In the second century A.D. Sappho was especially popular. In the time of Hadrian, Dracon of Stratonicea wrote a book about Sappho’s metres. In the days of Plutarch[150] the songs of Sappho were often sung at dinner parties. And Aulus Gellius (170 A.D.) in his _Attic Nights_[151] shows us that Sappho was all the rage in his day as in the time of Plutarch. It was the custom “after the chief courses were disposed of and the time was come for wine ... to have delightful renderings of a number of the songs of Anacreon and Sappho.” In the second century many writers on grammar, such as Apollonius Dyscolus and his son Herodian, Hephaestion (on metre), Demetrius (perhaps first century A.D.), Hermogenes, Maximus of Tyre, and Aristides (on rhetoric), Aelian, Pausanias, and Pollux quote Sappho abundantly. The great satirist Lucian (c. 120-c. 200 A.D.) calls her “the delicious glory of the Lesbians,”[152] makes her the standard for ladies of learning who write poems, and has her contribute to one of his pictures “the elegance of life.”[153] In _Loves_ (I, p. 905) he uses almost the very first words of the second ode. That Galen, another writer of the second century A.D., who knew not only medicine but also the popularity of Sappho, was speaking with authority on literature when he said that Sappho was “_the_ poetess,” is shown by the fact that most of the papyri with quotations from Sappho date from his time or from the third century, the century when Athenaeus and Philostratus, who cited much from Sappho, were living. In the fourth century Eusebius, Themistius, and the Emperor Julian, as well as Himerius, often quote her. Ausonius in _Idyl_ VI says: Et de nimboso saltum Leucate minatur Mascula Lesbiacis Sappho peritura sagittis. Claudian in his work on the _Marriage of Honorius and Mary_ (ll. 229-235) makes Mary “never cease under her mother’s guidance to unroll the writers of Rome and Greece, all that old Homer sang, or Thracian Orpheus, or that Sappho set to music with Lesbian quill” (Platnauer). In the fifth century the Christian writer Synesius and that compiler of chrestomathies Stobaeus often quote from Sappho. There is nothing to be gained by giving a long list of the writers on technical subjects to whom we owe so many fragments of Sappho not found on papyrus or parchment. Enough have been cited to prove that Sappho was much read in the first four and even the fifth centuries A.D. Himerius[154] especially proves her popularity in the fourth century, for he rewrites many of her songs in poetic prose and makes much use of Sapphic epithets and repetitions of words. The fragments (E. 68, 101) have influenced him in his _Orations_,[155] and in the _epithalamium_,[156] which he dedicated to his friend Severus in 354 A.D., Sappho’s influence is very apparent (see above pp. 88 ff.). The bride is likened to an apple and the bridegroom to Achilles, although in the fragments preserved we have no Achilles but rather Ares.