Still breathed the love, still lived the fire
To which the Lesbian tuned her lyre.[145]
He pictures her in Hades’ home:[146]
Aeoliis fidibus querentem
Sappho puellis de popularibus.
The meaning is simply that she is “singing plaintively (or complaining) about the girls of her country,” perhaps because they did not all return her love, as Atthis deserted her for Andromeda (E. 81); not that she complained of her fellow-maidens for not loving Phaon. Unconsciously Horace helped to defame Sappho’s character, for the epithet “mascula,” in the Epistle I. 19, 28, repeated by Ausonius, Idyl, VI. 21, has led to gross abuse of Sappho’s good fame.[147] It has no relation to mascula libido and should be interpreted in the light of Statius[148] as referring simply to the fact that she was an imitator of the measures of Archilochus and the equal of men poets. Of elegiac writers, Tibullus and Propertius (II. 8, 33) were influenced only in a general way by the personal and ardent poetry of Sappho’s lyrics. Ovid in the fifteenth epistle of the Heroides pictured Sappho as a passionate and voluptuous hetaera who could not win the love of the beautiful Phaon. With passion she burns “as when through ripened corn By driving winds the spreading flames are borne,” and seeks release and ease, “from the raging seas.” Ovid (43 B.C.-18 A.D.) in this letter and also in the Tristia (II. 365, Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas) completed the Roman defamation of Sappho’s good name begun by Horace, and so led the way for the modern idea. From this disgrace she has been rescued by Madame Anne Le Fèvre Dacier (1681), by Welcker (1816), the bachelor who loved Sappho’s genius and who by his chivalrous vindication made himself her knight, and by Wilamowitz (1896),—her three great defenders.
Seneca (circa 4 B.C.-65 A.D.) in his Letters to Lucilius (88) quotes a book of the grammarian Didymus on the question Whether Sappho was a prostitute. In the Flavian period, Statius in his miscellaneous poems, called Silvae, mentions her:[148]
saltusque ingressa viriles
Non formidata temeraria Leucade Sappho,
Quosque alios dignata chelys.