1. ALMA TADEMA’S SAPPHO _Frontispiece_ (_At end of Volume_) 2. BUST OF PITTACUS 3. MYTILENE 4. THE STORY OF PHAON ON A VASE IN FLORENCE 5. PHAON ON A GREEK VASE IN PALERMO 6. THE LEUCADIAN PROMONTORY 7. ROMAN FRESCO IN AN UNDERGROUND BUILDING 8. A PAPYRUS OF THE THIRD CENTURY A.D. 9. A CYLIX BY SOTADES 10. GREEK COIN FROM MYTILENE 11. IMPERIAL COINS 12. A GREEK VASE IN MUNICH 13. SAPPHO ON A VASE IN CRACOW 14. SAPPHO SEATED BEFORE A WINGED EROS 15. GREEK ARYBALLUS AT RUVO 16. A GREEK HYDRIA IN ATHENS 17. PHAON IN HIS BOAT 18. A POMPEIAN FRESCO 19. A BUST OF SAPPHO IN THE VILLA ALBANI 20. THE OXFORD BUST 21. A BUST IN THE BORGHESE PALACE 22. STATUE OF SAPPHO BY MAGNI 23. STATUE OF SAPPHO BY PRADIER 24. RAPHAEL’S PARNASSUS SAPPHO AND HER INFLUENCE I. SOME APPRECIATIONS, ANCIENT AND MODERN The name of Sappho will never die. But it lives in most of the minds that know it at all to-day as hardly more than the hazy nucleus of a ragged fringe suggestive of erotic thoughts or of sexual perversion. Very seldom does it evoke the vision of a great and pure poetess with marvellous expressions of beauty, grace, and power at her command, who not only haunts the dawn of Grecian Lyric poetry but lives in scattered and broken lights that glint from vases and papyri and from the pages of cold grammarians and warm admirers, whose eulogies we would gladly trade for the unrecorded poems which they quote so meagerly. Sappho has furnished the title of such a novel as Daudet’s _Sapho_. It figures in suggestive moving pictures.[1] The name will answer prettily as that of a bird or even a boat such as the yacht with which Mr. Douglas defended the American cup in 1871. The modern idea of Sappho truly seems to be based mainly on Daudet, who with Pierre Louys in recent times has done most to degrade her good character and who goes so far as to say that “the word Sappho itself by the force of rolling descent through ages is encrusted with unclean legends and has degenerated from the name of a goddess to that of a malady.” But to the lover of lyrics, who is also a student of Greek Literature in Greek, this poetess of passion becomes a living and illustrious personality, who of all the poets of the world, as Symonds says, is the “one whose every word has a peculiar and unmistakable perfume, a seal of absolute perfection and inimitable grace.” “Sappho,” says Tennyson in _The Princess_, “in arts of grace vied with any man.” She is one whose fervid fragments, as the great Irish translator of the _Odes_ of Anacreon and the _Anacreontics_, Thomas Moore, says in his _Evenings in Greece_, Still, like sparkles of Greek Fire, Undying, even beneath the wave, Burn on thro’ time and ne’er expire,