ut of a long list of Greek poetesses there were seven women who were, as a poem in the Greek Anthology says, "divinely tongued" or "spoke like gods." [1]   Of these Sappho was the admitted chief. Among the Greeks "the poet" meant Homer, and "the poetess" equally designated her. "There flourished in those days," said Strabo, writing a little before our era, "Sappho, a wondrous creature; for we know not any woman to have appeared, within recorded time, who was in the least to be compared with her in respect to poesy."

The dates of her birth and death are alike uncertain, but she lived somewhere between the years 628 and 572 B. C.; thus flourishing three or four centuries after Homer, and less than two centuries before Pericles. Her father's name is variously given, and we can only hope, in charity, that it was not Scamandronimus. We have no better authority than that of Ovid for saying that he died when his daughter was six years old. Her mother's name was Cleis, and Sappho had a daughter of the same name. The husband of the poetess was probably named Cercolas, and there is a faint suspicion that he was a man of property. It is supposed that she became early a widow, and won most of her poetic fame while in that condition. She had at least two brothers: one being Larichus, whom she praises for his graceful demeanor as cup-bearer in the public banquets, -- an office which belonged only to beautiful youths of noble birth; the other was Charaxus, whom Sappho had occasion to reproach, according to Herodotus, [2] for buying and marrying a slave of disreputable antecedents.

Of the actual events of Sappho's life almost nothing is known, except that she once had to flee for safety from Lesbos to Sicily, perhaps to escape the political persecutions that prevailed in the island. It is not necessary to assume that she had reached an advanced age when she spoke of herself as "one of the elders," [3] inasmuch as people are quite as likely to use that term of mild self-reproach while young enough for somebody to contradict them. It is hard to ascertain whether she possessed beauty even in her prime. Tradition represents her as having been "little and dark," but tradition describes Cleopatra in the same way; and we should clearly lose much from history by ignoring all the execution done by small brunettes. The Greek Anthology describes her as "the pride of the lovely haired Lesbians"; Plato calls her "the beautiful Sappho" or "the fair Sappho," [4] -- as you please to render the phrase more or less ardently, -- and Plutarch and Atheneus use similar epithets. But when Professor Felton finds evidence of her charms in her portraits on the Lesbian coins, as en- graved by Wolf I must think that he is too easily pleased with the outside of the lady's head, however it may have been with the inside.

The most interesting intellectual fact in Sappho's life was doubtless her relation to her great townsman Alcaeus. These two will always be united in fame as the joint founders of the lyric poetry of Greece, and therefore of the world. Anacreon was a child, or perhaps unborn, when they died; and Pindar was a pupil of women who seem to have been Sappho's imitators, Myrtis and Corinna. The Latin poets Horace and Catullus, five or six centuries after, drew avowedly from these Æolian models, to whom nearly all their metres have been traced back. Horace wrote of Alcaeus: "The Lesbian poet sang of war amid the din of arms, or when he had bound the storm-tossed ship to the moist shore, he sang of Bacchus, and the Muses, of Venus and the boy who clings forever by her side, and of Lycus, beautiful with his black hair and black eyes." [5] But the name of the Greek singer is still better preserved to Anglo-Saxons through an imitation of a single fragment by Sir William Jones, -- the noble poem beginning "What constitutes a state?" It is worth while to remember that we owe these fine lines to the lover of Sappho. And indeed the poems of Alcæus, so far as they remain, show much of the grace and elegance of Horace, joined with a far more heroic tone. His life was spent amid political convulsions, in which he was prominent, and, in spite of his fine verses, it is suspected, from the evidence remaining, that he was a good deal of a fop and not much of a soldier; and it is perhaps as well that the lady did not smile upon him, even in verse.

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¹ Brunck, II. 114.
² II. 535.
^3
4 Phaedr. 24. Homer celebrates the beauty of the Lesbian women in his day. ⁵ Carm., I, 32.5.