Alkæus and Sappho, both natives of Lesbos, appear about contemporaries with Arion, B. C. 610-580. Of their once celebrated lyric compositions, scarcely anything remains. But the criticisms which are preserved on both of them place them in strong contrast with Alkman, who lived and composed under the more restrictive atmosphere of Sparta,—and in considerable analogy with the turbulent vehemence of Archilochus,[176] though without his intense private malignity. Both composed for their own local audience, and in their own Lesbian Æolic dialect; not because there was any peculiar fitness in that dialect to express their vein of sentiment, but because it was more familiar to their hearers. Sappho herself boasts of the preëminence of the Lesbian bards;[177] and the celebrity of Terpander, Perikleitas, and Arion, permits us to suppose that there may have been before her many popular bards in the island who did not attain to Hellenic celebrity. Alkæus included in his songs the fiercest bursts of political feeling, the stirring alternations of war and exile, and all the ardent relish of a susceptible man for wine and love.[178] The love-song seems to have formed the principal theme of Sappho, who, however, also composed odes or songs[179] on a great variety of other subjects, serious as well as satirical, and is said farther to have first employed the Mixolydian mode in music. It displays the tendency of the age to metrical and rhythmical novelty, that Alkæus and Sappho are said to have each invented the peculiar stanza, well-known under their respective names,—combinations of the dactyl, trochee, and iambus, analogous to the asynartetic verses of Archilochus; they by no means confined themselves, however, to Alkaic and Sapphic metre. Both the one and the other composed hymns to the gods; indeed, this is a theme common to all the lyric and choric poets, whatever may be their peculiarities in other ways. Most of their compositions were songs for the single voice, not for the chorus. The poetry of Alkæus is the more worthy of note, as it is the earliest instance of the employment of the Muse in actual political warfare, and shows the increased hold which that motive was acquiring on the Grecian mind. [176] Horat. Epistol. i, 19, 23. [177] Sappho, Fragm. 93, ed. Bergk. See also Plehn, Lesbiaca, pp. 145-165. Respecting the poetesses, two or three of whom were noted, contemporary with Sappho, see Ulrici, Gesch. der Hellen. Poesie, vol. ii, p. 370. [178] Dionys. Hal. Ant. Rom. v, 82; Horat. Od. i, 32, ii, 13; Cicero, De Nat. Deor. i, 28; the striking passage in Plutarch, Symposion iii, 1, 3, ap. Bergk. Fragm. 42. In the view of Dionysius, the Æolic dialect of Alkæus and Sappho diminished the value of their compositions: the Æolic accent, analogous to the Latin, and acknowledging scarcely any oxyton words, must have rendered them much less agreeable in recitation or song.