Sappho’s white, speaking pages of dear song Yet linger with us and will linger long.
vivuntque commissi calores Aeoliae fidibus puellae.
That inadequate and misleading metaphor of fire, as Mackail says, recurs in all her eulogists. Μεμιγμένα πυρὶ φθέγγεται, “her words are mingled with fire,” writes Plutarch,[9] but the “fire” of the burning Sappho is not raging hot, it is an unscorching calm, brilliant lustre that makes other poetry seem cold by comparison. No wonder that Hermesianax[10] (about 290 B.C.) called her “that nightingale of hymns” and Lucian[11] “the honeyed boast of the Lesbians.” Strabo (1 A.D.) said: “Sappho is a marvellous creature (θαυμαστόν τι χρῆμα), in all history you will find no woman who can challenge comparison with her even in the slightest degree.” Antipater of Thessalonica (10 B.C.) named Sappho as one of the nine poetesses who were god-tongued and called her one of the nine muses: “The female Homer: Sappho pride and choice of Lesbian dames, whose locks have earned a name.”[12] In another epigram in the _Anthology_,[13] probably from the base of a lost statue of Sappho in the famous library at Pergamum,[14] and which Jucundus and Cyriac were able to cite many hundreds of years later, Antipater says,
Sappho my name, in song o’er women held As far supreme as Homer men excelled.
Some thoughtlessly proclaim the muses nine; A tenth is Lesbian Sappho, maid divine,
are the words of Plato in Lord Neaves’ translation of an epigram of which Wilamowitz[15] now timidly defends the genuineness. Antipater of Sidon (150 B.C.)[16] in his encomium on Sappho tells how
Amazement seized Mnemosyne At Sappho’s honey’d song: ‘What, does a tenth muse,’ then, cried she, ‘To mortal men belong!’
He also speaks[17] of Sappho as “one that is sung for a mortal Muse among Muses immortal ... a delight unto Greece.” Dioscorides[18] (180 B.C.) says: “Sappho, thou Muse of Aeolian Eresus, sweetest of all love-pillows unto the burning young, sure am I that Pieria or ivied Helicon must honour thee, along with the Muses, seeing that thy spirit is their spirit.” Again, in an anonymous epigram[19] it is said: “her song will seem Calliope’s own voice.” Another writer,[20] also anonymous, discussing the nine lyric poets, says: