Edmonds even goes so far as to suggest that Horace imitated not only the poem written by Sappho, but its position. For he thinks that this poem of Sappho was an epilogue to her collection; and Horace placed his imitation at the end of the third book, when he probably thought it would be his last. Horace seems to be adapting Sappho in the twelfth ode of the third book (see Landor’s imitation, p. 202). He composed twenty-six or more odes in the Sapphic metre, which he fitted to Italian measures, and he does them well, though in colder Latin. In him Still breathed the love, still lived the fire To which the Lesbian tuned her lyre.[145] He pictures her in Hades’ home:[146] Aeoliis fidibus querentem Sappho puellis de popularibus. The meaning is simply that she is “singing plaintively (or complaining) about the girls of her country,” perhaps because they did not all return her love, as Atthis deserted her for Andromeda (E. 81); not that she complained of her fellow-maidens for not loving Phaon. Unconsciously Horace helped to defame Sappho’s character, for the epithet “_mascula_,” in the _Epistle_ I. 19, 28, repeated by Ausonius, _Idyl_, VI. 21, has led to gross abuse of Sappho’s good fame.[147] It has no relation to _mascula libido_ and should be interpreted in the light of Statius[148] as referring simply to the fact that she was an imitator of the measures of Archilochus and the equal of men poets. Of elegiac writers, Tibullus and Propertius (II. 8, 33) were influenced only in a general way by the personal and ardent poetry of Sappho’s lyrics. Ovid in the fifteenth epistle of the _Heroides_ pictured Sappho as a passionate and voluptuous _hetaera_ who could not win the love of the beautiful Phaon. With passion she burns “as when through ripened corn By driving winds the spreading flames are borne,” and seeks release and ease, “from the raging seas.” Ovid (43 B.C.-18 A.D.) in this letter and also in the _Tristia_ (II. 365, _Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas_) completed the Roman defamation of Sappho’s good name begun by Horace, and so led the way for the modern idea. From this disgrace she has been rescued by Madame Anne Le Fèvre Dacier (1681), by Welcker (1816), the bachelor who loved Sappho’s genius and who by his chivalrous vindication made himself her knight, and by Wilamowitz (1896),—her three great defenders. Seneca (_circa_ 4 B.C.-65 A.D.) in his _Letters to Lucilius_ (88) quotes a book of the grammarian Didymus on the question _Whether Sappho was a prostitute_. In the Flavian period, Statius in his miscellaneous poems, called _Silvae_, mentions her:[148] saltusque ingressa viriles Non formidata temeraria Leucade Sappho, Quosque alios dignata chelys. About the same time Martial (c. 40-104 A.D.) cites a poem[149] of Canius on Sappho: “Sappho the lover praised a poetess: more pure is Theophila, yet Sappho was not more learned” (Ker).