n.
As says Daudet, who of all recent writers has done most to degrade the
name: "The word Sappho itself, by the force of rolling descent through
ages, is encrusted with unclean legends, and has degenerated from the
name of a goddess to that of a malady." The Greek comic poets invented
the misrepresentation; the early Christian writers accepted it, and
exaggerated it in their tirades against heathenism; and thus the
tradition that Sappho was a woman of low moral character became fixed.

Only in the present century have the ancient calumnies against Sappho
been seriously investigated. A German scholar, Friedrich Gottlieb
Welcker, was the first to show that they were based on altogether
insufficient evidence. Colonel Mure, with great lack of gallantry,
endeavored, without success, to expose fallacies in Welcker's arguments.
Professor Comparetti has more recently gone laboriously over the whole
ground, and his work substantiates in the main the conclusions of
Welcker. The whole tendency of modern scholarship is to vindicate the
name of Sappho.

We cannot claim that Sappho was a woman of austere virtue; but she was
one of the best of her race, and there is no trace of wantonness in any
stanza of hers preserved to us. She repulsed Alcaeus when he made
improper advances, while a recently discovered papyrus fragment shows
how keenly she felt a brother's disgrace, and this aversion to the
dishonorable would hardly have existed had her own life been open to
censure.

Sappho's brother Charaxus, who was a Lesbian wine merchant, fell
violently in love with the famous courtesan Rhodopis, then a slave in
Naucratis, and subsequently the most noted beauty of her day. He
ransomed her from slavery, devoted himself exclusively to her whims, and
squandered all his substance upon her maintenance. Sappho was violently
incensed at his conduct, and resorted to verse for the expression of her
anger and humiliation. According to the story in Ovid, Charaxus was
fiercely provoked by her ill treatment of him, and would listen to no
attempts at reconciliation made by his poet-sister after her anger had
cooled, though she reproached herself for the estrangement and did all
she could to win him back.

A twenty-line fragment of a poem, found a few years ago among the
Oxyrhynchus papyri, in a reference to the poet's brother, in its tone of
reproach, in its expression of a desire for reconciliation, in dialect
and in metre, indicates its origin as a