ABSTRACT
Sappho, so celebrated for her impassioned and elegant poetry, was a native of Mitylene, in the isle of Lesbos. She lived in the forty-second Olympiad, six hundred and ten years before the Christian æra. She composed a great number of odes, elegies, epigrams, epithalamiums, &c. and received from her contemporaries the title of the tenth muse. But few of her numerous productions have descended to posterity; yet those few justify the panegyrics which have been bestowed upon her. Her Hymn to Venus was preserved by Dionysus of Halicarnassus, who inserted it in his works as an example of perfection. Her well-known amatory ode was preserved by Longinus, as a specimen of equal excellence. Her poetry was held in great and just esteem by the ancients. “In Greece,” says Tanaquillus Faber, “no productions were esteemed more elegant, exquisite, and beautiful, than those of Sappho.” Mitylene boasted of the honour of her birth: in testimony of their respect for her memory, the Mitylenians stamped their coin with her image. The Romans afterwards erected a statue of porphyry to her honour. Both ancients and moderns have vied with each other in enthusiastic admiration of her genius and talents. Vostius affirms, that none of the Greek poets excelled Sappho for the sweetness of her verse: he adds, that she took is her model the style of Archilochus, the severity of which she softened. Critics, historians, and poets, have, in every age, united in her praise, Catullus endeavoured to imitate the verse of Sappho, but with inferior success: nature, tenderness, and passion, breathe through all her productions.
