My blood was hot wan wine of love,

And my song's sound the sound thereof,

The sound of the delight of it.

Epigrams and Elegies, Iambics and Monodies, she is also reported to have written. Nine books of her lyric Odes are said to have existed, but it is uncertain how they were composed. The imitations of her style and metre made by Horace are too well known to require more than a passing reference. Some of his odes have been regarded as direct translations from Sappho; notably his Carm. iii. 12, Miserarum est neque amori dare ludum neque dulci, which Volger compares to her fr. [90]. Horace looked forward to hearing her in Hades singing plaintively to the girls of her own country (Carm. ii. 13, 14[[6]]), and in his time

Still breathed the love, still lived the fire

To which the Lesbian tuned her lyre.

(Carm. iv. 9. 10.)

Athenaeus says that Chamaeleon, one of the disciples of Aristotle, wrote a book about Sappho; and Strabo says Callias of Lesbos interpreted her songs. Alexander the Sophist used to lecture on her; and Dracon of Stratonica, in the reign of Hadrian, wrote a commentary on her metres.

She wrote in the Aeolic dialect, the form of which Bergk has restored in almost every instance. The absence of rough breathings, the throwing back of the accent, and the use of the digamma (Ϝ) and of many forms and words unknown to ordinary Attic Greek, all testify to this. Three idyls ascribed to Theocrĭtus (cf. fr. [65]) are imitations of the dialect, metre, and manner of the old Aeolic poets; and the 28th, says Professor Mahaffy, 'is an elegant little address to an ivory spindle which the poet was sending as a present to the wife of his physician friend, Nikias of Cos, and was probably composed on the model of a poem of Sappho.'

Her poems or μέλη were undoubtedly written for recitation with the aid of music; 'they were, in fact,' to quote Professor Mahaffy again, 'the earliest specimens of what is called in modern days the Song or Ballad, in which the repetition of short rhythms produces a certain pleasant monotony, easy to remember and easy to understand.'