PLATE
1.Alma Tadema’s Sappho[Frontispiece]
([At end of Volume])
2.Bust of Pittacus
3.Mytilene
4.The Story of Phaon on a Vase in Florence
5.Phaon on a Greek Vase in Palermo
6.The Leucadian Promontory
7.Roman Fresco in an Underground Building
8.A Papyrus of the Third Century A.D.
9.A Cylix by Sotades
10.Greek Coin from Mytilene
11.Imperial Coins
12.A Greek Vase in Munich
13.Sappho on a Vase in Cracow
14.Sappho Seated before a Winged Eros
15.Greek Aryballus at Ruvo
16.A Greek Hydria in Athens
17.Phaon in His Boat
18.A Pompeian Fresco
19.A Bust of Sappho in the Villa Albani
20.The Oxford Bust
21.A Bust in the Borghese Palace
22.Statue of Sappho by Magni
23.Statue of Sappho by Pradier
24.Raphael’s Parnassus

SAPPHO AND HER INFLUENCE

I. SOME APPRECIATIONS, ANCIENT AND MODERN

The name of Sappho will never die. But it lives in most of the minds that know it at all to-day as hardly more than the hazy nucleus of a ragged fringe suggestive of erotic thoughts or of sexual perversion. Very seldom does it evoke the vision of a great and pure poetess with marvellous expressions of beauty, grace, and power at her command, who not only haunts the dawn of Grecian Lyric poetry but lives in scattered and broken lights that glint from vases and papyri and from the pages of cold grammarians and warm admirers, whose eulogies we would gladly trade for the unrecorded poems which they quote so meagerly. Sappho has furnished the title of such a novel as Daudet’s Sapho. It figures in suggestive moving pictures.[1] The name will answer prettily as that of a bird or even a boat such as the yacht with which Mr. Douglas defended the American cup in 1871. The modern idea of Sappho truly seems to be based mainly on Daudet, who with Pierre Louys in recent times has done most to degrade her good character and who goes so far as to say that “the word Sappho itself by the force of rolling descent through ages is encrusted with unclean legends and has degenerated from the name of a goddess to that of a malady.” But to the lover of lyrics, who is also a student of Greek Literature in Greek, this poetess of passion becomes a living and illustrious personality, who of all the poets of the world, as Symonds says, is the “one whose every word has a peculiar and unmistakable perfume, a seal of absolute perfection and inimitable grace.” “Sappho,” says Tennyson in The Princess, “in arts of grace vied with any man.” She is one whose fervid fragments, as the great Irish translator of the Odes of Anacreon and the Anacreontics, Thomas Moore, says in his Evenings in Greece,

Still, like sparkles of Greek Fire,