Most of the knowledge there was of Sappho in the Elizabethan and Jacobean times, however, seems to have been superficially based mainly on the Ovidian legend. Such a wonderful story told by such a wonderful story-teller interested the early classicists in England, and the Phaon myth permeated much literature.
Ben Jonson (Under-Woods, No. 45) says:
Did Sappho, on her seven-tongu’d lute,
So speak (as yet it is not mute)
Of Phaon’s form?
Thomas Nashe in his novel, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), is a typical example: “Golde easily bends, the most ingenious minds are easiest moved, Ingenium nobis molle Thalia dedit, said Psapho to Phao.” It is just possible that Robert Herrick (1591-1674), who published so many poems to or upon Sapho, the name of his own love, knew from Athenaeus the fragment (E. 62) “much whiter than an egg,” when he published in Hesperides, No. 350 (1648) the verses:
Fain would I kiss my Julia’s dainty leg,
Which is as white and hair-less as an egge.
John Lyly made Sappho an allegorical image of the Virgin Queen: “I will ever be virgin,” says Sappho. The play, Sapho and Phao, was produced in 1584 in the presence of Queen Elizabeth. Lyly makes Sappho a princess of Syracuse and takes many liberties with the historical Sappho. Lyly’s Sappho resembles the Queen, and Phao is supposed to be the Duke of Leicester, but in such an allegory all reference to the Leucadian Leap has to be omitted, and there are no echoes of Sappho’s own fragments. When Phaon comes, Sappho soliloquizes: “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.” Aphrodite interrupts their love and Phaon says: “This shall be my resolution, where-ever 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.” Even Robert Burton in that famous storehouse of quotations, his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), does not know Sappho as a poetess, and refers only to the Leucata Petra: “Here leaped down that Lesbian Sappho for Phaon on whom she miserably doted, hoping thus to ease herself and to be freed of her love pangs.” The first English translation of Sappho’s second ode (1652), quoted by Edwin Cox, is John Hall’s version in his translation of the Treatise an the Sublime. He does not mention Sidney, and Addison did not know even Hall’s translation or that of Pulteney, for he says that the versions by Ambrose Philips in 1711 were the first. In 1675 Edward Phillips in his Theatrum Poetarum devoted a chapter to Ancient Poetesses and Sappho. He knew the tradition of a second Sappho, but quoted no fragments. In 1680 Pulteney, who had a knowledge of small Latin and less Greek, gave a filtered translation from the French of the Treatise on the Sublime and the second Sapphic ode. In 1695 appeared another translation by an unknown author, but it was not till 1711 that any detailed study of Sappho began. In that year, in the Spectator (nos. 223, 229, and 233), Joseph Addison discussed Sappho at length. Even then we have only the namby-pamby verses of Ambrose Philips, so overpraised by Addison. Soon followed translations by Herbert in 1713, in his edition of Petronius (pp. 325-328); and in 1719, by Green. In 1735 John Addison published the works of Anacreon with Sappho added, in which the Loeb Classical Library idea of putting the Greek text on one page and the translation on the opposite page was anticipated. Philips’ version of the Aphrodite hymn was forty-two lines long, but Addison gives one of his own in twenty-eight lines, which is the number in the original Greek. His own rendering is as good as that of Philips, which perhaps is damning it with faint praise. His translations of the eight fragments which he includes are also not remarkable. In 1748, we have Tobias Smollett’s version of the second ode in Roderick Random. About 1745, Mark Akenside in his tenth Ode on Lyric Poetry based a stanza on Sappho’s first ode. In 1760, “a Gentleman of Cambridge” published his verse translations. In some publications he is considered to be different from Francis Fawkes, who undoubtedly is the gentleman referred to. In 1768 appeared E. B. Greene’s free and mediocre translation, in which Aphrodite’s doves become “feathered steeds,” and which ignores the Sapphic metre. In 1796, Mrs. Mary Robinson published Sappho and Phaon, but these sonnets of hers are not, as she claims, legitimate descendants of the real Sappho.
It was not till the nineteenth century, however, that the actual literary remains of Sappho were scientifically studied. In 1814, we have the translations of Elton, in 1815 of Egerton, in 1833 the Sapphics by Merivale, in 1854 Palgrave, in 1877 Walhouse. In 1869, Edwin Arnold’s Poets of Greece gave one of the best renderings of the Aphrodite hymn in Sapphic metre and included pretty translations of nine of her fragments. Edwin Arnold called her: “that exquisite poetess ... whose genius among all feminine votaries of singing stands incontestably highest.” He protests against Swinburne’s repetition of the scandal against her sweet name which gossiping generations have invented; he rejects the Leucadian Leap and the Phaon myth. In 1871 T. W. Higginson wrote his important article on Sappho for The Atlantic Monthly, which can now be found in his Atlantic Essays. He translated several of the fragments and the hymn than which, he says, “there is not a lyrical poem in Greek literature nor in any other which has by its artistic structure inspired more enthusiasm.” He subjects to many a hard blow that paltry Scot soul, Colonel Mure, whose history of Greek literature ought to be tabooed. He repudiates the calumnies of the comedians and scandal-mongers. His appreciation of Sappho is one of the best that has been written.