Sappho came of a noble family belonging to an Aeolian colony in the Troad. Though Suidas gives eight possibilities for the name of Sappho’s father, the most probable is Scamandronymus, a good Asia Minor name vouched for by Herodotus, Aelian and other ancient writers and now confirmed by a recently discovered papyrus.[28] He was rich and noble and probably a wine-merchant. He died, according to Ovid,[29] when Sappho’s eldest child was six years of age. Her mother’s name, says Suidas, was Cleïs.[30] Commentators assume that she was living when Sappho began to write poetry because of the reference to “mother” in the “Spinner in Love”; but this may be an impersonal poem. According to the Greek custom of naming the child after a grandparent the poetess called her only daughter Cleïs. The poetess had three brothers, Charaxus, Larichus, who held the aristocratic office of cup-bearer in the Prytaneum to the highest officials of Mytilene, and, according to Suidas, a third brother, Eurygyius,[31] of whom nothing is known. Athenaeus tells us that the beautiful Sappho often sang the praises of her brother Larichus; and the name was handed down in families of Mytilene, for it occurs in a Priene inscription[32] as the name of the father of a friend of Alexander who was named Eurygyius. This shows the family tradition and how descendants of Sappho’s family attained high ranks in Alexander’s army. Charaxus, the eldest brother as we now know, “sailed to Egypt and as an associate with a certain Doricha spent very much money on her,” according to the recently found late papyrus biography. Charaxus had strayed from home about 572 and sailed as a merchant to Naucratis, the great Greek port colony established in the delta of the Nile under conditions similar to those of China’s treaty-ports. There he was bartering Lesbian wine, Horace’s _innocentis pocula Lesbii_, for loveliness and pleasures, when he fell in love with and ransomed the beautiful Thracian courtesan, the world-renowned _demi-mondaine_. She was called Doricha by Sappho according to the Augustan geographer, Strabo, but Herodotus names her Rhodopis, rosy-cheeked,[33] and evidently thought she had contributed to Delphi[34] the collection of _obeliskoi_ or iron spits, the small change of ancient days before coin money was used to any great extent. Herodotus, the only writer preserved before 400 B.C. who gives us any details about Sappho tells the story and how the sister roundly rebuked her brother in a poem. Some four hundred years later Strabo, adding a legend which recalls that of Cinderella, repeats the story and it is retold by Athenaeus after another two hundred years. In our own day it has slightly influenced William Morris in the _Earthly Paradise_. Except for archaeology, however, we should never have heard Sappho’s own words. About 1898 the sands of Egypt gave up five mutilated stanzas of this poem which scholars had for many a year longed to hear, but the beginnings