In its rich Aeolian dialect the ode glows with true Greek fire. Sappho’s words are clear but far from cold. They are a sea of glass, but a sea of glass mingled with fire such as the Patmos seer saw from his island not far from Sappho’s Lesbian home. They enable us to understand why Byron in _Don Juan_ speaks of “the isles of Greece where burning Sappho loved and sung.” This is what Swinburne means, when he speaks of the fire eternal and in his _Sapphics_ says that about her “shone a light of fire as a crown for ever.” We know from Plutarch[75] that an ancient physician, Erasistratus, included this ode (which has influenced realistic descriptions of passion from Euripides and Theocritus to Swinburne and Sara Teasdale) in his book of diagnoses as a compendium of all the symptoms of corroding emotions. He applied this psychological test whenever Antiochus looked on Stratonice. “There appeared in the case of Antiochus all those symptoms which Sappho mentions: the choking of the voice, the feverish blush, the obscuring of vision, profuse sweat, disordered and tumultuous pulse and finally, when he was completely overcome, bewilderment, amazement and pallor.” Perhaps Sappho was influenced by Homer’s[76] description of fear and she herself surely suggested such symptoms to Lucretius.[77] We must regard the ode primarily as a literary product, but its pathological picture of passion is hardly secondary. Even if the symptoms seem appalling to our cold and unexpressive northern blood, we must remember that this physical perturbation, as Tucker calls it, was in no way strange to the ancients. Gildersleeve put it well in his unpublished lecture on Sappho, which he so kindly placed at my disposal and to which I am greatly indebted: “if a Greek melted, he melted with a fervent heat, and if this is true of the average Greek how much more was it true of an Aeolian and an Aeolian woman, and of Sappho most Aeolian of all.” Byron refers to this ode when he says in _Don Juan_: Catullus scarcely has a decent poem, I don’t think Sappho’s Ode a good example, Although Longinus tells us there is no hymn Where the sublime soars forth on wings more ample. With regard to Catullus’ rendering (LI), Swinburne in his _Notes on Poems and Reviews_, speaking of his poem _Anactoria_, says: “Catullus translated or as his countrymen would now say ‘traduced’ the Ode to Anactoria; a more beautiful translation there never was and will never be; but compared with the Greek, it is colourless and bloodless, puffed out by additions and enfeebled by alterations. Let anyone set against each other the two first stanzas, Latin and Greek, and pronounce.... Where Catullus failed I could not hope to succeed; I tried instead to reproduce in a diluted and dilated form the spirit of a poem which could not be reproduced in the body.” Tennyson has given the best paraphrase in _Eleänore_: