A young woman of good birth in such surroundings would be sure to have her love-affairs. When Sappho was at the height of her fame in young womanhood, the poet Alcaeus, her townsman, was also in his glory. We are not told whether he was older or younger than she, but probably Sappho was the older and lived before the political disorders which led to her exile from Lesbus. Alcaeus was said, perhaps wrongly, to be her lover. The story is based on the verses quoted by Aristotle in his _Rhetoric_,[47] “pure Sappho, violet-weaving and gently smiling, I would fain tell you something did not shame prevent me,” to which Sappho replied, “If your desire were of things good or fair, and your tongue were not mixing a draught of ill words, then would not shame possess your eye, but you would make your plea outright” (Edmonds). Tradition even in classic times represented her as beloved by Anacreon also,[48] but the bard of Teos flourished at least fifty years after the Lesbian poetess. Archilochus and Hipponax, the famous iambic satiric poets, the former dead before Sappho was born, the latter born after she was dead, were also represented as her lovers by Diphilus,[49] the Athenian comic playwright in his play _Sappho_. But as Athenaeus in the third century A.D. said, “I rather fancy he was joking.” Mackail says that “she was married and had one or more children,” and many of the new fragments, as well as Ovid, indicate this. A fragment long known says: I have a maid, a bonny maid, As dainty as the golden flowers, My darling Cleïs. Were I paid All Lydia, and the lovely bowers Of Cyprus, ’twould not buy my maid. (TUCKER) Professor Prentice[50] translates this fragment (E. 130), “there is a pretty little girl named Cleïs whom I love,” etc., and says that it does not refer to her own daughter. But there is no word for love in the Greek passage, and the ancient interpretation of Maximus of Tyre[51] is preferable, especially as Cleïs is definitely mentioned by Suidas and as the name reappears as that of a young woman in another of the old fragments and in one of the new pieces.[52] The matter seems now to be settled by the recent discovery on a papyrus (about 200 A.D.) of a new late prose biography of Sappho which is so important a source for her life that a literal translation of it is here given, especially as it is not in Edmonds’ _Lyra Graeca_.[53]