Sappho

A Lecture delivered before the Classical Association of Victoria, 1913.
SAPPHO
T. G. TUCKER, LITT.D. (CAMB.), HON. LITT.D. (DUBLIN)
Professor of Classical Philology in the University of Melbourne
MELBOURNE THOMAS C. LOTHIAN 1914 PRINTED IN ENGLAND
Copyright. First Edition, May 1914.
It is hardly possible to realise and judge of Sappho without realising her environment. The picture must have its background, and the background is Lesbos about the year 600 B.C. One may well regret never to have seen the island now called Mytilini, but known in ancient times as Lesbos. There are, however, descriptions not a few, and with these we must perforce be satisfied. On the map it lies there in the Ægean Sea, a sort of triangle with rounded edges, pierced deeply on the south by two deep lochs or fiords, while toward each of its three angles it rises into mountains of from two to three thousand feet in height. One way it stretches some thirty-five miles, the other some twenty-five.
It is twenty-five centuries ago since this island was the home of Sappho, of Alcæus, and of a whole school of the most finished lyric poetry and music ever heard in Greece. From its northern shore, across only seven miles of laughing sea, the poetess might every day look upon the Troad, the land of Homeric legend; and in the North-East distance, over the broadening strait, rose the storied crest of “many-fountained Ida.” The air was clear with that translucency of which Athens also boasted, and in which the Athenian poet rightly or wrongly found one cause of the Athenian intellectual brilliancy. The climate was, and still is, famous for its mildness and salubrity. The Lesbian soil was, and still is, rich in corn and oil and wine, in figs and olives, in building-wood and tinted marble. It was eminently a land of flowers and aromatic plants, of the rose and the iris, the myrtle and the violet, and the Lesbians would seem to have loved and cultivated flowers much as they are loved and cultivated in Japan.