and moral leaders, like Madame Blavatsky and Louise
Michel, have been either homosexual or bisexual or, at least, of
pronounced masculine temperament.[142] Great actresses from the eighteenth
century onward have frequently been more or less correctly identified with
homosexuality, as also many women distinguished in other arts.[143] Above
all, Sappho, the greatest of women poets, the peer of the greatest poets
of the other sex in the supreme power of uniting art and passion, has left
a name which is permanently associated with homosexuality.

It can scarcely be said that opinion is unanimous in regard to
Sappho, and the reliable information about her, outside the
evidence of the fragments of her poems which have reached us, is
scanty. Her fame has always been great; in classic times her name
was coupled with Homer's. But even to antiquity she was somewhat
of an enigma, and many legends grew up around her name, such as
the familiar story that she threw herself into the sea for the
love of Phaon. What remains clear is that she was regarded with
great respect and admiration by her contemporaries, that she was
of aristocratic family, that she was probably married and had a
daughter, that at one time she had to take her part in political
exile, and that she addressed her girl friends in precisely
similar terms to those addressed by Alcaeus to youths. We know
that in antiquity feminine homosexuality was regarded as
especially common in Sparta, Lesbos, and Miletus. Horace, who was
able to read Sappho's complete poems, states that the objects of
her love-plaints were the young girls of Lesbos, while Ovid, who
played so considerable a part in weaving fantastic stories round
Sappho's name, never claimed that they had any basis of truth. It
was inevitable that the early Christians should eagerly attack so
ambiguous a figure, and Tatian (_Oratio ad Graecos_, cap. 52)
reproached the Greeks that they honored statues of the tribade
Sappho, a prostitute who had celebrated her own wantonness and
infatuation. The result is that in modern times there have been
some who placed Sappho's character in a very bad light and others
who have gone to the opposite extreme in an attempt at
"rehabilitation." Thus, W. Mure, in his _History of the Language
and Literature of Ancient Greece_ (1854, vol. iii, pp. 272-326,
496-8), dealing ver