"Violet-crowned, chaste, sweet-smiling Sappho,
I fain would speak; but bashfulness forbids."
To which she replied:
"Had thy wish been pure and manly,
And no evil on thy tongue,
Shame had not possessed thine eyelids;
From thy lips the right had rung."
Anacreon, the lyric poet, was also represented as a lover of Sappho; and two poems are preserved, one of which he is said to have addressed to her, while the other is said to be her reply. But there is no doubt whatever that Anacreon flourished at least a generation after Sappho, so that the two could never have met. It seems to have been one of the stock motifs of the comic poets to represent Greek lyrists as being lovers of the Lesbian; thus Diphilus, in his Sappho, pictured Archilochus and Hipponax, her predecessors by a generation, as her lovers.
The story of Sappho's love for Phaon and her leap from the Leucadian rock in consequence of his disdaining her, though it has been so long implicitly believed, rests on no historical basis. The perpetuation of the story is due chiefly to Ovid, who, in his epistle, Sappho to Phaon, tells of her unquenchable love and of her determination to attempt the leap. The story is best told by Addison:
"Sappho, the Lesbian, in love with Phaon, arrived at the temple of Apollo, habited like a bride, in garments white as snow. She wore a garland of myrtle on her head, and carried in her hand the little musical instrument of her own invention. After having sung a hymn to Apollo, she hung up her garland on one side of his altar, and her harp on the other. She then tucked up her vestments, like a Spartan virgin, and amidst thousands of spectators, who were anxious for her safety and offered up vows for her deliverance, marched directly forward to the utmost summit of the promontory, where, after having repeated a stanza of her own verses, she threw herself off the rock with such an intrepidity as was never observed before in any who had attempted that leap. Many who were present related that they saw her fall into the sea, from whence she never rose again; though there were others who affirmed that she never came to the bottom of her leap, but that she was changed to a swan as she fell, and that they saw her hovering in the air under that shape. But whether or not the whiteness and fluttering of her garments might not deceive those who looked upon her, or whether she might not really be metamorphosed into that musical and melancholy bird, is still a doubt among the Lesbians."