estruction at our hands,
not even the man-child that the mother beareth in her womb;
let not even him escape, but all perish together out of
Ilios, uncared for and unknown" (VI., 57);

while Homer, with consummate art, paints for us the terrors of a
captured city, showing how the women--of all classes--were maltreated:

"As a woman wails and clings to her dear husband, who
falls for town and people, seeking to shield his home
and children from the ruthless day; seeing him dying,
gasping, she flings herself on him with a piercing cry;
while men behind, smiting her with the spears on back
and shoulder, force her along to bondage to suffer toil
and trouble; with pain most pitiful her cheeks are
thin...." (_Odyssey,_ VIII., 523-30.)[298]

LOVE IN SAPPHO'S POEMS

Having failed to find any traces of romantic love, and only one of
conjugal affection, in the greatest poet of the Greeks, let us now
subject their greatest poetess to a critical examination.

Sappho undoubtedly had the divine spark. She may have possibly
deserved the epithet of the "tenth Muse," bestowed on her by ancient
writers, or of "the Poetess," as Homer was "the Poet." Among the one
hundred and seventy fragments preserved some are of great beauty--the
following, for example, which is as delightful as a Japanese poem and
in much the same style--suggesting a picture in a few words, with the
distinctness of a painting:

"As the sweet apple blushes on the end of the bough,
the very end of the bough, which the gatherers
overlooked, nay overlooked not, but could not
reach."[299] It is otherwise in her love-poems, or
rather fragments of such, comprising the following:

"Now love masters my limbs, and shakes me, fatal
creature, bitter-sweet."
"Now Eros shakes my soul, a wind on the mountain
falling on the oaks."
"Sleep thou in the bosom of thy tender girl-friend."
"Sweet Mother, I cannot weave my web, broken as I am
by longing for a maiden, at soft Aphrodite's will."
"For thee there was no other girl, bridegroom, like
her."

"Bitter-sweet," "giver of pain," "the weaver of fictions," are some
expressions of Sappho's preserved by Maximus Tyrius; and Libanius, the
rhetorician, refers to Sappho, the Lesbian, as praying "that night
might be doubled for her." But the most important of her love-poems,
and the one