Note note 147 — III. THE LEGENDARY FRINGE Sappho’s Physical Appearance, The Phaon Story, The Vice Idea

147. Cf. Ogle, A. J. P., XLIII. 55 ff. (1922). For Sappho’s influence on Horace cf. Pasquali, Orazio lirico, 1920. Most of the literature on the subject is not fit to read. Cf. Richard F. Burton’s The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Terminal Essay, X, p. 208, for a filthy, wrong interpretation of the word ‘mascula’. It is surprising to find as great a modern scholar as Bloch, Die Prostitution, Berlin, 1912, I, p. 383, saying in his discussion of Homosexuality, ἀσέλγεια τριβακή, “Schon in früher Zeit galten Sparta und die Insel Lesbos als Orte, wo die weibliche Liebe besonders verbreitet war und an letzterem Ort in der Dichterin Sappho eine weltberühmte Vertreterin fand.” Cf. also on tribadie in Lesbos Bloch, Der Ursprung der Syphilis, II, pp. 586-588, where he thinks that he gives definite proof that Sappho was “eine echte Tribade.” It is lamentable that as great a literary critic as J. A. Symonds should say that “Sappho gave this female passion an eminent place in Greek Literature;” see J. A. Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics, An Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion, London, 1901, pp. 70-72. Fortunately the monograph was issued only in a very limited edition.