of pleasure.
The women, who were remarkable for their beauty and grace, enjoyed a
freedom and rank accorded them nowhere else in Greece. Symonds thus
vividly describes the free and artistic life of AEolian women:

"AEolian women were not confined to the harem, like Ionians, or subjected
to the rigorous discipline of the Spartans. While mixing freely with
male society, they were highly educated, and accustomed to express their
sentiments to an extent unknown elsewhere in history--until, indeed, the
present time. The Lesbian ladies applied themselves successfully to
literature. They formed clubs for the cultivation of poetry and music.
They studied the art of beauty, and sought to refine metrical form and
diction. Nor did they confine themselves to the scientific side of art.
Unrestrained by public opinion, and avid for the beautiful, they
cultivated their senses and emotions, and developed their wildest
passions. All the luxuries and elegancies of life which the climate and
the rich valleys of Lesbos could afford were at their disposal;
exquisite gardens in which the rose and hyacinth spread perfume; river
beds ablaze with the oleander and wild pomegranate; olive groves and
fountains, where the cyclamen and violet flowered with feathery
maiden-hair; pine-shadowed coves, where they might bathe in the calm of
a tideless sea; fruits such as only the southern sea and sea wind can
mature; marble cliffs, starred with jonquil and anemone in spring,
aromatic with myrtle and lentisk and samphire and wild rosemary through
all the months; nightingales that sang in May; temples dim with dusky
gold and bright with ivory; statues and frescoes of heroic forms. In
such scenes as these, the Lesbian poets lived and thought of love. When
we read their poems, we seem to have the perfumes, colors, sounds, and
lights of that luxurious land distilled in verse."

Amid such surroundings, burning Sappho sang:

"Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,
Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity,
Hearing, to hear them."

The complete works of Sappho must have been considerable. She was the
greatest erotic poet of antiquity, the chief composer of epithalamia, or
wedding songs, the writer of epigrams and elegies, invocatory hymns,
iambics, and monodies. Nine books of her lyric odes existed in ancient
times, and were known to Horace, who frequently imitated her style and
metre, and who doubtless at times in his o