Writers in the Greek Anthology continually sing her praises, calling her "the Tenth Muse," "pride of Hellas," "comrade of Apollo," "child of Aphrodite and Eros," "nursling of the Graces and Persuasion." Nor have modern critics been less restrained in their praises, notwithstanding the fact that they possess merely a handful of fragments by which to judge "The Poetess." Addison, for example, says: "Among the mutilated poets of antiquity there is none whose fragments are so beautiful as those of Sappho." John Addington Symonds is even more enthusiastic. "The world has suffered no greater literary loss," says he, "than the loss of Sappho's poems. So perfect are the smallest fragments preserved, that we muse in a sad rapture of astonishment to think what the complete poems must have been." And Swinburne, her best modern interpreter, calls Sappho "the unapproachable poetess," and says: "Her remaining verses are the supreme success, the final achievement, of the poetic art." Sappho was at the zenith of her fame about the beginning of the sixth century before the Christian era. Her home was at Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos. The lapse of twenty-five centuries has left us few authentic records of her life. There is a tradition that she was born at Eresus, on the island of Lesbos, and later established herself in the capital city, Mytilene. She was of a wealthy and aristocratic family. Herodotus says that she was the daughter of Scamandronymus, and Suidas states that her mother's name was Cleis, that she was the wife of a rich citizen of Andros, Cercylas or Cercolas by name, and that she had a daughter named after her grandmother, Cleis. Sappho refers to a daughter by this name in one of the extant fragments, but none of these other statements are corroborated. She had two brothers, Larichus, a public cupbearer at Mytilene,--an office reserved for noble youths,--and Charaxus, a wine merchant, of whom we shall speak more fully later. From one source we learn that she went into exile to Sicily along with other aristocrats of Lesbos, but the date is a matter of conjecture. Pittacus was tyrant of Mytilene at this time, and Sappho probably returned to Lesbos at the time when he granted amnesty to political exiles. How long she lived we cannot tell, while how and when she died are also unknown. Judging from the allusions of the writers in the Anthology, her tomb, erected in the city of her adoption, was for centuries afterward regularly visited by her votaries. These are the few facts we can positively state regarding the life of Sappho; but myth and legend have supplied what was lacking, and those scandalmongers, the Greek comic poets, have woven all sorts of stories about her manner of life. These stories centre chiefly about the names of three men,--Alcaeus and Anacreon, the poets, and Phaon, the mythical boatman of Mytilene, endowed by Aphrodite with extraordinary and irresistible beauty.