in weaving fantastic stories round Sappho’s name, never claimed that they had any basis of truth.  It was inevitable that the early Christians should eagerly attack so ambiguous a figure, and Tatian (Oratio ad Graecos, cap. 52) reproached the Greeks that they honored statues of the tribade Sappho, a prostitute who had celebrated her own wantonness and infatuation.  The result is that in modern times there have been some who placed Sappho’s character in a very bad light and others who have gone to the opposite extreme in an attempt at “rehabilitation.”  Thus, W. Mure, in his History of the Language and Literature of Ancient Greece (1854, vol. iii, pp. 272-326, 496-8), dealing very fully with Sappho, is disposed to accept many of the worst stories about her, though he has no pronounced animus, and, as regards female homosexuality, which he considers to be “far more venial” than male homosexuality, he remarks that “in modern times it has numbered among its votaries females distinguished for refinement of manners and elegant accomplishments.”  Bascoul, on the other hand, will accept no statements about Sappho which conflict with modern ideals of complete respectability, and even seeks to rewrite her most famous ode in accordance with the colorless literary sense which he supposes that it originally bore (J.M.F.  Bascoul, La Chaste Sappho et le Mouvement Feministe a Athenes, 1911).  Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (Sappho und Simonides, 1913) also represents the antiquated view, formerly championed by Welcker, according to which the attribution of homosexuality is a charge of “vice,” to be repudiated with indignation.  Most competent and reliable authorities today, however, while rejecting the accretions of legend around Sappho’s name and not disputing her claim to respect, are not disposed to question the personal and homosexual character of her poems.  “All ancient tradition and the character of her extant fragments,” says Prof.  J.A.  Platt (Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th. ed., art.  “Sappho"), “show that her morality was what has ever since been known as ‘Lesbian.’” What exactly that “Lesbian morality” involved, we cannot indeed exactly ascertain.  “It is altogether idle,” as A. Croiset remarks of Sappho (Histoire de la Litterature Grecque, vol. ii, ch. v), “to discuss the exact quality of this friendship or this love, or to seek to determine with precision the frontiers, which language itself often seems to seek to confuse, of a friendship more or less esthetic and sensual, of a love more or less Platonic.” (See also J.M.  Edmonds, Sappho in the Added Light of the New Fragments, 1912).  Iwan Bloch similarly concludes (Ursprung der Syphilis, vol. ii, 1911, p. 507) that Sappho probably combined, as modern investigation shows to be easily possible, lofty ideal feelings with passionate sensuality, exactly as happens in normal love.

It must also be said that in literature homosexuality in women has furnished a much more frequent motive