SAPPHO

168
Gellins uff Nights fon Niobe’s children]: For Homer
says that she had six of either sex, Euripides seven, Sapplin
nine, and Bacchylides and Pindar ten.?

169

Servius on Vereil sfewend [seven of their children every
year]: Some commentators take this to mean that seven
boys and seven girls, as Plato says in the Pivelo and Sappho
in her Lyric Poems . . . , were set free by Theseus.

170

Id, BeJogres [απ the theft of Prometheus 7: Prometheus
.. . after he had created man, is said to have ascended with
Minerva’s help into heaven, and there lighting a torch at the
wheel of the Sun, to have stolen fire and revealed it to man.

Angered at the theft, the Gods sent two ills wpon earth,
fever? and disease, as we are told by Sappho and Hesiod,
171
Philostratus Lelfers: Sappho loves the τόκος and always
erowns it with a meed of praise, likening beautiful maidens
to it: and she compares it to the bared fore-arms of the
“Graces.
172
Himerius Orw‘ions: Your case is now to be likened to the
éhoir-leader of the Muses himself, such as he is when both
Sappho and Pindar send him ina poem, adorned with golden
hair and with a lyre and drawn by swans, to dance with the
Muses and (sraces on Mount Helicon; or sueh again as is
the Great Reveller—as the lyre calls Dionysus—when the
Muse-inspired povts lead him in the first dawn of Spring.
crowned ‘with Springtime blossoms” and ivy-clusters, now
to the topmost heights of Caueasus and the valleys of Lydia.
now to the crags of Parnassus and the Rock of Delphi. ©. . 8
γ

1 Sappho probably in 140 2 }» suggests women
* some of H.'s yorum are borrowed. ¢.y. ‘springtime
blossoms’ from J/, 2. 89

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