And Sappho with that gloriole
. . . . .
Of ebon hair on calmëd brows—
O poet-woman, none forgoes
The leap, attaining the repose!
(Mrs. E. B. Browning.)
Sappho 'loved, and loved more than once, and loved to the point of desperate sorrow; though it did not come to the mad and fatal leap from Leucate, as the unnecessary legend pretends. There are, nevertheless,' continues Mr. Edwin Arnold, 'worse steeps than Leucate down which the heart may fall; and colder seas of despair than the Adriatic in which to engulf it.'
Seeing that six comedies are known to have been written under the title of Sappho (cf. p. [37]), and that her history furnished material for at least four more, it is not strange that much of their substance should in succeeding centuries have been regarded as genuine. In a later and debased age she became a sort of stock character of the licentious drama. The fervour of her love and the purity of her life, and the very fact of a woman having been the leader of a school of poetry and music, could not have failed to have been misunderstood by the Greek comedians at the close of the fifth century B.C. The society and habits of the Aeolians at Lesbos in Sappho's time were, as M. Bournouf (Lit. Grecq. i. p. 194) has shown, in complete contrast to those of the Athenians in the period of their corruption; just as the unenviable reputation of the Lesbians was earned long after the date of Sappho. 'It is not surprising,' writes Mr. Philip Smith, in his article SAPPHO in Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, 'that the early Christian writers against heathenism should have accepted a misrepresentation which the Greeks themselves had invented.' The licence of the Attic comedians is testified by Athenaeus' mention that Antiochus of Alexandria, a writer otherwise unknown, whose date is quite uncertain, wrote a 'Treatise on the Poets who were ridiculed by the Comic writers of the Middle Comedy'; and by the fact that a little before 403 B.C. a law was passed which enacted that no one was to be represented on the stage by name, μὴ δεῖν ὀνομαστὶ κωμῳδεῖν (cf. p. [38]).
It was not till early in the present century that the current calumnies against Sappho were seriously inquired into by the celebrated scholar of Göttingen, Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, and found to be based on quite insufficient evidence. Colonel Mure endeavoured at great length, both here and in Germany, to expose fallacies in Welcker's arguments; but the bitterness of his attack, and the unfairness of much of his reasoning, go far to weaken his otherwise acknowledged authority. Professor Comparetti has recently examined the question with much fairness and erudition, and, with the possible exception referred to above (p. [3], note), has done much to separate fiction from fact; but he does not endorse all Welcker's conclusions.
Sappho seems to have been the centre of a society in Mitylene, a kind of æsthetic club, devoted to the service of the Muses. Around her gathered maidens from even comparatively distant places, attracted by her fame, to study under her guidance all that related to poetry and music; much as at a later age students resorted to the philosophers of Athens.