Maidens, that pass my tomb with laughter sweet, A voice unresting echoes at your feet; Pause, and if any would my story seek, Dumb as I am, these graven words will speak; ‘Once in the vanished years it chanced to please Arista, daughter of Hermocleides, To dedicate my life in virgin bliss To thee, revered of women, Artemis! O Goddess, deign to bless my grandsire’s line, For Saon was a temple priest of thine; And grant, O Queen, in thy benefic grace, Unending fame and fortune to his race.’ (O’HARA’s adaptation) The epigram on the fisherman (E. 145) is most unlike Sappho. Fawkes, Elton, Neaves, and many a modern poet have put it into verse:[102] Above the lowly grave of Pelagon, Ill-fated fisher lad, Meniscus’ son, His father placed as sign of storm and strife The weel and oar, memorial of his life. (O’HARA) The two elegiac couplets on _The Dust of Timas_, who died before her wedding day, are rather flat and hardly worthy of Sappho’s genius (E. 144); but if Edmonds’ restoration of one of Sappho’s fragments as referring to Timas is correct (p. 60 above), it may be genuine and in that case one of the very few surviving early metrical epitaphs. I give you the recent rendering by one of our best modern American poets, Edwin Arlington Robinson: This dust was Timas; and they say That almost on her wedding day She found her bridal home to be The dark house of Persephone. And many maidens, knowing then That she would not come back again, Unbound their curls; and all in tears, They cut them off with sharpened shears. V. SAPPHO IN ART