Page:A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country (1804).djvu/785

Rh brothers, Larychus she highly extolled in her verses for virtue and munificence, but against Charaxus she bitterly inveighed for the extravagant love he bore to Rhodope.

She married one Cercolas, a man of great wealth and power in the island of Andros, by whom she had a daughter named Cleis. Becoming a widow very young, she renounced all thoughts of a second marriage; but imputations with which her memory is loaded, should not be too easily credited; since perhaps they rest but on the faith of Ovid. Had not chronology contradicted her amour with Anacreon, that would still have been considered as a fact; and the cause of truth is so holy, that we ought not more implicitly to believe ill reports of the dead than of the living; or at least, if there is a doubt, candour ought to incline one to give it its full force.

She fell desperately in love with Phaon, a young man of Lesbos, who is said to have been a kind of ferryman, and thence fabled to have carried Venus over the stream in his boat, and to have received from her, as a reward, the favour of becoming the most beautiful man in the world. She took a voyage into Sicily in pursuit of him, he having withdrawn thither on purpose to avoid her. It was on this occasion, and on this island, she composed her Hymn to Venus, which is extant, and considered as a pattern of perfection; but her prayer was ineffectual, and she was so far transported with her passion, that she resolved to get rid of it at any rate.

There was a promontory in Acarnania, called Leucate, on the top of which was a little temple dedicated to Apollo. In this temple it was usual for despairing lovers to make their vows in secret, and