The best-authenticated facts seem to be that the poet was a small dark woman sometimes referred to as “ill-favored,” but endowed with sufficient grace and personal charm to inspire in several fellow countrymen and poets a passion which she did not reciprocate. She was of distinguished family and lived in a time of acute political strife. She suffered exile twice during her early years: once from Mitylene to the interior of the island of Lesbos, the second time to Sicily. Weigall believes she was already well-known as a poet before her Sicilian sojourn, and suggests that she may have spent her several years on the island in Sybaris, where she acquired something of that city’s brilliant sophistication. He places in this period also her marriage, probably of short duration, and the birth of her daughter Kleis to whom she was devoted throughout her life. After her return to Mitylene in her middle twenties she seems to have had constantly about her an ever-changing circle of younger women to whom she taught the verse-writing, music, and dancing which constituted a well-born girl’s preparation for marriage. Some of these pupils or protégées may have lived in her house; it is known they came from neighboring islands and mainland to be taught by her. The incident most often connected with her name is her leap to death from the cliffs of Leucadia for unrequited love of a young ferryman, Phaon. Certain references in her work and that of others, however, indicate that she died peacefully at home at a relatively advanced age. In fact, modern scholars are inclined to pronounce the whole Phaon anecdote legendary; but since it persisted for a couple of millennia, Weigall attempts to demonstrate at least its possible truth. The tenacity with which the story has survived is undoubtedly due to Ovid’s incorporating it in his _Heroides_ or Epistles of Heroines (15: “Sappho to Phaon”),[4] since, thanks to his romantic qualities, he was the most popular of all classical authors for several centuries after the Revival of Learning. Ovid’s epistle, though sympathetically written, represents Sappho as an aging and heartbroken woman deserted by her handsome young lover and still consumed by passion for him “as by a grass fire.” Ridiculed by friends, reproached by her brother for such despondency while she still has a living daughter, desperate over her waning charms, she can think only of suicide; and all this plaint she pours out in a letter to the man who has left her without even a farewell. The lament shows less restraint than any of Sappho’s known verse, for fervent though that often is, it never lacks dignity. There is always the chance, of course, that Ovid had access to poems now wholly lost and never mentioned elsewhere; it is certain that during the centuries immediately following her death Sappho was the subject of some dramatic works (possibly satiric) of which we now know only the author’s names, but which Ovid may have known.