That all the tributes
of her contemporaries show reverence not less for her personality than for
her genius is sufficient answer to the calumnies with which the ribald
jesters of that later period, the corrupt and shameless writers of Athenian
comedy, strove to defile her fame. It is sufficient, also, to warrant our
regarding the picturesque but scarcely dignified story of her vain pursuit
of Phaon and her frenzied leap from the Cliff of Leucas as nothing more
than a poetic myth, reminiscent, perhaps, of the myth of Aphrodite and
Adonis--who is, indeed, called Phaon in some versions. The story is further
discredited by the fact that we find no mention of it in Greek literature--
even among those Attic comedians who would have clutched at it so eagerly
and given it so gross a turn--till a date more than two hundred years after
Sappho's death. It is a myth which has begotten some exquisite literature,
both in prose and verse, from Ovid's famous epistle to Addison's gracious
fantasy and some impassioned and imperishable dithyrambs of Mr. Swinburne;
but one need not accept the story as a fact in order to appreciate the
beauties which flowered out from its coloured unreality.
The applause of contemporaries, however, is not always justified by the
verdict of after-times, and does not always secure an immortality of
renown.
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