tators, who were anxious for her safety and
offered up vows for her deliverance, marched directly forward to the
utmost summit of the promontory, where, after having repeated a stanza
of her own verses, she threw herself off the rock with such an
intrepidity as was never observed before in any who had attempted that
leap. Many who were present related that they saw her fall into the sea,
from whence she never rose again; though there were others who affirmed
that she never came to the bottom of her leap, but that she was changed
to a swan as she fell, and that they saw her hovering in the air under
that shape. But whether or not the whiteness and fluttering of her
garments might not deceive those who looked upon her, or whether she
might not really be metamorphosed into that musical and melancholy bird,
is still a doubt among the Lesbians."

Modern critics justly set aside the whole story as fabulous, explaining
it as derived from the myth of Aphrodite and Adonis, who in the Greek
version was called Phaethon or Phaon. The leap from the Leucadian
rock--the promontory of Santa Maura, or Leucate, in Sicily, known to
this day as "Sappho's Leap"--was used by other poets, notably
Stesichorus and Anacreon, as a metaphorical expression to denote
complete despair, and Sappho herself may have used it in this sense. The
legend did not connect itself with Sappho until two centuries after her
death, and then only in the comic poets; hence it can have no basis in
fact. The tradition of Sappho's AEolian grave, preserved in the
Anthology, indicates strongly that she died a peaceful death on her own
island. "Sappho," says Edwin Arnold, "loved, and loved more than once,
to the point of desperate sorrow; though it did not come to the mad and
fatal leap from Leucate, as the unnecessary legend pretends. There are,
nevertheless, worse steeps than Leucate down which the heart may fall;
and colder seas of despair than the Adriatic in which to engulf it."

The whole story of her love for Phaon is an instance of how her name was
maligned by the comic poets of the later Attic school. It was impossible
for the Athenians, who kept their women in seclusion, to understand how
a woman could enjoy the freedom of life and movement that Sappho enjoyed
and yet remain chaste. Consequently, she became a sort of stock
character of the licentious drama, and even modern writers have used her
name as the synonym for the brilliant, beautiful, but licentious woma