To piece these fragments together has been a task more delicate and arduous than to dig them out of the earth. Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt succeeded in combining some twenty shreds of papyrus, and thus in showing the nature of the original manuscript. And the chief product of their labor and skill was a poem of six stanzas in the form to which Sappho's name is given, a poem, however, from which two entire lines and many words were missing. Then it was that J. M. Edmonds, an eminent Hellenist of Cambridge University, gave his attention to the matter. He studied the possible relationship of the words, parsing and analyzing as diligently as any youth whom only the implacable Homer separates from a strip of parchment marked with the university's seal and his own name parodied in Latin. "Anactoria," he saw, was vocative--and that was greatly significant. He added accents, syllables, words, and finally he supplied--it was pure guesswork, of course--two entire lines. And the result is undoubtedly a close approximation of the original lyric, more nearly complete, indeed, than most of the poems which have made critics call Sappho "the Tenth Muse." For Sappho is known only by two brief odes and a few lyric fragments--"two small brilliants and a handful of star dust," they have been called. She wrote, it is believed, at least nine books of odes, together with epithalamia, epigrams, elegies, and monodies. To account for the disappearance of all this poetry several theories have been advanced. One, which is largely accepted, is that Sappho's poems were burned at Byzantium in the year A. D. 380 by command of Gregory Nazianzen, who desired that his own poems might be studied in their stead, for the improvement of the morals of his people. J. M. Edmonds has contributed to an issue of _The Classical Review_ his amended version of the poem. He gives also the following prose translation: The fairest thing in all the world some say is a host of horsemen, and some a host of foot, and some, again, a navy of ships; but to me, 'tis my heart's beloved, and 'tis easy to make this understood by any. When Helen surveyed much mortal beauty, she chose for the best the destroyer of all the honor of Troy, and thought not so much either of child or parent dear, but was led astray by love to bestow her heart afar; for woman is ever easy to be bent when she thinks lightly of what is near and dear. Even so you to-day, my Anactoria, remember not, it seems, when she is with you one of whom I would rather have the sweet sound of her footfall and the sight of the brightness of her beaming face than all the chariots and armored footmen of Lydia. Know that in this world man cannot have the best; yet to pray for a share in what was once shared is better than to forget it. I have roughly rendered the poem into English verse as follows: