Page:The Poems of Sappho (1924).djvu/19

Rh Gregory Nazianzen, and another in the year 1073 when Gregory VII was pope.

Rome and Constantinople were the chief centres of this madness, and the value of what was destroyed on these and similar occasions is from the present-day point of view incalculable.

A consequence of such occurrences as far as Sappho is concerned is that, notwithstanding the esteem in which she was held by writers who came within a measurable distance of her epoch, her writings have practically disappeared, although a large proportion of the works of many Greek writers living not much after her have come down to us with something approaching completeness. For the story of her life we must depend upon the scanty, more or less casual, and sometimes hostile statements of writers who, in most cases, were, in point of time, further away from her than we are from Shakespeare. It is only by collating the statements of these later writers, while giving much greater proportionate weight to what was written by those who lived nearest to the period of her life, that we can arrive at even approximate accuracy in the details of her biography.

Sappho was the one woman poet in history to whom the somewhat misused term “great” may be justly applied. We do not know with certainty the date either of her birth or of her death, but the years from 610 B.C. to 570 B.C. may reasonably be assumed to have covered the most important