_Portraits_[61] is repeating the same source when he says “physically, Sappho was very ill-favored, being small and dark, like a nightingale with ill-shapen wings enfolding a tiny body.” The famous fragment, This little creature, four feet high, Cannot hope to touch the sky, (EDMONDS) may not refer to Sappho, and if it does, we must remember, that Edmonds’ new reading is doubtful. Perhaps Horace was thinking of this line when he wrote[62] sublimi feriam sidera vertice, which recalls Tennyson’s Old Horace! I will strike, said he, The stars with head sublime. (EPILOGUE) Edmonds forces the meaning of the Greek to get even four feet out of his new restoration. Sappho was surely taller than that and there is no evidence earlier than Roman days to justify even Swinburne’s The small dark body’s Lesbian loveliness That held the fire eternal. In any case Sappho was no dwarf, otherwise her deformity would not have escaped the notice of the Athenian comic mud-slingers and scandal-mongers who did so much to spoil her good name. Such is the traditional, not the real, human, historical Sappho of the sixth century B.C. The story of Sappho’s love for Phaon is patently mythological, as indicated by the legend of his transformation by Aphrodite from an old man into a handsome youth. There can be only slight historic foundation for connecting Sappho with him and making Sicily the scene of their first meeting. An inscription on the Parian marble in Oxford says: “When Critius the First was archon at Athens Sappho fled from Mytilene and sailed to Sicily.” The date is uncertain as there is a lacuna in the inscription, but it is between 604 and 594 B.C., perhaps about 598. The recently discovered hymn to Hera, _Longing for Lesbus_, lends support to this story of exile. She may have been banished by Pittacus for engaging like Alcaeus in political intrigues. She probably returned to Lesbus under the amnesty of 581, as her grave is often mentioned as in Lesbus. There is even a tradition preserved by the English traveller Pococke that her own sepulchral urn was once in the Turkish mosque of the castle of Mytilene. We have already cited one or two fragments which seem to show that she had more than reached middle age. She was old enough to feel that she should not re-marry, especially if she had to choose one younger than herself.[63] Fragment (E. 99) is in the style of Shakespeare’s “Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.” Nowhere in her poems is there any evidence that she committed suicide for love of Phaon, but as her name has started this legend we must speak of it in some detail. The famous fragment (E. 108), to judge from the context where it is quoted in connection with Socrates’ death, seems to give her last words: “It is not right that there be mourning in the house of poetry; this befits us not.”