Now let us discuss the supposititious love affair, to which we have referred, about which I share the ancient and modern Lesbian doubt. The ancients tell of Sappho’s unrequited love for the ferryman prototype of St. Christopher, the beautiful Phaon. The story is well given in Servius’ _précis_ of Turpilius’ Latin paraphrase of Menander,[64] though he does not mention Sappho by name: “Phaon, who was a ferryman plying for hire between Lesbus (others say he was from Chios[65]) and the mainland, one day ferried over for nothing the Goddess Venus in the guise of an old woman, and received from her for the service an alabaster box of unguent, the daily use of which made women fall in love with him. Among those who did so was one who in her disappointment is said to have thrown herself from Mount Leucates, and from this came the custom now in vogue of hiring people once a year to throw themselves from that place into the sea.” (Edmonds). But neither Phaon nor anything connected with Phaon is mentioned in any of Sappho’s fragments, though Francis Fawkes and others have connected Phaon’s name with the Hymn to Aphrodite. A writer of the second century B.C., Palaephatus,[66] makes the very inconsistent statement that “this is the Phaon in whose honor as a lover many a song has been written by Sappho.” Nor is there any allusion to Sappho’s curing her passion by leaping from the white Leucadian cliff. Athenaeus[67] and Suidas go so far as to say that the victim was another Sappho, and even in the late lists of Leucadian leapers, in Photius, Sappho is not included. Who first conjured up a Phaon, we know not, but the story belongs to folk-lore, and Phaon appears on Greek vases of the time and style of Meidias, who is dated by most archaeologists toward the end of the fifth century B.C., much earlier than Plato’s play (392 B.C.). His indifference to the many ladies who are making love to him is well portrayed, especially on vases (Pl. 4, 5) in Florence and Palermo (p. 107)[68]. The fair Phaon, Aphrodite’s shining star (φάων = shining), is only another _avatar_ of Adonis, who appears in similar style on similar vases, one even found in the same grave with a Phaon vase. Phaon, I believe, is as old as the fifth century; but the story of Sappho’s leap transferred to the white cliffs in the south of the white island of Leucas, the modern Cape Ducato, is later. The Cape is also called Santa Maura, some two hundred feet high, and even to-day this rock of desperation is haunted by Sappho’s ghost and known as Sappho’s Leap (Pl. 6). The legend of the Lesbian’s leap first occurs in the poet of the Old Comedy, Plato, who wrote the play called _Phaon_. Later in the New Comedy, Menander was probably adorning an old tale to point a contemporary moral when he produced his _Leucadia_ of which Turpilius, a contemporary of Terence, wrote a Latin paraphrase. A few anapaestic lines are preserved by Strabo, who speaks of the Leucadian Cliff: