In XI. 22-24, Catullus was perhaps thinking of Sappho’s stricken hyacinth, although some rustic proverb may also have been in his mind:
Qui illius culpa cecidit velut prati Vltimi flos, praetereunte postquam Tactus aratro est.
Think not henceforth, thou, to recall Catullus’ Love; thy own sin slew it, as on the meadow’s Verge declines, un-gently beneath the ploughshare Stricken, a flower.
From these lines and not from Sappho herself, of whom there is no echo in Virgil, Virgil took his description of the dying Euryalus:
And like the purple flower the plough cuts down He droops and dies.
We are reminded of Robert Burns’ _To A Mountain Daisy_:
But now the share uptears thy bed, And low thou lies! ... Stern Ruin’s ploughshare drives, elate, Full on thy bloom, Till crushed beneath the furrow’s weight, Shall be thy doom!
We refer on p. 9 to Catullus’ allusion to Sappho in XXXV. 17.
In the age of Augustus, even if Virgil neglects Sappho, in Horace (65-8 B.C.) she is re-born. If Edmonds[144] is right in his analysis of a passage in Dio’s _Corinthian Oration_, two fragments (E. 76, 77) of Sappho are incorporated there from a poem which Horace imitated in the same metre:
Edmonds even goes so far as to suggest that Horace imitated not only the poem written by Sappho, but its position. For he thinks that this poem of Sappho was an epilogue to her collection; and Horace placed his imitation at the end of the third book, when he probably thought it would be his last. Horace seems to be adapting Sappho in the twelfth ode of the third book (see Landor’s imitation, p. 202). He composed twenty-six or more odes in the Sapphic metre, which he fitted to Italian measures, and he does them well, though in colder Latin. In him
Still breathed the love, still lived the fire To which the Lesbian tuned her lyre.[145]
Aeoliis fidibus querentem Sappho puellis de popularibus.
The meaning is simply that she is “singing plaintively (or complaining) about the girls of her country,” perhaps because they did not all return her love, as Atthis deserted her for Andromeda (E. 81); not that she complained of her fellow-maidens for not loving Phaon. Unconsciously Horace helped to defame Sappho’s character, for the epithet “_mascula_,” in the _Epistle_ I. 19, 28, repeated by Ausonius, _Idyl_, VI. 21, has led to gross abuse of Sappho’s good fame.[147] It has no relation to _mascula libido_ and should be interpreted in the light of Statius[148] as referring simply to the fact that she was an imitator of the measures of Archilochus and the equal of men poets. Of elegiac writers, Tibullus and Propertius (II. 8, 33) were influenced only in a general way by the personal and ardent poetry of Sappho’s lyrics. Ovid in the fifteenth epistle of the _Heroides_ pictured Sappho as a passionate and voluptuous _hetaera_ who could not win the love of the beautiful Phaon. With passion she burns “as when through ripened corn By driving winds the spreading flames are borne,” and seeks release and ease, “from the raging seas.” Ovid (43 B.C.-18 A.D.) in this letter and also in the _Tristia_ (II. 365, _Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas_) completed the Roman defamation of Sappho’s good name begun by Horace, and so led the way for the modern idea. From this disgrace she has been rescued by Madame Anne Le Fèvre Dacier (1681), by Welcker (1816), the bachelor who loved Sappho’s genius and who by his chivalrous vindication made himself her knight, and by Wilamowitz (1896),—her three great defenders.