SAPPHO,
A celebrated Greek poetess, was a native of Mitylene, in the Isle of Lesbos, and flourished about B. C. 610. She married Cercala, a rich inhabitant of Andros, by whom she had a daughter named Cleis; and it was not, probably, till after she became a widow that she rendered herself distinguished by her poetry. Her verses were chiefly of the lyric kind, and love was the general subject, which she treated with so much warmth, and with such beauty of poetical expression, as to have acquired the title of the "Tenth Muse." Her compositions were held in the highest esteem by her contemporaries, Roman as well as Greek, and no female name has risen higher in the catalogue of poets. Her morals have been as much depreciated, as her genius has been extolled. She is represented by Ovid as far from handsome; and as she was probably no longer young when she fell in love with the beautiful Phaon, his neglect is not surprising. Unable to bear her disappointment, she went to the famous precipice of Leucate, since popularly called the Lover's Leap, and throwing herself into the sea, terminated at once her life and her love.
Sappho formed an academy of females who excelled in music; and it was doubtless this academy which drew on her the hatred of the women of Mitylene. She is said to have been short in stature, and swarthy in her complexion. Ovid confirms this description in his Heroides, in the celebrated epistle from Sappho to The Mitylenes esteemed her so highly, and were so sensible of the glory they received from her having been born among them, that they paid her sovereign honours after her death, and stamped their money with her image. The Romans also erected a monument to her memory. "It must be granted," says Rapin, "from what is left us of Sappho, that Longinus had great reason to extol the admirable genius of this woman; for there is in what remains of her something delicate, harmonious, and impassioned to the last degree. Catullus endeavoured to imitate Sappho, but fell infinitely short of her; and so have ail others who have written upon love."
Besides the structure of verse called Sapphic, she invented the Æolic measure, composed elegies, epigrams, and nine books of lyric poetry, of which all that remain are, an ode to Venus, an ode to one of her lovers, and some small fragments.