Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

[310] within our reach an illustration so obvious, showing the way in which a whole race of women may be misconstrued. If a Frenchman visits America and sees a young girl walking or riding with a young man, he is apt to assume that she is of doubtful character. Should he hear a married woman talk about “emancipation,” he will infer either that her marriage is not legal, or that her husband has good reason to wish it were not. Precisely thus did an Athenian view a Lesbian woman; and if she collected round her a class of young pupils for instruction, so much the worse. He could no more imagine any difference between Sappho and Aspasia, than could a Frenchman between Margaret Fuller and George Sand. To claim any high moral standard, in either case, would merely strengthen the indictment by the additional count of hypocrisy. Better Aspasia than a learned woman who had the effrontery to set up for the domestic virtues. The stories that thus gradually came to be told about Sappho in later years — scandal at longer and longer range — were simply inevitable, from the point of view of Athens. If Aristophanes spared neither Socrates nor Euripides, why should his successors spare Sappho?

Therefore the reckless comic authors of that luxurious city, those Pre-Bohemians of literature, made the most of their game. Ameipsias, Amphis, Antiphanes, Diphilus, Ephippus, Timocles, all wrote farces bearing the name of a woman who had died in excellent repute, so far as appears, two centuries before. With what utter recklessness they did their work is shown by their naming as her lovers Archilochus, who died before she was born, and Hipponax, who was born after she died. Then came, in later literature, the Roman Ovid, who had learned from licentious princesses to regard womanly virtue as only a