How the fine radiance Sappho shed on woman’s love for woman and on her love of love and on the glory of pure and honorable marriage shines at last across these twenty-five hundred years! Her figure stands there on her isle. In itself it is white marble veined with gold. Much mud from many lands has been flung against it. For centuries, almost for millenniums, it has been soiled and stained. Even good men have come to think of the stains as integral parts of the statue, and of the gold as base metal. But the winds and rains of time have tired out the soilers and washed the figure white and clean of all Attic and all later defilings. It is all pure marble now, veined with warm gold. Something that suggests the Pygmalion miracle is happening to it. The statue is alive and luminous with its own beauty, grace, and power. Sappho’s poetry deals with the eternal experiences of the human heart and carries with it those touches which make the whole world kin. As T. G. Tucker says: “Love and Sorrow are re-born with every human being. Time and civilisation make little difference.” And not unhallowed was the page By wingèd Love inscribed, to assuage The pangs of vain pursuit; Love listening while the Lesbian Maid With finest touch of passion swayed Her own Aeolian lute. (WORDSWORTH, _Upon the Same Occasion_, 1819) NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY NOTES (The dates given in the text with authors are generally those of _floruit_, _i.e._ about the fortieth year.) [1] Somewhere recently in a newspaper I saw these lines entitled, _They Lived Too Soon_: I fear Cleopatra was wasted Way back in her misty old realm. As matters befell, she did fairly well But she’d have been great in a film. If Dido and Sappho were with us— They’re advertised widely, you see— And Helen of Troy—good gracious My boy, what movie successes they’d be. [2] _Oxyrhynchus Papyri_, XV. 1787, frag. 4. [3] Galen, _Protrep._, 2. [4] _Classical Philology_, XVIII. 35 ff. (1923). [5] Sir Edward Cook, _More Literary Recreations_, 1919, p. 205, quotes Wharton with approval to the effect that Tennyson called Sappho “the poet, implying her supremacy by the absence of any added epithet.” [6] _Anth. Pal._, VII. 16. [7] Athenaeus, _Deipnosophistae_ (Doctors at dinner), 596 b. [8] _Odes_, IV. 9. 11. [9] _Amatorius_, 18. [10] Athenaeus, 598 b. [11] _Loves_, 30. [12] Lord Neaves, _The Greek Anthology_, p. 113. [13] _Anth. Pal._, VII. 15. [14] Fraenkel, _Inschriften von Pergamon_, I, p. 118, no. 198; _C. I. G._ 3555. [15] _Sappho und Simonides_, p. 41, 1. [16] _Anth. Pal._, IX. 66. [17] _Anth. Pal._, VII. 14. [18] _Anth. Pal._, VII. 407. [19] _Anth. Pal._, IX. 189. Cf. A. J. Butler, _Amaranth and Asphodel_, Oxford, 1922, p. 195. The ending is “you shall fain Deem that Calliope doth hymn the strain.” [20] _Anth. Pal._, IX. 571. [21] XXXV. 16.