also in Demetrius, as an example
of Sappho's grace. One cannot but believe that Catullus had in his mind
some such hymeneal ode of Sappho's as that in which this fragment must have
occurred when he wrote his _Vesper adest, juvenes, consurgite: Vesper
Olympo_, etc. (lxii.), part of which was imitated in the colloquy between
Opinion and Truth in Ben Jonson's _The Barriers_.


96

  [Greek: Aiparthenos essomai.]

  _I shall be ever maiden._

From a Parisian MS. edited by Cramer, adduced to show the Aeolic form of
[Greek: aei], 'ever.'


97

  [Greek: Dôsomen, êsi patêr.]

  _We will give, says the father ..._

From a Parisian MS. edited by Cramer.


98

  [Greek: Thyrôrô podes eptoroguioi,]
  [Greek: ta de sambala pempeboêa,]
  [Greek: pisyngoi de dek' exeponasan.]

_To the doorkeeper feet seven fathoms long, and sandals of five bulls'
hides, the work of ten cobblers._

From Hephaestion, as an example of metre. Demetrius says: 'And elsewhere
Sappho girds at the rustic bridegroom and the doorkeeper ready for the
wedding, in prosaic rather than poetic phrase, as if she were reasoning
rather than singing, using words out of harmony with dance and song.'


99

  [Greek: Olbie gambre, soi men dê gamos, ôs arao,]
  [Greek: ektetelest', echês de parthenon, an arao.]

_Happy bridegroom, now is thy wedding come to thy desire, and thou hast the
maiden of thy desire._

  Happy bridegroom, thou art blest
  With blisses far beyond the rest,
        For thou hast won
        The chosen one,
  The girl thou lovest best.
              FREDERICK TENNYSON.

Quoted by Hephaestion, along with the following, to exemplify metres; both
fragments seem to belong to the same ode.


100

  [Greek: Mellichios d' ep' imertô kechytai prosôpô.]

  _And a soft_ [paleness] _is spread over the lovely face._

In the National Library of Madrid there is a MS. of an epithalamium by
Choricius, a rhetorician of Gaza, who flourished about 520 A.D., in which
the lamented Ch. Graux (_Revue de Philologie_, 1880, p. 81) found a
quotation from Sappho which is partly identical with this fragment
preserved by Hephaestion. H. Weil thus attempts to restore the passage:--

  [Greek: Soi charien men eidos, oppata d'] - v - =
  [Greek: mellichr', eros d' ep' imertô]
        [Greek: kechytai prosôpô;]
  - v [Greek: tetimak' exocha s' Aphrodita.]

_Well favoured is thy form, and thine eyes ... honeyed, and love is spread
over thy fair face ... Aphrodite has honoured thee above all._

Two apparent imitations by Catullus are quoted by Weil to confirm his
restoration of Sappho's verses; viz., _mellitos oculos_, honeyed eyes (48,
1), and _pulcher es, neque te Venus negligit_, fair thou art, nor does
Venus neglect thee (61, 194).


101

  [Greek: O men gar kalos, osson idên, peletai [agathos],]
  [Greek: o de kagathos autika kai kalos essetai.]

_He who is fair to look upon is_ [good], _and he who is good will soon be
fair also._

  Beauty, fair flower, upon the surface lies;
  But worth with beauty e'en in aspect vies.
                                   ? FELTON.

Galen, the physician, writing about 160 A.D., says: 'It is better
therefore, knowing that the beauty of youth is like Spring flowers, its
pleasure lasting but a little while, to approve of what the Lesbian [here]
says, and to believe Solon when he points out the same.'


102

  [Greek: Êr' eti parthenias epiballomai?]

  _Do I still long for maidenhood?_

Quoted by Apollonius, and by the Scholiast on Dionysius of Thrace, to
illustrate the interrogative particle [Greek: ara], Aeolic [Greek: êra],
and as an example of the catalectic iambic.


103

  [Greek: Chairoisa nympha, chairetô d' o gambros.]

  _The bride_ [comes] _rejoicing; let the bridegroom rejoice._

From Hephaestion, as a catalectic iambic.


104

  [Greek: Tiô s', ô phile gambre, kalôs eikasdô?]
  [Greek: orpaki bradinô se kalist' eikasdô.]

_Whereunto may I well liken thee, dear bridegroom? To a soft shoot may I
best liken thee._

From Hephaestion, as an example of metre.


105

  [Greek: ... Chaire, nympha,]
  [Greek: chaire, timie gambre, polla.]

  _Hail, bride! noble bridegroom, all hail!_

Quoted by Servius, about 390 A.D., on Vergil, _Georg._ i. 31; also referred
to by Pollux and Julian.


106

  [Greek: Ou gar ên atera pais, ô gambre, toiauta.]

  _For there was no other girl, O bridegroom, like her._

From Dionysius of Halicarnassus.


107, 108

  [Greek: Espet' Ymênaon.]
  [Greek: Ô ton Adônion.]

  _Sing Hymenaeus!_
  _Ah for Adonis!_

From Plotius, about the fifth or sixth century A.D., to show the metre of
Sappho's hymeneal odes. The text is corrupt; the first verse is thus
emended by Bergk, the second by Scaliger. Cf. fr. 63.

109

  A. [Greek: Parthenia, parthenia, poi me lipois' apoichê?]
  B. [Greek: Ouketi hêxô pros se, ouketi hêxô.]

  A. _Maidenhood, maidenhood, whither art thou gone away from me?_
  B. _Never again will I come to thee, never again._

  'Sweet Rose of May, sweet Rose of May,
  Whither, ah whither fled away?'
  'What's gone no time can e'er restore--
  I come no more, I come no more.'
                         J. H. MERIVALE.

From Demetrius, who quoted the fragment to show the grace of Sappho's style
and the beauty of repetition.


110

  [Greek: Allan mê kamesteran phrena.]

  _Fool, faint not thou in thy strong heart._

From a very corrupt passage in Herodian. The translation is from Bergk's
former emendation--

  [Greek: Alla mê kame ty sterean phrena.]


111

  [Greek: Phainetai woi kênos.]

  _To himself he seems ..._

From Apollonius, to show that the Aeolians used the digamma, [Greek: w].
Bergk says this fragment does not belong to fr. 2.


112

  [Greek: Ôiô poly leukoteron.]

  _Much whiter than an egg._

From Athenaeus; cf. frs. 56 and 122.


113

  [Greek: Mêt' emoi meli mête melissa]

  _Neither honey nor bee for me._

A proverb quoted by many late authors, referring to those who wish for good
unmixed with evil. They seem to be the words of the bride. This, and the
second line of fr. 62, and many other verses, show Sappho's fondness for
alliteration; frs. 4 and 5, among several others, show that she did not
ignore the charm of assonance.


114

  [Greek: Mê kinê cheradas.]

  _Stir not the shingle._

Quoted by the Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius to show that [Greek:
cherades] were 'little heaps of stones.'


115

  [Greek: Optais amme.]

  _Thou burnest us._

Compare Swinburne's--

  My life is bitter with thy love; thine eyes
  Blind me, thy tresses burn me, thy sharp sighs
  Divide my flesh and spirit with soft sound, _etc._
                                        _Anactoria_.

Quoted by Apollonius to show the Aeolic form of [Greek: hêmas], 'us.'


116

  [Greek: Êmitybion stalasson.]

  _A napkin dripping._

From the Scholiast on Aristophanes' _Plutus_, quoted to show the meaning of
[Greek: hêmitybion], 'a half worn out shred of linen with which to wipe the
hands.'


117

  [Greek: Ton won paida kalei.]

  _She called him her son._

Quoted by Apollonius to show the Aeolic use of the digamma.




IX

EPIGRAMS


All three are preserved only in the _Greek Anthology_. The authenticity of
the last, fr. 120, is doubtful. To none of them does Bergk restore the form
of the Aeolic dialect.


118

  [Greek: Paides, aphônos eoisa tod' ennepô, ai tis erêtai,]
    [Greek: phônan akamatan katthemena pro podôn;]
  [Greek: Aithopia me kora Latous anethêken Arista]
    [Greek: Hermokleidaia tô Saonaiada,]
  [Greek: sa propolos, despoina gunaikôn; ha sy chareisa]
    [Greek: prophrôn hameteran eukleison genean.]

_Maidens, dumb as I am, I speak thus, if any ask, and set before your feet
a tireless voice: To Leto's daughter Aethopia was I dedicated by Arista
daughter of Hermocleides son of Saonaïades, thy servant, O queen of women;
whom bless thou, and deign to glorify our house._

ON A PRIESTESS OF DIANA.

  Does any ask? I answer from the dead;
  A voice that lives is graven o'er my head:
  To dark-eyed Dian, ere my days begun,
  Aristo vowed me, wife of Saon's son:
  Then hear thy priestess, hear, O virgin Power,
  And thy best gifts on Saon's lineage shower.
                                            R.

The goddess here invoked as the 'queen of women' appears to have been
Art[)e]mis, the Diana of the Romans.


119

  [Greek: Timados hade konis, tan dê pro gamoio thanousan]
  [Greek: dexato Phersephonas kyaneos thalamos,]
  [Greek: has kai apophthimenas pasai neothagi sidarô]
  [Greek: alikes himertan kratos ethento koman.]

_This is the dust of Timas, whom Persephone's dark chamber received, dead
before her wedding; when she perished, all her fellows dressed with
sharpened steel the lovely tresses of their heads._

    This dust was Timas'; ere her bridal hour
    She lies in Proserpina's gloomy bower;
    Her virgin playmates from each lovely head
  Cut with sharp steel their locks, their strewments for the dead.
                                            SIR CHARLES A. ELTON.

  This is the dust of Timas, whom unwed
  Persephone locked in her darksome bed:
  For her the maids who were her fellows shore
  Their curls, and to her tomb this tribute bore.
                                  J. A. SYMONDS.


120

  [Greek: Tô gripei Pelagôni patêr epethêke Meniskos]
    [Greek: kyrton kai kôpan, mnama kakozoias.]

_Over the fisherman Pelagon his father Meniscus set weel and oar, memorial
of a luckless life._

ON A FISHERMAN.

  This oar and net and fisher's wickered snare
    Meniscus placed above his buried son--
  Memorials of the lot in life he bare,
    The hard and needy life of Pelagon.
                         SIR CHARLES A. ELTON.

  Here, to the fisher Pelagon, his sire Meniscus laid
  A wicker-net and oar, to show his weary life and trade.
                                            LORD NEAVES.

    Above a fisher's tomb
  Were set his withy-basket and his oar,
    The tokens of his doom,
  Of how in life his labour had been sore:
  A father put them up above his son,
  Meniscus over luckless Pelagon.
                     MICHAEL FIELD, 1889.

Bergk sees no reason to accept the voice of tradition in attributing this
epigram to Sappho.




X

MISCELLANEOUS


121

Athenaeus says:--

'It is something natural that people who fancy themselves beautiful and
elegant should be fond of flowers; on which account the companions of
Persephone are represented as gathering flowers. And Sappho says she saw--

  [Greek: anthe' amergousan paid' agan hapalan,]

  '_A maiden full tender plucking flowers._'


122, 123

  [Greek: Poly paktidos adymelestera, chrysô chrysotera.]

  _Far sweeter of tone than harp, more golden than gold._

Quoted by Demetrius as an example of hyperbolic phrase. A commentator on
Hermogenes the rhetorician says: 'These things basely flatter the ear, like
the erotic phrases which Anacreon and Sappho use, [Greek: galaktos
leukotera] _whiter than milk_, [Greek: hydatos hapalôtera] _fresher than
water_, [Greek: pêktidôn emmelestera] _more musical than the harp_, [Greek:
hippou gaurotera] _more skittish than a horse_, [Greek: rhodôn habrotera]
_more delicate than the rose_, [Greek: himatiou heanou malakôtera] _softer
than a fine robe_, [Greek: chrysou timiôtera] _more precious than gold_.'


124

Demetrius says:--

'Wherefore also Sappho is eloquent and sweet when she sings of Beauty, and
of Love and Spring and the Kingfisher; and every beautiful expression is
woven into her poetry, besides what she herself invented.'


125

Maximus Tyrius says:--

'Diotima says that Love flourishes in prosperity, but dies in adversity; a
sentiment which Sappho comprehends when she calls Love [Greek: glykipikros]
_bitter-sweet_ [cf. fr. 40] and [Greek: algesidôros] giver of pain.
Socrates calls Love the wizard, Sappho [Greek: mythoplokos] _the weaver of
fictions_.'


126

  [Greek: To melêma toumon.]

  _My darling._

Quoted by Julian, and by Theodoras Hyrtacenus in the twelfth century A.D.,
as of 'the wise Sappho.' Bergk says Sappho would have written [Greek: to
melêma ômon] in her own dialect.


127

Aristides says:--

[Greek: To ganos] _the brightness_ standing over the whole city, [Greek: ou
diaphtheiron tas opseis] _not destroying the sight_, as Sappho says, but
developing at once and crowning and watering with cheerfulness; in no way
[Greek: hyakinthinô anthei homoion] _like a hyacinth-flower_, but such as
earth and sun never yet showed to men.'


128

Pollux writes:--

'Anacreon ... says they are crowned also with _dill_, as both Sappho [cf.
fr. 78] and Alcaeus say; though these also say [Greek: selinois] _with
parsley_.'


129

Philostratus says:--

'Thus contend [the maidens] [Greek: rhodopêcheis kai helikôpides kai
kalliparêoi kai meliphônoi] _with rosy arms and glancing eyes and fair
cheeks and honeyed voices_--this indeed is Sappho's sweet salutation.'

And Aristaen[)e]tus:--

'Before the porch the most musical and [Greek: meilichophônoi]
_soft-voiced_ of the maidens sang the hymeneal song; this indeed is
Sappho's sweetest utterance.'

Antipater of Sidon, _Anthol. Pal._ ix. 66, and others, call Sappho
_sweet-voiced_.


130

Libanius the rhetorician, about the fourth century A.D., says:--

'If therefore nought prevented Sappho the Lesbian from praying [Greek:
nykta autê genesthai diplasian] _that the night might be doubled for her_,
let me also ask for something similar. Time, father of year and months,
stretch out this very year for us as far as may be, as, when Herakles was
born, thou didst prolong the night.'

Bergk thinks that Sappho probably prayed for [Greek: nykta triplasian] _a
night thrice as long_ as an ordinary night, in reference to the myth of
Jupiter and Alcmene, the mother of Hercules.


131

Strabo says:--

'A hundred furlongs further (from Elaea, a city in Aeolis) is Cané, the
promontory opposite to Lectum, and forming the Gulf of Adramyttium, of
which the Elaïtic Gulf is a part. Canae is a small city of the Locrians of
Cynus, over against the most southerly extremity of Lesbos, situated in the
Canaean territory, which extends to Arginusae and the overhanging cliff
which some call _Aega_, as if "a goat," but the second syllable should be
pronounced long, Aeg[=a], like [Greek: akta] and [Greek: archa], for this
was the name of the whole mountain which at present is called Cané or Canae
... and the promontory itself seems afterwards to have been called _Aega_,
as Sappho says the rest Can[=e] or Canae.'


132

The Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius says:--

'Apollonius calls Love the son of Aphrodite, Sappho _of Earth and Heaven_.'

But the Argument prefixed to Theocritus, _Idyl_ xiii., says:--

'Sappho called _Love the child of Aphrodite and Heaven_.'

And Pausanias, about 180 A.D., says:--

'On Love Sappho the Lesbian sang many things which do not agree with one
another.' Cf. fr. 74.


133

Himerius says:--

'Thou art, I think, an evening-star, of all stars the fairest: this is
Sappho's song to Hesperus.' And again: 'Now thou didst appear like that
fairest of all stars; for the Athenians call thee Hesperus.'

Bergk thinks Sappho's line ran thus:--

  [Greek: Asterôn pantôn ho kalistos ...]

  _Of all stars the fairest._

Elsewhere Himerius refers to what seems an imitation of Sappho, and says:
'If an ode had been wanted, I should have given him such an ode as this--

[Greek: Nympha rhodeôn erôtôn bryousa, Nympha Paphiês agalma kalliston,
ithi pros eunên, ithi pros lechos meilicha paizousa, glykeia nymphiô;
Hesperos s' hekousan agoi, argyrothronon zygian Hêran thaumazousan.']

_Bride teeming with rosy loves, bride, fairest image of the goddess of
Paphos, go to the couch, go to the bed, softly sporting, sweet to the
bridegroom. May Hesperus lead thee rejoicing, honouring Hera of the silver
throne, goddess of marriage._

  Bride, in whose breast haunt rosy loves!
  Bride, fairest of the Paphian groves!
  Hence, to thy marriage rise, and go!
  Hence, to thy bed, where thou shalt show
  With honeyed play thy wedded charms,
  Thy sweetness in the bridegroom's arms!
  Let Hesper lead thee forth, a wife,
  Willing and worshipping for life,
  The silver-throned, the wedlock dame,
  Queen Hera, wanton without shame!
                    J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.


134

The Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius says:--

'The story of the love of Sel[=e]n[=e] is told by Sappho, and by Nicander
in the second book of his _Europa_; and it is said that Selene came to
Endymion in the same cave' (on Mount Latmus in Caria).


135

The Scholiast on Hesiod, _Op. et D._, 74, says:--

'Sappho calls Persuasion [Greek: Aphroditês thygatera] _Daughter of
Aphrodite_.' Cf. fr. 141.


136

Maximus Tyrius says:--

'Socrates blames Xanthippe for lamenting his death, as Sappho blames her
daughter--

[Greek: Ou gar themis en mousopolôn oikia thrênon einai; ouk ammi prepei
tade.]

_For lamentation may not be in a poet's house: such things befit not us.'_

  In the home of the Muses 'tis bootless to mourn.
                              FREDERICK TENNYSON.


137

Aristotle, in his _Rhetoric_, ii. 23, writes:--

[Greek: ê hôsper Sapphô, hoti to apothnêskein kakon; hoi theoi gar houtô
kekrikasin; apethnêskon gar an.]

Gregory, commenting on Hermogenes, also quotes the same saying:--

[Greek: hoion phêsin hê Sapphô, hoti to apothnêskein kakon; hoi theoi gar
houtô kekrikasin; apethnêskon gar an, eiper ên kalon to apothnêskein.]

Several attempts have been made to restore these words to a metrical form,
and this of Hartung's appears to be the simplest:--

  [Greek: To thnaskein kakon; houtô kekrikasi theoi;]
  [Greek: ethnaskon gar an eiper kalon ên tode.]

_Death is evil; the Gods have so judged: had it been good, they would die._

The preceding fragment (136) seems to have formed part of the same ode as
the present. Perhaps it was this ode, which Sappho sent to her daughter
forbidding her to lament her mother's death, that Solon is said to have so
highly praised. The story is quoted from Aelian by Stobaeus thus: 'Solon
the Athenian [who died about 558 B.C.], son of Execest[)i]des, on his
nephew's singing an ode of Sappho's over their wine, was pleased with it,
and bade the boy teach it him; and when some one asked why he took the
trouble, he said, [Greek: hina mathôn auto apothanô]. 'That I may not die
before I have learned it.'


138

Athenaeus says:--

'Naucratis has produced some celebrated courtesans of exceeding beauty; as
D[=o]richa, who was beloved by Charaxus, brother of the beautiful Sappho,
when he went to Naucratis on business, and whom she accuses in her poetry
of having robbed him of much. Herodotus calls her Rhod[=o]pis, not knowing
that Rhodopis was different from the Doricha who dedicated the famous spits
at Delphi.'

Herodotus, about 440 B.C., said:--

'Rhodopis came to Egypt with Xanthes of Samos; and having come to make
money, she was ransomed for a large sum by Charaxus of Mitylene, son of
Scamandronymus and brother of Sappho the poetess. Thus Rhodopis was made
free, and continued in Egypt, and being very lovely acquired great riches
for a Rhodopis, though no way sufficient to erect such a pyramid [as
Mycer[=i]nus'] with. For as any one who wishes may to this day see the
tenth of her wealth, there is no need to attribute any great wealth to her.
For Rhodopis was desirous of leaving a monument to herself in Greece, and
having had such a work made as no one ever yet devised and dedicated in a
temple, to offer it at Delphi as a memorial of herself: having therefore
made from the tenth of her wealth a great number of iron spits for roasting
oxen, as far as the tenth allowed, she sent them to Delphi; and they are
still piled up behind the altar which the Chians dedicated, and opposite
the temple itself. The courtesans of Naucratis are generally very lovely:
for in the first place this one, of whom this account is given, became so
famous that all the Greeks became familiar with the name Rhodopis; and in
the next place, after her another whose name was Archid[)i]ce became
celebrated throughout Greece, though less talked about than the former. As
for Charaxus, after ransoming Rhodopis he returned to Mitylene, where
Sappho ridiculed him bitterly in an ode.'

And Strabo:--

'It is said that the tomb of the courtesan was erected by her lovers:
Sappho the lyric poet calls her _D[=o]richa_. She was beloved by Sappho's
brother Charaxus, who traded to the port of Naucratis with Lesbian wine.
Others call her Rhodopis.'

And another writer (_Appendix Prov._, iv. 51) says:--

'The beautiful courtesan Rhodopis, whom Sappho and Herodotus commemorate,
was of Naucratis in Egypt.'


139

Athenaeus says:--

'The beautiful Sappho in several places celebrates her brother,
Lar[)i]chus, as cup-bearer to the Mitylenaeans in the town-hall.'

The Scholiast on the _Iliad_, xx. 234, says:--

'It was the custom, as Sappho also says, for well-born and beautiful youths
to pour out wine.'

Cf. fr. 5.


140

Palaeph[)a]tus, probably an Alexandrian Greek, says:--

'Phaon gained his livelihood by a boat and the sea; the sea was crossed by
a ferry; and no complaint was made by any one, since he was just, and only
took from those who had means. He was a wonder among the Lesbians for his
character. The goddess--they call Aphrodite "the goddess"--commends the
man, and having put on the appearance of a woman now grown old, asks Phaon
about sailing; he was swift to wait on her and carry her across and demand
nothing. What thereupon does the goddess do? They say she transformed the
man and restored him to youth and beauty. This is that Phaon, her love for
whom Sappho several times made into a song.'

The story is repeated by many writers. Cf. fr. 29.


141

[Fr. 141 now appears as fr. 57A, _q.v._]


142

Pausanias says:--

'Yet that gold does not contract rust the Lesbian poetess is a witness, and
gold itself shows it.'

And the Scholiast on Pindar, _Pyth._, iv. 407:--

'But gold is indestructible; and so says Sappho,

  [Greek: Dios pais ho chrysos, keinon ou sês oude kis daptei],

  _Gold is son of Zeus, no moth nor worm devours it._'

Sappho's own phrase is lost.


143

Aulus Gellius, about 160 A.D., writes:--

'Homer says Niobe had six sons and six daughters, Euripides seven of each,
Sappho _nine_, Bacchylides and Pindar ten.'

Cf. fr. 31, the only line extant from the ode here referred to.


144

Servius, commenting on Vergil, _Aeneid_, vi. 21, says:--

'Some would have it believed that Theseus rescued along with himself seven
boys and seven maidens, as Plato says in his _Phaedo_, and Sappho in her
lyrics, and Bacchylides in his dithyrambics, and Euripides in his
_Hercules_.'

No such passage from Sappho has been preserved.


145

Servius, commenting on Vergil, _Eclog._, vi. 42, says:--

'Prometheus, son of Iap[)e]tus and Clym[)e]ne, after he had created man, is
said to have ascended to heaven by help of Minerva, and having applied a
small torch [or perhaps 'wand'] to the sun's wheel, he stole fire and
showed it to men. The Gods being angered hereby sent two evils upon the
earth, fevers and disease [the text is here obviously corrupt; it ought to
be 'women and disease' or 'fevers and women'], as Sappho and Hesiod tell.'


146

Philostratus says:--

'Sappho loves the Rose, and always crowns it with some praise, likening
beautiful maidens to it.'

This remark seems to have led some of the earlier collectors of Sappho's
fragments to include the 'pleasing song in commendation of the Rose' quoted
by Achilles Tatius in his love-story _Clitophon and Leucippe_, but there is
no reason to attribute it to Sappho. Mrs. E. B. Browning thus translated
it:--

SONG OF THE ROSE.

  If Zeus chose us a king of the flowers in his mirth,
    He would call to the Rose and would royally crown it,
  For the Rose, ho, the Rose, is the grace of the earth,
    Is the light of the plants that are growing upon it.

  For the Rose, ho, the Rose, is the eye of the flowers,
    Is the blush of the meadows that feel themselves fair--
  Is the lightning of beauty that strikes through the bowers
    On pale lovers who sit in the glow unaware.

  Ho, the Rose breathes of love! Ho, the Rose lifts the cup
    To the red lips of Cypris invoked for a guest!
  Ho, the Rose, having curled its sweet leaves for the world,
    Takes delight in the motion its petals keep up,
  As they laugh to the wind as it laughs from the west!

And Mr. J. A. Symonds (1883):--

THE PRAISE OF ROSES.

  If Zeus had willed it so
    That o'er the flowers one flower should reign a queen,
  I know, ah well I know
    The rose, the rose, that royal flower had been!
  She is of earth the gem,
  Of flowers the diadem;
  And with her flush
  The meadows blush:
  Nay, she is beauty's self that brightens
  In Summer, when the warm air lightens!
  Her breath's the breath of Love,
  Wherewith he lures the dove
  Of the fair Cyprian queen;
  Her petals are a screen
  Of pink and quivering green,
  For Cupid when he sleeps,
  Or for mild Zephyrus, who laughs and weeps.

'Sappho loves flowers with a personal sympathy,' writes Professor F. T.
Palgrave. "Cretan girls," she says, "with their soft feet dancing lay flat
the tender bloom of the grass" [fr. 54]: she feels for the hyacinth "which
shepherds on the mountain tread under foot, and the purple flower is on the
ground" [fr. 94]: she pities the wood-doves (apparently) as their "life
grows cold and their wings fall" before the archer' [fr. 16].


147

Himerius says:--

'These gifts of yours must now be likened to those of the leader of the
Muses himself, as Sappho and Pindar, in an ode, adorn him with golden hair
and lyres, and attend him with a team of swans to Helicon while he dances
with Muses and Graces; or as poets inspired by the Muses crown the
Bacchanal (for thus the lyre calls him, meaning Dion[=y]sos), when Spring
has just flashed out for the first time, with Spring flowers and
ivy-clusters, and lead him, now to the topmost heights of Caucasus and
vales of Lydia, now to the cliffs of Parnassus and the rock of Delphi,
while he leaps and gives his female followers the note for the Evian tune.'


148

Eustathius says:--

'There is, we see, a vagabond friendship, as Sappho would say, [Greek:
kalon dêmosion], _a public blessing_.'

This appears to have been said against Rhodopis. Cf. fr. 138.


149

The _Lexicon Seguerianum_ defines--

'[Greek: Akakos] _one who has no experience of ill_, not, one who is
good-natured. So Sappho uses the word.'


150

The _Etymologicum Magnum_ defines--

[Greek: Amamaxys] _a vine trained on long poles_, and says Sappho makes the
plural [Greek: amamaxydes]. So Choeroboscus, late in the sixth century
A.D., says 'the occurrence of the genitive [Greek: amamaxydos] [the usual
form being [Greek: amamaxyos]] in Sappho is strange.'


151

The _Etymologicum Magnum_ says of [Greek: Amara], _a trench for watering
meadows_, 'because it is raised by a water-bucket, [Greek: amê] being a
mason's instrument'--that it is a word Sappho seems to have used; and
Orion, about the fifth century A.D., also explains the word similarly, and
says Sappho used it.


152

Apollonius says:--

'And in this way metaplasms of words [_i.e._, tenses or cases formed from
non-existent presents or nominatives] arise, like [Greek: erysarmates]
[chariot-drawing], [Greek: lita] [cloths], and in Sappho [Greek: to aua],
Dawn.'

And the _Etymologicum Magnum_ says:--

'We find [Greek: para tên auan] [during the morning] in Aeolic, for "during
the day."'


153

The _Etymologicum Magnum_ says:--

'[Greek: Auôs] or [Greek: êôs], that is, the day; thus we read in Aeolic.
Sappho has--

  [Greek: potnia auôs],

  _Queen Dawn_.'

  The solemn Dawn.
        FREDERICK TENNYSON.


154

Athenaeus says:--

'The [Greek: barômos] [_baromos_] and [Greek: sarbitos] [_sarb[)i]tos_],
both of which are mentioned by Sappho and Anacreon, and the Mag[)a]dis and
the Triangles and the Samb[=u]cae, are all ancient instruments.'

Athenaeus in another place, apparently more correctly, gives the name of
the first as [Greek: barmos] [_barmos_].

What these instruments precisely were is unknown. Cf. p. 46.


155

Pollux says:--

'Sappho used the word [Greek: beudos] for _a woman's dress_, a
_kimber[)i]con_, a kind of short transparent frock.'


156

Phryn[)i]chus the grammarian, about 180 A.D., says:--

'Sappho calls _a woman's dressing-case_, where she keeps her scents and
such things, [Greek: grytê].'


157

Hesychius, about 370 A.D., says Sappho called Zeus [Greek: Hektôr],
_Hector_, _i.e._ 'holding fast.'


158

A Parisian MS. edited by Cramer says:--

'Among the Aeolians [Greek: z] is used for [Greek: d], as when Sappho says
[Greek: zabaton] for [Greek: diabaton], _fordable_.'


159

A Scholiast on Homer quotes [Greek: agagoiên], _may I lead_, from Sappho.


160

Eustathius, commenting on the _Iliad_, quotes the grammarian Aristophanes
[about 260 B.C.] saying that Sappho calls a wind that is as if twisted up
and descending, a cyclone, [Greek: anemon katarê], _a wind rushing from
above_.

Nauck would restore the epithet to verse 2 of fr. 42.


161

Choeroboscus says:--

'Sappho makes the accusative of [Greek: kindynos] _danger_ [Greek:
kindyn].'

Another writer, in the _Codex Marc._, says:--

'Sappho makes the accusative [Greek: kindyna].'


162

Joannes Alexandrinus, about the seventh century A.D., says:--

'The acute accent falls either on the last syllable or the last but one or
the last but two, but never on the last but three; the accent of [Greek:
Mêdeia] [_Medeia_ the sorceress, wife of Jason] in Sappho is allowed by
supposing the [Greek: ei] to form a diphthong.'


163

An unknown author, in _Antiatticista_, says:--

'Sappho, in her second book, calls [Greek: smirna] _myrrh_ [Greek: myrra].'


164

A treatise on grammar edited by Cramer says:--

'The genitive plural of [Greek: Mousa] is [Greek: Môsaôn] among the
Laconians, [Greek: Moisaôn] _of the Muses_ in Sappho.'


165

Phrynichus says:--

[Greek: Nitron] _natron_ (carbonate of soda) is the form 'an Aeolian would
use, such as Sappho, with a [Greek: n]; but,' he goes on, 'an Athenian
would spell it with a [Greek: l], [Greek: litron].'


166

A Scholiast on Homer, _Iliad_, iii. 219, says:--

'Sappho said [Greek: polyidridi] _of much knowledge_ as the dative of
[Greek: polyidris].'


167

Photius, in his _Lexicon_, about the ninth century A.D., says:--

'[Greek: Thapsos] is a wood with which they dye wool and hair yellow, which
Sappho calls [Greek: Skythikon xylon] _Scythian wood_.'

And the Scholiast on Theocritus, _Idyl_ ii. 88, says:--

'[Greek: Thapsos] is a kind of wood which is also called [Greek:
skytharion] or Scythian wood, as Sappho says; and in this they dip fleeces
and make them of a quince-yellow, and dye their hair yellow; among us it is
called [Greek: chrysoxylon] _gold-wood_.'

Ahrens thinks that here the Scholiast quoted Sappho, and he thus restores
the verses:--

  - v - [Greek: Zkythikon xylon,]
  [Greek: tô baptoisi te têria]
  [Greek: poieisi de malina]
  [Greek: xanthisdoisi te tas trichas.]

_Scythian wood, in which they dip fleeces and make them quince-coloured,
and dye their hair yellow._

_Thapsus_ may have been box-wood, but it is quite uncertain.


168

The _Etymologicum Magnum_ says:--

'The Aeolians say [Greek: Tioisin ophthalmoisin] _with what eyes_ ...
[using [Greek: tioisi] for [Greek: tisi], the dative plural of [Greek:
tis]] as Sappho does.'


169

Orion of Thebes, the grammarian, about 450 A.D., says:--

'In Sappho [Greek: chelônê] is [Greek: chelynê] _a tortoise_'; which is
better written [Greek: chelyna], or rather [Greek: chelyna], as other
writers imply.


170

Pollux says:--

'Bowls with a boss in the middle are called [Greek: balaneiomphaloi],
circular-bottomed, from their shape, [Greek: chrysomphaloi], gold-bottomed,
from the material, like Sappho's [Greek: chrysastragaloi], _with golden
ankles_.'

Some few other fragments are attributed to Sappho, but Bergk admits none as
genuine. Above is to be seen every word which he considered hers. An
account of some which have recently been brought to light is given on the
succeeding pages.




THE FAYUM FRAGMENTS


In the Egyptian Museum at Berlin there are some ancient manuscripts which
were bought in the summer of 1879, and which are believed to have come from
Medînet-el-Fayûm in Central Egypt, near the ancient Arsinoë or
Crocodilopolis. A tiny scrap of parchment among these was deciphered by
Professor F. Blass of Kiel, and described by him with much minuteness in
the _Rheinisches Museum_ for 1880, vol. xxxv. pp. 287-290. Through the
kindness of Dr. Erman, the Director of the Museum, and Professor of
Egyptian Archæology in the University, I have been favoured with
photographs of each side of this piece of parchment, exactly the size of
the original. These have been reproduced in facsimile by the Autotype
Company upon the accompanying plate. Some of the minutiæ of the manuscript
are lost in the copy, but it gives a fair general idea of the precious
relic, and exhibits the manner in which it has been torn and perforated and
defaced. It also shows some of the difficulties with which those who
decipher ancient manuscripts have to contend. Few, at the first glance,
would guess how much could be made out of so little.

The letters on each side of the parchment are clearly written, punctuated,
and accented. They appear to belong to the eighth century A.D., so that the
writing is at least a thousand years old. The actual letters are these,
those which are not decipherable with certainty being marked off by
brackets:--


  (A.) [Greek: dôsên]
       [Greek: ytônment' ep]
       [Greek: alôn kaslôn; (s]
       [Greek: ; lois. lytês te m]
    5  [Greek: m' oneidos]
       [Greek: oidêsais. epi t (a]
       [Greek: ia(nasaio. to gar]
       [Greek: m) onouk' outô (m]
       [Greek: diakêtai;]
   10  [Greek: m (êd]



  (B.) [Greek: thethymom]
       [Greek: mipampan]
       [Greek: dynamai]

    5  [Greek: askenêmoi]
       [Greek: s) antilampên]
       [Greek: lonprosôpon]

       [Greek: nchroistheis]
   10      [Greek: ... (ros]

The two fragments, distinguished by Blass as A. and B., occur, the one on
the front, the other on the back of the scrap of parchment. They were
edited by Bergk, in the fourth (posthumous) edition of his _Poetae Lyrici
Graeci_, 1882, vol. iii. pp. 704, 705. Blass ascribed the verses to Sappho,
and he is still of opinion that they are hers, from the metre, the dialect,
and 'the colour of the diction,' to use his own expression in a letter to
me.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

Indeed, every word of them makes one feel that no poet or poetess save
Sappho could have so exquisitely combined simplicity and beauty. Bergk,
however, prints them as of uncertain origin, _fragmenta adespota_ (56 A.,
56 B). He agrees with Blass that they are in the Lesbian dialect and the
Sapphic metre, but he thinks that they may have been written by Alcaeus.
Bergk's decision partly rests upon the statement of Suidas, that Horapollo,
the Greek grammarian, who first taught at Alexandria and afterwards at
Constantinople, in the reign of Theodosius, about 400 A.D., wrote a
commentary on Alcaeus; but he gives no reason for believing that these
Fayum manuscripts necessarily come from Alexandria: their history is very
uncertain. Blass thinks that the greater fame, especially in later times,
of Sappho, strongly favours his own view. To my mind there is little doubt
that we have herein none but her very words.

A restoration of such imperfect fragments must needs be guess-work. Bergk
has, however, attempted it in part, and he has accepted the emendations of
Blass in lines 3-5 of fragment A. Bücheler, one of the editors of the
_Rheinisches Museum_, has also expressed his views with regard to some of
the lines; but they are not endorsed by the authority of Bergk. According
to the latter distinguished scholar, fragment A may have run thus:--

   1 - v - v - [Greek: dokimois charin moi ouk apydôsên;]
     - [Greek: klytôn men t' epterygês] v - v
     - [Greek: kalôn kaslôn] v v - v - v
     [Greek: philois, lypês te me kaporiptês]
   5    [Greek: eis em' oneidos.]
     [Greek: ê ken oidêsais, epi t' aig' amelgôn]
     [Greek: Skyrian asaio; to gar noêma]
     [Greek: tômon ouk outô malakophron, echthrôs]
         [Greek: tois diakêtai.]
  10 - v [Greek: mêd'] v - v v - v - v

In which case it might have had this meaning:--

Thou seemest not to care _to return_ my favour; and _indeed_ thou didst fly
away from famous ... _of_ the fair _and noble_ ... to thy friends, _and
painest me_, and castest _reproach_ at _me._ Truly _thou mayst swell, and
sate thyself_ with milking a goat of Scyros. _For_ my mood is _not so_
soft-hearted to those soever to whom _it is disposed_ unfriendly ... _nor_
....

The words which are here italicised are those which alone are extant in
full in the manuscript; the others are only plausible guesses, though some
of them are indicated by the existence of accents and portions of letters.

Bergk's ingenious restoration of lines 6 and 7 is founded on a fragment of
Alcaeus (fr. 110), wherein Chrysippus explains [Greek: aix Skyria], a goat
of Scyros, as a proverb of those who spoil kindness ([Greek: epi tôn tas
euergesias anatrepontôn]), as a goat upsets her milking pail ([Greek:
epeidê pollakis ta angeia anatrepei hê aix]). Blass would, however,
complete the phrase thus:--

          [Greek: epi t (a te lôba]
  [Greek: kard) ian asaio],

  _And with the outrage sate thy heart._

Disappointing as this is, the restoration of fragment B. is yet more
hopeless. Authorities are agreed as to the position of the words in the
Sapphic stanza, thus:--

     - v - v - v v - [Greek: the thymon]
     - v - v - v v - [Greek: mi pampan]
     - v - v - v v - [Greek: dynamai]
         - v v - v
   5 - v - v - v v [Greek: as ken ê moi]
     - v - v - v v [Greek: antilampên]
     - v - v - v [Greek: ka) lon prosôpon]
         - v v - v
     - v - v - v v [Greek: sy) nchroistheis]
  10 - v - v - v v - [Greek: etai) ros].

The only additions hazarded by Bergk, or accepted by him from Blass, are
given on the left of the brackets. Bergk says that [Greek: dynamai] (as if
v - - ; cf. fr. 13) is an old form of the conjunctive for [Greek: dynômai].
He reads line 5, [Greek: as ken ê moi], comparing Theocritus, 29, 20,
[Greek: as ken erês], 'as long as thou lovest': Bergk and Blass alike
consider [Greek: ê] as a later form of [Greek: ê]. The words may mean:

_... soul ... altogether ... I should be able ... as long indeed as to me
... to flash back ... fair face ... stained over ... friend._

But in the absence of any context the very meaning of the separate words is
uncertain.

Bergk thinks that the fragments belong to different poems, unless we read
fragment A. after fragment B.; there is nothing on the parchment to
indicate sequence.

In fragment B. it will be seen that a space occurs in each place where the
last (or Adonic) verses of each Sapphic stanza would have been, as if they
had been written more to the left in the manuscript; they probably
therefore ranged with the long lines, of which we have only some of the
last syllables preserved. Indenting the shorter verses is a modern fashion;
the ancient way was to begin each one at the same distance from the margin.




SAPPHO TO PHAON


A TRANSLATION OF OVID'S HEROIC EPISTLE, XV.
BY ALEXANDER POPE, 1707

  Say, lovely youth that dost my heart command,
  Can Phaon's eyes forget his Sappho's hand?
  Must then her name the wretched writer prove,
  To thy remembrance lost as to thy love?
    Ask not the cause that I new numbers choose,
  The lute neglected and the lyric Muse:
  Love taught my tears in sadder notes to flow,
  And tuned my heart to elegies of woe.
    I burn, I burn, as when through ripened corn
  By driving winds the spreading flames are borne.
  Phaon to Aetna's scorching fields retires,
  While I consume with more than Aetna's fires.
  No more my soul a charm in music finds;
  Music has charms alone for peaceful minds:
  Soft scenes of solitude no more can please;
  Love enters there, and I'm my own disease.
  No more the Lesbian dames my passion move,
  Once the dear objects of my guilty love:[9]
  All other loves are lost in only thine,
  Ah, youth ungrateful to a flame like mine!
  Whom would not all those blooming charms surprise,
  Those heavenly looks and dear deluding eyes?
  The harp and bow would you like Phoebus bear,
  A brighter Phoebus Phaon might appear.
  Would you with ivy wreathe your flowing hair,
  Not Bacchus' self with Phaon could compare:
  Yet Phoebus loved, and Bacchus felt the flame;
  One Daphne warmed and one the Cretan dame;
  Nymphs that in verse no more could rival me
  Than e'en those gods contend in charms with thee.
  The Muses teach me all their softest lays,
  And the wide world resounds with Sappho's praise.
  Though great Alcaeus more sublimely sings,
  And strikes with bolder rage the sounding strings,
  No less renown attends the moving lyre
  Which Venus tunes and all her Loves inspire.
  To me what Nature has in charms denied
  Is well by wit's more lasting flames supplied.
  Though short my stature, yet my name extends
  To heaven itself and earth's remotest ends:
  Brown as I am, an Aethiopian dame
  Inspired young Perseus with a generous flame:
  Turtles and doves of different hue unite,
  And glossy jet is paired with shining white.
  If to no charms thou wilt thy heart resign
  But such as merit, such as equal thine,
  By none, alas, by none thou canst be moved;
  Phaon alone by Phaon must be loved.
  Yet once thy Sappho could thy cares employ;
  Once in her arms you centred all your joy:
  No time the dear remembrance can remove,
  For oh how vast a memory has love!
  My music then you could for ever hear,
  And all my words were music to your ear:
  You stopt with kisses my enchanting tongue,
  And found my kisses sweeter than my song.
  In all I pleased, but most in what was best;
  And the last joy was dearer than the rest:
  Then with each word, each glance, each motion fired,
  You still enjoyed, and yet you still desired,
  Till all dissolving in the trance we lay,
  And in tumultuous raptures died away.

    The fair Sicilians now thy soul inflame:
  Why was I born, ye gods, a Lesbian dame?
  But ah, beware, Sicilian nymphs, nor boast
  That wandering heart which I so lately lost;
  Nor be with all those tempting words abused:
  Those tempting words were all to Sappho used.
  And you that rule Sicilia's happy plains,
  Have pity, Venus, on your poet's pains.

    Shall fortune still in one sad tenor run
  And still increase the woes so soon begun?
  Inured to sorrow from my tender years,
  My parent's ashes drank my early tears:
  My brother next, neglecting wealth and fame,
  Ignobly burned in a destructive flame:
  An infant daughter late my griefs increased,
  And all a mother's cares distract my breast.
  Alas, what more could Fate itself impose,
  But thee, the last and greatest of my woes?
  No more my robes in waving purple flow,
  Nor on my hand the sparkling diamonds glow;
  No more my locks in ringlets curled diffuse
  The costly sweetness of Arabian dews;
  Nor braids of gold the varied tresses bind
  That fly disordered with the wanton wind.
  For whom should Sappho use such arts as these?
  He's gone whom only she desired to please!
  Cupid's light darts my tender bosom move;
  Still is there cause for Sappho still to love;
  So from my birth the Sisters fixed my doom,
  And gave to Venus all my life to come:
  Or, while my Muse in melting notes complains,
  My yielding heart keeps measure to my strains.
  By charms like thine, which all my soul have won,
  Who might not--ah, who would not be undone?
  For those, Aurora Cephalus might scorn,
  And with fresh blushes paint the conscious morn:
  For those, might Cynthia lengthen Phaon's sleep,
  And bid Endymion nightly tend his sheep:
  Venus for those had rapt thee to the skies,
  But Mars on thee might look with Venus' eyes.
  O scarce a youth, yet scarce a tender boy!
  O useful time for lovers to employ!
  Pride of thy age, and glory of thy race,
  Come to these arms and melt in this embrace!
  The vows you never will return, receive;
  And take at least the love you will not give.
  See, while I write, my words are lost in tears:
  The less my sense, the more my love appears.

    Sure 'twas not much to bid one kind adieu:
  At least, to feign was never hard to you.
  'Farewell, my Lesbian love,' you might have said;
  Or coldly thus, 'Farewell, O Lesbian maid.'
  No tear did you, no parting kiss receive,
  Nor knew I then how much I was to grieve.
  No lover's gift your Sappho could confer;
  And wrongs and woes were all you left with her.
  No charge I gave you, and no charge could give
  But this--'Be mindful of our loves, and live.'
  Now by the Nine, those powers adored by me,
  And Love, the god that ever waits on thee;--
  When first I heard (from whom I hardly knew)
  That you were fled and all my joys with you,
  Like some sad statue, speechless, pale I stood;
  Grief chilled my breast and stopt my freezing blood;
  No sigh to rise, no tear had power to flow,
  Fixed in a stupid lethargy of woe.
  But when its way the impetuous passion found,
  I rend my tresses and my breasts I wound;
  I rave, then weep; I curse, and then complain;
  Now swell to rage, now melt in tears again.
  Not fiercer pangs distract the mournful dame
  Whose first-born infant feeds the funeral flame.
  My scornful brother with a smile appears,
  Insults my woes, and triumphs in my tears;
  His hated image ever haunts my eyes;--
  'And why this grief? thy daughter lives,' he cries.
  Stung with my love and furious with despair,
  All torn my garments and my bosom bare,
  My woes, thy crimes, I to the world proclaim;
  Such inconsistent things are love and shame.
  'Tis thou art all my care and my delight,
  My daily longing and my dream by night.--
  O night, more pleasing than the brightest day,
  When fancy gives what absence takes away,
  And, dressed in all its visionary charms,
  Restores my fair deserter to my arms!
  Then round your neck in wanton wreath I twine;
  Then you, methinks, as fondly circle mine:
  A thousand tender words I hear and speak;
  A thousand melting kisses give and take:
  Then fiercer joys; I blush to mention these,
  Yet, while I blush, confess how much they please.
  But when with day the sweet delusions fly,
  And all things wake to life and joy, but I;
  As if once more forsaken, I complain,
  And close my eyes to dream of you again:
  Then frantic rise; and, like some fury, rove
  Through lonely plains, and through the silent grove,
  As if the silent grove and lonely plains,
  That knew my pleasures, could relieve my pains.
  I view the grotto, once the scene of love,
  The rocks around, the hanging roofs above,
  That charmed me more, with native moss o'ergrown,
  Than Phrygian marble or the Parian stone:
  I find the shades that veiled our joys before;
  But, Phaon gone, those shades delight no more.
  Here the pressed herbs with bending tops betray
  Where oft entwined in amorous folds we lay;
  I kiss that earth which once was pressed by you,
  And all with tears the withering herbs bedew.
  For thee the fading trees appear to mourn,
  And birds defer their song till thy return:
  Night shades the groves, and all in silence lie,--
  All but the mournful Philomel and I:
  With mournful Philomel I join my strain;
  Of Tereus she, of Phaon I complain.

    A spring there is whose silver waters show,
  Clear as a glass, the shining sands below:
  A flowery lotus spreads its arms above,
  Shades all the banks and seems itself a grove;
  Eternal greens the mossy margin grace,
  Watched by the sylvan genius of the place:
  Here as I lay, and swelled with tears the flood
  Before my sight a watery virgin stood:
  She stood and cried,--'O you that love in vain,
  Fly hence and seek the fair Leucadian main:
  There stands a rock from whose impending steep
  Apollo's fane surveys the rolling deep;
  There injured lovers, leaping from above,
  Their flames extinguish and forget to love.
  Deucalion once with hopeless fury burned;
  In vain he loved, relentless Pyrrha scorned.
  But when from hence he plunged into the main,
  Deucalion scorned, and Pyrrha loved in vain.
  Haste, Sappho, haste, from high Leucadia throw
  Thy wretched weight, nor dread the deeps below.'
  She spoke, and vanished with the voice: I rise,
  And silent tears fall trickling from my eyes.
  I go, ye nymphs, those rocks and seas to prove:
  How much I fear, but ah, how much I love!
  I go, ye nymphs, where furious love inspires;
  Let female fears submit to female fires:
  To rocks and seas I fly from Phaon's hate,
  And hope from seas and rocks a milder fate.
  Ye gentle gales, beneath my body blow,
  And softly lay me on the waves below.
  And thou, kind Love, my sinking limbs sustain,
  Spread thy soft wings and waft me o'er the main,
  Nor let a lover's death the guiltless flood profane.
  On Phoebus' shrine my harp I'll then bestow,
  And this inscription shall be placed below:--
  'Here she who sung, to him that did inspire,
  Sappho to Phoebus consecrates her lyre:
  What suits with Sappho, Phoebus, suits with thee;
  The gift, the giver, and the god agree.'

    But why, alas, relentless youth, ah, why
  To distant seas must tender Sappho fly?
  Thy charms than those may far more powerful be,
  And Phoebus' self is less a god to me.
  Ah, canst thou doom me to the rocks and sea,
  O far more faithless and more hard than they?
  Ah, canst thou rather see this tender breast
  Dashed on these rocks that to thy bosom pressed?
  This breast, which once, in vain! you liked so well;
  Where the Loves played, and where the Muses dwell.
  Alas, the Muses now no more inspire:
  Untuned my lute, and silent is my lyre:
  My languid numbers have forgot to flow,
  And fancy sinks beneath the weight of woe.

    Ye Lesbian virgins and ye Lesbian dames,
  Themes of my verse and objects of my flames,
  No more your groves with my glad songs shall ring;
  No more these hands shall touch the trembling string:
  My Phaon's fled, and I those arts resign:
  (Wretch that I am, to call that Phaon mine!)
  Return, fair youth, return, and bring along
  Joy to my soul and vigour to my song.
  Absent from thee, the poet's flame expires;
  But ah, how fiercely burn the lover's fires!
  Gods, can no prayers, no sighs, no numbers move
  One savage heart, or teach it how to love?
  The winds my prayers, my sighs, my numbers bear;
  The flying winds have lost them all in air.
  Or when, alas, shall more auspicious gales
  To these fond eyes restore thy welcome sails?
  If you return, ah, why these long delays?
  Poor Sappho dies while careless Phaon stays.
  O launch the bark, nor fear the watery plain:
  Venus for thee shall smooth her native main.
  O launch thy bark, secure of prosperous gales:
  Cupid for thee shall spread the swelling sails.
  If you will fly--(yet ah, what cause can be,
  Too cruel youth, that you should fly from me?)
  If not from Phaon I must hope for ease,
  Ah, let me seek it from the raging seas:
  To raging seas unpitied I'll remove;
  And either cease to live or cease to love.




BIBLIOGRAPHY


The following list comprises most of the books and articles in Sapphic
literature which I have consulted. I have added a few to which I have had
reference, but which I have not succeeded in seeing: many of them are mere
curiosities. I could have still further extended the bibliography, if I had
taken more on trust. I have not generally thought it necessary to quote
well-known histories of Greece and Greek literature, nor such translations
as throw no light upon her beyond what this list contains.

  ADDISON, JOHN: The Works of Anacreon translated into English Verse; with
  Notes explanatory and poetical. To which are added the Odes, Fragments,
  and Epigrams of Sappho. With the original Greek placed opposite to the
  Translation. 8vo, London, 1735.

  ADDISON, JOSEPH: Spectator, No. 223, Nov. 15, 1711 and No. 233, Nov. 27,
  1711.

  AHRENS, HEINRICH LUDOLF: De Graecae Linguae Dialectis, Sapphus fragmenta,
  pp. 256-274 of Lib. I. 8vo, Göttingen, 1839.

  AHRENS, HEINRICH LUDOLF: Conjecturen in Alcäus und Sappho, Rheinisches
  Museum, 1842, pp. 388-401.

  Anacreontis Carmina, cum Sapphonis et Alcaei fragmentis. Glasgow, 1744,
  1757, 1761 and 1783.

  Anacreontis et Sapphonis Carmina. Cum virorum doctorum notis et
  emendationibus, in usum juventutis Academiae Salfordiensis, Com.
  Lancastriae. 8vo, London, 1754.

  ANDREAS, ELIAS: Anacreontis Teii antiquissimi poëtae Lyrici Odae, ab
  Helia Andrea Latinae factae. 16mo, Lutetiae, 1556.

  ANDREAS, ELIAS: Anacreontis, Sapphus, et Erinnae Carmina interpretibus
  Henrico Stephano et Elia Andrea. 64mo, Edinburgh, 1766.

  ARNOLD, DR. BERNHARD: Sappho. Vortrag, gehalten zu München am 25. März
  1870. Aus Sammlung gemeinverständlicher Vorträge herausg. v. Rud. Virchow
  und Fr. von Holtzendorff. Berlin, 1871.

  ARNOLD, EDWIN, M.A., C.S.I.: The Poets of Greece [pp. 105-118]. 8vo,
  London, 1869.

  BAXTER, WILLIAM: see Vossius, Isaac (1695).

  BAXTER, WILLIAM: Anacreontis Teii Carmina Graece e Recensione Guilielmi
  Baxteri cum ejusdem Henr. item Stephani atque Tanegvidi Fabri notis
  accesserunt duo Sapphus Odaria [pp. 167-172; 249-254] et Theocriti
  Anacreonticum in mortuum Adonin. Iterum edidit varietatemque lectionibus
  cum suis animadversionibus et Anacreontis fragmenta adjecit Joh. Frider.
  Fischerus. 8vo, Leipzig, 1776.

  BEAU, GABRIEL: La Grèce Poétique. Anacréon--Sappho [pp.
  81-97]--Bion--Moschus--Théocrite. 12mo, Paris, 1884.

  BENTLEY, RICHARD, D.D.: in Graevius' Callimachi Fragmenta, 8vo, Utrecht,
  1697, ad. fr. 417, de Sapphus fragm. 118.

  BERGK, THEODOR: De aliquot fragmentis Sapphonis et Alcaei. Rheinisches
  Museum für Philologie, 8vo, Bonn, 1835, pp. 209-231.

  BERGK, THEODOR: Anthologia Lyrica. 8vo, Leipzig, 1854, pp. 261-273 (text
  only).

  BERGK, THEODOR: Poetae Lyrici Graeci, ed. 4, vol. 3, pp. 82-140. 8vo,
  Leipzig, 1882.

  Bibliothèque Universelle des Dames; _alias_ Bibliothèque de
  Mesdemoiselles Eulalie, Félicité, Sophie, Emilie De Marcilly. Mélanges.
  Tom. viii. pp. 95-130. 24mo, Paris, 1787.

  BLAND, REV. ROBERT: see Merivale, J. H.

  BLASS, FRIEDRICH, of Kiel: Zu den Griechischen Lyrikern. Rhein. Mus.,
  vol. xxix., 1874: Sappho, pp. 149-151.

  BLASS, FRIEDRICH, of Kiel: Neue Fragmente ... der Sappho. Rhein. Mus.,
  vol. xxxv. 1880; pp. 287-290.

  BLOMFIELD, CHARLES JAMES, Bishop of London: Cambridge Museum Criticum,
  vol. i., pp. 1-31, 250-252, 421, 422. 8vo, 1826.

  BLOMFIELD, CHARLES JAMES: see Gaisford.

  BLUM, JOHANN CHRISTIAN: in Olearius' De Poetriis Graecis. 4to, Leipzig,
  1712.

  BOETTICHER, K.: Zwei Hermenbildnisse der Sappho; with a photograph.
  Archäologische Zeitung, 4to, Berlin, 1872, pp. 83-86.

  BORN, FRIEDRICH GOTTLIEB, PH.D.: Anacreontis et Sapphus [pp. 219-227]
  Carmina Graece recensuit notisque illustravit ex optimis interpretibus,
  quibus et suas adjecit. 8vo, Leipzig, 1789.

  BOTHE, FRIDERICUS HENRICUS: Anacreontica Graece recensuit notisque
  criticis instruxit. [Greek: Sapphous leipsana] pp. 77-81. 16mo, Leipzig,
  1805.

  BRAUN, G. C.: Die Fragmente der Sappho, übersetzt von G. C. B[raun]. 8vo,
  Wetzlar, 1815.

  BROCKHAUSEN, R.: Sappho's Lieder in deutschen Versen nachgebildet. Lemgo,
  1827.

  BRUNCK, RICHARD FRANÇOIS PHILIPPE: Analecta veterum poetarum Graecorum:
  i., pp. 54-57; ii., p. 8. 8vo, Strassburg, 1772.

  BRUNCK, RICHARD FRANÇOIS PHILIPPE: Anacreontis Carmina: accedunt quaedam
  e lyricorum reliquiis pp. 82-86. Ed. 2, 12mo, Strassburg, 1786.

  BRUNCK, RICHARD FRANÇOIS PHILIPPE: see Weise, G. H. (1844).

  BÜRGER, EDUARD: Anacreon und andere lyrische Dichter Griechenlands in
  deutschen Reimen. 32mo, Stuttgart, 1855.

  BUSTELLI, GIUSEPPE: Vita e Frammenti di Saffo de Mitilene. Discorso e
  versione (prima intera). Pp. 104. 8vo, Bologna, 1863.

  CAPPONE, FRANCESCO ANTONIO: Liriche Parafrasi di D. Francesco Antonio
  Cappone, Academico ozioso. Sopra tutte l'Ode d'Anacreonte, e sopra alcune
  altre Poesie di diversi Lirici Poeti Greci. Secundo la preposta version
  Latina de'l'or più celebri Traduttori. pp. 190-200. 24mo, Venice, 1670.

  COMPARETTI, PROFESSOR DOMENICO: Saffo e Faone dinanzi alla critica
  storia, in the Nuova Antologia di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, anno xi.,
  seconda serie, vol. i., fasc. ii., pp. 253-288. 8vo, Florence, Febr.
  1876.

  COMPARETTI, PROFESSOR DOMENICO: Sulla Epistola Ovidiana di Saffo a Faone,
  studico critio. Published by the R. Istituto di Studi Superiori pratici e
  di perfezionamento in Firenze, Sezione di Filosofia e Filologia, vol.
  ii., dispensa prima, 8vo, pp. 53, Florence, 1876.

  COMPARETTI, PROFESSOR DOMENICO: Sappho nelle Antiche Rappresentanze
  Vascolari. Published in the Museo Italiano di Antichita Classica, pp.
  41-80, with 4 plates, 4to, Firenze, 1886.

  COUPIN: see Girodet de Roussy.

  COURIER, P.-L.: Daphnis et Chloé, traduit par P.-L. Courier. Suivi des
  Poésies d'Anacréon et de Sappho [Odes I. and II. in French prose, pp.
  45-49] traduction nouvelle d'après un Manuscrit de l'école d'Athènes.
  8vo, Paris, 1878.

  CRAMER, JOHN ANTONY, D.D.: Anecdota Graeca e codd. manuscriptis
  Bibliothecarum Oxoniensium descripsit. Frag. 95, vol. i., p. 444; frag.
  158, vol. ii., p. 325. 2 vols. 8vo, Oxford, 1835-6.

  CRAMER, J. CHR.: Diatribe chronologico-critica de patriâ Sapphus. 4to,
  Jena, N.D.

  CRAMER, J. CHR.: Diatribe chronologico-critica de [Greek: sygphronismô]
  Sapphus et Anacreontis. 4to, Jena, 1755.

  DACIER, ANNE LEFÈVRE [10]: Les Poésies d'Anacréon et de Sapho, traduites
  de Grec en François, avec des Remarques. Les Poésies de Sapho de Lesbos,
  pp. 387-429. 12mo, Paris, 1681.

  DACIER, ANNE LEFÈVRE: Les Poésies d'Anacréon et de Sapho traduites de
  Grec en François, avec des Remarques par Mademoiselle Le Fèvre, pp.
  387-429, 12mo, Lyons, 1696.

  DACIER, ANNE LEFÈVRE: Les poésies d'Anacréon et de Sapho traduites de
  Grec en François, avec des Remarques, par Madame Dacier. Nouvelle édition
  augmentée des Notes Latines de Mr. le Fèvre. 12mo, Amsterdam, 1699.

  DACIER, ANNE LEFÈVRE: Les Poésies d'Anacréon et de Sapho traduites de
  Grec en François, avec des Remarques, par Madame Dacier. Nouvelle
  édition, augmentée des Notes Latines de Mr. le Fèvre, et de la Traduction
  en vers François de Mr. de la Fosse. 8vo, Amsterdam, 1716.

  DEGEN, J. F.: Anacreon and Sappho's Lieder nebst and. lyr. Gedichten,
  Text und Übers. Altenburg, 1787.

  Die Gedichte Anakreons und der Sappho Oden aus dem Griechischen
  übersetzt, und mit Anmerkungen begleitet, pp. 205-216. 8vo, Carlsruhe,
  1760.

  Discours sur la Poësie lyrique, avec les modèles du genre tirés de
  Pindare, d'Anacréon, de Sapho [pp. 137-140], de Malherbe, etc. 24mo,
  Paris, 1761.

  DU BOIS, EDWARD: The Wreath; composed of Selections from Sappho, etc.,
  ... accompanied by a prose translation, with notes. 8vo, London, 1799.

  DUBOIS-GUCHAN, E.-P.: La Pléiade Grecque: Traductions contenant Les Odes
  et Fragments d'Anacréon, Les Poésies de Sapho, etc., pp. 71-88. 8vo,
  Paris, 1873.

  EASBY-SMITH, JAMES S.: The Songs of Sappho. 8vo, pp. ix. 97, Washington,
  1891.

  EGERTON, THE HONOURABLE FRANCIS HENRY: A Fragment of an Ode of Sappho,
  from Longinus: also, an Ode of Sappho from Dionysius Halicarn. Pp. 26.
  8vo, Paris, 1815.

  ELTON, SIR CHARLES ABRAHAM, BART.: Specimens of the Classic Poets ...
  translated into English verse, and illustrated with biographical and
  critical notices; vol. i., pp. 99-111. 8vo, London, 1814.

  FABER, TANAQUILLUS: Anacreontis et Sapphonis Carmina. Notas et
  Animadversiones addidit Tanaquillus Faber; in quibus multa Veterum
  emendantur. 24mo, Saumur, 1670.

  FABER, TANAQUILLUS: see Baxter, William (1776).

  FARD, LE POËTE SANS: see Gaçon, François.

  FARNELL, GEORGE S.: Greek Lyric Poetry; pp. 148-167, 327-342. 8vo,
  London, 1891.

  FAWKES, REV. FRANCIS, M.A.: The Works of Anacreon, Sappho [pp. 169-196],
  Bion, Moschus, and Musaeus. Translated into English by a Gentleman of
  Cambridge. 12mo, London, 1760. Often reprinted, _e.g._ 1789; 1810; 1832;
  in Anderson's Poets of Great Britain, vol. xiii., 1793; Chalmers' Works
  of the English Poets, vol. xx., 1810, etc.

  FELTON, CORNELIUS CONWAY, LL.D.: Greece, Ancient and Modern. Lectures
  delivered before the Lowell Institute [1852-1854]. (Sappho, vol. i. pp.
  171-180). 2 vols., 8vo, Boston, 1867.

  FÈVRE, MADEMOISELLE LE: see Dacier, Madame.

  FIELD, MICHAEL: Long Ago. 8vo, pp. 132, London, 1889.

  FINKENSTEIN, F. L. K.: Sappho, Ode aus Aphrodita übers. Berlin, 1810.

  FISCHER, JOH. FRIDR.: see Baxter, William (1776).

  FONVIELLE, B. F. A.: Sapho, ou Le Saut de Leucate, tragédie lyrique en
  trois actes. 8vo, Paris, 1816.

  FOSSE, DE LA: see Dacier, Madame (1716).

  FRIEDRICH: Bion, Anacreon, und Sappho. Aus d. Griech. übers. Libau, 1787.

  FROTHINGHAM, ELLEN: Sappho, a tragedy in five acts. A translation from
  the German play by Franz Grillparzer. 16mo, Boston, U.S.A., 1876.

  GAÇON, FRANÇOIS: Les Odes d'Anacréon et de Sappho [pp. 343-354] en vers
  François par le poète Sans Fard. 12mo, Rotterdam, 1712; also Les Poésies
  d'Anacréon, etc., 32mo, Paris, 1754.

  GAÇON, FRANÇOIS: [Greek: Anakreontos Têiou melê. Sapphous Asmata.] 16mo,
  Paris, 1754.

  GAISFORD, THOMAS, D.D.: Sapphonis Fragmenta, edited by Charles James
  Blomfield, and reprinted from the Cambridge Museum Criticum, fasc. i., in
  Gaisford's Poetae Minores Graeci, vol. iii., pp. 289-314. 8vo, Leipzig,
  1823.

  GERHARD, W.: Anacreon und Sappho. Freie Nachbildung für den deutschen
  Gesang. Leipzig, 1847.

  GILES, J. A.: see Hainebach, J. H.

  GILLIVER: Anacreontis carmina, etc. ... et poetriae Sapphus quae
  supersunt. London, 1733.

  GIRODET DE ROUSSY, ANNE LOUIS: Sappho, Bion, Moschus, Recueil de
  Compositions dessinées par Girodet, et gravées par M. Chatillon, son
  élève, avec la traduction en vers par Girodet, et une Notice sur la Vie
  et les Oeuvres de Sappho, par Coupin. 4to, Paris, 1829.

  GLEIM, J. W. L.: Die Oden Anakreons in reimlosen Versen. Nebst einigen
  andern Gedichten. Die 2 Oden der Dichterin Sappho, pp. 45-48. 8vo,
  Frankfort and Leipzig, 1746.

  GOLDMANN, C. A. F.: Bion, nebst einigen Gedichten der Sappho, der Erinna,
  und des Mimnermus übers. Soest, 1808.

  GRAINVILLE, J. B.: Les hymnes de Sapho, nouvellement découvertes et
  traduites pour la première fois en françois, avec des notes et une
  version italienne. 8vo, Paris, 1796.

  GRAUX, CHARLES: Revue de Philologie, 1880, pp. 81, ff.

  Greek Authoresses, an anonymous article in the Edinburgh Review, vol.
  lv., No. cix., April, 1832, pp. 182-208.

  GREENE, E. B.: The Works of Anacreon and Sappho [pp. 127-169] ...
  illustrated by observations on their lives and writings, explanatory
  notes from established commentators, and additional remarks by the
  Editor; with the Classic, an introductory Poem. 8vo, London, 1768.

  GRILLPARZER, FRANZ: see Frothingham.

  GROSSET: see Marcelot et Grosset.

  GUNTHER WAHT, F. L.: Anacreon und Sappho, Lieder der Liebe aus dem
  Griech. Erfurt, 1783.

  GYRALDUS, LILIUS GREG.: see Stephanus, H. (1566, 1660).

  HAINEBACH, J. H.: Specimen Scriptorum Graecorum minorum, quorum
  reliquias, fere omnium melioris notae, ex editionibus variis excerptas ab
  J. A. Giles recognoscet et supplebit J. H. Hainebach. 8vo, Frankfort,
  1834.

  HARLES [_alias_ Harless], GOTTLIEB CHRISTOPHER: Anthologia Graeca
  Poetica, pp. 239-249. 8vo, Baruthi, 1792.

  HARRISON, FREDERIC: The New Calendar of Great Men, pp. 46, 47. 8vo,
  London, 1892.

  HARTEL, W.: Die Sappho und die Sappho-Sage, in the Oesterr. Wochenschrift
  f. Wissenschaft und Kunst v. W. Bucher, N. F., 1872.

  HARTUNG, J. A.: Die Griechischen Lyriker, vol. vi., pp. 63-110. 8vo,
  Leipzig, 1857.

  HAUTEROCHE, ALLIER DE: Notizie intorno a Saffo de Ereso. Paris, 1822.

  HELLER, H. J.: Carmen Sapphus Secundum, in Philologus, pp. 431-437, 8vo,
  Göttingen, 1856. (Heller reads the last line thus: [Greek: pan de
  tolmateon epi ta 'gapêta], _i.e._ amicae causâ, ad amicam mihi
  conciliandam).

  HERMANN, G.: Bermerkungen über Homer und die Fragmente der Sappho, in his
  Works, vol. vi., pp. 70-141. 1835.

  HIGGINSON, THOMAS WENTWORTH, COLONEL: Sappho, an article published in the
  Atlantic Monthly for 1871, and reprinted in Atlantic Essays, pp. 299-324.
  Boston, 1882.

  HOFFMANN, S. F. W.: Lexicon Bibliographicum, sive Index Editionum et
  Interpretationum Scriptorum Graecorum, tum sacrorum tum profanorum. V.
  sub voce Sappho, vol. iii. 8vo, Leipzig, 1832.

  HOSKEN, JAMES DRYDEN, 'the Postman-Poet': Phaon and Sappho, a Play. 8vo,
  Penzance, 1891.

  HÜBNER, E.: Die Madrider Sapphoherme. Archäologische Zeitung, 8vo,
  Berlin, 1872, pp. 86-87; 1873, pp. 46, 47.

  HUDSON, JOHN, D.D.: Dionysius Longinus de Sublimitate, cum
  praefationibus, notis, et variis lectionibus. 8vo, Oxford, 1710.

  IMPERIALE, G. V.: see Verri, A.

  JAEGER, W.: Sappho, poésies françaises et allemandes. Berlin, 1852.

  KANNEGIESSER, K. L.: Anacreon und Sappho, übers. Prenzlau, 1827.

  KOCK, THEODOR: Alkäos und Sappho, pp. 22-98. 8vo, Berlin, 1862.

  KOECHLY, H.: Über Sappho, mit Rücksicht auf die gesellschaftliche
  Stellung der Frauen bei den Griechen: Academische Vorträge, Zürich, 1859,
  pp. 155-277, 406-412.

  LANGAPETRAEUS = Longepierre, q.v.

  LE FÈVRE, TANNEGUY: see Dacier, 1699.

  LEFÈVRE, ANNE: see Dacier.

  LEWIS, MRS. ESTELLE: Sappho: a Tragedy in five Acts, by 'Stella.' Ed.
  6th, 8vo, London, 1881.

  LILLY, JOHN, 'the Euphuist': Sapho and Phao, played before the Queen's
  Majesty on Shrove Tuesday, by her Majesty's children and the Boys of St.
  Paul's. 4to, London, 1584.

  LONGEPIERRE, MR. DE: Les Oeuvres d'Anacréon et de Sapho, contenant leurs
  Poësies, et les galanteries de l'ancienne Grèce. Traduites de Grec en
  vers François par Mr. de Longepierre, avec des Notes curieuses sur tout
  l'ouvrage.--Les Poésies de Sapho de Lesbos, pp. 347-398. 12mo, Paris,
  1692.

  LUNIAK (LUNÁK), JOHN, Phil. Mag.: Quaestiones Sapphicae; accedit
  Corollarium criticum atque exegeticum ad Ovidianam Sapphus Epistulam.
  8vo, pp. vi. 115, Kazan, Russia, 1888.

  LUT, C. BREGHOT DU: Poésies de Sapho, traduites en François, avec le
  texte en regard, précédées d'une notice sur la vie de cette femme
  célèbre, accompagnées de notes et d'un choix polyglotte d'imitations en
  vers des principales pièces. Pp. 18, 8vo, Lyons, 1835.

  LUZAN, DON IGNACIO DE: Las dos Odas de Safo, in vol. iv., pp. 169-171, of
  J. J. Lopez de Sedano's Parnasso Español. Coleccion de Poesias escogidas
  de los mas celebres poetas Castellanos. 8vo, Madrid, 1776.

  MÄHLY, J.: Sappho bei Himerius. Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, Neue
  Folge, pp. 301-308. 8vo, Frankfort, 1866.

  MANNA, ANTONIO LA: Le Odi di Anacreonte tradotte in versi Siciliani, con
  altre poesie; Sappho's fragm. 1, 2, and 52 on pp. 129-131. 12mo, Palermo,
  1843.

  MARCELOT ET GROSSET: Odes d'Anacréon et de Sapho, traduction française
  avec le texte en regard. Paris, 1847.

  MARCILLY, DE: see Bibliothèque Univ. des Dames.

  MERINO, A. FERNANDEZ: Estudios de Literatura Griega. Safo ante la critica
  moderna. Ed. 3, pp. 80. 8vo, Madrid, 1884.

  MERIVALE, JOHN HERMAN: Collections from the Greek Anthology, by the late
  Rev. Robert Bland and others, pp. 12-22. 8vo, London, 1833.

  MERULA ALEXANDRINUS, GEORGIUS: Commentarium in Sapphus epistolam. 4to,
  Venice, 1475. Reprinted, with alterations and additions, in 1499, 1510,
  1528, etc., along with commentaries by Badius, Calderinus, and Egnatius.

  MICHAELIS, ADOLF THEODOR FRIEDRICH: Thamyris und Sappho auf einem
  Vasenbilde. 1 plate, pp. 18. 4to, Leipzig, 1865.

  MILESI, BIANCA: Vita di Saffo, scritto da Bianca Milesi. 8vo, Paris,
  1824.

  MODONA, LEONELLO: La Saffo storica, ed il mito di Saffo e Faone,
  published in the Rivista Internazionale, April 16, 1878, and reprinted,
  pp. 25, 8vo, Florence, 1878.

  MOEBIUS, ERNST ANTON LUDWIG: Anacreontis, quae feruntur, Carmina, Sapphus
  [pp. 104-110], et Erinnae fragmenta. Textum passim refinxit brevique
  annotatione illustravit Ernst Ant. Moebius. Forming vol. 19 of Frid.
  Jacobs' and Val. Chr. Fr. Rost's Bibliotheca Graeca. 8vo, Gotha and
  Erfurt, 1826.

  MOORE, THOMAS: Odes of Anacreon translated into English verse, with
  Notes. 4to, London, 1800.

  MOUTONNET-CLAIRFONS, J. J.: Anacréon, Sapho [pp. 95-118], Bion et
  Moschus, traduction nouvelle en Prose. 4to, Paphos and Paris, 1773. (In
  1780 another edition was issued, with illustrations by Eisen.)

  MURE, COLONEL WILLIAM: Sappho, and the ideal love of the Greeks: in the
  Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 1847, pp. 564-593.

  NEANDER, MICHAEL: Aristologia Pindarica Graecolatina ... Ad finem
  accesserunt Sententiae quaedam utiles et sapientes Novem Lyricorum, ex
  variis tum Patrum tum Ethnicorum libris collectae, pp. 427-430. 8vo,
  Basle, 1556.

  NEUE, CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH: Sapphonis Mytilenaeae Fragmenta: specimen
  operae in omnibus artis Graecorum Lyricae reliquiis excepto Pindaro
  collocandae proposuit D. Christianus Fridericus Neue, Professor
  Portensis. Pp. 106. 4to, Berlin, 1827.

  OKES, HOLT: Quaedam Fragmenta Lyrica Sapphus, Alcaei, et aliorum; numeris
  suis restituta et recensita. Pp. 11. 8vo, Cambridge, 1809.

  OLEARIUS, GOTTFRIED: see Blum.

  ORGER, THOMAS, LL.D.: The Odes of Anacreon, with the fragments of Sappho
  [pp. 81-85] and Alcaeus, literally translated into English prose. 8vo,
  London, 1825.

  PAGNINI, G. M.: Poesie di Anacreonte recate in versi Italiani da Eritisco
  Pilenejo [a pseudonym]. Le Poesie di Saffo di Lesbo, pp. 91-99. 8vo,
  Parma, 1793.

  PAGNINI, G. M.: Le Poesie di Anacreonte, di Saffo [pp. 46-49], e di
  Erinna dal Greco trasportate in rime Toscano per opera di Eritisco
  Pilenejo, P.A. 8vo, Lucca, 1794.

  PALGRAVE, FRANCIS TURNER, Professor of Poetry in the University of
  Oxford: a Lecture on Poetry and the other Fine Arts, 'The National
  Review,' Oct 1887, vol. x., pp. 202-218.

  PAULIDOS, JOACHEIM J., OF LESBOS, PH.D.: [Greek: Sapphô hê Mutilênaia.]
  Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doctorwürde der hohen
  philosophischen Facultät der Universität Erlangen vorgelegt. 8vo,
  Leipzig, 1885.

  PELAYO, MENENDEZ Y: Translation in Spanish verse of the Ode to Aphrodite,
  in the first edition of his Las Poesias de tan docto academico. Madrid,
  1877.

  PEMBER, E. H., Q.C.: The Tragedy of Lesbos. 8vo, London, 1870.

  PHILIPS, AMBROSE: The Works of Anacreon and Sappho [pp. 61-75 by Ambrose
  Philips]. Done from the Greek, by several hands. 12mo, London, 1715. See
  also Addison, Joseph.

  PILENEJO, ERITISCO: pseudonym of G. M. Pagnini, whom see.

  PLEHN, SEVERUS LUCIANUS: Lesbiacorum Liber, pp. 175-196. 8vo, Berlin,
  1826.

  POESTION, JOSEPH CALASANZ: Griechische Dichterinnen, ein Beitrag zur
  Geschichte der Frauenliteratur. Pp. 33-92. 8vo, Wien, Pest, Leipzig,
  1876.

  Poetae Graeci: sive Selecta ex Homeri Odyss. ... Sapphone [p. 168] ...
  Musaeo, cum vulgata versione emendata, ac variis partim Scholiastarum
  Graecorum, partim Doctorum recentiorum notis. In usum Regiae Scholae
  Etonensis. Edito altera. 8vo, Eton, 1777.

  POMTOW, JOH.: Poetae Lyrici Graeci minores [vol. i., pp. 100-116, 341,
  343]. 2 vols., 16mo, Leipzig, 1885.

  PRIEN, DR. CARL: Die Symmetrie und Responsion der Sapphischen und
  Horazischen Ode. 4to, Lübeck, 1865.

  RAABE, A.: Interpretatio odarii Sapphici in Venerem. Leipzig, 1794.

  RAMLER, KARL WILHELM: Anakreons auserlesene Oden, und die zwey noch
  übrigen Oden der Sappho. 8vo, Berlin, 1801.

  REENEN, J. H. VAN: Anacreontis et Sapphus Reliquiae, ad fidem optimarum
  editionum recensitae, pp. 95-123. 4to, Amsterdam, 1807.

  REINHOLD, J. L.: Anacreon und der Sappho, Lieder, Text, und Übersetz.
  Riga, 1826.

  RICHEPIN, JEAN: Sapphô; illustrations par MM. Hector Leroux, D. Vierge,
  Kauffman. Pp. 36. 8vo, Paris, 1866?

  RICHTER, PROFESSOR FRZ. W.: Sappho und Erinna nach ihrem Leben
  beschrieben und in ihren poëtischen Überresten übersetzt und erklärt.
  8vo, Quedlinburg and Leipzig, 1833.

  ROBINSON, MRS. MARY: Sappho and Phaon, in a series of legitimate Sonnets,
  etc. 16mo, London, 1796.

  ROCHE-AYMON, DE LA: Poësies de Anacréon et de Sapho [pp. 89-97].
  Traduction en vers de M. de la Roche-Aymon, ancien professeur de
  rhétorique. Illustrations de P. Avril. 32mo, Paris, 1882.

  ROGATI, FRANCESCO SAVERIO DE': Le Odi di Anacreonte e di Saffo [vol. ii.,
  pp. 193-217] recate in versi Italiani. 2 vols., 8vo, Colle, 1782; ed. 2,
  1818.

  ROSSEY, HENRI: Mélanges Poétiques, suivis de quelques traductions
  d'Horace, Sapho [pp. 223-228] et Anacréon. 12mo, Paris, 1863.

  RUBIO Y LLUCH, ANTONIO: Trad. catalana de la oda á Afrodita y de frag.
  cons. por Longino. Barcelona, 1880.

  SACY, C. L. M.: Les Amours de Sapho et de Phaon. Pp. 180. 8vo, Amsterdam,
  1775.

  SAINT-REMY, REDAREZ: Les Poésies de Sapho de Lesbos. Pp. 120. 8vo, Paris,
  1852.

  SANS FARD: see Gaçon, François.

  SAUVIGNY, E. BILLARDON DE: Poésies de Sapho, suivies de différentes
  poésies dans le même genre. 12mo, Amsterdam, 1777; London, 1781, 1792.

  SCHNEIDER, A.: [Greek: Mousôn Anthê]. sive selecta Poetriarum Graecarum
  Carmina et Fragmenta edidit, earum vitas, animadversiones et indices
  adjecit A. Schneider; pp. 3-82. 8vo, Giessen, 1802.

  SCHNEIDEWIN, F. G.: Delectus Poesis Graecorum Elegiacae, Iambicae,
  Melicae.--Sapphonis Mitylenaeae Carmina, pp. 289-322. 8vo, Göttingen,
  1838.

  SCHOENE, ALFRED: Untersuchungen über das Leben der Sappho, pp. 731-762 of
  Symbola Philologorum Bonnensium in honorem Friderici Ritschelii collecta.
  8vo, Leipzig, 1864-7.

  SEIDLER: Über einige Fragmente der Sappho und des Alcäus, von Herrn
  Hofrath Seidler, in the Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, pp. 153-228.
  8vo, Bonn, 1829.

  SIVRY, POINSINET DE: Anacréon, Sapho, etc., traduits en vers Français.
  Poésies de Sapho de Mytilene, pp. viii., 24. 8vo, Nancy, 1758.

  SMITH, PHILIP: art. Sappho, in Dr. William Smith's Dictionary of Greek
  and Roman Biography and Mythology, vol. iii., pp. 707-711. 8vo, London,
  1870.

  STADELMANN, HEINRICH: Aus Tibur und Teos. Eine Auswahl lyrischer Gedichte
  von Horaz, Anakreon, Catull, Sappho [pp. 87-95] u. A. In deutscher
  Nachdichtung von Heinrich Stadelmann. 32mo, Halle, 1868.

  STEPHANUS, HENRICUS: [Greek: Anakreontos melê]. 8vo, Paris, 1554. Editio
  princeps.

  STEPHANUS, HENRICUS: Anacreontis et aliorum Lyricorum aliquot poetarum
  Odae. In easdem Henr. Stephani observationes. Eadem Latinae. 16mo, Paris,
  1556.

  STEPHANUS, HENRICUS: Carminum Poetarum novem, lyricae poeseos princip[=u]
  fragmenta ... Sapphus [pp. 33-71] ... nonnulla etiam aliorum. Editio
  secunda, 16mo, Paris, 1566. Prefixed to the text is: Sapphus vita, ex
  Lilii Greg. Gyraldi dialogo IX. De poetarum historia. Reprinted in 1660
  and other years.

  STEPHANUS, HENRICUS: see Andreas, Elias (1766).

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  114-136. 8vo, London, 1873; 3rd ed., 1893.

  TENNYSON, FREDERICK: The Isles of Greece. Sappho and Alcaeus. 8vo,
  London, 1890.

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  pp. 365-372.

  TRANER, J.: Sapphus, graecanicae Poetriae, quae exstant, Residua. Progrr.
  acadd. Upsalae, par. x. 8vo, 1824.

  TRAPP, J.: Anacreontis Teii Carmina: accurate edita; cum notis perpetuis;
  et versione Latina ... Accedunt ejusdem, ut perhibentur, Fragmenta et
  Poetriae Sapphus [pp. 224-233] quae supersunt. Ed. 2. 12mo, London, 1742.

  TRESHAM, ENRICO: Le Avventure di Saffo. Fol., Rome, 1784. 18 plates,
  drawn and engraved by Enrico Tresham; no text.

  URSINUS, FULVIUS: Carmina novem illustrium feminarum, Sapphus [pp. 2-36],
  etc. 8vo, Antwerp, 1568.

  VERRI, ALESSANDRO: Le Avventure di Saffo poetessa di Mitilene, traduzione
  dal Greco originale nuovamente scoperto. [Or rather an original romance
  in Italian by A. V.] Pp. 188. 8vo, Vercelli, 1780-1804.

  VERRI, ALESSANDRO: Le Avventure di Saffo poetessa di Mitilene, e la
  Faoniade [by G. V. Imperiale] inni ed odi, traduzioni dal greco. 24mo,
  Paris, 1790.

  VOLGER, HEINRICH FRIEDRICH MAGNUS: Diatribe historico-critica de Sapphus
  Poetriae vita et scriptis. 8vo, Gotha, 1809. (Reprinted in a more
  extended form in his subsequent edition of Sappho.)

  VOLGER, HEINRICH FRIEDRICH MAGNUS: Sapphus Lesbiae Carmina et Fragmenta
  recensuit, commentario illustravit, schemata musica adjecit, et indices
  confecit Henr. Frid. Magnus Volger, Paedagogii Regii Ilfeldensis
  Collaborator. Pp. lxviii., 195. 8vo, Leipzig, 1810.

  VOSSIUS, ISAAC: Catullus et in eum observationes. Pp. 112-117. 4to,
  London, 1684.

  VOSSIUS, ISAAC: Anacreontis Teii Carmina ... Willielmus Baxter.
  Subjiciuntur autem duo vetustissimae Poetriae Sapphus [pp. 122-131]
  elegantissima odaria, una cum correctione Isaaci Vossii. 8vo, London,
  1695.

  VRIES, S. G. DE: Epistula Sapphus ad Phaonem apparatu critico instructa,
  commentario illustrata, et Ovidio vindicata. An inaugural dissertation
  for the doctorate. Pp. ix. 155. 8vo, Leyden, 1885.

  WALHOUSE, MORETON JOHN: The Nine Greek Lyric Poets, in The Gentleman's
  Magazine, pp. 433-451, April, 1877.

  WEIL, H.: quoted by Graux, q.v.

  WEISE, C. H.: Anacreontis Carmina, cum Sapphus aliorumque reliquiis.
  Adjectae sunt integrae Brunckii notae. Nova editio stereotypa curante C.
  H. Weise. 32mo, Leipzig (Tauchnitz), 1844-1878.

  WEISSE, C. F.: Eine Ode, übersetz. von C. F. Weisse. Vid. Schmidii
  Anthologie, tom. ii. Leipzig.

  WELCKER, FRIEDRICH GOTTLIEB: Sappho von einem herrschenden Vorurtheil
  befreyt. Pp. 150. 8vo, Göttingen, 1816. Reprinted in his Kleine
  Schriften, vol. ii., p. 80 f., 1846.

  WELCKER, FRIEDRICH GOTTLIEB: Sappho, a review of Neue's edition, in
  Jahn's Jahrbuch. Pp. 394-408, 1828. Reprinted in his Kleine Schriften,
  vol. i., pp. 110-125. 8vo, Bonn, 1844.

  WELCKER, FRIEDRICH GOTTLIEB: Sappho und Phaon, in the Rheinisches Museum,
  pp. 242-252, 1863. Reprinted in his Kleine Schriften, vol. v., pp.
  228-242. 8vo, Elberfeld, 1867. A review of Mure and Koch.

  WESTPHAL, K.: Zwei Strophen der Sappho, in the Jahrbuch für class.
  Philologie, pp. 690-694, 1860.

  WOLF, JOHANN CHRISTIAN: Sapphus, poetriae Lesbiae, fragmenta et elogia,
  quotquot in auctoribus antiquis Graecis et Latinis reperiuntur, cum
  virorum doctorum notis integris, cura et studio Jo. Christiani Wolfii, in
  Gymnasio Hamburgensi Professoris Publici. Qui vitam Sapphonis et Indices
  adjecit. Pp. xxxii., 279. 8vo, Hamburg, 1733.


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Notes

 [1] Prof. Domenico Comparetti has lately (1876) published an essay on the
     authenticity of this Epistle and on its value in elucidating the
     history of Sappho. After minutely examining all the evidence against
     it, he concludes that it is the genuine work of Ovid. And in 1885 De
     Vries brought out an elaborate dissertation on the same subject; he
     proves, almost to a certainty, that Ovid wrote the Epistle in
     question. But the fact remains that it is absent from all the oldest
     and best MSS., and was only given its present place in Ovid's _Heroic
     Epistles_ by Heinsius in 1629. Even if it be genuine, we may safely
     aver that in Ovid's day it was far more difficult to estimate Sappho's
     character rightly than it is now. The Romans, we can well believe,
     were likely to regard her in no other light than that in which she had
     been portrayed by the facile and unscrupulous comedians of Athens.

 [2] The exact site of Naucr[)a]tis was unknown until December 1884, when
     Mr. W. M. Flinders Petrie, acting as agent for the Egypt Exploration
     Fund, discovered it at Nebireh, or rather close to El Gaief, a modern
     Arab village on the Rosetta mouth of the Nile, about forty miles from
     the present sea-coast. It is near the edge of the Delta, some six
     miles N.E. of Tel-el-Barûd, a railway station nearly midway between
     Alexandria and Cairo. Before Mr. Petrie's explorations, Naucr[)a]tis
     had been sought for several miles nearer the sea than it actually lay,
     and its identification had been despaired of. For centuries it was the
     only city in Egypt in which the Greeks were permitted to settle and
     carry on commerce unmolested. Ionians, Dorians, and Aeolians there
     united in a sort of Hanseatic league, with special representatives and
     a common sanctuary, the Panhell[=e]nion--which served as a tie among
     them. This rich colony remained in faithful connection with the
     mother-country, contributed to public works in Hellas, received
     political fugitives from that home as guests, and made life fair for
     them, as for its own children, after the Greek model. The women and
     the flower-garlands of Naucr[)a]tis were unsurpassed in beauty.

 [3] Psammetichus flourished about 588 B.C. He was the Pharaoh-hophra
     mentioned by the prophet Jeremiah (xliv. 30), whose house in Tahpanhes
     has been recently discovered by Mr. Petrie.

 [4] Such light as can be thrown upon the legend from Comparative
     Mythology, and from the possible etymologies of the names of Sappho
     and Phaon, has been, I fear rather inconclusively, gathered by
     Leonello Modona in his _La Saffo storica_ (Florence, 1878). Human
     nature, however, varies so little from age to age, that I think it
     better to judge the story as it has come down to us, than to resort to
     the most erudite guessing.

 [5] Sappho's riddle is translated in full by Colonel Higginson in his
     _Atlantic Essays_, p. 321.

 [6] A quaint mediæval commentator on Horace, quoted by Professor
     Comparetti, says this passage (_querentem Sappho puellis de
     popularibus_) refers to Sappho's complaining, even in Hades, of her
     Lesbian fellow-maidens for not loving the youth with whom she was
     herself so much in love.

 [7] [Greek: poikilothron'] = richly worked throne, is by some read [Greek:
     poikilophron] = full of various wiles, subtle-minded.

 [8] When _Fatima_ was first published (1832) this motto was prefixed--

       [Greek: Phainetai moi kênos isos theoisin]
       [Greek: emmen anêr],

     showing Tennyson's acknowledgments to Sappho.

 [9] Line 19, 'quas _non_ sine crimine amavi,' which Pope translates thus,
     is read in many old texts 'quas _hic_ sine crimine amavi' = whom here
     I blamelessly loved; and even if the former reading be adopted, it
     must be remembered that crimen means 'an accusation' more often than
     it does 'a crime.'

[10] Anne Lefèvre, daughter of Tanneguy Lefèvre [Tanaquillus Faber], born
     at Saumur about 1654, married André Dacier in 1683 and died at the
     Louvre, 1720.









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