e poems that all Hellas
loved and praised as long as the love and praise of Hellas was of any
worth. Remembrance among men was, to her, the Muses' crowning gift; that
which should distinguish her from ordinary mortals, even beyond the
grave, and grant her new life in death. But it was only for her songs'
sake that she cared to live; she looked for immortality only because she
felt that they were too fair to die.

It was almost by accident that the name of Sappho was first associated
with the slanders that have ever since clung round it.

By the close of the fourth century, B.C., Athenian comedy had
degenerated into brilliant and witty and scandalous farce, in many
essentials resembling the new Comedy of the Restoration in England. But
the vitiated Athenian palate required a seasoning which did not commend
itself to English taste; it was necessary that the shafts of the
writer's wit should strike some real and well-known personage.

Politics, which had furnished so many subjects and so many characters to
Aristophanes, were now a barren field, and public life at Athens in
those days was nothing if not political. Hence arose the practice of
introducing great names of bygone days into these comedies, in all kinds
of ridiculous and disgraceful surroundings.

There was a piquancy about these libels on the dead which we cannot
understand, but which we may contrast with the less dishonourable
process known to modern historians as "whitewashing." Just as Tiberius
and Henry VIII. have been rescued from the infamy of ages, and placed
among us upon pedestals of honour from which it will be difficult
hereafter wholly to dislodge them, many honoured names were taken by
these iconoclasts of the Middle Comedy and hurled down to such infamy as
they alone could bestow.

Sappho stood out prominently as the one supreme poetess of Hellas, and
the poets, if so they must be called, of the decline of Greek dramatic
art were never weary of loading her name with every most disgraceful
reproach they could invent. It is hardly worth while to discuss a
subject so often discussed with so little profit, or it would be easy to
show that these gentlemen, Ameipsias, Antiphanes, Diphilus, and the
rest, were indebted solely to their imagination for their facts.

It would be as fair to take the picture of Sokrates in the "Clouds" of
Aristophanes for a faithful representation of the philosopher as it
would be to take the Sappho of the comic stage for