“To us who are accustomed to spiritualized love-lyrics after the style of Geibel’s this erotic song of Sappho may seem too glowing, too violent; but we must not forget that love was conceived by the Greeks altogether in a less spiritual manner than we demand that it should be.”

That is it precisely.  These Greek love-poems do not depict romantic love but sensual passion.  Nor is this the worst of it.  Sappho’s absurdly overrated love-poems are not even good descriptions of normal sensual passion.  I have just said that they are purely physiologic; but that is too much praise for them.  The word physiologic implies something healthy and normal, but Sappho’s poems are not healthy and normal; they are abnormal, they are pathologic.  Had they been written by a man, this would not be the case; but Sappho was a woman, and her famous ode is addressed to a woman.  A woman, too, is referred to in her famous hymn to Venus in these lines, as translated by Wharton: 

“What beauty now wouldst thou draw to love thee?  Who wrongs thee, Sappho?  For even if she flies, she shall soon follow, and if she rejects gifts shall yet give, and if she loves not shall soon love, however loth.”

In the five fragments above quoted there are also two at least which refer to girls.  Now I have not the slightest desire to discuss the moral character of Sappho or the vices of her Lesbian countrywomen.  She had a bad reputation among the Romans as well as the Greeks, and it is a fact that in the year 1073 her poems were burnt at Rome and Constantinople, “as being,” in the words of Professor Gilbert Murray, “too much for the shaky morals of the time.”  Another recent writer, Professor Peck of Columbia University, says that

“it is difficult to read the fragments which remain of her verse without being forced to come to the conclusion that a woman who could write such poetry could not be the pure woman that her modern apologists would have her.”

The following lament alone would prove this: 

[Greek:  Deduke men a Selana kai Plaeiades, mesai de nuktes, para d’ erxet ora ego de mona katheudo.]

MASCULINE MINDS IN FEMALE BODIES

Several books and many articles have been written on this topic,[300] but the writers seem to have overlooked the fact that in the light of the researches of Krafft-Ebing and Moll it is possible to vindicate the character of Sappho without ignoring the fact that her passionate erotic poems are addressed to women.  These alienists have shown that the abnormal state of a masculine mind inhabiting a female body, or vice versa, is surprisingly common in all parts of the world.  They look on it, with the best of reasons, as a diseased condition, which does not necessarily, in persons of high principles, lead to vicious and unnatural practices.  In every country there are thousands