Sappho: Memoir, text, selected renderings, and a literal translation. Henry Thornton Wharton

to madness stung

      The Teian bard with envious jealousy.

      For her Anacreon, charming lyrist, wooed,

      And fain would win, with sweet mellifluous chime,

      Encircled by her Lesbian sisterhood;

      Would often Samos leave, and many a time

      From vanquished Teos' viny orchards hie

      To viny Lesbos' isle—and from the shore,

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

      And think on bygone days and times no more.

      (Translated by J. Bailey.)

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

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

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

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

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