SAPPHO IN HER SCHOOL OF POETRY IN LESBOS.
After the painting by Hector Leroux.
Wharton, in his great Memoir of Sappho, says she
"seems to have been the centre of society in Mitylene,--
capital of Lesbos,--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". In the memoir he defends her character and
speaks of "the fervor of her love and the purity of her
life." The Encyclopedia Britannica ranks her as
"incomparably the greatest poetess the world has ever seen."
The form and melody of Sappho's poems are due to the fact that they were to accompany vocal and instrumental music, which, thanks to the innovations of Terpander of Lesbos, was at that time exquisitely adapted to the purposes of the lyric. Terpander introduced the seven-stringed lyre, or cithara, with its compass of a diapason, or Greek octave, and this became the peculiar instrument of Sappho and her school. The choice of the musical measure determined the tone of the poem. Terpander united the music of Asia Minor with that of Greece proper, and the resulting product of Æolian poetry was the union of Oriental voluptuousness with Greek self-restraint and art. Of Sappho's numerous songs, two odes alone are presented to us in anything like their entirety, one dedicated to the service of Aphrodite, and the other composed in honor of a girl friend, Anactoria. Dionysius of Halicarnassus embodies the first in one of his rhetorical works, as a perfect illustration of the elaborately finished style of poetry, and comments on the fact that its grace and beauty lie in the subtle harmony between the words and the ideas. Edwin Arnold renders it as follows:
"Splendor-throned Queen, immortal Aphrodite,
Daughter of Jove, Enchantress, I implore thee
Vex not my soul with agonies and anguish;
Slay me not, Goddess!
Come in thy pity--come, if I have prayed thee;
Come at the cry of my sorrow; in the old times
Oft thou hast heard, and left thy father's heaven,
Left the gold houses,