Page:The Poems of Sappho (1924).djvu/18

12 Lesbos fell under Persian domination, but later was freed and joined the Delian confederacy. The subsequent somewhat dismal history of the island is of no interest to us at present, but the glories of the lyric poetry of its golden age have never sunk into oblivion and can never fail to be a source of inspiration to students of form and language in poetical composition.

It is obvious that after the vicissitudes of twenty-five centuries, the task of disentangling biographical details in connection with an individual however eminent, with any degree of accuracy and completeness must, in the nature of the case, be one of great difficulty. Almost every important writer of ancient times has suffered to a considerable extent from neglect, ignorance, or insensate destructiveness and bigotry, and if we were called upon to designate the period when reactionary forces had reduced culture, art, and literary appreciation to their lowest point, we should be right in choosing the six black centuries from about A.D. 400 to about A.D. 1000. The state of European civilization in general at that period is too well known to need comment, but it may be noted that among the writers singled out from time to time during some centuries for such assaults of bigotry and destructiveness were the ancient lyric poets, and it is a matter of knowledge that among these Sappho was a prominent victim. There is known to have been one orgy of such destructiveness about A.D. 380 at the instigation of