But the dramatists reflected in a thousand ways the altered spirit of an age in which good women had no visible part. Their immortal heroines are equally strong and instinct with vitality, though less simple and of severer mold, but they are revered from afar as the goddesses were, while real women are a target for abuse and ridicule. It is to no rare and perishable beauty, no fleeting grace, no intellectual brilliancy, that they owe their eternal charm, but to their moral greatness, their strength of sacrifice. These exalted ideals, so bravely tender, so patiently enduring, were the victims of adverse destiny or of their own devotion. But the world held for them no reward in the masculine heart. There were many women in classic story who died for men, but only one for whom men were willing to die, and this was Helen, whose divine beauty appealed to the senses and the imagination. She was made to be loved, to command; all others were made to serve. The Greeks adored beauty; they lived in it, they created it. Here lay their pride; here more than once they found their Nemesis. But virtue they gave a place apart, as they did the wise Athena, who towered in golden isolation over the Attic divinities. It had no share in the joy of existence. Beneath the glad pæans of heroes we hear at intervals, across the ages, the clear voices of women chanting a miserere in an undertone of sorrow or despair. Doubtless the poets saw and felt the tragical side of their lives, but tradition had the inevitability of fate, as it has had in other times. They have given us great and lonely ideals of womanhood, but a somber picture of the place held by living women in the Athenian world. SAPPHO AND THE FIRST WOMAN’S CLUB [Illustration: Decorative image] · Golden Age of Lyric Poetry · · The Mythical and the Real Sappho · · Her Poems · · Contrast with Hebrew Singers · · Poet of Nature and Passion · · The First Woman’s Club · · Æolian and Doric Poetesses · · Honors to the Genius of Hellenic Women · [Illustration: Decorative image] I A woman and a poet; adored by men and loved by her own sex; artist, singer, teacher, leader; an exile and an immortal--all this was the Sappho who stood upon the heights twenty-five centuries ago and sang the verses that thrilled the heart of the world. She lived in the brilliant period when lyric poetry reached its zenith and was its finest representative. Before her no woman had appeared in a distinctly literary rôle, so far as we know. To-day she still stands supreme in her own field.