We cannot claim that Sappho was a woman of austere virtue; but she was one of the best of her race, and there is no trace of wantonness in any stanza of hers preserved to us. She repulsed Alcaeus when he made improper advances, while a recently discovered papyrus fragment shows how keenly she felt a brother's disgrace, and this aversion to the dishonorable would hardly have existed had her own life been open to censure. Sappho's brother Charaxus, who was a Lesbian wine merchant, fell violently in love with the famous courtesan Rhodopis, then a slave in Naucratis, and subsequently the most noted beauty of her day. He ransomed her from slavery, devoted himself exclusively to her whims, and squandered all his substance upon her maintenance. Sappho was violently incensed at his conduct, and resorted to verse for the expression of her anger and humiliation. According to the story in Ovid, Charaxus was fiercely provoked by her ill treatment of him, and would listen to no attempts at reconciliation made by his poet-sister after her anger had cooled, though she reproached herself for the estrangement and did all she could to win him back. A twenty-line fragment of a poem, found a few years ago among the Oxyrhynchus papyri, in a reference to the poet's brother, in its tone of reproach, in its expression of a desire for reconciliation, in dialect and in metre, indicates its origin as a part of an ode addressed by Sappho to her brother Charaxus. It is conceived by its editors and translators to be one of her vain appeals that he would forget the past: "Sweet Nereids, grant to me That home unscathed my brother may return, And every end for which his soul shall yearn, Accomplished see! "And thou, immortal Queen, Blot out the past, that thus his friends may know Joy, shame his foes--nay, rather, let no foe By us be seen! "And may he have the will To me his sister some regard to show, To assuage the pain he brought, whose cruel blow My soul did kill, "Yea, mine, for that ill name Whose biting edge, to shun the festal throng Compelling, ceased a while; yet back ere long To goad us came!" Was Sappho's beauty a myth? Greek standards of feminine beauty included height and stateliness. Homer celebrates the characteristic beauty of Lesbian women in speaking of seven Lesbian captives whom Agamemnon offered to Achilles, "surpassing womankind in beauty." Plato, in the Phaedrus, calls Sappho "beautiful," but he was probably referring to the sweetness of her songs. Democharis, in the Anthology, in an epigram on a statue of Sappho, speaks of her bright eyes and compares her beauty with that of Aphrodite. According to Maximus of Tyre, who preserves the traditions of the comic poets, she was "small and dark," a phrase immortalized by Swinburne: "The small dark body's Lesbian loveliness, That held the fire eternal."