‘To mortal men belong!’
(Wellesley)
He also speaks[17] of Sappho as “one that is sung for a mortal Muse among Muses immortal ... a delight unto Greece.” Dioscorides[18] (180 B.C.) says: “Sappho, thou Muse of Aeolian Eresus, sweetest of all love-pillows unto the burning young, sure am I that Pieria or ivied Helicon must honour thee, along with the Muses, seeing that thy spirit is their spirit.” Again, in an anonymous epigram[19] it is said: “her song will seem Calliope’s own voice.” Another writer,[20] also anonymous, discussing the nine lyric poets, says:
Sappho would make a ninth; but fitter she
Among the Muses, a tenth Muse to be.
(Neaves)
Catullus[21] speaks of the Sapphica Musa, and Ausonius in Epigram XXXII calls her Lesbia Pieriis Sappho soror addita Musis.[22]
If we turn now from the praise of the ancients to modern literary critics of classic lore we shall not find any depredation but rather an enhancing of that ancient praise. The classic estimate of Sappho holds its own and more than holds it to-day. J. A. K. Thomson in his Greeks and Barbarians[23] says: “Landor is not Greek any more than Leconte de Lisle is Greek ... they have not the banked and inward-burning fire which makes Sappho so different.” Mackail speaks of “the feeling expressed in splendid but hardly exaggerated language by Swinburne, in that early poem where, alone among the moderns, he has mastered and all but reproduced one of her favourite metres, the Sapphic stanza which she invented and to which she gave her name”—
Ah the singing, ah the delight, the passion!
All the Loves wept, listening; sick with anguish,