re is no blue bluer than its waters.
There is nothing so violet as the velvet of its sky. With such accessories
the presence of Erato was perhaps inevitable. In any case it was profuse.
Nowhere, at no time, has emotional aestheticism, the love of the lovely,
the fervor of individual utterance, been as general and spontaneous as it
was in this early Academe.

In the later Academe at Athens laughter was prohibited. That of Mitylene
was less severe. To loiter there some familiarity with the magnificence of
Homer may have been exacted, but otherwise a receptive mind, appreciative
eyes, and kissable lips were the best passports to Sappho, the girl Plato
of its groves, who, like Plato, taught beauty, sang it as well and with it
the _glukupikros_--the bitterness of things too sweet.

Others sang with her. Among those, whose names at least, the fates and the
Fathers have spared us, were Erinna and Andromeda. Sappho cited them as
her rivals. One may wonder could they have been really that. Plato called
Sappho the tenth muse. Solon, after hearing one of her poems, prayed that
he might not die until he had learned it. Longinus spoke of her with awe.
Strabo said that at no period had any one been known who in any way,
however slight, could be compared to her.

Though twenty-five centuries have gone since then, Sappho is still
unexceeded. Twice only has she been approached; in the first instance by
Horace, in the second by Swinburne, and though it be admitted, as is
customary among scholars, that Horace is the most correct of the Latin
poets, as Swinburne is the most faultless of our day, Sappho sits and
sings above them atop, like her own perfect simile of a bride:

Like the sweet apple which reddens atop on the topmost bough,
Atop on the topmost twig which the pluckers forgot somehow.
Forget it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now.[10]

It is regrettable that one cannot now get Sappho. But of at least nine
books there remain but two odes and a handful of fragments. The rest has
been lost on the way, turned into palimpsests, or burned in Byzance. The
surviving fragments are limited some to a line, some to a measure, some to
a single word. They are the citations of lexicographers and grammarians,
made either as illustrations of the AEolic tongue or as examples of metre.

The odes are addressed, the one to Aphrodite, the other to Anactoria. The
first is derived from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who quo