In the seventh century after the founding of Naucratis, about 650 B.C., many Mytilenaeans migrated to Naucratis and engaged in trade in wine and other products.[41] Among these was included, as Herodotus’ story shows, Sappho’s brother Charaxus; the mention of his name furnishes a further confirmation of the date we have assumed, and proves that Sappho lived at least after 572 B.C., the year of the accession to the throne of Egypt of Amasis, in whose reign Herodotus[42] says that Rhodopis flourished. This would make Sappho’s age at the time about sixty and justify the epithet of “old” which she applies to herself in the poem given in Edmonds 99. Fragment 42 in Edmonds seems to say “age now causeth a thousand twisted wrinkles to make their track along my face.”[43] Stobaeus[44] tells how one evening over the wine Solon’s nephew, Execestides, sang to him a song by Sappho, and Solon requested him to teach it to him that he might learn it before he died. Now Solon was one of the seven to whom Pittacus also belonged. He died about 559 B.C. at the age of eighty, and the incident serves to indicate that Sappho’s poems were coming into vogue among the young Athenians in Solon’s old age.
Sappho’s birthplace was Eresus,[45] the birthplace also of Aristotle’s famous pupil Theophrastus. She early moved to Mytilene (Pl. 3), chief city of Lesbus. Lesbus had been renowned for lovely ladies from Homer’s day, when beauty contests were held there, as they have been down to the present time. It had also been famous from early days for its sweet wine. Many an ancient author speaks of this wholesome tipple, and to-day a thirsty traveller is delighted to sit in a café on the quay and drink a glass of the fine modern κρασὶ τῆς Μιτυλήνης.
Lesbus was so near to Lydia that it could not help absorbing some of the Ionian and Lydian luxury. No one has better described the position of Lesbus in Greek literature than Symonds:[46]
“For a certain space of time the Aeolians occupied the very foreground of Greek literature, and blazed out with a brilliance of lyrical splendor that has never been surpassed. There seems to have been something passionate and intense in their temperament, which made the emotions of the Dorian and the Ionian feeble by comparison. Lesbos, the centre of Aeolian culture, was the island of overmastering passions: the personality of the Greek race burned there with a fierce and steady flame of concentrated feeling. The energies which the Ionians divided between pleasure, politics, trade, legislation, science, and the arts, and which the Dorians turned to war and statecraft and social economy, were restrained by the Aeolians within the sphere of individual emotions, ready to burst forth volcanically. Nowhere in any age of Greek history, or in any part of Hellas, did the love of physical beauty, the sensibility to radiant scenes of nature, the consuming fervor of personal feeling, assume such grand proportions and receive so illustrious an expression as they did in Lesbos. At first this passion blossomed into the most exquisite lyrical poetry that the world has known; this was the flower-time of the Aeolians, their brief and brilliant spring. But the fruit it bore was bitter and rotten. Lesbos became a byword for corruption. The passions which for a moment had flamed into the gorgeousness of art, burning their envelope of words and images, remained a mere furnace of sensuality, from which no expression of the divine in human life could be expected. In this the Lesbian poets were not unlike the Provençal troubadours, who made a literature of love, or the Venetian painters, who based their art upon the beauty of color, the voluptuous charms of the flesh. In each case the motive of enthusiastic passion sufficed to produce a dazzling result. But as soon as its freshness was exhausted there was nothing left for art to live on, and mere decadence to sensuality ensued.”