Scarcely inferior to Corinna were those ardent pupils of Sappho, who had flocked from the sunny isles of the Aegean and the laurel-crowned hills of Greece around "the fair-haired Lesbian" in her island home, which was, at the same time, a school of poetry and music. The most gifted of these were Danophila, the Pamphylian, and Erinna, whose hexameters were said by the ancients to reveal a genius equal to that of Homer. She died at the early age of nineteen and has always excited a pathetic interest because, like so many others of her sex since her time--women and maidens of the loftiest spiritual aspirations,--she was condemned to the spindle and the distaff when she wished to devote her life to the service of the Muses. The following is her own epitaph: "These are Erinna's songs, how sweet, though slight! For she was but a girl of nineteen years. Yet stronger far than what most men can write; Had death delayed, whose fame had equaled hers?" Never before nor since did such a wave of feminine genius pass over the fragrant valleys and vine-clad plains of Greece. Never in any other place or time shone so brilliant a galaxy of women of talent and imagination; never was there a more perfect flowering of female intelligence of the highest order. According to tradition, there appeared in the favored land of Hellas, when the entire population of the country was not equal to that of a fair-sized modern city, within the brief space of a century, no fewer than seventy-six women poets. When we remember that the Renaissance produced only about sixty female poets, though in a more extended territory and with a much larger population, and that none of them could approach the incomparable Sappho, or even many of her pupils, in the perfection of their work, we can realize the splendor of the achievements of the female intellect in the Hellenic world during the golden age of feminine poetic art.[5] One would think that this phenomenal outburst of mental vigor, and especially the marvelous achievements of Sappho, Corinna and those of their pupils and followers, would have compelled the world for all subsequent time to recognize the innate power of the female mind, and perceive the wisdom--not to say justice--of according to women the same advantages for the development of their inborn gifts as were afforded to men. They had proved that, under favorable conditions, there was essentially no difference between the male and the female intellect, and that genius knows no sex. And this they demonstrated not only in poetry, but also in philosophy and in other branches of human knowledge as well.