part of an ode addressed by
Sappho to her brother Charaxus. It is conceived by its editors and
translators to be one of her vain appeals that he would forget the past:

"Sweet Nereids, grant to me
That home unscathed my brother may return,
And every end for which his soul shall yearn,
Accomplished see!

"And thou, immortal Queen,
Blot out the past, that thus his friends may know
Joy, shame his foes--nay, rather, let no foe
By us be seen!

"And may he have the will
To me his sister some regard to show,
To assuage the pain he brought, whose cruel blow
My soul did kill,

"Yea, mine, for that ill name
Whose biting edge, to shun the festal throng
Compelling, ceased a while; yet back ere long
To goad us came!"

Was Sappho's beauty a myth? Greek standards of feminine beauty included
height and stateliness. Homer celebrates the characteristic beauty of
Lesbian women in speaking of seven Lesbian captives whom Agamemnon
offered to Achilles, "surpassing womankind in beauty." Plato, in the
Phaedrus, calls Sappho "beautiful," but he was probably referring to the
sweetness of her songs. Democharis, in the Anthology, in an epigram on a
statue of Sappho, speaks of her bright eyes and compares her beauty
with that of Aphrodite. According to Maximus of Tyre, who preserves the
traditions of the comic poets, she was "small and dark," a phrase
immortalized by Swinburne:

"The small dark body's Lesbian loveliness,
That held the fire eternal."

The problem, therefore, is whether she conformed to the Greek ideal of
beauty or was small and dark. Our only evidence in this matter is that
furnished by art. The portrait of Sappho is preserved on coins of
Mytilene, which present a face exquisite in contour. A fifth century
vase, preserved in Munich, gives us representations of Alcaeus and
Sappho, in which Sappho is taller than Alcaeus, of imposing figure and
exceedingly beautiful. She was frequently portrayed in plastic art.
According to Cicero, a bronze statue of Sappho, made by Silanion, stood
in the prytaneum at Syracuse, and was stolen by Verres. In the fifth
century of our era, there was a statue of her in the gymnasium of
Zeuxippus, in Byzantium. The Vatican bust is that of a woman with Greek
features, but, of course, lends no corroborating testimony as to her
size and complexion.

Alma-Tadema has fixed the cu