Page:The Poems of Sappho (1924).djvu/60

54 mean an eagle; though usually a small bird is understood. Swan would perhaps be an appropriate, though perhaps not an exact, reading.

Part X, 1914, of the Egypt Exploration Society's publication of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri contains an important Sapphic discovery, apparently an almost complete poem of twenty-four lines which are nearly perfect. The poem has been emended by Mr. J. M. Edmonds of Cambridge, and it was published with a literal translation in the “Times” and in “The Classical Review” in 1914. Such discoveries keep alive in us the hope that the future may be still kinder to us and that some day the Egyptian sands will give up a considerable proportion of the nine books of lyrics. An interesting point in connection with this discovery is that Apollonius quotes a fragment which he gives as:

We are now able to expand this into nearly the whole of a poem, for it is the ending of the first stanza of this addition to what remains to us of the efflorescence of Sappho’s poetic genius, by good chance restored to us from the dry sands of Egypt. During the past decade a number of newly discovered papyri has, after immense labour by scholars, given to the world a few more fragments of Sappho's work. The latest and most complete collection of these is to be found in