Sappho was the title of plays by six different Greek comedians, Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiphanes, Diphilus, Ephippus, and Timocles. Of those by Ameipsias and Amphis we have only a single word, and the fragments of the others throw little light on the question as to how much was taken from Sappho herself. To the plays of Plato, Menander, and Antiphanes on the legends of Phaon and the Leucadian Leap, we have already referred (p. 41).
In the Hellenistic Age, after the time of Alexander, Sappho was very popular. Clearchus, the Peripatetic philosopher (300 B.C.) drew on her for his Treatise on Love Matters.139 In the third book of his Biographies Aristoxenus, a writer on music (320 B.C.), classes her among inventors as did Menaechmus of Sicyon in his treatise On Artists. He says that “her books were her companions.”140 The third century B.C. showed a serious interest in the Lesbians, and Theocritus has many imitations of Sappho in dialect,141 metre, and content. In the second idyl Simaetha’s description of her feelings is taken from Sappho. In the seventh idyl, the picture of the farm to which two friends walked out from Syracuse in order to attend a harvest home festival, Theocritus is imitating Sappho’s Garden of the Nymphs, especially in ll. 135 ff.: “Close at hand the sacred water from the nymphs’ own cave welled forth with murmurs musical” (Lang). Probably the eighteenth idyl on Helen and Menelaus borrowed much from Sappho, since the first lines seem to be cited as Sappho’s by Himerius. Line 38, “O maid of beauty, maid of grace,” is lifted bodily from Sappho. The twenty-eighth idyl on A Distaff undoubtedly employed Sappho as a model, and likewise the twenty-ninth and thirtieth idyls.
Callimachus (270 B.C.) in his first hymn (ll. 95 ff.) echoes the fragment which influenced Pindar (E. 100): “Wealth without virtue cannot make men happy, nor virtue without wealth, therefore grant both virtue and wealth.” It was about the same time that a fellow townsman, Callias, interpreted her poems as well as those of Alcaeus. Apollonius of Rhodes (260 B.C.) knew her, and so did the Lament for Bion, which has been attributed doubtfully to Moschus (150 B.C.): “Oh, Bion, Mytilene bewails thy song evermore instead of Sappho’s” (III. 91). Bion (100 B.C.?) in his Lament for Adonis was probably influenced by Sappho’s words about the dying Adonis (E. 103) and used in l. 44 the same word as Sappho did in E. 29. The philosopher Chrysippus (240 B.C.) mentions her (fr. 36, 69), as does Cicero’s contemporary, the poet-philosopher Philodemus (60 B.C.). In fragment 57a he speaks of her, and in an epigram he uses as an “intelligence test” of an educated woman a knowledge of the poems of Sappho. Alexander the Sophist gave a university extension course of lectures on her poems. A little later in the Augustan Age the great literary critic and grammarian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus (20 B.C.), quotes the hymn to Aphrodite, and Strabo calls her a marvel. Living probably sometime in the first century A.D., the anonymous author of the Treatise on the Sublime quotes the second ode. A little later, about 85 A.D., the golden-tongued orator, Dio, cites her, and his contemporary Plutarch often refers to her, in his Essay on Love, 18; in his Dinner-table Problems, VII. 8, 2; in his Moralia, 243b, 622c, and 406a, where there is a comparison with the practice of Paiderastia of Socrates. Plutarch prefers Anacreon, but refers to at least four of the fragments which are preserved from Sappho (E. 2, 48, 71, 137).
Among the Romans Sappho was flattered abundantly, if imitation is the sincerest flattery. As Tucker says: “the most genuine lyric poet of Rome, Catullus, and its most skilful artificer of odes, Horace, both freely copied her. They did more than imitate; they plagiarised, they translated, sometimes almost word for word.” The flattery does not begin until the time of Cicero, for Latin comedy, unlike Greek comedy, paid little heed to the Lesbian poetess. Cicero refers to Silanion’s statue (p. 109). Lucretius must have taken his description at second hand, perhaps from some medical source, if he did not take the verses of the second ode of Sappho direct as his model for his description of fear.142 Catullus (84-54 B.C.),143 who caught the Greek rhythm even better than Horace, translated the same ode in his famous fifty-first poem, addressed to Lesbia, and adapted the fragments on the hyacinth and the evening star in his epithalamia, the sixty-first and sixty-second songs in the Catullian collection. Probably in the sixty-second he is imitating a lost poem of Sappho. The verse of Sappho (E. 142), “I flutter like a child after her mother,” referring perhaps to a wounded bird, has been used by Catullus in his well-known third poem, on the Passer, which probably also imitated a poem of Sappho.
In XI. 22-24, Catullus was perhaps thinking of Sappho’s stricken hyacinth, although some rustic proverb may also have been in his mind:
From these lines and not from Sappho herself, of whom there is no echo in Virgil, Virgil took his description of the dying Euryalus:
We are reminded of Robert Burns’ To A Mountain Daisy:
We refer on p. 9 to Catullus’ allusion to Sappho in XXXV. 17.
In the age of Augustus, even if Virgil neglects Sappho, in Horace (65-8 B.C.) she is re-born. If Edmonds144 is right in his analysis of a passage in Dio’s Corinthian Oration, two fragments (E. 76, 77) of Sappho are incorporated there from a poem which Horace imitated in the same metre:
Edmonds even goes so far as to suggest that Horace imitated not only the poem written by Sappho, but its position. For he thinks that this poem of Sappho was an epilogue to her collection; and Horace placed his imitation at the end of the third book, when he probably thought it would be his last. Horace seems to be adapting Sappho in the twelfth ode of the third book (see Landor’s imitation, p. 202). He composed twenty-six or more odes in the Sapphic metre, which he fitted to Italian measures, and he does them well, though in colder Latin. In him
He pictures her in Hades’ home:146
The meaning is simply that she is “singing plaintively (or complaining) about the girls of her country,” perhaps because they did not all return her love, as Atthis deserted her for Andromeda (E. 81); not that she complained of her fellow-maidens for not loving Phaon. Unconsciously Horace helped to defame Sappho’s character, for the epithet “mascula,” in the Epistle I. 19, 28, repeated by Ausonius, Idyl, VI. 21, has led to gross abuse of Sappho’s good fame.147 It has no relation to mascula libido and should be interpreted in the light of Statius148 as referring simply to the fact that she was an imitator of the measures of Archilochus and the equal of men poets. Of elegiac writers, Tibullus and Propertius (II. 8, 33) were influenced only in a general way by the personal and ardent poetry of Sappho’s lyrics. Ovid in the fifteenth epistle of the Heroides pictured Sappho as a passionate and voluptuous hetaera who could not win the love of the beautiful Phaon. With passion she burns “as when through ripened corn By driving winds the spreading flames are borne,” and seeks release and ease, “from the raging seas.” Ovid (43 B.C.-18 A.D.) in this letter and also in the Tristia (II. 365, Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas) completed the Roman defamation of Sappho’s good name begun by Horace, and so led the way for the modern idea. From this disgrace she has been rescued by Madame Anne Le Fèvre Dacier (1681), by Welcker (1816), the bachelor who loved Sappho’s genius and who by his chivalrous vindication made himself her knight, and by Wilamowitz (1896),—her three great defenders.
Seneca (circa 4 B.C.-65 A.D.) in his Letters to Lucilius (88) quotes a book of the grammarian Didymus on the question Whether Sappho was a prostitute. In the Flavian period, Statius in his miscellaneous poems, called Silvae, mentions her:148
About the same time Martial (c. 40-104 A.D.) cites a poem149 of Canius on Sappho: “Sappho the lover praised a poetess: more pure is Theophila, yet Sappho was not more learned” (Ker).
In the second century A.D. Sappho was especially popular. In the time of Hadrian, Dracon of Stratonicea wrote a book about Sappho’s metres. In the days of Plutarch150 the songs of Sappho were often sung at dinner parties. And Aulus Gellius (170 A.D.) in his Attic Nights151 shows us that Sappho was all the rage in his day as in the time of Plutarch. It was the custom “after the chief courses were disposed of and the time was come for wine ... to have delightful renderings of a number of the songs of Anacreon and Sappho.” In the second century many writers on grammar, such as Apollonius Dyscolus and his son Herodian, Hephaestion (on metre), Demetrius (perhaps first century A.D.), Hermogenes, Maximus of Tyre, and Aristides (on rhetoric), Aelian, Pausanias, and Pollux quote Sappho abundantly. The great satirist Lucian (c. 120-c. 200 A.D.) calls her “the delicious glory of the Lesbians,”152 makes her the standard for ladies of learning who write poems, and has her contribute to one of his pictures “the elegance of life.”153 In Loves (I, p. 905) he uses almost the very first words of the second ode. That Galen, another writer of the second century A.D., who knew not only medicine but also the popularity of Sappho, was speaking with authority on literature when he said that Sappho was “the poetess,” is shown by the fact that most of the papyri with quotations from Sappho date from his time or from the third century, the century when Athenaeus and Philostratus, who cited much from Sappho, were living.
In the fourth century Eusebius, Themistius, and the Emperor Julian, as well as Himerius, often quote her. Ausonius in Idyl VI says:
Claudian in his work on the Marriage of Honorius and Mary (ll. 229-235) makes Mary “never cease under her mother’s guidance to unroll the writers of Rome and Greece, all that old Homer sang, or Thracian Orpheus, or that Sappho set to music with Lesbian quill” (Platnauer). In the fifth century the Christian writer Synesius and that compiler of chrestomathies Stobaeus often quote from Sappho. There is nothing to be gained by giving a long list of the writers on technical subjects to whom we owe so many fragments of Sappho not found on papyrus or parchment. Enough have been cited to prove that Sappho was much read in the first four and even the fifth centuries A.D. Himerius154 especially proves her popularity in the fourth century, for he rewrites many of her songs in poetic prose and makes much use of Sapphic epithets and repetitions of words. The fragments (E. 68, 101) have influenced him in his Orations,155 and in the epithalamium,156 which he dedicated to his friend Severus in 354 A.D., Sappho’s influence is very apparent (see above pp. 88 ff.). The bride is likened to an apple and the bridegroom to Achilles, although in the fragments preserved we have no Achilles but rather Ares.
The many epigrams157 referring to Sappho, from Plato’s couplet written in the fourth century B.C. to the time of Paul the Silentiary (who died 575 A.D.), some of which we have quoted above, bear out the testimony for Sappho’s continuous influence through these thousand years; and now we can trace the reading of Sappho down to the seventh century, thanks to the finding in Egypt of two manuscripts of that century (E. 34, 82-86). Probably, however, Sappho’s works were not much read even as early as the end of the sixth century. If so, Paul the Silentiary would never have written the epigram that appears in the Greek Anthology.158 I give a literal translation: “Soft Sappho’s kisses; soft the embraces of her snowy limbs, soft every part of her, but her soul is of unyielding adamant. For her love stops at her lips; the rest belongs to her virginity. And who could endure this? Perhaps one who has borne it, will endure the thirst of Tantalus easily.” As Professor Gildersleeve159 says: “Could Paulus have ever read anything of burning Sappho? We often envy the Byzantines their richer stores, but they seem to have been more familiar with Menander than with the early lyrists.... Tell us, Pothos and Himeros, why has Paulus taken the name of Sappho in vain? We forgive him for playing with Theocritus’ Galatea but he ought to have let Sappho sleep alone.” Perhaps Paulus had heard of the question debated in school and society ever since the days of Didymus; and so he came to her defence with an interesting compromise on her tantalizing chastity.
How long after the seventh century Sappho was read we cannot say, but in mediaeval days men were either entirely ignorant of her or had erroneous ideas. By the ninth century she seems to have become almost unknown, otherwise the critic and compiler Photius160 would have preserved some of her works. He refers only to the tradition of her love for Phaon and the Leucadian Leap, and to the hypothesis that she was different from Sappho the courtesan, as she had been branded by that father of the church, Tatian (about 140 A.D.), who called her a female harlot, love-mad, γύναιον πορνικὸν ἐρωτομανές. That idea undoubtedly led to the burning of her books, according to Cardan, under Gregory Nazianzen, about 380 A.D. According to Scaliger, the burning took place in Constantinople and Rome in 1073. In any case, no manuscript has survived in Europe; and it is strange that now not even her legendary adventures with Phaon appear in the popular literature. The Etymologicum Magnum (1000 A.D.?) mentions her only five times, but in that way preserves for us five fragments. After the time of that lexicon and Suidas, the mediaeval encyclopaedias and the Speculum Historiale of Vincent de Beauvais of the thirteenth century make no mention of her, though they cite many another Greek poet. Georgius Cedrenus (1015 A.D.?), a Greek monk, who in his Compendium Historiarum said that she was “the first of the Muses,” is about the only one of this time who notices her. Anna Comnena,161 daughter of the Emperor Comnenus I, quotes as Sappho’s the verses supposed to be addressed to Sappho by Alcaeus (E. 119). And the archbishop Eustathius preserves a few fragments. Dante makes no reference to her, unless possibly very faintly in the verse “le muse lattar più ch’altri mai.” Boccaccio (1313-1375), who seems to have been forgotten by modern writers on Sappho, includes her among his Delle Donne Famose, “ma confortata da più caldo fervore d’animo (i suoi versi sono famosi) ... e certamente non sono più famose che la sua corona le corone dei re, nè le mitre de’ sacerdoti, nè le lauree de’ trionfanti.” Petrarch (1304-1374) mentions Sappho in his Triumph of Love (IV. 25):162
In his Tenth Eclogue he dedicated four verses to her:
Petrarch’s friend, Domenico di Bandino of Arezzo (1340-c. 1415), professor at Bologna, gave her a brief article in his encyclopaedic Fons Memorabilium Universi. The other commentators on Petrarch ignore her. Giorgio Merula (1424-1494), Poliziano’s adversary, accepts the whole Ovidian legend as historical fact and even adds a new item to Sappho’s life by giving her a son Didas by her wealthy Andrian husband, Cercylas.
The Renaissance. There was now a second “floruit” of Sappho’s fame, but like her previous popularity among the Romans the second renaissance was not favorable to Sappho, and there was no true understanding of the historical Sappho. It was in the fifteenth century that Ovid’s perverse epistle was discovered and from that time on it biased all Sapphic literature. The great humanist Poliziano knew her slightly and has left a Latin version of the epigram on Timas. Domizio Calderini (1447-1477), the learned though not overcritical humanist, based his little knowledge of Sappho on an uncritical use of Suidas. He even falsified Horace’s querentem by forging in its place gaudentem, and transformed Sappho from the leader of a sacred sorority into a tribade163 or lover of her pupils, even of the famous poetess Erinna. The result was that the great injustice done Sappho by Horace and especially by Ovid was much aggravated. Thanks to Tatian and Calderini, working at different times and in different fields, Sappho was even more misjudged in the seventeenth century. It would be idle to cite the many authors who mention or malign her but who give us little material of literary importance: Giraldi (1489-1552), Ludovico di Castelvetro (1505-1571), Giorgio Carraria (1514 A.D.), Iacopo Filippo Pellenagra (1517 A.D.), Francesco Anguillac (1572), who well renders the second ode, “Parmi quell’uomo equale essere à i Dei,” Lorenzo Crasso (1625?), Ugo Foscolo (1776-1827), and many another.164 One needs only to read the long account with many references in the famous Dictionnaire historique et critique (1696) by that learned compiler, Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), who because of his scepticism lost his professorship of philosophy three years before (1693). In his ignorance he assumed that Sappho must have been bad and repeated the usual errors about her. I quote what he says ironically with regard to the charity of Madame Dacier: “charité de Mlle Le Fèvre qui a tâché pour l’honneur de Sappho de rendre le fait incertain; mais je la crois trop raisonnable pour se fâcher que nous en croyons nos propres yeux.” Anne Le Fèvre165 in 1681 had made the first real defense of Sappho’s character, long before Wilhelm Heinse’s Ardinghello, and one hundred and thirty-five years before Johannes Friedrich Welcker,166 who so influenced Goethe and Comparetti and Wilamowitz.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Sappho was rehabilitated and countless works of literature and art show her influence. Though the old perverse idea pervades all forms of literature and art in many insidious ways and Sappho loses her real personality and becomes a heroine of Romance, and although the legends connected with her are given a prominent place in the sunlight, yet even this proves her great potentiality in modern times.
The romantic Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), who translated passages from the Odyssey and wrote an interesting essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients, composed also a Last Song of Sappho. In this poem, drawn from Ovid, he has given the modern reader a strong impression for better or worse of the stormy and passionate soul of the great poetess. As in his Brutus, Leopardi is giving his own views of life, which are biased by his physical affliction; but he blends his sorrow with that of nature and rises, especially in the third stanza, almost to the heights attained by Aeschylus in his Prometheus. He ends his song with beautiful mysterious pathos:
One is reminded of Sappho’s silver moon in Leopardi’s calm first lines, and also of Sappho’s autumn fragment in the lines “where in shade Of drooping willows doth a liquid stream Display its pure and crystal course....” Leopardi also translated the famous midnight song (p. 78) and imitated the third fragment in La Impazienza. Carducci’s (1888) comment on Leopardi is worth quoting: “la poetessa di Lesbo non fu nè brutta nè infelice come il Leopardi l’accolse a imagine sua da una tarda tradizione, e che della bellezza e dell’amore intese gustò, e cantò più non potesse il Leopardi.” Leopardi believed in two Sapphos, as did Zannoni (1822), following the judgment of Visconti. About 1793, Pagnini (Pilenejo), wishing to praise Teresa Bandettini Landucci, likened her to Sappho in genius but not in habit:
Parini about 1777 dedicated an ode to Lady Pellegrina Amoretti d’Oneglia on her graduation from the University of Padua, La Laurea, in which he said that if instead of studying law she had given herself to literature she would have been the equal of Sappho. In 1782 Verri published Le Avventure di Saffo, in which there is a paraphrase of the second ode. This romance was written in good literary style and had some fine thoughts and considerable Greek atmosphere. It went through more than a dozen editions, and was twice translated into French. In 1787 Parini celebrated the seductive qualities of a Venetian Signora Cecilia Tron in a poem of which I quote the first two stanzas:
One evening in 1827, as the story goes, the great Manzoni in the presence of Lamartine called La Palli, the happy-hearted Italian poetess, a “Saffo novella.” Eurica Dionigi was called the “Saffo Lazia,” and Anassilide was named “Saffo campestre” by the inhabitants on the Piave. Their verses, however, fall far short of the real Sappho. In 1857 Giovanni Meli published La Morti di Saffu; and many another Italian writer has published poems in her honor, Gemma, Cipolla, Botti, etc.
Tragedies on the subject of Sappho in Italy have been few, among others those of Luigi Scevola (1815) and Salvatore Cammarono (1842); that of Leopoldo Marenco (1880) pictured Sappho as one of the Furies who was rejected by Phaon when he became enamored of another woman. Giovanni Pacini (Naples, 1840) first produced an opera on the theme, but changed the figure of Phaon to one who fell in love with Sappho and became jealous of Alcaeus, but was ready to die with him.
In recent years Carducci, in his Primavere Elleniche, makes Sappho and Alcaeus follow Apollo across the Aegean in a boat drawn by two white swans:
The influence of Sappho on Italian literature is also seen in the many Italian translations of some or all of the fragments; Cappone (1670), Rogati (1783), Pilenejo (1793), Broglio d’Ajano (1804), Leopardi (1816), Benedetti da Cortona (1819), Foscolo (1822), Milani (1824), Zanotto (1844), Jacopo d’Oria (1845), Nievo (1858), Viani (1858), Bustelli (1863), Canini (1885), and others have translated the famous folk-song (see p. 78). Giovambattista Possevini (1565), Francesco Anguilla (1572), Pinelli (1639), Cappone (1670), Corsini (1700), Conti (1739), Verre (1780), Pindemonte (1781), Rogati (1783), Vincenzo Imperiale (1784), Pilenejo (1793), Tommaseo (1827), Comparetti (1876), Ardizzone (1876), Fraccaroli (1878), Ambrosoli (1878), Gemma (1879), Cavallotti (1883), De Gubernatis (1883), Canini (1885) have translated the Hymn to Aphrodite. Rogati (1783), Gori (1801), Montalti (1804), Broglio d’Ajano (1804), Sabbione (1817), Venini (1818), Caselli (1819), Foscolo (1823), Milani (1824), Costa (1825), Accio (1830), Monti (1832), Leone (1843), Nievo (1858), Canna (1871), Fraccaroli (1878), Canini (1885) have translated or adapted the second ode. D’Ajano (1804) gave the first complete version of all the old fragments, and in 1863 Bustelli did likewise,—neither of a high order of merit. In 1890 Cipollini published his verse translation of the first two odes and of the fragment about the Pleiades, which his brother set to music. The latest translation I have seen is by Latini (1914) and it is an excellent piece of work. Italy has had for the last hundred or more years a high regard for Sappho. Cipolla, thinking perhaps of Meleager’s comparison of Sappho’s poems to roses, says:
And Zanotto says:
Many of the fragments besides those mentioned have been translated into Italian or imitated by Italian writers, as for example Zanella’s famous imitation, A donna ignorante:
Montalti (1804) imitated the fragment on virginity (p. 91), adding, however, much material of his own; and D’Oria (1845) expanded Sappho’s ten words on the evening star into:
Zanella (1887) says in his Volo in Ellade, which Cipollini quotes at length, that it is sweet to
There is not space to speak further of Sappho’s influence in Italy; we have said enough to show that Italian poetry has many echoes of Sappho and that Italy still takes an interest in the Lesbian lyrist. Ada Negri with her fiery pictures of passion is to-day called the modern Italian Sappho.
We have spoken of Sappho’s influence on the ancient Latin authors and especially of Catullus’ translation and elaboration of the second ode. Horace also may have translated whole odes, but we have only Catullus’ preserved. In later days many of the editions of Athenaeus, Dionysius, Pseudo-Longinus, Hephaestion, and of the Anthology included Latin versions, and many other writers have Latinized the fragments of Sappho, especially Ausonius, Stephanus, Thomas Venatorius, Lubinus, Poliziano, and Thomas Moore. One of Moore’s two versions of Plato’s epigram is quoted here:
Among the Latin translators of the odes have been Elias Andreas, Simone Bircovio, Professor Le Fèvre (Tanaquillus Faber), Zacharias Pearce, Valentini, Barbagallo and Allucci, Ambrocio, Emilio Porto and Birkow, etc. Gorsse, A. Stace, Vossius, and Henri Etienne and others have rendered the second ode into Latin.
Spanish. In Spain in 1794 there was a translation of Sappho and many other Greek lyric poets into Castilian verse by D. Jos. y D. Bernabé Canga Arguelles; and in 1832 appeared a prose and verse translation of Anacreon, Sappho, and Tyrtaeus by D. Jose del Castilla y Ayensa. Recently in Paris (1913) has been printed a modern Spanish version by T. Meabe. But in general Sappho has had but little influence on Spanish and German literatures, as compared with her great effect on Italian, French, and English. Mention, however, must not be omitted of the account of Sappho by A. Fernandez Merino. It is written in Spanish and discusses many of the Sapphic problems, giving full references.
German. In 1710 Philander von der Linde translated the second ode, and in 1732 Hudemann translated a few of the fragments, and there were good German editions of all Sappho’s fragments as early as the careful one by Christian Wolf (1734). In 1744 appeared Neukirch’s translation of the first two odes, and in 1746 Götz published his translation in rhymeless verse. In the same year appeared Stählin’s translations. In 1764 “the German Sappho,” Die Karshin, mentions Sappho five or six times and Phaon, but has no direct echoes. In 1776 Meinecke put Sappho into verse; in 1782 Ramler; in 1783 Günther Wahl. In 1787 verse translations were published at Berlin and Liebau, and in 1793 Conz published his translation of the fragment, To an Ignorant Girl. In 1809 Friedrich Gottlieb Born edited an edition for schools; in the same year C. Braun translated the fragments; in 1810 Volger published his very important and rare edition with commentary and musical schemes. He was soon followed by Welcker’s defense (1816), which Goethe mentions four times. But Sappho’s poetry remained a closed book to Goethe.166 There were many succeeding editions or translations: Degen (1821), Neue (1827), Brockhausen’s verse imitations (1827), Richter (1833), Jäger (1836), Gerhard’s free rendering for German student songs (1847), Köchly (1851), Hartung (1857), Weise (1878), Theodor Bergk’s great edition of 1882 reprinted in 1914; Schultz-Geffcken’s Altgriechische Lyrik im deutschen Reim (1895), Stowasser, Griechenlyrik in deutsche Verse übertragen (1910); and Wilamowitz, Sappho und Simonides (1913). There is a good German account of Sappho by Paul Brandt in his Sappho, ein Lebensbild aus den Frühlingstagen altgriechischer Dichtung (1905). In Griechische Lyrik (1920) Erich Bethe in a good chapter on Sappho translates into rhymed verse the first two odes and several of the fragments (E. 99, 119, 135, 114, 54, 71, as well as the new papyrus fragments E. 83, 149, 150, 148, 154).
I can quote here only the new fragment 83:
There are only a few distinct cases of Sappho’s influence on the great German poets, and so I limit myself to comparing Grillparzer’s melodramatic adaptation of the Aphrodite ode with the beautiful rendering by the German lyric poet of modern times, Geibel, who as a tutor in Athens learned to love Lesbian lyrics and Greek literature, though he could not reproduce the wonderful soft sound of the Aeolic Greek: