suits among the women was marked. Poetry
was their natural field, and philosophy appealed to them as being the
most learned vocation of the times. Even in the Heroic Age, women were
skilled in the uses of plants for purposes of witchcraft and of healing;
and in historic times, when medicine became a science, women engaged in
various medical pursuits. Similar tastes led many also to follow the
different branches of natural science, and in Alexandrian times, when
philology was the prevailing study, history and grammar and literary
criticism became favorite studies with the daughters of the learned.

In a previous chapter, we have described the Lesbian Sappho's seminary
of the Muses, to which maidens flocked from all Hellenic lands for the
study of poetry and art. The natural beauties of the isle of Lesbos, the
luxurious life of the aristocratic classes, the brilliancy and zeal of
Sappho herself, and her ardent affection for her girl friends, were
influences favorable to the pursuits of the Muses and the Graces.

It is not surprising that, amid such surroundings and with such a
teacher, women should acquire a love of poetry and of all that appeals
to the aesthetic nature. There is a vague tradition that there were
seventy-six women poets among the Ancient Greeks. Unfortunately, the
names of but few of these are preserved to us. We have authentic
information concerning only the nine most distinguished poetesses, to
whom the Greeks gave the title of the Terrestrial Muses.

The second of the nine Terrestrial Muses--for Sappho was, of course, the
first--was the poetess's favorite and most promising pupil, Erinna of
the isle of Telos. She aroused among Greek poets a most respectful and
tender sentiment, and they frequently sounded her praises. Her most
noted production was a poem called _The Distaff_, and the poets compared
it to the honeycomb, which the gracious bee had gathered from the
flowers of Helicon; they perceived in this production of a maiden the
freshness and perfume of spring, and they likened her delicate notes to
the sweet voice of a swan as he sings his death song--a comparison only
too just, for she died at the tender age of nineteen years. A poet of
the Anthology thus laments her untimely taking-off:

"These are Erinna's songs: how sweet, though slight!
For she was but a girl of nineteen years:--
Yet stronger far than what most men can write:
Had death delayed, what fame had equalled