Notes
Prof. Domenico Comparetti has lately (1876) published an essay on the authenticity of this Epistle and on its value in elucidating the history of Sappho. After minutely examining all the evidence against it, he concludes that it is the genuine work of Ovid. And in 1885 De Vries brought out an elaborate dissertation on the same subject; he proves, almost to a certainty, that Ovid wrote the Epistle in question. But the fact remains that it is absent from all the oldest and best MSS., and was only given its present place in Ovid's Heroic Epistles by Heinsius in 1629. Even if it be genuine, we may safely aver that in Ovid's day it was far more difficult to estimate Sappho's character rightly than it is now. The Romans, we can well believe, were likely to regard her in no other light than that in which she had been portrayed by the facile and unscrupulous comedians of Athens.
The exact site of Naucrătis was unknown until December 1884, when Mr. W. M. Flinders Petrie, acting as agent for the Egypt Exploration Fund, discovered it at Nebireh, or rather close to El Gaief, a modern Arab village on the Rosetta mouth of the Nile, about forty miles from the present sea-coast. It is near the edge of the Delta, some six miles N.E. of Tel-el-Barûd, a railway station nearly midway between Alexandria and Cairo. Before Mr. Petrie's explorations, Naucrătis had been sought for several miles nearer the sea than it actually lay, and its identification had been despaired of. For centuries it was the only city in Egypt in which the Greeks were permitted to settle and carry on commerce unmolested. Ionians, Dorians, and Aeolians there united in a sort of Hanseatic league, with special representatives and a common sanctuary, the Panhellēnion—which served as a tie among them. This rich colony remained in faithful connection with the mother-country, contributed to public works in Hellas, received political fugitives from that home as guests, and made life fair for them, as for its own children, after the Greek model. The women and the flower-garlands of Naucrătis were unsurpassed in beauty.
Psammetichus flourished about 588 B.C. He was the Pharaoh-hophra mentioned by the prophet Jeremiah (xliv. 30), whose house in Tahpanhes has been recently discovered by Mr. Petrie.
Such light as can be thrown upon the legend from Comparative Mythology, and from the possible etymologies of the names of Sappho and Phaon, has been, I fear rather inconclusively, gathered by Leonello Modona in his La Saffo storica (Florence, 1878). Human nature, however, varies so little from age to age, that I think it better to judge the story as it has come down to us, than to resort to the most erudite guessing.