Amid such surroundings, burning Sappho sang:
"Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,
Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity,
Hearing, to hear them."
The complete works of Sappho must have been considerable. She was the greatest erotic poet of antiquity, the chief composer of epithalamia, or wedding songs, the writer of epigrams and elegies, invocatory hymns, iambics, and monodies. Nine books of her lyric odes existed in ancient times, and were known to Horace, who frequently imitated her style and metre, and who doubtless at times in his odes directly translated her poems. But of all this we have only two poems which may be said to be in any way complete: a considerable portion of the ode to her brother Charaxus, already quoted, and somewhat over a hundred and fifty fragments, the total comprising not more than three hundred lines. Within the last few months, Doctor Schubart, of the Egyptian Section of the Royal Museum in Berlin, has discovered in papyri, recently added to its collection, several hitherto unknown poems of Sappho.
"Few, indeed, but those roses," as says Meleager, in the Anthology, are the precious verses spared to us in spite of the unholy zeal of antipaganism. And, strange to relate, we are indebted for what we have to the quotations of grammarians and lexicographers, who preserved the verses, not usually for their poetic beauty, but to illustrate a point in syntax or metre. But, though so few and fragmentary, they are, as Professor Palgrave says, "grains of golden sand which the torrent of Time has carried down to us."
Sappho wrote in the Æolic dialect, noted for the soft quality of its vowel sounds; and her poems were undoubtedly written for recitation to the accompaniment of the lyre, being the earliest specimens of the song or ballad so popular in modern times.
Predecessors of the melic poetry of Sappho are to be found in the chants and hymns in honor of Apollo prevalent throughout Greece, in the popular songs of Hellas, and in the songs sung in the home and at religious festivals by Lesbian men and women,--children's rhymes, songs at vintage festivals, plaints of shepherds expressive of rustic love, epithalamia or bridal songs, dirges, threnodies and laments for Adonis, typifying the passing of spring and summer.
