This is the verse placed by Pierre Louÿs at the beginning of “Elegiacs in Mytilene.” * * * * * “Phryne.” The crime of which Phryne was accused, and for which she was tried before the Areopagos at Athens, was of profaning the Eleusinian Mysteries--a crime even more serious than Pierre Louÿs’ “murder.” * * * * * “Apelles revealed his Anadyomene.” Pierre Louÿs writes “entrevit la forme.” Apelles was a painter. BUCOLICS IN PAMPHYLIA XIV “Melissa.” That is: “bee.” Marcus Argentarius has an epigram in the Anthology using the word (Anth. Pal. V-32): “Melissa is thy name and truly so, as my heart bears witness. Thy soft lips sweeten thy kisses with honey, but thou also piercest with a cruel sting.” * * * * * XVI “Like a cup with two handles.” The “amphora kiss,” as though one drank the kiss from a beaker. * * * * * XXXVI “My father.” An oversight, as Pierre Louÿs says in the “Life of Bilitis,” she seems never to have known her father for he is not mentioned ...” See also the First and Second Epitaphs. * * * * * XLII “First dawn.” Execrations of the morning light were popular among the Greek amatory poets. See Meleager (Anth. Pal. V-172): “Star of Morning, enemy of lovers, why shinest thou so quickly upon the couch where, a moment since, I lay warm with Demo?...” * * * * * XLIII “The trunks of the pines.” The same thought in the “Song of Songs” (Song of Solomon) I-17: “The beams of our house are of cedar and our rafters of fir.” ELEGIACS AT MYTILENE John Addington Symonds in his “Problem in Greek Ethics” (London. 1901. pp 71-72) remarks: “Lesbian passion, as the Greeks called it, never obtained the same social sanction as boy-love. It is significant that Greek Mythology offers no legends of the goddesses parallel to those which consecrated paederastia among the male deities. Again, we have no recorded example, so far as I can remember, of noble friendships between women rising into political and historical prominence.... The Greeks, while tolerating, regarded it rather as an eccentricity of nature, or a vice, than as an honourable and socially useful emotion.... There is an important passage in the ‘Amores’ of Lucian which proves that the Greeks felt an abhorrence of sexual inversion among women similar to that which moderns feel for its manifestation among men.... And ... while the love of males for males in Greece obtained moralisation, and reached the high position of a recognized social function, the love of female for female remained undeveloped and unhonoured, on the same level as both forms of homosexual passion in the modern European world are.” The exposition, perhaps beyond decorum, of Lesbian love in this section of the Songs of Bilitis has no parallel in all Greek literature where references to the subject are very few.