Some bitter words there were that passed his lip,— For me the wrath of love made fierce And him resentful,—just as he took ship, When to the quick did pierce My song-shaft sharp. He sought to crush my heart,— Not distant be the feasting day When civic welcome on his fellows’ part, Shall laugh all wrath away! And may a wife, if he desires, be found In wedlock due, with worthy rite— But as for thee, thou black-skinned female hound, Baleful and evil sprite, Set to the ground thy low malodorous snout And let my brother go his way Whilst thou, along thy low-lived paths, track out The trail of meaner prey. (D. M. R.) In this letter, handed perhaps to Charaxus on his return from Egypt, the tone is that of reconciliation rather than that of rebuke, and the rebuke itself may be found in a fragment of another letter, if Edmonds’ restoration is anywhere near the truth.[35] You seek the false and shun the true, And bid your friends go hang for you, And grieve me in your pride and say I bring you shame. Go, have your way, And flaunt me till you’ve had your fill; I have no fears and never will For the anger of a child. (EDMONDS) “Sappho,” or “Sapho,”[36] as the name appears on vases and papyri, or “Psappho,” as coins and vases have it, or “Psappha,” as she herself spelled it in her soft Aeolic dialect, is perhaps a nom de plume,—the word meaning _lapis lazuli_. According to Athenaeus[37] (who wrote at the beginning of the third century A.D.) she lived in the time of the father of Croesus, Alyattes, who reigned over Lydia from 628 to 560 B.C. Jeremiah, Nebuchadnezzar, and at Rome Tarquinius Priscus were her contemporaries. Suidas, a Greek lexicographer of the tenth century A.D., says that she flourished about the 42nd Olympiad (612-608 B.C.),[38] along with Alcaeus and Stesichorus and Pittacus,[39] (Pl. 2) the latter, one of the seven wise men of Greece and lord of Lesbus. This would indicate that she was then in her poetic prime. If so, she must have been born about 630 B.C. or earlier. Mackail dates her birth as far back as the middle of the seventh century. These early dates given above are amply confirmed by her explicit reference to Sardis and by her descriptions of the luxurious life of the Lydians (E.[40] 20, 38, 86, 130, etc.) which have lately been made so realistic by the American excavations with their finds of gold staters of Croesus, beautiful Lydian seals, jewelry, pottery, and inscriptions.