THE

LIFE OF SAPPHO.

SAPPHO was a native of Mitylene in the island of Lesbos. Who was her father is uncertain, there being no less than eight persons who have contended for that honour; but it is universally acknowledged that Cleis was her mother. She flourished, according to Suidas, in the 42d Olympiad; according to Eusebius, in the 44th Olympiad, about 600 years before our Saviour Christ. She was contemporary with Pittachus, the famous tyrant of Mitylene, and the two celebrated poets, Stesichorus and Alcæus. Barnes has endeavoured to prove, from the testimonies of Chamæleon and Hermesianax, that Anacreon was one of her lovers; but this amour has been generally esteemed too repugnant to chronology, to be admitted for any thing but a poetical fiction.

She married one Cercolas, a man of great wealth and power in the island of Andros, by whom she had a daughter named Cleis. He leaving her a widow very young, she renounced all thoughts of a second marriage, but not the pleasures of love; not enduring to confine that passion to one person, which, as the ancients tell us, was too violent in her to be restrained even to one sex.

But no one seems to have been the object of her admiration so much as the accomplished Phaon, a young man of Lesbos; who is said to have been a kind of ferry-man, and thence fabled to have carried Venus over the stream in his boat, and to have received from her, as a reward, the favour of becoming the most beautiful man in the world. She fell desperately in love with him, and took a voyage into Sicily in pursuit of him, he having withdrawn himself thither on purpose to avoid her. It was in that island, and on this occasion, that she composed her Hymn to Venus.

Her poem was ineffectual for the procuring that happiness which she prayed for in it. Phaon was still obdurate, and Sappho was so transported with the violence of her passion, that she resolved to get rid of it at any rate.

There was a promontory in Acarnania called Leucate, on the top of which was a little temple dedicated to Apollo. In this temple it was usual for despairing lovers to make their vows in secret, and afterwards to fling themselves from the top of the precipice into the sea. For it was an established opiniou, that all those who were taken up alive, would immediately be cured of their former passion. Sappho tried the remedy; but perished in the experiment. The original of this unaccountable humour is not known. Ovid represents Sappho as advised to undertake this strange project by the vision of a sea-nymph, of which she sent the following account to the cruel Phaon :

Hic ego cum lassos, &c.

Here as I lay, and swell'd with tears the flood,

Before my sight a watery virgin stood;
She stood and cry'd, "O you that love in vain
Fly hence, and seek the fair Leucadian main:
There stands a rock, from whose impending steep
Apollo's fane surveys the rolling deep;

There injur'd lovers, leaping from above,
Their flames extinguish, and forget to love,
Haste, Sappho, haste, from high Leucadia throw
Thy wretched weight, nor dread the deeps below!"
She spoke, and vanish'd with the voice-I rise
And silent tears fall trickling from my eyes.

I go, ye nymphs, those rocks and seas to prove;
How much I fear, but, ah, how much I love!
I go, ye nymphs, where furious love inspires,
Let female fears submit to female fires.
To rocks and seas I fly from Phaon's hate,
And hope from seas and rocks a milder fate.
Ye gentle gales beneath my body blow,
And softly lay me on the waves below;

And thou, kind Love, my sinking limbs sustain,
Spread thy soft wings, and waft me o'er the main,
Nor let a lover's death the guiltless flood profane!

Pope.

The Romans erected a most noble statue of porphyry to her memory; and the Mitylenians, to express their sense of her worth, and the glory they received from her being born amongst them, paid her sovereign honours after her death, and coined money with her head for the impress. The best idea we can have of her person, is from her own description of it in Ovid:

Si mihi difficilis formam, &c.

To me what nature has in charms deny'd,
Is well by wit's more lasting charms supply'd.
Though short my stature, yet my name extends
To Heaven itself, and Earth's remotest ends.
Brown as I am, an Ethiopian dame
Inspir'd young Perseus with a generous flame;
Turtles and doves of different hues unite,
And glossy jet is pair'd with shining white.
If to no charms thou wilt thy heart resign,

But such as merit, such as equal thine,

By none, alas! by none thou canst be mov'd,
Phaon alone by Phaon must be lov'd.

Pope.

To give the English reader a true notion what opinion the ancients entertained of her works, would be to collect a volume in her praise. She was honoured with the glorious title of the tenth Muse. Horace says,

On the revival of learning, men of the most refined taste accounted the loss of her writings inestimable, and collected the sacred relics with the utmost assiduity: though Mr. Addison (in the Spectator, No. 223.) judiciously observes: "I do not know, by the character that is given of her works, whether it is not for the benefit of mankind that they are lost. They were filled with such bewitching tenderness and rapture, that it might have been dangerous to have given them a reading.”

Vossius, in the third book of his Institutioness Poeticæ, says, that none of the Greek poets excelled Sappho in sweetness of verse; and that she made Archilochus the model of her style, but at the same time took great care to soften and temper the severity of his expression.

Hoffman, in his Lexicon, says, "Some authors are of opinion, that the elegy which Ovid made under the name of Sappho, and which is infinitely superior to his other elegies, was all, or at least the most beautiful part of it, stolen from the poems of the elegant Sappho."

She was the inventress of that kind of verse which (from her name) is called the Sapphic. She wrote nine books of odes, besides elegies, epigrams, iambics, monodies, and other pieces; of which we have nothing remaining entire, but an hymn to Venus, an ode preserved by Longinus, (which, however, the learned acknowledge to be imperfect) two epigrams, and some other little fragments. I shall conclude my account of this celebrated lady in the words of Mr. Addison, taken from the above-mentioned Spectator.

“Among the mutilated poets of antiquity, there is none whose fragments are so beautiful as those of Sappho. They give us a taste of her way of writing, which is perfectly conformable with that extraordinary character we find of her in the remarks of those great critics who were conversant with her works when they were entire. One may see, by what is left of them, that she followed nature in all her thoughts, without descending to those little points, conceits, and turns of wit with which many of our modern lyrics are so miserably infected. Her soul seems to have been made up of love and poetry: she felt the passion in all its warmth, and described it in all its symptoms. She is called by ancient authors the tenth Muse; and by Plutarch is compared to Cacus the son of Vulcan, who breathed out nothing but flame

THE

ODES OF SAPPHO.

TRANSLATED BY FAWKES.

something very pretty in this circumstance, wherein Venus is described as sending away her chariot, upon her arrival at Sappho's lodgings, to denote that it was not a short transient visit which Madame Dacier.

20. Back flew the feather'd band.] There is she intended to make her.