Breathing of love, I know by heart completely.
Sappho was the title of plays by six different Greek comedians, Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiphanes, Diphilus, Ephippus, and Timocles. Of those by Ameipsias and Amphis we have only a single word, and the fragments of the others throw little light on the question as to how much was taken from Sappho herself. To the plays of Plato, Menander, and Antiphanes on the legends of Phaon and the Leucadian Leap, we have already referred ([p. 41]).
In the Hellenistic Age, after the time of Alexander, Sappho was very popular. Clearchus, the Peripatetic philosopher (300 B.C.) drew on her for his Treatise on Love Matters.[139] In the third book of his Biographies Aristoxenus, a writer on music (320 B.C.), classes her among inventors as did Menaechmus of Sicyon in his treatise On Artists. He says that “her books were her companions.”[140] The third century B.C. showed a serious interest in the Lesbians, and Theocritus has many imitations of Sappho in dialect,[141] metre, and content. In the second idyl Simaetha’s description of her feelings is taken from Sappho. In the seventh idyl, the picture of the farm to which two friends walked out from Syracuse in order to attend a harvest home festival, Theocritus is imitating Sappho’s Garden of the Nymphs, especially in ll. 135 ff.: “Close at hand the sacred water from the nymphs’ own cave welled forth with murmurs musical” (Lang). Probably the eighteenth idyl on Helen and Menelaus borrowed much from Sappho, since the first lines seem to be cited as Sappho’s by Himerius. Line 38, “O maid of beauty, maid of grace,” is lifted bodily from Sappho. The twenty-eighth idyl on A Distaff undoubtedly employed Sappho as a model, and likewise the twenty-ninth and thirtieth idyls.
Callimachus (270 B.C.) in his first hymn (ll. 95 ff.) echoes the fragment which influenced Pindar (E. 100): “Wealth without virtue cannot make men happy, nor virtue without wealth, therefore grant both virtue and wealth.” It was about the same time that a fellow townsman, Callias, interpreted her poems as well as those of Alcaeus. Apollonius of Rhodes (260 B.C.) knew her, and so did the Lament for Bion, which has been attributed doubtfully to Moschus (150 B.C.): “Oh, Bion, Mytilene bewails thy song evermore instead of Sappho’s” (III. 91). Bion (100 B.C.?) in his Lament for Adonis was probably influenced by Sappho’s words about the dying Adonis (E. 103) and used in l. 44 the same word as Sappho did in E. 29. The philosopher Chrysippus (240 B.C.) mentions her (fr. 36, 69), as does Cicero’s contemporary, the poet-philosopher Philodemus (60 B.C.). In fragment 57a he speaks of her, and in an epigram he uses as an “intelligence test” of an educated woman a knowledge of the poems of Sappho. Alexander the Sophist gave a university extension course of lectures on her poems. A little later in the Augustan Age the great literary critic and grammarian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus (20 B.C.), quotes the hymn to Aphrodite, and Strabo calls her a marvel. Living probably sometime in the first century A.D., the anonymous author of the Treatise on the Sublime quotes the second ode. A little later, about 85 A.D., the golden-tongued orator, Dio, cites her, and his contemporary Plutarch often refers to her, in his Essay on Love, 18; in his Dinner-table Problems, VII. 8, 2; in his Moralia, 243b, 622c, and 406a, where there is a comparison with the practice of Paiderastia of Socrates. Plutarch prefers Anacreon, but refers to at least four of the fragments which are preserved from Sappho (E. 2, 48, 71, 137).
Among the Romans Sappho was flattered abundantly, if imitation is the sincerest flattery. As Tucker says: “the most genuine lyric poet of Rome, Catullus, and its most skilful artificer of odes, Horace, both freely copied her. They did more than imitate; they plagiarised, they translated, sometimes almost word for word.” The flattery does not begin until the time of Cicero, for Latin comedy, unlike Greek comedy, paid little heed to the Lesbian poetess. Cicero refers to Silanion’s statue ([p. 109]). Lucretius must have taken his description at second hand, perhaps from some medical source, if he did not take the verses of the second ode of Sappho direct as his model for his description of fear.[142] Catullus (84-54 B.C.),[143] who caught the Greek rhythm even better than Horace, translated the same ode in his famous fifty-first poem, addressed to Lesbia, and adapted the fragments on the hyacinth and the evening star in his epithalamia, the sixty-first and sixty-second songs in the Catullian collection. Probably in the sixty-second he is imitating a lost poem of Sappho. The verse of Sappho (E. 142), “I flutter like a child after her mother,” referring perhaps to a wounded bird, has been used by Catullus in his well-known third poem, on the Passer, which probably also imitated a poem of Sappho.
In XI. 22-24, Catullus was perhaps thinking of Sappho’s stricken hyacinth, although some rustic proverb may also have been in his mind:
Qui illius culpa cecidit velut prati
Vltimi flos, praetereunte postquam
Tactus aratro est.
Think not henceforth, thou, to recall Catullus’