a celebrated poetess of antiquity, who for her excellence in the art has been called the Tenth Muse, was born at Mitylene, in the isle of Lesbos, about 610 years before Christ. She was contemporary with Stesichorus and Alcæus.

Of her numerous poems there is nothing remaining but some small fragments, which the ancient scholiasts have cited; a hymn to Venus, preserved by Dionysius of Halicarnassus; and an ode.

Ovid introduces her as making a sacrifice to Phaon, one of her paramours. She fell desperately in love with Phaon, and did all she could to win him, but in vain; upon which she threw herself headlong from a rock, and died. The Mitylenians held her in such high esteem that they paid her sovereign honours after her death, and stamped their money with her image. The Romans erected a noble statue of porphyry to her; and the ancients as well as moderns have done honour to her memory. Vossius says that none of the Greek poets excelled Sappho for sweetness of verse; and that she made Archilochus the model of her style, but at the same time took care to soften the severity of his expression. It must be granted, from what is left us of Sappho, that Longinus had great reason to extol the admirable genius of this woman; for there is in what remains something delicate, harmonious, and impassioned to the last degree.