“Now that you are leaving, I shall be really indispensable to our friends here.  Amasis is old; when Psamtik comes to the throne we shall have infinitely greater difficulties to contend with than heretofore.  I must remain and fight on in the fore-front of our battle for the freedom and welfare of the Hellenic race.  Let them call my efforts unwomanly if they will.  This is, and shall be, the purpose of my life, a purpose to which I will remain all the more faithful, because it is one of those to which a woman rarely dares devote her life.  During this last night of tears I have felt that much, very much of that womanly weakness still lingers in me which forms at once the happiness and misery of our sex.  To preserve this feminine weakness in my granddaughter, united with perfect womanly delicacy, has been my first duty; my second to free myself entirely from it.  But a war against one’s own nature cannot be carried on without occasional defeat, even if ultimately successful.  When grief and pain are gaining the upperhand and I am well nigh in despair, my only help lies in remembering my friend Pythagoras, that noblest among men, and his words:  ’Observe a due proportion in all things, avoid excessive joy as well as complaining grief, and seek to keep thy soul in tune and harmony like a well-toned harp.’”

[There is no question that Pythagoras visited Egypt during the reign of Amasis, probably towards the middle of the 6th century (according to our reckoning, about 536 B. C.) Herod.  II. 81-123.  Diod.  I. 98.  Rich information about Pythagoras is to be found in the works of the very learned scholar Roeth, who is however occasionally much too bold in his conjectures.  Pythagoras was the first among Greek thinkers (speculators).  He would not take the name of a wise man or “sage,” but called himself “Philosophos,” or a “friend of wisdom.”]

“This Pythagorean inward peace, this deep, untroubled calm, I see daily before me in my Sappho; and struggle to attain it myself, though many a stroke of fate untunes the chords of my poor heart.  I am calm now!  You would hardly believe what power the mere thought of that first of all thinkers, that calm, deliberate man, whose life acted on mine like sweet, soft music, has over me.  You knew him, you can understand what I mean.  Now, mention your wish; my heart is as calmly quiet as the Nile waters which are flowing by so quietly, and I am ready to hear it, be it good or evil.”

“I am glad to see you thus,” said the Athenian.  “If you had remembered the noble friend of wisdom, as Pythagoras was wont to call himself a little sooner, your soul would have regained its balance yesterday.  The master enjoins us to look back every evening on the events, feelings and actions of the day just past.

“Now had you done this, you would have felt that the unfeigned admiration of all your guests, among whom were men of distinguished merit, outweighed a thousandfold the injurious words of a drunken libertine; you would have felt too that you were a friend of the gods, for was it not in your house that the immortals gave that noble old man at last, after his long years of misfortune, the greatest joy that can fall to the lot of any human being? and did they not take from you one friend only in order to replace him in the same moment, by another and a better?  Come, I will hear no contradiction.  Now for my request.