An egg upon the ground.
Sappho makes a sarcastic reference to Leto and Niobe as very dear comrades (E. 140), and gives Niobe nine children of either sex (E. 168). She knows the love of the Moon for Endymion in the cave on Mt. Latmus (E. 167); she wrote about Theseus (E. 169), Prometheus (E. 170), Medea (E. 185), and Philomela and Procne, “the heavenly swallow, Pandion’s daughter” (E. 122). Perhaps Sappho pictured the story of Hero and Leander ([cf. p. 31]). Stebbing changes the sex of Hero and makes a long poem on Champion, Athlete, and Harpist:
“Hero” of Gyaros; Hellas cannot forget his name.
The lovely, gallant youth, a paragon in women’s eyes.
The divinities in Sappho are primarily Aphrodite, Peitho, Ares, Hecate, Hera, Hermes, Hephaestus, and the Muses. There is much reverence in the beautiful Hymn to Hera, the latter half of which Edmonds (E. 40) has so very tentatively restored on the hypothesis that this was written in Syracuse before Sappho embarked to return to Mytilene on hearing of the amnesty of Pittacus.
Sappho was not only the poet of ardent love, as we have seen, but the greatest composer of wedding-songs of antiquity, and much of such poetry in later days is nothing but a translation or a transfusion of Sappho. Her Epithalamia were written for actual wedding ceremonies, but I cannot agree with a great German critic who says that they were not literary productions. I do not mean to say that she published these songs, for I believe that they were not collected into a ninth book until later days. We have already quoted what may be an introductory poem to the Epithalamies; perhaps even some of the other fragments which we have mentioned, such as that perfect weaving-song, which may reflect the awakening of love in the heart of the bride, and certainly the verses on the Evening Star ([p. 64]) belong to her Epithalamies. The wonderful new poem (E. 66) with its Homeric genitives and datives and its Homeric forms of words on the Marriage of Hector and Andromache could be used as a wedding-song at any wedding:
HOME-COMING OF HECTOR WITH HIS BRIDE
(Recitation for “The Wedding Day”)
Sustained by sturdy limbs a herald came