and again with lofty scorn she addresses some other woman:

"But thou shalt lie dead, nor shall there ever be remembrance of
thee then or in the time to come, for thou hast no share in the
roses of Pieria; but thou shalt wander unseen even in the halls of
Hades, flitting forth amid the shades of the dead."

The words sound in our ears with a melancholy close as we remember how
hopelessly lost is almost every one of those poems that all Hellas
loved and praised as long as the love and praise of Hellas was of any
worth. Remembrance among men was, to her, the Muses' crowning gift; that
which should distinguish her from ordinary mortals, even beyond the
grave, and grant her new life in death. But it was only for her songs'
sake that she cared to live; she looked for immortality only because she
felt that they were too fair to die.

It was almost by accident that the name of Sappho was first associated
with the slanders that have ever since clung round it.

By the close of the fourth century, B.C., Athenian comedy had
degenerated into brilliant and witty and scandalous farce, in many
essentials resembling the new Comedy of the Restoration in England. But
the vitiated Athenian palate required a seasoning which did not commend
itself to English taste; it was necessary that the shafts of the
writer's wit should strike some real and well-known personage.

Politics, which had furnished so many subjects and so many characters to
Aristophanes, were now a barren field, and public life at Athens in
those days was nothing if not political. Hence arose the practice of