Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

[314] around Sappho? Mure pronounces it to have been a school of vice. The German professors see in it a school of science. Professor Felton thinks that it may have resembled the Courts of Love in the Middle Ages. But a more reasonable parallel, nearer home, must occur to the minds of those of us who remember Margaret Fuller and her classes. If Sappho, in addition to all that the American gave her pupils, undertook the duty of instruction in the most difficult music, the most complex metres, and the profoundest religious rites, then she had on her hands quite too much work to be exclusively a troubadour or a savante or a sinner. And if such ardent attachments as Margaret Fuller inspired among her own sex were habitually expressed by Sappho's maiden lovers, in the language of Lesbos instead of Boston, we can easily conceive of sentimental ardors which Attic comedians would find ludicrous and Scotch advocates nothing less than a scandal.

Fortunately we can come within six centuries of the real Lesbian society in the reports of Maximus Tyrius, whom Felton strangely calls “a tedious writer of the time of the Antonines,” but who seems to me often to rival Epictetus and Plutarch in eloquence and nobleness of tone. In his eighth dissertation he draws a parallel between the instruction given by Socrates to men and that afforded by Sappho to women. “Each,” he says, “appears to me to deal with the same kind of love, the one as subsisting among males, the other among females.” “What Alcibiades and Charmides and Phaedrus are with Socrates, that Gyrinna and Atthis and Anactoria are with the Lesbian. And what those rivals Prodicus, Gorgias, Thrasymachus, and Protagoras are to Socrates, that Gorgo and Andromeda are to Sappho. At one time she reproves, at another she confutes these, and addresses ”