Page:The Poems of Sappho (1924).djvu/26

20 the same way in which, by the use of satire and suggestive allusion, they attacked other famous individuals. They used Sappho merely as a celebrity whom they considered vulnerable, but they were certainly not attempting to conduct a moral crusade like some of their more sanctimonious and ignorant successors. From an evidential point of view these onslaughts may be safely disregarded. Later, during the Middle Ages, Sappho seems to have suffered attack, not on account of alleged moral depravity, but because she, like other lyric poets, wrote what some austere fanatics chose to consider frivolous and, according to their views, immoral poems. The attacks of this nature were against her works rather than against her character, and this is a distinction which must be kept before our minds in weighing much that has been written upon the subject. Many other ancient writers were treated in the same way. There were six comedies entitled “Sappho” and two entitled “Phaon” produced in the era of the Middle Comedy, all more or less scurrilous, and when we consider the way, for example, in which Socrates was lampooned by Aristophanes, we are justified in absolutely rejecting any account of Sappho which rests upon the authority of the writers of such comedies.

It has already been noted that in the golden period about 600 B.C. Lesbos was the centre of a rich and highly organized literary, social, and commercial life. At about that date there flourished an unsurpassed school of lyric poetry. In