[89] Cf. _Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association_, LIII. xvi (1922).
[90] For Mnesidice Edmonds would now read Anactoria. There is a good metrical translation by G. M. Whicher in Manatt, _Aegean Days_, London, 1913, p. 286.
Gold is the son of Zeus, Immortal, bright; Nor moth nor worm may eat it, Nor rust tarnish.
So are the Muse’s gifts The offspring fair, That merit from high heaven Youth eternal.
[93] These may be vases in the form of an _astragalus_ or knuckle-bone, two or three of which in clay are to be seen in museums, or they may be bowls or cups with the bottom rounded like one end of a knuckle-bone. They might be bowls with a mid-boss in the form of a knuckle-bone. For such gold-bossed golden bowls as Pollux (VI, 98) mentions in the context of this quotation see the recently acquired beautiful gold bowl with a Corinthian inscription of about Sappho’s time in the Boston Museum, which, however, is probably a modern forgery. Cf. _Bulletin, Boston Museum of Fine Arts_, XX. 65 ff. (1922).
[94] German and Austrian scholars have failed to see the lovely lyrical literature in this delightful ballad. Aly considers it only the beginning of a longer ode; and I cannot agree with him that it does not fit in with what we know of Sappho who often expresses her loneliness in the absence of her companions. Even if the thought is of love, we must not expect consistency in a high-strung Aeolian woman. Fragments such as E. 152, 159, 167 may have been in a totally different context. But I do not mean to say that the ballad certainly refers to Sappho herself. The context is gone and it is not even definitely assigned to Sappho. Some of the editions seem to have contained it, but much anonymous literature has been included in the Sapphic _corpus_ as in that of Plato or Hippocrates. However, as it is one of the prettiest and most perfect pieces and quite in Sappho’s style and metre and thought, I consider it genuine. Ovid (_Sappho to Phaon_, 155 ff.) seems to know the lines. Ruthlessly to insert a negative in the text (“Alone I do not sleep”) as does Lunák (_Wiener Studien_, XL, 1918, p. 98) spoils the literary quality and makes it insipid. How much suggestive concision in those seventeen words in four verses (four of them small particles), but what vast and profound humanity; silence, solitude, obscurity, waiting, anxiety, sympathy of nature. How the strong and rapid description catches our deepest thoughts. Such things disprove the arguments against its genuineness by Wilamowitz, _Textgeschichte_, p. 33; and _Sappho und Simonides_, p. 75. Cf. Münscher, _Hermes_, LIV. 29, 4 (1919).