Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

“ [315] them in the same ironical language with Socrates.” Then he draws parallels between the writings of the two. “Diotima says to Socrates that love flourishes in abundance, but dies in want. Sappho conveys the same meaning when she calls love ‘sweetly bitter’ and ‘a painful gift.’ Socrates calls love ‘a sophist,’ Sappho ‘a ringlet of words.’ Socrates says that he is agitated with Bacchic fury through the love of Phoedrus; but she that ‘love shakes her mind as the wind when it falls on mountain-oaks.’ Socrates reproves Xantippe when she laments that he must die, and Sappho writes to her daughter, ‘Grief is not lawful in the residence of the Muse, nor does it become us.’ ”

Thus far Maximus Tyrius. But that a high intellectual standard prevailed in this academy of Sappho's may be inferred from a fragment of her verse, in which she utters her disappointment over an uncultivated woman, whom she had, perhaps, tried in vain to influence. This imaginary epitaph warns this pupil that she is in danger of being forgotten through forgetfulness of those Pierian roses which are the Muses' symbol. This version retains the brevity of the original lines, and though rhymed, is literal, except that it changes the second person to the third:--

Dying she reposes;
Oblivion grasps her now;
Since never Pierian roses
Were wreathed round her empty brow;
She goeth unwept and lonely
To Hades' dusky homes,
And bodiless shadows only
Bid her welcome as she comes.

To show how differently Sappho lamented her favorites, I give Elton's version of another epitaph on a