Plutarch prefers Anacreon, but refers to at least four of the fragments which are preserved from Sappho (E. 2, 48, 71, 137). Among the Romans Sappho was flattered abundantly, if imitation is the sincerest flattery. As Tucker says: “the most genuine lyric poet of Rome, Catullus, and its most skilful artificer of odes, Horace, both freely copied her. They did more than imitate; they plagiarised, they translated, sometimes almost word for word.” The flattery does not begin until the time of Cicero, for Latin comedy, unlike Greek comedy, paid little heed to the Lesbian poetess. Cicero refers to Silanion’s statue (p. 109). Lucretius must have taken his description at second hand, perhaps from some medical source, if he did not take the verses of the second ode of Sappho direct as his model for his description of fear.[142] Catullus (84-54 B.C.),[143] who caught the Greek rhythm even better than Horace, translated the same ode in his famous fifty-first poem, addressed to Lesbia, and adapted the fragments on the hyacinth and the evening star in his _epithalamia_, the sixty-first and sixty-second songs in the Catullian collection. Probably in the sixty-second he is imitating a lost poem of Sappho. The verse of Sappho (E. 142), “I flutter like a child after her mother,” referring perhaps to a wounded bird, has been used by Catullus in his well-known third poem, on the _Passer_, which probably also imitated a poem of Sappho. In XI. 22-24, Catullus was perhaps thinking of Sappho’s stricken hyacinth, although some rustic proverb may also have been in his mind: Qui illius culpa cecidit velut prati Vltimi flos, praetereunte postquam Tactus aratro est. Think not henceforth, thou, to recall Catullus’ Love; thy own sin slew it, as on the meadow’s Verge declines, un-gently beneath the ploughshare Stricken, a flower. (ROBINSON ELLIS) From these lines and not from Sappho herself, of whom there is no echo in Virgil, Virgil took his description of the dying Euryalus: And like the purple flower the plough cuts down He droops and dies. (_Aeneid_, IX. 435) We are reminded of Robert Burns’ _To A Mountain Daisy_: But now the share uptears thy bed, And low thou lies! ... Stern Ruin’s ploughshare drives, elate, Full on thy bloom, Till crushed beneath the furrow’s weight, Shall be thy doom! We refer on p. 9 to Catullus’ allusion to Sappho in XXXV. 17. In the age of Augustus, even if Virgil neglects Sappho, in Horace (65-8 B.C.) she is re-born. If Edmonds[144] is right in his analysis of a passage in Dio’s _Corinthian Oration_, two fragments (E. 76, 77) of Sappho are incorporated there from a poem which Horace imitated in the same metre: Exegi monumentum aere perennius.