What we really know best of Sappho’s life is that she was acknowledged the choicest spirit of her time in music and poetry, and that, whether as friendly guide or professional teacher or something of both, she gathered about her what may be variously called a coterie, academy, conservatorium, or club, of young women, not only from Lesbos itself but from other islands, and even from Miletus and the distant Pamphylia. Sometimes they were called her “companions,” sometimes her “disciples.” One of them, Erinna of Telos, herself became famous, but unhappily survives for us as a lyrist only in an inconsiderable line or two. Sappho appears to have taught these damsels music and also the art of poetry, so far as that art is teachable. She appears, moreover, to have taught them whatever charms and graces of bearing and behaviour were most desired by women, whether in their social life or in their frequent appearances in religious or secular processions and ceremonies. There exists a short fragment in which she derides the rusticity of the woman who has no idea how to hold up her train about her ankles. In another place she bids one of her maidens-- “Take sprigs of anise fair With soft hands twined, And round thy bonny hair A chaplet bind; The Muse with smiles will bless Thy blossoms gay, While from the garlandless She turns away.” It has often been observed that the relations of Sappho with the young women Erinna and Atthis and Anactoria resembled those of Socrates with the young men Alcibiades and Charmides and Phædrus. But it has apparently not been also pointed out as a parallel that, three centuries later, there similarly gathered about the _maître_ Philêtas, in the isle of Cos, a school of young poets, among whom were no less persons than Theocritus, Asclepiades and Aratus.