Aristophanes and his audience were familiar with the figure of Sokrates as he went in and out amongst them; they knew his character and his manner of life; and, though the poet ventured to pervert the teaching and to ridicule the habits of a well-known citizen, he would not venture to put before the people a representation in which there was not a grain of truth.

But Sappho had been dead for two hundred years:  the Athenian populace knew little of her except that she had been great and that she had been unhappy; and the descendants of the men who had thronged the theatre to see the Oedipus of Sophokles, sickening with that strange disease which makes the soul crave to batten on the fruits that are its poison, found a rare feast furnished forth in the imaginary history of the one great woman of their race.

The centuries went on, and Sappho came before the tribunal of the early Christian Church.

The chief witnesses against her were these same comic poets, who were themselves prisoners at the bar; and her judges, with the ruthless impartiality of undiscriminating zeal, condemned the whole of her works, as well as those of her accusers, to be destroyed in the flames.

Thus her works have almost totally perished:  the fragments that are extant give us only the faintest hints of the grace and sweetness that we have for ever lost.

The mode of the preservation of these remains is half-pathetic, half-grotesque.  We have one complete poem and a considerable portion of another; the rest are the merest fragments—­now two or three lines, now two or three words, often unintelligible without their context.  We have imitations and translations by Catullus and by Horace; but even Catullus has conspicuously failed to reproduce her.  As Mr. Swinburne has candidly and very truly said:  “No man can come close to her.”

No; all that we possess of Sappho is gleaned from the dictionary, the geography, the grammar and the archaeological treatise; from a host of worthy authors who are valued now chiefly for these quotations which they have enshrined.  Here a painful scholar of Alexandria has preserved the phrase—­

     “The golden sandalled dawn but now has (waked) me,”

to show how Sappho employed the adverb.  Apollonius, to prove that the AEolic dialect had a particular form for the genitive case of the first personal pronoun, has treasured up two sad and significant utterances,

     “But thou forgettest me!”

and

     “Or else thou lovest another than me,”

The AEolic genitive has saved for us another of these sorrow-laden sentences which Mr. Swinburne has amplified in some beautiful but too wordy lines.  Sappho only says

     “I am full weary of Gorgo.”

—­A few of these fragments tell us of the poet herself.

     “I have a daughter like golden flowers, Kleis my beloved, for whom
     (I would take) not all Sydia....”