The number of poems or fragments (Pl. 8) of Sappho has increased from a hundred and twenty in Volger’s edition (1810) to a hundred and ninety-one in Edmonds. “Though few they are roses,” and a marvellous vitality and mentality permeates their mangled and marred members. Sappho probably had her own collection of her poems, but they were surely not published in a large edition as has sometimes been said. An introductory poem is possibly preserved on an Attic vase, but even of that we cannot be sure. In Roman days there were two editions, one arranged according to subject and the other according to metre, both based on some Alexandrian source much earlier than the book _On the Metres of Sappho_, published by Dracon of Stratonicea about 180 A.D. Sappho wrote many forms of literature in many different metres, cult hymns or odes, marriage songs, scolia or drinking songs, songs of love and friendship, besides her nine books of lyrics, epigrams, elegies, none of which has survived or been described by any other author, iambics, monodies, and funeral songs like that for Adonis. The Athenian dramatists even pictured her as proposing puzzles and riddles. Colombarius, as quoted by Meursius in his notes on Hesychius, called Sappho the poetess of the Trojans, the meaning of which has recently been made clear by the discovery of the _Marriage of Hector and Andromache_.
The first poem is the _Ode to Aphrodite_ which was cited by Dionysius of Halicarnassus for its finished and brilliant style,—the style used by Euripides among the tragedians and by Isocrates among the orators. Though the rhythm, ardor, terseness, and noble simplicity can be given in no translation,[73] nearly every lover of Greek lyrics has tried his hand at it. Ambrose Philips made thirty-four words out of the first stanza which in the Greek has only sixteen; Merivale found forty-three words necessary; but Tucker and Leonard with strict compression and simplicity manage to translate with twenty-three; Gildersleeve in an unpublished version which I also quote here, and Fairclough use twenty-four:
Broidered-throned goddess, O Aphrodite, Child of Zeus, craft-weaving, I do beseech thee, Do not crush my soul with distress and sorrow, Wholly my mistress.