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This page intentionally left blank
 COBOL PROGRAMMERS SWING
WITH JAVA
In the fast-moving world of information technology, Java is now the #1 program-
ming language. Programmers and developers everywhere need to know Java to
keep pace with traditional and web-based application development. COBOL Pro-
grammers Swing with Java provides COBOL programmers a clear, easy transition
to Java programming by drawing on the numerous similarities between COBOL
and Java.
The authors introduce the COBOL programmer to the history of Java and
object-oriented (OO) programming and then dive into the details of Java syntax,
always contrasting it with the parallels in COBOL. A running case study gives the
reader an overall view of application development with Java, with increased func-
tionality as new material is presented. This second edition of the acclaimed Java
for the COBOL Programmer features the development of graphical user interfaces
(GUIs) using the latest in Java Swing components.
The clear writing style and excellent examples make the book suitable for
anyone wanting to learn Java and OO programming, whether or not they have a
background in COBOL.

E. Reed Doke is Professor Emeritus of Information Systems at Southwest Missouri

State University in Springfield. He received his Ph.D. in Management and Com-
puter Information Systems from the University of Arkansas. He worked for several
years as a software developer and information systems manager prior to joining
academia and continues to assist firms with systems development problems. He
has published eight books and numerous articles focusing on object-oriented
software development.
Bill C. Hardgrave is Associate Professor of Information Systems and Executive
Director of the Information Technology Research Center, and he holds the
Edwin & Karlee Bradberry Chair at the University of Arkansas. Prior to entering
academia, he worked as a programmer, systems analyst, and general manager for
two software development firms. He continues to help companies solve a variety
of information systems–related problems. Dr. Hardgrave has published two books
and more than 50 articles, primarily on the topic of software development.
Richard A. Johnson worked for several Fortune 500 companies as an industrial
engineer and manager before receiving a Ph.D. in Computer Information Systems
from the University of Arkansas in 1998. Since then, Dr. Johnson has published a
text on systems analysis and design and fourteen articles in refereed journals. He
is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Information Systems at South-
west Missouri State University, where he teaches Java programming and web
application development.
COBOL PROGRAMMERS
SWING WITH JAVA
E. REED DOKE
Southwest Missouri State University

BILL C. HARDGRAVE
University of Arkansas

RICHARD A. JOHNSON
Southwest Missouri State University
  
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521546843

© Cambridge University Press 2005

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of

relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place
without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published in print format 2005

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s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
 “To Graham Reed Doke”
–Reed

“To Ronda, Rachel, and Gavin”

–Bill

“To Deborah and our children”

–Richard
 Contents

Preface xiii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1
Why You Should Learn Java 3

Objectives 3
History and Overview of Java 4
The Popularity of Java 6
What Makes Java Different? 8
Java Is Simple 8
Java Is Object-Oriented 9
Java Is Portable 10
Will Java Replace COBOL? 12
How to Use This Book 16
Summary of Key Points in Chapter 1 18
Bibliography 19

Chapter 2
An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming 21

Objectives 21
The Community National Bank 22
History of OO 22
Objects 24
vii
viii CONTENTS

Classes 25
Diagramming Classes and Objects 26
Class Relationships 28
Inheritance 29
Aggregation 32
Association 34
Object Communication 35
Polymorphism 37
Dynamic Binding 38
Summary of Key Points in Chapter 2 39
Bibliography 40

Chapter 3
Java Structure 41

Objectives 41
A Class Program 42
Listing 3.1: Customer.java 44
Java Column Restrictions 47
Writing Comments in Java 47
Naming Rules and Conventions 49
Creating Objects 50
Listing 3.2: Customer.java 53
Invoking Methods 54
Listing 3.3: CustomerProcessor.java 56
Working with Subclasses 58
Listing 3.4: Account.java 58
Listing 3.5: CheckingAccount.java 60
Listing 3.6: AccountProcessor.java 62
Summary of Key Points in Chapter 3 64

Chapter 4
Defining Data 66

Objectives 66
COBOL Picture Clause 67
Defining Java Variables 68
Writing Java Literals 70
The Scope of Variables 71
Defining Java Constants 72
CONTENTS ix

String Variables 72
Listing 4.1: StringDemo.java 74
Changing Variable Types 76
Listing 4.2: CastDemo.java 77
Variables for Community National Bank 79
Summary of Key Points in Chapter 4 80

Chapter 5
Computation 82

Objectives 82
Exceptions 83
Listing 5.1: try-catch Structure 85
Listing 5.2:
ArithmeticExceptionDemo.java 86
Custom Exception Classes 87
Listing 5.3: CheckingAccount.java with
NSFException 89
Listing 5.4: AccountProcessor.java with
try-catch 91
A Review of Primitive Data Types 92
Wrapper Classes 93
Listing 5.5: WrapperDemo.java 96
Arithmetic Operators 98
The Math Class 99
Listing 5.6: MathClassDemo.java 103
The NumberFormat Class 104
Listing 5.7: NumberFormatDemo.java 105
Summary of Key Points in Chapter 5 107

Chapter 6
Decision Making 108

Objectives 108
Service Charges at Community National Bank 109
The if Statement 109
Using the else Clause 112
Nested if Statements 114
Writing Compound Conditions 115
Java’s Conditional Operator 116
x CONTENTS

Condition Names 117

Computing the Service Charge with if Statements 118
Listing 6.1: COBOL Service Charge Computation
Using IF Statements 119
Listing 6.2: ComputeServiceCharge method Using
if Statements 120
Case Structure: COBOL EVALUATE and Java switch 121
Computing the Service Charge Using switch 123
Listing 6.3: COBOL Service Charge Computation
Using EVALUATE 123
Listing 6.4: Java Service Charge Computation
Using switch 125
Summary of Key Points in Chapter 6 126

Chapter 7
Loops 129

Objectives 129
Loop Structure 130
The COBOL PERFORM Statement 130
The Java while Statement 132
Listing 7.1: WhileLoopDemo.java 135
The Java do Statement 137
Listing 7.2: DoLoopDemo.java 139
The Java for Statement 140
Listing 7.3: ForLoopDemo.java 142
Nested Loops 143
Java break and continue Statements 145
Producing a Loan Amortization Schedule 146
Listing 7.4: Amortizer.java 147
Summary of Key Points in Chapter 7 149

Chapter 8
Arrays 151

Objectives 151
Declaring One-Dimensional Arrays 152
Populating One-Dimensional Arrays 155
Creating String Arrays 157
Listing 8.1: OneDimArrayDemo.java 158
CONTENTS xi

Declaring Two-Dimensional Arrays 160

Populating Two-Dimensional Arrays 162
Listing 8.2: TwoDimArrayDemo.java 163
Passing Arrays as Arguments 166
Searching Arrays 167
Listing 8.3: FindZipCode.java 168
Listing 8.4: ZipCodeProcessor.java 169
Summary of Key Points in Chapter 8 171

Chapter 9
Data Access 173

Objectives 173
Java’s I-O Class Library (java.io) 174
Object Persistence 175
Sequential File I-O 175
Listing 9.1: SequentialFileDemo.java 179
Database Access 181
Listing 9.2: COBOL SQL Example 182
Listing 9.3: DatabaseDemo.java 188
Object Serialization 189
Listing 9.4:
ObjectSerializationDemo.java 193
Network Access 195
Summary of Key Points in Chapter 9 195

Chapter 10
Graphical User Interfaces 197

Objectives 197
Java’s Swing Components 198
Event-Driven Programming 199
JFrame: Displaying and Closing a Window 201
Listing 10.1—CustomerGUIOne.java 201
JLabel: Adding Labels to a Window 203
Listing 10.2: CustomerGUITwo.java 203
JTextField: Adding Text Fields to a Window 205
Listing 10.3—CustomerGUIThree.java 206
xii CONTENTS

JButton: Adding Buttons to a Window 209

Listing 10.4—CustomerGUIFour.java 209
How Java Handles Events 213
Improving the Window Layout 214
Listing 10.5: CustomerGUIFive.java 215
Creating Drop-Down Menus 220
Listing 10.6—CustomerGUISix.java 220
Writing Applets 225
Summary of Key Points in Chapter 10 227

Chapter 11
Object-Oriented Development Issues 229

Objectives 229
Developing Object-Oriented Systems 230
OO Methodologies 231
OO Analysis 232
OO Design 233
Three-Tier Design 235
Architecture Issues 246
Performance Issues 247
Summary of Key Points in Chapter 11 248
Bibliography 249

Glossary 251
Index 260
 Preface

If you are like most other programmers, you have probably been thinking
about updating your technical skills. You have been hearing a lot about Java,
object-oriented development, and Internet applications. These topics have
been getting a tremendous amount of press lately. In the fanfare, you may
have heard someone suggest that COBOL programmers will be obsolete and
can’t possibly make the switch to OO. Can this possibly be true? We don’t
think so.
We wrote this book because we believe it is important that you learn Java
and OO development. Although we don’t claim learning a new programming
language is a trivial task, the fact that you already know COBOL gives you a
head start on learning Java. Don’t let what others say bother you.
We work with COBOL as consultants for industry, in our classrooms, and as
authors. However, we also work with Java and object-oriented development.
From our perspective, we believe COBOL and Java are highly complementary
development tools in the evolving computing environment. COBOL does a
great job of processing and maintaining a firm’s data. Java plays an equally
important role of capturing and reporting data by connecting clients to the
server across a variety of networked computers, with little concern about the
specific hardware and operating systems involved.
Today’s business environment is diverse. A single platform and/or single
language cannot meet the needs of most organizations. The business envi-
ronment is becoming one of interconnectivity, requiring many different or-
ganizations with many different computing environments to communicate.
Perhaps your organization is moving in this direction. Has your manager in-
quired about your interests in client-server computing or Java? The fact that
you are reading this suggests you have been thinking about your future. We
xiii
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
shame possess your eye, but you would make your plea outright” (Edmonds).
Tradition even in classic times represented her as beloved by Anacreon also,48
but the bard of Teos flourished at least fifty years after the Lesbian poetess.
Archilochus and Hipponax, the famous iambic satiric poets, the former dead
before Sappho was born, the latter born after she was dead, were also
represented as her lovers by Diphilus,49 the Athenian comic playwright in his
play Sappho. But as Athenaeus in the third century a.d. said, “I rather fancy
he was joking.”
Mackail says that “she was married and had one or more children,” and
many of the new fragments, as well as Ovid, indicate this. A fragment long
known says:

I have a maid, a bonny maid,

As dainty as the golden flowers,
My darling Cleïs. Were I paid
All Lydia, and the lovely bowers
Of Cyprus, ’twould not buy my maid.
(Tucker)

Professor Prentice50 translates this fragment (E. 130), “there is a pretty little
girl named Cleïs whom I love,” etc., and says that it does not refer to her own
daughter. But there is no word for love in the Greek passage, and the ancient
interpretation of Maximus of Tyre51 is preferable, especially as Cleïs is
definitely mentioned by Suidas and as the name reappears as that of a young
woman in another of the old fragments and in one of the new pieces.52 The
matter seems now to be settled by the recent discovery on a papyrus (about
200 a.d.) of a new late prose biography of Sappho which is so important a
source for her life that a literal translation of it is here given, especially as it is
not in Edmonds’ Lyra Graeca.53
“Sappho by birth was a Lesbian and of the city of Mytilene and her father
was Scamandrus or according to some Scamandronymus. And she had three
brothers, Eurygyius, Larichus, and the eldest, Charaxus, who sailed to Egypt
and as an associate with a certain Doricha spent very much on her; but
Sappho loved more Larichus, who was young. She had a daughter Cleïs with
the same name as her own mother. She has been accused by some of being
disorderly in character and of being a woman-lover. In shape she seems to
have proved contemptible and ugly, for in complexion she was dark, and in
stature she was very small; and the same has happened in the case of ... who
was undersized.”
The man whom Sappho married, she herself also being a person of some
means, was said to be Cercylas, a man of great wealth from the island of
Andrus. Cercylas sounds like concocted comic chaff, but we can believe
enough of the tradition to say that she was married. A Russian scholar54
made her a widow at thirty-five.55 Thereafter she sought for love and
companionship among the girls whom she made members of her salon and
instructed in the arts.
Sappho must have had a wonderful personality or she could not have
attracted so many pupils and companions whom she trained to chant or sing
in the choruses for the marriage ceremony and for other occasions. She was
president of the world’s first woman’s club. It was a thiasos or a kind of
sacred sorority to which the members were bound by special ties and
regulations. We have a long list of the members who were her friends and
pupils, not only from Lesbus but from Miletus, Colophon, Pamphylia, and even
Salamis and Athens. For some of them she had an ardent passion. When they
left her, she missed them terribly (E. 43, 44, 46). “Is it possible for any maid
on earth to be far apart from the woman she loves?” She was so jealous at
times that she spited her wrath on her rivals, especially Gorgo and
Andromeda. She “had enough of Gorgo,” and she scolds Atthis for having
come to hate the thought of her and for flitting after Andromeda in her stead
(E. 55, 81). Suidas tells us that she had three companions or friends, Atthis,
Telesippa, and Megara, to whom she was slanderously declared to be
attached by an impure affection; and that her pupils or disciples were Anagora
(Anactoria) of Miletus, Gongyla (the dumpling) of Colophon, Euneica of
Salamis. Ovid mentions Atthis, Cydro, and Anactoria, the name which
Swinburne took for his poem in which he welded together many of Sappho’s
fragments with fine expression and passionate thought. Maximus of Tyre
(xxiv, 9) says: “What Alcibiades, Charmides, and Phaedrus were to Socrates,
Gyrinna, Atthis and Anactoria were to Sappho, and what his rival craftsmen,
Prodicus, Gorgias, Thrasymachus and Protagoras were to Socrates, that Gorgo
and Andromeda were to Sappho, who sometimes takes them to task and at
others refutes them and dissembles with them exactly like Socrates”
(Edmonds). Philostratus in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana56 tells of Sappho’s
brilliant pupil Damophyla of Pamphylia who is said to have had girl-
companions like Sappho and to have composed love-poems and hymns just
as she did, with adaptations from the lectures of her professor. Her own
fragments mention Anactoria, Atthis, Gongyla, Gyrinno (which perhaps means
Little Tadpole), “Mnasidica, of fairer form than the dainty Gyrinno” (E. 115),
and possibly Eranna.57 One fragment says, “Well did I teach Hero of Gyara,
the fleetly-running maid” (E. 73). If this is the famous Hero of the Hero and
Leander story so often pictured in Greek art and on coins of Abydus, Sappho
knew the story of two king’s children who loved one another long before the
days of the painter Apelles.58 Sappho’s school of poetry in modern times has
been prettily pictured in a painting by Hector Leroux (p. 118), but the best
representation of what her school may have been is given by Alma Tadema
(Pl. 1) in his academic and learned classical painting “Sappho” in the Walters’
Art Gallery in Baltimore. Archaic Greek inscriptions, of interest to the specialist
in epigraphy, can be read on the marble seats of the theatre at Mytilene
represented in the picture,—the names of Erinna of Telos, Gyrinno, Anactoria
of Miletus, Atthis, Gongyla of Colophon, Dika (short for Mnasidica), and
others. I quote the beautiful appreciation which Professor Gildersleeve has
published:59

“A semi-circle of marble seats, veined and stained, a screen of olive trees

that fling their branches against the sky, and against the sapphire seas, a
singing man, a listening woman, whose listening is so intense that nothing
else in the picture seems to listen—not the wreathed girl in flowered robe
who stands by her and rests her hand familiarly on her shoulder. Not she,
for though she holds a scroll in her other hand, the full face, the round
eyes, show a soul that matches wreathed head and flowered robe. She is
the pride of life. Nor she on the upper seat, who props her chin with her
hand and partly hides her mouth with her fingers and lets her vision reach
into the distance of her own musings. Nor her neighbor whose composed
attitude is that of a regular church-goer who has learned the art of sitting
still and thinking of nothing. Nor yet the remotest figure—she who has
thrown her arms carelessly on the back of the seat and is looking out on
the waters as if they would bring her something. A critic tells us that the
object of the poet is to enlist Sappho’s support in a political scheme of
which he is the leader, if not the chief prophet, and he has come to
Sappho’s school in Lesbos with the hope of securing another voice and
other songs to advocate the views of his party. The critic seems to have
been in the artist’s secret, and yet Alma Tadema painted better than he
knew. Alkaios is not trying to win Sappho’s help in campaign lyrics. The
young poet is singing to the priestess of the Muses a new song with a new
rhythm, and as she hears it, she feels that there is a strain of balanced
strength in it she has not reached: it is the first revelation to her of the
rhythm that masters her own. True, when Alkaios afterwards sought not
her help in politics, but her heart in love, and wooed her in that rhythm,
she too had caught the music and answered him in his own music.”
 III. THE LEGENDARY FRINGE
Sappho’s Physical Appearance, The Phaon
Story, The Vice Idea
So far we have been dealing with ascertained facts, reasonable inferences
as to other facts, and strong probabilities: in a word, with the real Sappho so
far as her history can be made out with at least some measure of certainty.
There is, however, a legendary fringe attaching to every great outstanding
personality. It is one of the penalties of personal or literary greatness to
become the centre of fanciful stories, personal detraction, misrepresentation,
and wild legends often conceived in a most grotesque and improbable
fashion. To all this Sappho is no exception. First the question will be discussed
whether she was a dwarf. The famous and far-flung story of Phaon and the
Leucadian Leap will then claim our mention, and thirdly a word must be said
about her character.
According to Damocharis60 Sappho had a beautiful face and bright eyes.
The famous line of Alcaeus refers to her gentle smile. So Burns in his Pastoral
Poetry says, “In thy sweet voice, Barbauld, survives even Sappho’s flame.”
Plato calls her beautiful as does many another writer, though the epithet may
refer, as Maximus of Tyre says, to the beauty of her lyrics, one of which
practically says long before Goldsmith, “handsome is that handsome does” (E.
58). The word which Alcaeus employs does not necessarily mean that she had
violet tresses as Edmonds translates it. It has generally been rendered as
violet-weaving, and it is to be regretted that P. N. Ure without evidence, in his
excellent book entitled The Greek Renaissance (London, 1921), tells us that
Sappho had black hair, even if Mrs. Browning does speak of “Sappho, with
that gloriole of ebon hair on calmèd brows.” Tall blondes were popular in
ancient days and Sappho was neither divinely tall nor most divinely fair. But
the ancient busts, the representations of her as full-sized, on coins of Lesbus
and on many Greek vases, belie the idea of the rhetorical Maximus of Tyre
who in the second century a.d. labelled her “small and dark,” an idea that
occurs also in the new papyrus which we have already quoted. Some have
even interpreted her name as derived from Ψᾶφος, “Little Pebble,” i.e., short
of stature. Undoubtedly the epithet of Maximus reflects the Roman perverted
idea which finds expression in Ovid’s apology for her appearance. The
scholiast on Lucian’s Portraits61 is repeating the same source when he says
“physically, Sappho was very ill-favored, being small and dark, like a
nightingale with ill-shapen wings enfolding a tiny body.” The famous fragment,

This little creature, four feet high,

Cannot hope to touch the sky,
(Edmonds)

may not refer to Sappho, and if it does, we must remember, that Edmonds’
new reading is doubtful. Perhaps Horace was thinking of this line when he
wrote62

sublimi feriam sidera vertice,

which recalls Tennyson’s

Old Horace! I will strike, said he,

The stars with head sublime.
(Epilogue)

Edmonds forces the meaning of the Greek to get even four feet out of his new
restoration. Sappho was surely taller than that and there is no evidence earlier
than Roman days to justify even Swinburne’s

The small dark body’s Lesbian loveliness

That held the fire eternal.

In any case Sappho was no dwarf, otherwise her deformity would not have
escaped the notice of the Athenian comic mud-slingers and scandal-mongers
who did so much to spoil her good name. Such is the traditional, not the real,
human, historical Sappho of the sixth century b.c.
The story of Sappho’s love for Phaon is patently mythological, as indicated
by the legend of his transformation by Aphrodite from an old man into a
handsome youth. There can be only slight historic foundation for connecting
Sappho with him and making Sicily the scene of their first meeting. An
inscription on the Parian marble in Oxford says: “When Critius the First was
archon at Athens Sappho fled from Mytilene and sailed to Sicily.” The date is
uncertain as there is a lacuna in the inscription, but it is between 604 and 594
b.c., perhaps about 598. The recently discovered hymn to Hera, Longing for
Lesbus, lends support to this story of exile. She may have been banished by
Pittacus for engaging like Alcaeus in political intrigues. She probably returned
to Lesbus under the amnesty of 581, as her grave is often mentioned as in
Lesbus. There is even a tradition preserved by the English traveller Pococke
that her own sepulchral urn was once in the Turkish mosque of the castle of
Mytilene. We have already cited one or two fragments which seem to show
that she had more than reached middle age. She was old enough to feel that
she should not re-marry, especially if she had to choose one younger than
herself.63 Fragment (E. 99) is in the style of Shakespeare’s “Crabbed age and
youth cannot live together.” Nowhere in her poems is there any evidence that
she committed suicide for love of Phaon, but as her name has started this
legend we must speak of it in some detail. The famous fragment (E. 108), to
judge from the context where it is quoted in connection with Socrates’ death,
seems to give her last words: “It is not right that there be mourning in the
house of poetry; this befits us not.”
Now let us discuss the supposititious love affair, to which we have referred,
about which I share the ancient and modern Lesbian doubt. The ancients tell
of Sappho’s unrequited love for the ferryman prototype of St. Christopher, the
beautiful Phaon. The story is well given in Servius’ précis of Turpilius’ Latin
paraphrase of Menander,64 though he does not mention Sappho by name:
“Phaon, who was a ferryman plying for hire between Lesbus (others say he
was from Chios65) and the mainland, one day ferried over for nothing the
Goddess Venus in the guise of an old woman, and received from her for the
service an alabaster box of unguent, the daily use of which made women fall
in love with him. Among those who did so was one who in her disappointment
is said to have thrown herself from Mount Leucates, and from this came the
custom now in vogue of hiring people once a year to throw themselves from
that place into the sea.” (Edmonds). But neither Phaon nor anything
connected with Phaon is mentioned in any of Sappho’s fragments, though
Francis Fawkes and others have connected Phaon’s name with the Hymn to
Aphrodite. A writer of the second century b.c., Palaephatus,66 makes the very
inconsistent statement that “this is the Phaon in whose honor as a lover many
a song has been written by Sappho.” Nor is there any allusion to Sappho’s
curing her passion by leaping from the white Leucadian cliff. Athenaeus67 and
Suidas go so far as to say that the victim was another Sappho, and even in
the late lists of Leucadian leapers, in Photius, Sappho is not included. Who
first conjured up a Phaon, we know not, but the story belongs to folk-lore,
and Phaon appears on Greek vases of the time and style of Meidias, who is
dated by most archaeologists toward the end of the fifth century b.c., much
earlier than Plato’s play (392 b.c.). His indifference to the many ladies who are
making love to him is well portrayed, especially on vases (Pl. 4, 5) in Florence
and Palermo (p. 107)68. The fair Phaon, Aphrodite’s shining star (φάων =
shining), is only another avatar of Adonis, who appears in similar style on
similar vases, one even found in the same grave with a Phaon vase. Phaon, I
believe, is as old as the fifth century; but the story of Sappho’s leap
transferred to the white cliffs in the south of the white island of Leucas, the
modern Cape Ducato, is later. The Cape is also called Santa Maura, some two
hundred feet high, and even to-day this rock of desperation is haunted by
Sappho’s ghost and known as Sappho’s Leap (Pl. 6). The legend of the
Lesbian’s leap first occurs in the poet of the Old Comedy, Plato, who wrote the
play called Phaon. Later in the New Comedy, Menander was probably
adorning an old tale to point a contemporary moral when he produced his
Leucadia of which Turpilius, a contemporary of Terence, wrote a Latin
paraphrase. A few anapaestic lines are preserved by Strabo, who speaks of
the Leucadian Cliff:

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.
(D. M. R.)

Antiphanes probably told the story in both his Leucadius and his Phaon; and
Cratinus must have mentioned Phaon, for Athenaeus69 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 legend70 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 fresco71 (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.
The moral purity of Sappho shines in its own light. She expresses herself,
no doubt, in very passionate language, but passionate purity is a finer article
than the purity of prudery, and Sappho’s passionate expressions are always
under the control of her art. A woman of bad character and certainly a woman
of such a variety of bad character as scandal (cf. p. 128 and note 147) has
attributed to Sappho might express herself passionately and might run on
indefinitely with erotic imagery. But Sappho is never erotic. There is no
language to be found in her songs which a pure woman might not use, and it
would be practically impossible for a bad woman to subject her expressions to
the marvellous niceties of rhythm, accent, and meaning which Sappho
everywhere exhibits. Immorality and loss of self-control never subject
themselves to perfect literary and artistic taste. It is against the nature of
things that a woman who has given herself up to unnatural and inordinate
practices which defy the moral instinct and throw the soul into disorder,
practices which harden and petrify the soul, should be able to write in perfect
obedience to the laws of vocal harmony, imaginative portrayal, and
arrangement of the details of thought. The nature of things does not admit of
such an inconsistency. Sappho’s love for flowers, moreover, affords another
luminous testimony. A bad woman as well as a pure woman might love roses,
but a bad woman does not love the small and hidden wild flowers of the field,
the dainty anthrysc and the clover, as Sappho did. There is, moreover, in a life
of vice something narrowing as well as coarsening. An imagination which like
Sappho’s sees in a single vision the moonlight sweeping the sea, breaking
across the shore and illuminating wide stretches of landscape with life-giving
light, and in the midst of all this far-spreading glory sees and personifies the
spirit of the night, listening to the moanings of homesickness and repeating
them with far-flung voice to those across the sea,—an imagination with such a
marvellous range as this is never given to the child of sodden vice. Here once
more is a woman who made it her life business to adorn and even to glorify
lawful wedlock, and carried on this occupation in a sympathetic and delightful
strain of dance and song which, however passionate in their expression,
contain no impure words. It is simply unthinkable that such a woman should
be perpetually destroying the very foundations of her own ideals.
 IV. THE WRITINGS OF SAPPHO
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.

Rather come, if ever didst come aforetime,

Hearkening to my cry from afar in mercy;
And didst leave the palace of thine own father
Golden and gorgeous;

And didst yoke thy chariot, swift thy sparrows

Drew thee, beauteous sparrows, to earth’s dark surface,
Moving quick their wings from the height of heaven
Through the mid ether.

Soon their journey’s end was attained and smiling

Blessed goddess, smiling with heavenly visage,
Thou didst ask of me what it was I suffer’d,
Why I invoked thee,

What it was I wished to receive of all things,

Maddened in my soul, ‘Who is he thou seekest,
Whom shall I ensnare for my darling Sappho?
Who is it grieves thee?’

‘Nay, if thou but flee he will soon pursue thee,

If he get no presents, he’ll give thee presents,
If thou love him not, he will love thee quickly,
E’en if thou wilt not.’

Come then now again and relieve me, goddess,

From my carking cares and whate’er my spirit
Longeth for accomplish, and on my side do
Battle, my mistress;

(Gildersleeve)

or, with the translation of doves for sparrows:

 Guile-weaving child of Zeus, who art
Immortal, throned in radiance, spare,
O Queen of Love, to break my heart
With grief and care.

But hither come, as thou of old,

When my voice reached thine ear afar,
Didst leave thy father’s hall of gold,
And yoke thy car,

And through mid air their whirring wing

Thy bonny doves did swiftly ply
O’er the dark earth, and thee did bring
Down from the sky.

Right soon they came, and thou, blest Queen,

A smile upon thy face divine,
Didst ask what ail’d me, what might mean
That call of mine.

‘What would’st thou have, with heart on fire,

Sappho?’ thou saidst. ‘Whom pray’st thou me
To win for thee to fond desire?
Who wrongeth thee?

Soon shall he seek, who now doth shun;

Who scorns thy gifts, shall gifts bestow;
Who loves thee not, shall love anon,
Wilt thou or no.’

So come thou now, and set me free

From carking cares; bring to full end
My heart’s desire; thyself O be
My stay and friend!

(Tucker)74

Here follow two translations where “he” is changed to “she” in the sixth
stanza. The controversy as to the sex of the belovèd turns on the admission
or omission of a single letter in the Greek.
Deathless Aphrodite, throned in flowers,
Daughter of Zeus, O terrible enchantress,
With this sorrow, with this anguish, break my spirit,
Lady, not longer!

Hear anew the voice! O hear and listen!

Come, as in that island dawn thou camest,
Billowing in thy yokèd car to Sappho
Forth from thy father’s

Golden house in pity!... I remember:

Fleet and fair thy sparrows drew thee, beating
Fast their wings above the dusky harvests,
Down the pale heavens,

Lighting anon! And thou, O blest and brightest,

Smiling with immortal eyelids, asked me:
‘Maiden, what betideth thee? Or wherefore
Callest upon me?

‘What is hers the longing more than others,

Here in this mad heart? And who the lovely
One belovèd thou wouldst lure to loving?
Sappho, who wrongs thee?’

‘See, if now she flies, she soon must follow;

Yes, if spurning gifts, she soon must offer;
Yes, if loving not, she soon must love thee,
Howso unwilling....’

Come again to me! O now! Release me!

End the great pang! And all my heart desireth
Now of fulfilment, fulfil! O Aphrodite,
Fight by my shoulder!

(W. E. Leonard, unpublished)

 Richly throned, O deathless one, Aphrodite,
Child of Zeus, enchantress-queen, I beseech thee
Let not grief nor harrowing anguish master,
Lady, my spirit.

Ah! come hither. Erstwhile indeed thou heardest

When afar my sorrowful cry of mourning
Smote thine ears, and then from thy father’s mansions
Golden thou camest,

Driving forth thy chariot, and fair birds bore thee

Speeding onward over the earth’s dark shadows,
Waving oft their shimmering plumes thro’ heaven’s
Ether encircling.

Quickly drew they nigh me, and thou, blest presence,

Sweetest smile divine on thy face immortal,
Thou didst seek what sorrow was mine to suffer,
Wherefore I called thee.

What my soul, too, craved with intensest yearning,

Frenzy’s fire enkindling. ‘Now whom,’ thou criest,
‘Wouldst thou fain see led to thy love, or who, my
Sappho, would wrong thee?’

‘Though she flees thee now, yet she soon shall woo thee,
Though thy gifts she scorneth, she soon shall bring gifts;
Though she loves thee not, yet she soon shall love thee,
Yea, though unwilling.’

Come, ah! come again, and from bitter anguish

Free thy servant. All that my heart is craving,
That fulfil, O goddess. Thyself, my champion,
Aid in this conflict.

(H. Rushton Fairclough)

The second ode, quoted in a mutilated condition by the treatise On the

Sublime, is even more difficult to translate. As Wordsworth says, here
 the Lesbian Maid
With finest touch of passion swayed
Her own Aeolian lute.

In its rich Aeolian dialect the ode glows with true Greek fire. Sappho’s words
are clear but far from cold. They are a sea of glass, but a sea of glass mingled
with fire such as the Patmos seer saw from his island not far from Sappho’s
Lesbian home. They enable us to understand why Byron in Don Juan speaks
of “the isles of Greece where burning Sappho loved and sung.” This is what
Swinburne means, when he speaks of the fire eternal and in his Sapphics says
that about her “shone a light of fire as a crown for ever.” We know from
Plutarch75 that an ancient physician, Erasistratus, included this ode (which
has influenced realistic descriptions of passion from Euripides and Theocritus
to Swinburne and Sara Teasdale) in his book of diagnoses as a compendium
of all the symptoms of corroding emotions. He applied this psychological test
whenever Antiochus looked on Stratonice. “There appeared in the case of
Antiochus all those symptoms which Sappho mentions: the choking of the
voice, the feverish blush, the obscuring of vision, profuse sweat, disordered
and tumultuous pulse and finally, when he was completely overcome,
bewilderment, amazement and pallor.” Perhaps Sappho was influenced by
Homer’s76 description of fear and she herself surely suggested such
symptoms to Lucretius.77 We must regard the ode primarily as a literary
product, but its pathological picture of passion is hardly secondary. Even if the
symptoms seem appalling to our cold and unexpressive northern blood, we
must remember that this physical perturbation, as Tucker calls it, was in no
way strange to the ancients. Gildersleeve put it well in his unpublished lecture
on Sappho, which he so kindly placed at my disposal and to which I am
greatly indebted: “if a Greek melted, he melted with a fervent heat, and if this
is true of the average Greek how much more was it true of an Aeolian and an
Aeolian woman, and of Sappho most Aeolian of all.” Byron refers to this ode
when he says in Don Juan:

Catullus scarcely has a decent poem,

I don’t think Sappho’s Ode a good example,
Although Longinus tells us there is no hymn
Where the sublime soars forth on wings more ample.

With regard to Catullus’ rendering (LI), Swinburne in his Notes on Poems and
Reviews, speaking of his poem Anactoria, says: “Catullus translated or as his
countrymen would now say ‘traduced’ the Ode to Anactoria; a more beautiful
translation there never was and will never be; but compared with the Greek, it
is colourless and bloodless, puffed out by additions and enfeebled by
alterations. Let anyone set against each other the two first stanzas, Latin and
Greek, and pronounce.... Where Catullus failed I could not hope to succeed; I
tried instead to reproduce in a diluted and dilated form the spirit of a poem
which could not be reproduced in the body.”
Tennyson has given the best paraphrase in Eleänore:

I watch thy grace; and in its place

My heart a charmed slumber keeps,
While I muse upon thy face;
And a languid fire creeps
Thro’ my veins to all my frame,
Dissolvingly and slowly: soon
From thy rose-red lips my name
Floweth; and then, as in a swoon,
With dinning sound my ears are rife,
My tremulous tongue faltereth,
I lose my color, I lose my breath,
I drink the cup of a costly death,
Brimm’d with delirious draughts of warmest life.
I die with my delight, before
I hear what I would hear from thee.

The following version I have based mainly on Edmonds’ recent text,78 with
a conjectural restoration of the last stanza, of which only a few words are
preserved in the Greek:
 O life divine! to sit before
Thee while thy liquid laughter flows
Melodious, and to listen close
To rippling notes from Love’s full score.

O music of thy lovely speech!

My rapid heart beats fast and high,
My tongue-tied soul can only sigh,
And strive for words it cannot reach.

O sudden subtly-running fire!

My ears with dinning ringing sing,
My sight is lost, a blinded thing,
Eyes, hearing, speech, in love expire,

My face pale-green, like wilted grass

Wet by the dew and evening breeze,
Yea, my whole body tremblings seize,
Sweat bathes me, Death nearby doth pass,

Such thrilling swoon, ecstatic death

Is for the gods, but not for me,
My beggar words are naught to thee,
Far-off thy laugh and perfumed breath.

(D. M. R.)

As J. A. K. Thomson says in his recent fascinating book Greeks and

Barbarians (London and New York, 1921), “Sappho, in the most famous of her
odes, says that love makes her ‘sweat’ with agony and look ‘greener than
grass.’ Perhaps she did not turn quite so green as that, although
(commentators nobly observe) she would be of an olive complexion and had
never seen British grass. But even if it contain a trace of artistic exaggeration,
the ode as a whole is perhaps the most convincing love-poem ever written. It
breathes veracity. It has an intoxicating beauty of sound and suggestion, and
it is as exact as a physiological treatise. The Greeks can do that kind of thing.
Somehow we either overdo the ‘beauty’ or we overdo the physiology. The
weakness of the Barbarian, said they, is that he never hits the mean. But the
Greek poet seems to do it every time. We may beat them at other things, but
not at that. And they do it with so little effort; sometimes, it might happen,
with none at all.”
The passion of love is the supreme subject of Sappho’s songs, as shown by
these first two and many a short fragment, as for example (E. 81) where Love
is called for the first time in literature “sweet-bitter.” Some scholars have
credited it to the much later Posidippus, but he and Meleager took the word
from Sappho, though it may not have been original even with her. Sappho’s
order of the compound word is generally reversed in translation, but Sir Edwin
Arnold says “sweetly bitter, sadly dear,” and Swinburne in Tristram of Lyonesse
speaks of “Sweet Love, that are so bitter.” Tennyson also has the same order
in Lancelot and Elaine (pp. 205-206). To Sappho love is a second death, and
in the second ode death itself seems not very far away. The Greek words for
swooning are mostly metaphors from death, and so we are not surprised
when we read that like death love relaxes every limb and sweeps one away in
its giddy swirling, a sweet-bitter resistless wild beast. Here is Sir Sidney
Colvin’s translation (John Keats, 1917, p. 332): “Love the limb-loosener, the
bitter-sweet torment, the wild beast there is no withstanding, never harried a
more helpless victim.” Another fragment (E. 54) also shows the power of love:

Love tossed my heart as the wind

That descends on the mountain oaks.
(Edmonds)

Sappho’s range of subjects is much greater than the personal emotions of

love, though very personal and individual feelings predominate. She touches
almost every field of human experience, so that there is much in her scant
fragments to bring her near to us. The wail against ingratitude comes home
to those high-strung natures who do good to others but are sensitive to every
wrong when they have the unfortunate experience of learning that one’s
friends are sometimes one’s own worst enemies. “Those harm me most by
whom I have done well” (Mackail). But she is not one of those who bear a
grudge long, her heart is for peace. One of the few ethical fragments, as
Mackail says, “is a speech of delicate self-abasement, spoken with the effect
of a catch in the voice and tears behind the eyes;” “No rancour in this breast
runs wild, I have the heart of a child.” Sappho’s love of sermonizing is seen in
her commandment: “when anger swells in the heart, restrain the idly barking
tongue.” From Aristotle’s Rhetoric Edmonds (91) reconstructs another
fragment:
 Death is an ill; the Gods at least think so,
Or else themselves had perished long ago.

In another fragment of a different nature (E. 120) we read: “Stand up, look
me in the face as friend to friend and unveil the charm that is in thy eyes.” In
other fragments we enter a Lesbian lady’s home and see woman’s love of
dress,—no short skirt for her, for they “wrapped her all around with soft
cambric” (E. 105). “A motley gown of fair Lydian work reached down to her
feet” (E. 20), or, if we believe Pollux (VII. 93), it is the Greek love of fine
shoes. No Lesbian butchery for her tender feet, but she must wear soft
luxurious Lydian slippers: “A broidered strap of fair Lydian work covered her
feet.” Punning on the name of Timas (precious), another fragment, which
perhaps refers to a statue of Aphrodite in Sappho’s home, seems to dote on
fancy handkerchiefs; “and hanging on either side thy face the purple
handkerchief which Timas sent for thee from Phocaea, a precious gift from a
precious giver” (E. 87).79 The fragment (E. 21), “shot with a thousand hues,”
refers to dress rather than to the rainbow. The sight of beautiful gowns
thrilled her: “Come you back, my rosebud Gongyla, in your milk-white gown.”
Again she says: “Many are the golden bracelets and the purple robes, aye and
the fine smooth broideries, indeed a richly varied bride-gift; and without
number also are the silver goblets and the ornaments of ivory” (E. 66). She
coined new words for women; she calls the chest in which women keep their
perfumes and like things a gruté or hutch (E. 180). Again she uses (E. 179)
the word Beudos for a short diaphanous frock or blouse. She is the first to use
the word Chlamys, where she speaks of Love as “coming from Heaven and
throwing off his purple mantle” (E. 69). Blondes were much admired among
the fair-haired Lesbians, though Sappho herself was a brunette, and so she
herself mentions (E. 189) a kind of box-wood or scytharium-wood with which
women dye their hair a golden color. She is fond of cassia and frankincense
(E. 66), and she dotes on myrrh and royal perfumes (E. 83). She rebukes the
foolish girl who prides herself on her ring.80 With “a keen swift flicker of
woman’s jealousy,” and well acquainted with the philosophy of clothes and
with the new Ionic dresses introduced into Lesbus during her own lifetime at
the beginning of the sixth century b.c. from Asia Minor, she jests about her
rival Andromeda, the country girl who knows not how to manage the train of
her new gown81 (E. 98):
 What rustic hoyden ever charmed the soul,
That round her ankles could not kilt her coats!
(Thomas Davidson in Warner’s Library
of the World’s Best Literature)

There is an intimate love of the loveliness of nature in Sappho, as we

should expect of one resident on an island under Ionian skies where, as
Herodotus (I. 142) says, “the climate and seasons are the most beautiful of
any cities in the world.” “The many garlanded earth puts on her broidery” (E.
133). “Thus of old did the dainty feet of Cretan maidens dance pat to the
music beside some lovely altar, pressing the soft smooth bloom of the grass”
(E. 114). As Thomas Davidson has so well said: “every hour of the day comes
to Sappho with a fresh surprise.” We lie down for a noonday siesta in “a
murmurous, blossomy June,” as Stebbing puts it, in the orchard of the
nymphs where (E. 4),

around
Through boughs of the apple
Cool waters sound.
From the rustling leaves
Drips sleep to the ground.

(Unpublished, Rhys Carpenter)82

In the Greek, as Edwin Cox says, “the sound of the words, the repetition of
long vowels particularly omega, the poetic imagery of the whole and the
drowsy cadence of the last two words give this fragment a combination of
qualities probably not surpassed in any language.” The beautiful verses about
the pippin on the topmost branch we shall quote below. In another fragment
(E. 3) Sappho sees the stars in a way which Tennyson echoes when he writes:
“As when in heaven the stars about the moon Look beautiful.” Or again
Sappho’s love of nature appears in the line (E. 112): “the moon rose full and
the maidens took their stand about the altar.” In the new Ode to Atthis the
moon is not silver (as in E. 3) but rosy-fingered: “after sunset the rosy-
fingered moon beside the stars that are about her, when she spreads her light
o’er briny sea and eke o’er flowery field, while the dew lies so fair on the
ground and the roses revive and the dainty anthrysc and the melilot with all
its blooms” (E. 86). Recently (1922) A. C. Benson in The Reed of Pan has
combined fragment (E. 3) with the beautiful half stanza quoted above, under
the title Moonrise:
 The moon high-hung in the hollow night
Resistless pours her silver tide;
Swift, swift the stars withdraw their light,
And their diminished glories hide.

And where cool streams through reed-beds slip,

The breeze through the orchard alley stirs,
And slumber well-nigh seems to drip
From the dark arms of dusky firs.

In another fragment, which we quote below, Sappho pictures a spring

midnight with almost astronomical exactness. She loves the sun: “I have
loved daintiness [from childhood] and for me love possesses the brightness
and beauty of the sun.” William Stebbing in his Minstrel of Love expands the
two verses into ten, the last “Dazzling my brain with gazing on the Sun.”
Sappho knows the golden-sandalled and queenly dawn (E. 19, 177). She
wrote an ode to Hesperus, the Evening Star, of which we have only the
tantalizing beginning, “fairest of all the stars that shine” (E. 32). Another
graceful fragment quoted in antiquity to show the charm of repetition (E.
149)83 on the Evening Star, which comes in Catullus too, has influenced not
only Byron in Don Juan but Andrew Lang in Helen of Troy (II. 4) and
especially Tennyson (see p. 206). “That Greek blockhead,” as Sir Walter Scott
was called, though he knew more Greek than most undergraduate students of
Greek to-day, even if he didn’t know the Sappho fragment, expresses the
same idea in the Doom of Dever Girl, “All meet whom day and care divide.”
Sappho is fond of birds, the dove, the lovely or heavenly swallow (E. 122),
the nightingale. The doves drive Aphrodite’s car in the first ode and in E. 16
“their heart grows light and they slacken the labor of their pinions.” Ben
Jonson took from Sappho (E. 138) his line in The Sad Shepherd, “the dear
good angel of the spring, The nightingale,” and Swinburne, “The tawny sweet-
winged thing Whose cry was but of spring.” A fragment published even since
Edmonds’ book speaks of the “clear-voiced nightingales.” She knows exactly
what crickets do at noon of a summer’s day. Listen to their song (E. 94),
rescued from Alcaeus, to whom Bergk had wrongly ascribed it:
 And clear song from beneath her wings doth raise
When she shouts-down the perpendicular blaze
Of the outspread sunshine of noon.

(Edmonds)84

We see the woman also in her love of flowers as well as of birds. Flowers
are her favorites and she worships them with almost the modern reverence of
the Japanese, whom I have sometimes seen saying their morning prayers to a
beautiful bouquet. Take, for example, this simple but pretty flower-picture of
Sappho’s (E. 107):

I saw one day a-gathering flowers

The daintiest little maid.
(Edmonds)

She sympathizes with the hyacinth (E. 151), which the shepherd tramples
under foot on the mountain, and uses it in one of the most attractive flower-
similes in all literature. Listen to this aubade which has been recently found
and very tentatively restored (E. 82). It gives a delightful glimpse also of
Sappho’s ménage:

‘Sappho, I swear if you come not forth I will love you no more. O rise
and shine upon us and set free your beloved strength from the bed, and
then like a pure lily beside the spring hold aloof your Chian robe and wash
you in the water. And Cleïs shall bring down from your presses saffron
smock and purple robe; and let a mantle be put over you and be crowned
with a wreath of flowers tied about your head; and so come, sweet with all
the beauty with which you make me mad. And do you, Praxinoa, roast us
nuts, so that I may make the maidens a sweeter breakfast; for one of the
Gods, child, has vouchsafed us a boon. This very day has Sappho the
fairest of all women vowed that she will surely return unto Mytilene the
dearest of all towns—return with us, the mother with her children.’
Dearest Atthis, can you then forget all this that happened in the old
days?... (Edmonds)

Or take this other example of Sappho’s love of flowers which Symonds has
expanded into a sonnet too long to quote here. I give Tucker’s new version:
 Take sprigs of anise fair
With soft hands twined,
And round thy bonny hair
A chaplet bind;
The Muse with smiles will bless
Thy blossoms gay,
While from the garlandless
She turns away.

Sappho speaks of the golden pulses (E. 139):

[It was summer when I found you

In the meadow long ago,]
And the golden vetch was growing
By the shore.
(Bliss Carman)

Sappho knows the little and common flowers, the dainty anthrysc and melilot,
the violets and the lilies (E. 86, 83, 82), but, like Pindar, she especially loves
the rose. Meleager’s garland of song assigned the rose to Sappho. She says in
one of the new fragments (E. 83): “with many a garland of violets and sweet
roses mingled, you have decked my flowing locks as I stood by your side, and
with many a woven necklet made of a hundred blossoms you have adorned
my dainty throat.” Philostratus in his Letters (51) says: “Sappho loves the rose
and always crowns it with a meed of praise, likening beautiful maidens to it;
and she compares it to the bared fore-arms of the Graces.” Fragment E. 68
says: “Hither pure rose-armed Graces, daughters of Zeus.” Sappho’s love of
the rose has led earlier collectors of Sappho’s fragments to include among her
verses the famous song in praise of the rose quoted by Achilles Tatius in his
love romance on Clitophon and Leucippe, which Elizabeth Barrett Browning
has translated:
 If Zeus chose us a King of the Flowers in his mirth,
He would call to the Rose and would royally crown it,
For the Rose, ho, the Rose, is the grace of the earth,
Is the light of the plants that are growing upon it.

For the Rose, ho, the Rose, is the eye of the flowers,
Is the blush of the meadows that feel themselves fair—
Is the lightning of beauty that strikes through the bowers
On pale lovers who sit in the glow unaware.

Ho, the Rose breathes of love! Ho, the Rose lifts the cup
To the red lips of Cypris invoked for a guest!
Ho, the Rose, having curled its sweet leaves for the world,
Takes delight in the motion its petals keep up,
As they laugh to the wind as it laughs from the west!

Sappho, however, does mention the roses of Pieria in the famous lines
spoken with characteristic teacher’s tone, almost in the manner of Mrs.
Poyser. According to Plutarch, in one passage, the verses are addressed to a
wealthy woman, in another passage,85 to a woman of no refinement or
learning; according to Stobaeus,86 to a woman of no education; probably it
was some rich but uncultured Lesbian girl, who would not go to the Lesbian
Smith or Vassar or Bryn Mawr:

Thou shalt die and be laid low in the grave, hidden from mortal ken
Unremembered, and no song of the Muse wakens thy name again;
No Pierian rose brightens thy brow, lost in the nameless throng,
Thy dark spirit shall flit forth like a dream, bodiless ghosts among.
(Shorey)

For another expanded version by Swinburne in his Anactoria I must refer to

Wharton. Sappho had known and loved the wee wee maiden Atthis when she
was an awkward school girl, but now in the bloom of beauty after a sad
parting the fickle Atthis has flitted away to another woman’s college and clean
forgotten Sappho for a rival teacher, Andromeda; “I loved you, Atthis, long
ago, when my own girlhood was still all flowers, and you—you seemed to me
a small ungainly child” (E. 48).87 “So you hate to think of me, Atthis; ’Tis all
Andromeda now” (Edmonds).
 Lesbus was a land of flowers, of the rose and the violet, “a land rich in corn
and oil and wine, in figs and olives, in building-wood and tinted marble,” as
Tucker says. But this triangular island (about thirty-five by twenty-five miles)
had mountains rising from two to three thousand feet at its corners and two
deep fiords on its southern coast. From the northern coast Sappho must often
have looked across the short seven miles of laughing sea upon Troyland and
thought of the Homeric poems in which Lesbus played such an important
rôle.88 The air like that of Athens as described by Pindar, with a glamor
wreathing such cities as Smyrna, was so translucent that in the northeast
across the dividing sea many-fountained Ida could easily be seen. It is
perhaps an accident that there is so little mention of mountain or sea in
Sappho. But she was no “landlubber,” as Professor Allinson would have us
believe.89 Pindar and the other lyric poets were acquainted with the sea and
so must Sappho have known it, as she daily saw the ships fly in and out of
their haven on white wings (cf. first stanza of poem on p. 82). In one of the
new fragments (E. 86) we have a marvellous picture of the sea in the last
stanza of a poem which otherwise, with its love of flowers, with the beautiful
simile of the rosy-fingered moon, is one of the most perfect things in
literature. The telepathic and telegraphic sympathy of Sappho startles us and
the wireless message sent by night across the severing sea, whose sigh you
can hear in the original Greek, anticipates the modern radio.90 As this is a
memory poem, and Anactoria, like Hallam, is “lost,” for the time being at
least, I have followed as a model Tennyson’s In Memoriam in metre, stanza,
and rhyming. The first line seems to be “remembered” in rhyme as it were
after the interval during which the second and third lines have been made and
rhymed.

SAPPHO’S GIRL FRIEND ACROSS THE SEA

Atthis, in Sardis far away
Anactoria dear to thee
And dear indeed alike to me
Now dwells, but hither often stray

Her thoughts sent usward by the power

That lives anew the life she loved
When thou her glorious goddess proved,—
Thy songs her joy at every hour.

You were her sun, now set too soon;

Among the Lydian dames she shines
As, after sunset, glow the lines
Of light the rosy-fingered moon

Throws on her retinue of stars

Spreading a far-flung lane of beams
That gleams the salt sea o’er and streams
Across the rocky shore that bars

In vain the light that floods its gloom,

And leaping landward bathes the fields
Where many a flower its beauty yields
With fragrant variegated bloom.

Full fair the dew springs forth and holds

The light, the roses lift their heads,
The dainty anthryscs quit their beds,
The clover, honey-rich, unfolds.

Through all this beauty, hard unrest

And longing crushing like a stone
Her tender heart, ofttimes atone
She wanders with a weighted breast.

She cannot calm her quivering lip

And through the balmy, scented dark
She cries aloud we must embark
And thither come on some swift ship.

Full clear her words to thee and me,

F i ht ith ll h
 For night with all her many ears
Their ardent sound full gladly hears
And sends us o’er the severing sea.

(D. M. R.)
This ode alone marks Sappho as a great poetess. The reasons are: (1) the
loving notice of little and common flowers, (2) the comparison of Anactoria
when surrounded by other women to the moon in the midst of her
surrounding stars, the bold personification of the moon secured by the use of
the single figure “rosy-fingered,” (3) sudden and masterful survey of land and
sea, (4) the successful centering of attention upon Anactoria’s homesickness
even in the midst of such far-reaching beauty of land and sea, (5) the
remarkably forceful portrayal of what in our day we call thought-transference
as seen, for example, in Tennyson’s Aylmer’s Field or Enoch Arden, (6) and
not least important, the simplicity and sharpness of outline displayed in the
imagery. “Night” is a vague, widely diffused, mystic thing, but Sappho makes
us see her a thing of many ears and one of them close to Anactoria’s face.
Night does not send a mystic intimation such as Tennyson’s vibration of light
might indicate. But she speaks right out in a clear voice that carries far
enough to reach across the sea to Sappho. A seventh reason is the strange,
hot emotion of love and sorrow and longing that throbs like a pulse in every
line and makes the whole letter a living creature. Milton said and lovers of
poetry have always agreed that poetry must be simple, sensuous, and
passionate. By sensuous he of course meant expressed in images involving
the use of the bodily senses. Is there anything in poetry, ancient or modern,
that more exactly meets Milton’s requirements than these few lines of
Sappho’s letter to her girl friend? Now if this is evident to the reader of an
English translation, it is vastly more so to one who knowing the meaning of
the words has read them in the Greek and then read them again because
they were so sweet, and read them a third time and many times until the
music haunts him like the face of a lover. This will rank with Matthew Arnold’s
verses To Marguerite in no. 5 of his series of little poems on Switzerland:
 Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown
...
Now round us spreads the watery plain—
Oh might our marges meet again!

Who order’d that their longing’s fire

Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?
Who renders vain their deep desire?
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.

Sappho’s last verse also reminds us of Horace’s Oceano dissociabili91 and

Tennyson’s “bond-breaking sea.” Fragment E. 41 refers to the mariner at sea
in a storm; and E. 66 pictures a beautiful scene on the sea, where “Hector
and his comrades bring from sacred Thebe and everflowing Placia, by ship
upon the briny sea, the dainty Andromache of the glancing eye.” (Edmonds)
Sappho’s verses are full of color, of bright and beautiful things. She ranks
with Pindar in her special devotion to gold, not for its value but for its fine
amber lustre and its permanency (E. 110). The Cyprian queen of love sits on
a throne of rich color and splendor, with inlaid wood or metal (E. 1); she
“dispenses the nectar of love in beakers of gold” in what was perhaps the
introductory poem of Sappho’s Wedding-Songs (E. 6):

Come thou, foam-born Kypris, and pour in dainty

Cups of amber gold thy delicate nectar
Subtly mixed with fire that will swiftly kindle
Love in our bosoms.
(O’Hara’s Love’s Banquet)

Aphrodite wears a golden coronal (E. 9), is herself golden (E. 157), and her
handmaid is golden-shining (E. 24). The Muses are golden (E. 11), perhaps
also the Nereids (E. 36). They have a golden house (E. 129):

Hither now, O Muses, leaving the golden

House of God, unseen in the azure spaces.
(O’Hara’s Muses)
The dawn is golden-slippered (E. 19); something or somebody is more golden
than gold (E. 60). “Gold is pure of rust” (E. 109); “Gold is a child of Zeus; no
moth nor worm devours it; and it overcomes the strongest of mortal hearts”
(E. 110).92 Sappho’s daughter Cleïs looks like a golden flower (E. 130);
“Golden pulse grew on the shore” (E. 139, cf. O’Hara’s poem Golden Pulse).
One of many fragments of interest to the student of Greek life and antiquities
speaks of “gold-knuckle bowls” (E. 191).93 Sappho was cited by Menaechmus
of Sicyon in his Treatise on Artists as the first to use a lyre called the pectis,
and she invented the Mixo-Lydian mode, particularly sensual or emotional,
which the Greek tragedians copied from her.
Sappho makes allusions to children which are natural and tender (E. 130).
In similes she uses children simply and directly as in The Ode to Hesperus (E.
149) and in the verse, which may refer to a sparrow and which Catullus
imitated, “I flutter like a child after her mother” (E. 142).
Sappho from her tender years was inured to the sorrows as well as the joys
of love. Two of her fragments (E. 111, 135), the first perhaps a complete
poem, represent the loneliness of a long night spent in vain waiting for a
lover. Cipollini (1890) and others have often set these to music. They are
popular ballads which Sappho must have used just as Burns did in writing
Auld Lang Syne. As Tucker says: “It is probable that she is setting one such
prehistoric lyrical idea to new words or recasting one such vagrom ditty.” He is
thinking, I imagine, of such a Scottish ballad as:
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