There is no comparable evidence with regard to her feeling for men. Once, to be sure, in attempting to hearten a girl on the eve of her wedding, she says: “That night was sweet enough to me, neither have you, dear maid, anything to fear ...”[6] Again she writes to a man: “But if you love me, choose yourself a younger wife; for I cannot submit to live with one that is younger than I.”[7] And finally: “If my paps could still give suck and my womb were able to bear children, then would I come to another marriage bed with unfaltering feet; but nay, age now maketh a thousand wrinkles to go upon my flesh, and Love is in no haste to fly to me with his gift of pain ...”[8] (The complaint: “Sweet mother, I truly cannot weave my web; for I am overwhelmed through Aphrodite with love of a slender youth,” cannot be counted as significant, for it was rendered by one translator even before the Oxyrinchus discoveries as ending: “a slender maiden.”)[9] These are the total count of verses referring to heterosexual love, and there is nothing in them to match the “delicate fire” of the “Hymn to Aphrodite” imploring the goddess to soften the heart of a girl; or of the “Ode” quoted above; of the verses to Anactoria and Gongyla and the five poems to Atthis; or of the numerous fragments that glow with vivid delight in the beauty and love of girls. Significant too is the poem addressed to these girls in her old age. She laments her fading charms more bitterly even than in Ovid’s fictitious epistle, and ends: But I, be it known, love soft living, and for me brightness and beauty belong to the desire of the sunlight [are as necessary to me as light] and therefore I shall not crawl away to my lair till needs must be, but shall continue loved and loving with you. And now it is enough that I have your love, nor would I pray for more.[10] Thus on internal evidence it appears that despite marriage and motherhood, opportunities for a second match, and much writing of conventional hymeneal verses, her lifelong preference was for women. Nor does the meager quantity of surviving verse disqualify such an assumption. A great part of it consists of quotations chosen by forty classical authorities on poetic style, who can scarcely be suspected of mass preference for variant subject matter. The remainder (barring one seventh century manuscript) comes from papyri which had been used to reinforce mummy-casings.[11] Altogether, no sounder random sampling could well be devised.