And low thou lies!
...
Stern Ruin’s ploughshare drives, elate,
Full on thy bloom,
Till crushed beneath the furrow’s weight,
Shall be thy doom!
We refer on [p. 9] to Catullus’ allusion to Sappho in XXXV. 17.
In the age of Augustus, even if Virgil neglects Sappho, in Horace (65-8 B.C.) she is re-born. If Edmonds[144] is right in his analysis of a passage in Dio’s Corinthian Oration, two fragments (E. 76, 77) of Sappho are incorporated there from a poem which Horace imitated in the same metre:
Exegi monumentum aere perennius.
Edmonds even goes so far as to suggest that Horace imitated not only the poem written by Sappho, but its position. For he thinks that this poem of Sappho was an epilogue to her collection; and Horace placed his imitation at the end of the third book, when he probably thought it would be his last. Horace seems to be adapting Sappho in the twelfth ode of the third book ([see Landor’s imitation, p. 202]). He composed twenty-six or more odes in the Sapphic metre, which he fitted to Italian measures, and he does them well, though in colder Latin. In him