Page:The Poems of Sappho (1924).djvu/28

22 meaning and sound, and her command of language in expressing emotion have been held up to us as exhibiting all that was most perfect in those particulars. Aristotle, in his “Rhetoric,” mentions her three times, always with approbation, and there are many references to her in the works of various other writers before the beginning of the Christian era. In the time of Augustus there occurred the first revival of Roman interest in her works.

Of all those who, at that period, sought to imitate or adapt any part of them, Catullus was the foremost and most successful. He made the well-known Latin paraphrase of the ode preserved in its original Greek by Longinus, and he was more successful than any of his Roman contemporaries in entering into the spirit of the Greek rhythm. Horace also was a successful imitator of the Sapphic metre which he employed in numerous instances, but both he and Catullus were imitators, not translators or preservers. In the Augustan age a knowledge of the poems of Sappho was looked upon as almost an essential accomplishment among the Roman women of education. There was at this period a considerable amount of intellectual traffic between Rome and Athens, and a knowledge of the Greek language and literature was considered, among the educated classes, to be very important. Ovid’s epistle, “Sappho to Phaon,” belongs to this period, but whatever may be its poetical and literary merits, it may, from a historical and biographical point of