Note 45 — II. SAPPHO’S LIFE, LESBUS, HER LOVE-AFFAIRS, HER PERSONALITY AND PUPILS

Dioscorides in Anth. Pal., VII. 407 has Eresus; and coins and Suidas give both towns. Cf. Wilamowitz, Sappho und Simonides, 23; Her. II. 135 and references in Jacoby, Das Marmor Parium, 1904, p. 101. Many sources call Sappho a Mytilenaean, Schol. to Pindar (E. p. 144); Schol. Plato, Phaedrus, 235 c; Arist., Rhet., 1398 b; Anth. Pal., VII. 17. Some scholars assume that there were two Sapphos, but the two traditions can easily be reconciled by supposing that Sappho belonged to both cities, born at Eresus but later living at Mytilene. Edmonds thinks that Strabo would have mentioned Sappho when he is speaking of Eresus (618), had he believed her to have been born there, but Strabo omits many famous writers. The tradition of two Sapphos is found also in Aelian, Historical Miscellanies, XII. 19 and in Suidas. Cf. the novel Beulah by Augusta Evans, pp. 216-218: “Do you think that Sappho’s frenzy was established by the Leucadian leap? You confound the poetess with a Sappho, who lived later, and threw herself into the sea from the promontory of Leucate. Doubtless she too had ‘poetic idiosyncrasies,’ but her spotless life, and I believe natural death, afford no indication of an unsound intellect.”