a review

Sappho of Lesbos

By Arthur Weigall. Garden City Publishing Company, Inc., 1932

So little is known about Sappho, but thero is so much we would like to know. The bare facts romain: born in Lesbos some time in the Seventh century B.C.; exiled to Sicily by the tyrant Pittakos, where she married Korcolas and was widowed shortly after, and then returned to the island where she opened a school of music and dance for young girls, Evon the circumstances of her death remain shadowy due to confusion of names wherein another Sappho, a courtosan, leaped from the Leucadian cliffs for the unrequited love of Phaon.

Lesbos! The very name elicits visions of surpassing beauty: old gnarled olive groves creeping down to the seas, small streams and "fairy-like glens among boulders covered with maiden-hair fern". One may oven conjur shades of slender maidens dancing wild and bright-haired to the weird flutetones ebbing on a cold night's air. Almost alone among Greek comminitios, Lesbos enjoyed a freedom for women, shared only by the military state of Sparta. The general inference is that Lesbian women wero about as free as Western women of today. As late as 1847, the travelor Skeno reported that Lesbian women "wore extremely masculino, inheriting all landed property, and being managers of all family affairs...And in fact, they used to go out to work, or to hunt on horseback, while the men cat home to spin." How far a departure this was from the oriental exclusion of women practiced elsewhere on the mainland of Greece!

Upon the return of Sappho from her Sicilian exile, she immediately started a school of arts for aristocratic young maidens. Poetry, music and dance made up the curriculum, which sooner or later attracted daughters of the best families of Greece. Among those wore the frail delicate Gyriino,

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