centuries afterward
regularly visited by her votaries.

These are the few facts we can positively state regarding the life of
Sappho; but myth and legend have supplied what was lacking, and those
scandalmongers, the Greek comic poets, have woven all sorts of stories
about her manner of life. These stories centre chiefly about the names
of three men,--Alcaeus and Anacreon, the poets, and Phaon, the mythical
boatman of Mytilene, endowed by Aphrodite with extraordinary and
irresistible beauty.

Alcaeus, the poet of love and wine and war, was a native of Mytilene, and
a contemporary of Sappho, and the two poets no doubt knew each other
well. The comic poets made them lovers. There is still extant the
opening of a poem which Alcaeus addressed to Sappho:

"Violet-crowned, chaste, sweet-smiling Sappho,
I fain would speak; but bashfulness forbids."

To which she replied:

"Had thy wish been pure and manly,
And no evil on thy tongue,
Shame had not possessed thine eyelids;
From thy lips the right had rung."

Anacreon, the lyric poet, was also represented as a lover of Sappho; and
two poems are preserved, one of which he is said to have addressed to
her, while the other is said to be her reply. But there is no doubt
whatever that Anacreon flourished at least a generation after Sappho, so
that the two could never have met. It seems to have been one of the
stock motifs of the comic poets to represent Greek lyrists as being
lovers of the Lesbian; thus Diphilus, in his _Sappho_, pictured
Archilochus and Hipponax, her predecessors by a generation, as her
lovers.

The story of Sappho's love for Phaon and her leap from the Leucadian
rock in consequence of his disdaining her, though it has been so long
implicitly believed, rests on no historical basis. The perpetuation of
the story is due chiefly to Ovid, who, in his epistle, _Sappho to
Phaon_, tells of her unquenchable love and of her determination to
attempt the leap. The story is best told by Addison:

"Sappho, the Lesbian, in love with Phaon, arrived at the temple of
Apollo, habited like a bride, in garments white as snow. She wore a
garland of myrtle on her head, and carried in her hand the little
musical instrument of her own invention. After having sung a hymn to
Apollo, she hung up her garland on one side of his altar, and her harp
on the other. She then tucked up her vestments, like a Spartan virgin,
and amidst thousands of spec