Where Sappho ’tis said the first of the world In her furious chase of Phaon so haughty All maddened with longing plunged down from the height Of the shimmering rock.
Antiphanes probably told the story in both his _Leucadius_ and his _Phaon_; and Cratinus must have mentioned Phaon, for Athenaeus[69] tells us that he told how Aphrodite, beloved by Phaon, concealed him among the fair wild lettuce, just as other writers say Adonis was hidden.
The practice of abandoned lovers taking the leap may possibly have been known even in Sappho’s day, for Stesichorus tells of a girl throwing herself from a cliff near Leucas because a youth had scorned her. By the time of Anacreon (550 B.C.), the leap had become the symbol of a love passion that could no longer be borne; “Lifted up from the Leucadian rock, I dive into the hoary wave, drunk with Love.” It is the same old story told at every summer resort about some place called Lover’s Leap, but in Anacreon nothing is said about drowning. And legend[70] says that sometimes wings or feathers were attached to the person jumping off the cliff to lighten the fall. In any case the leap, legendary or not, was not suicide but a desperate remedy, killing or curing, for hopeless love. We hear of many who survived the expiatory leap.
In a stucco fresco[71] (Pl. 7) (not later than 40 A.D.) in the half dome of the apse at one end of the underground building in Rome near the Porta Maggiore, which served for the cult of some secret neo-Pythagorean sect or possibly as a temple of the Muses or possibly only as the underground summer abode of an enthusiast over Greek poets like the newly discovered underground rooms of the Homeric enthusiast at Pompeii, we have possibly an illustration of the Leucadian leap, at least in symbolism, as personifying the parting of the image of the soul. Sappho, lyre in hand, is springing from the misty cliff, which Ausonius mentions in his sixth idyl (cf. p. 131), and below in the sea is a Triton spreading out a garment to break her fall. Opposite on a height stands Apollo, who had a temple on the spot and to whom according to Ovid’s _Fifteenth Heroic Epistle_ Sappho promised to dedicate her lyre if he was propitious. Ovid is the first writer from whom we have the story in detail. It was often used in later literature, as we shall see in a succeeding chapter. Many know Pope’s translation of Ovid,[72] but if my readers desire to read an imaginative and humorous circumstantial account of Sappho’s leap, on which the modern popular idea is mostly based, they may find it in Addison’s _Spectator_, No. 233, November 27, 1711.