Sappho

"Thomas Hardy, Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)"

"I wanted to hear Sappho’s laughter and the speech of her stringed shell.What I heard was whiskered mumble- ment of grammarians:Greek pterodactyls and Victorian dodos."

"J. A. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets (1st series, 1873; 2nd series, 1876; revised 1883)"

"One of the earliest -- and perhaps the first -- rivals of the hymnology of war, hatred, and revenge made immortal by Homer was the poetry of an Aeolian woman called Sappha by her people but uniformly known to later times as Sappho...Much of Sapphos poetry was of a plaintive tenderness but she had a fervid feeling for love as a saving grace. Several of her feminine disciples also sang of the beauty and healing force of love. Solon the law-giver and Plato the philosopher were deeply affected by her hymns to the great idea of a social power unrecognized by "the Bible of the Greeks": Homer. Though Attic poets and playwrights tried to destroy her by attacking her as a courtesan or "Lesbian" pervert, the German classical scholar, Welcker, in his Kleine Schriften, declares that such attacks were sheer calumny. Nor did they succeed in their aim. More than twenty centuries have honored the "sweet singer" of Aeolia."

"Some say cavalry and others claim infantry or a fleet of long oars is the supreme sight on the black earth. I say it isthe one you love. And easily proved. Didnt Helen, who far surpassed all mortals in beauty, desert the best of men, her king,and sail off to Troy and forget her daughter and her dear parents? Merely Aphrodites gaze made her readily bend and led her farfrom her path. These tales remind me now of Anaktoria who isnt here, yet I for onewould rather see her warm supple step and the sparkle in her face than watch all the chariots in Lydia and foot soldiers armored in glittering bronze."

"W. G. Headlam, A Book of Greek Verse (Cambridge UP, 1907) pp. 4–17"