Did she attempt any other innovation in regard to the position of women? What did she think were the relations which ought to subsist between the one sex and the other? These are questions that we should fain wish we could answer; but history remains silent, and we can only form conjectures from isolated facts and statements. A late Greek writer, Maximus Tyrius,[35] compares her association with young women to the association which existed between Socrates and young men. It has to be remembered that even in Sparta the men were thrown into very close and continual intimacy; and that this was still more the case in other States where the women were kept in strict confinement. Even in Sparta the men dined together alone; they were often away on military expeditions for whole months together, and men were the instructors of the youths. In this way passionate intimacies arose between old and young, the old man striving to instruct his favourite youth in all manly and virtuous exercises, and the young man serving and protecting his old friend to the best of his power. These attachments were like the loves of Jonathan and David, surpassing the love of women. It is likely that Sappho did not see why these intimacies, fraught as they were with so many advantages, should be confined to the male sex; and she strove, or at least Maximus Tyrius thought she strove, to establish much closer connexions, such strong ties of love between members of her own sex as would unite them for ever in firm friendship, soothe them in the time of sorrow, and make the hours of life pass joyfully on. And her poetry expresses an extraordinary strength and warmth of affection. Just as Socrates almost swoons at the sight of the exquisite beauty of an Athenian youth, so Sappho trembles all over when she gazes on her lovely girls. And she weaves all the beauties of nature into the expression of the depth of her emotion. She seems to have had a rarely intense love of nature. The bright sun, the moon and the stars, the music of birds, the cool river, the shady grove, Hesperus, and the golden-sandalled Dawn--all are to her ministers of love, of this intense love for her poetical pupils, for one of whom she says she would not take the whole of Lydia. But though this association may have been one great object, it cannot be affirmed that she formed any idea of making the love of women a substitute for the love of men. Some of her girls unquestionably married, and Sappho composed their hymeneal songs. She entered into their future destinies, and sympathized with them throughout their career, following them to the grave with the sad lament which they only can utter who have felt intensely the joys of life, and see in death the entrance to a cold, shadowy, and pithless existence.