Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays

But to lose her fabled leap from the Leucadian promontory would doubtless be a greater sacrifice; it formed so much more effective a termination for her life than any novelist could have contrived. It is certain that the leap itself, as a Greek practice, was no fable; sometimes it was a form of suicide, sometimes a religious incantation, and sometimes again an expiation of crime. But it was also used often as a figure of speech by comfortable poets who would have been sorry to find in it anything more. Anacreon, for instance, says in an ode, “Again casting myself from the Leucadian rock, I plunge into the gray sea, drunk with love” ; though it is clear that he was not a man to drown his cares in anything larger than a punch-bowl. It is certainly hard to suppose that the most lovelorn lady, residing on an island whose every shore was a precipice, and where her lover was at hand to feel the anguish of her fate, would take ship and sail for weary days over five hundred miles of water to seek a more sensational rock. Theodor Kock, the latest German writer on Sappho, thinks it is as if a lover should travel from the Rhine to Niagara to drown himself. “Are not Abana and Pharpar rivers of Damascus?” More solid, negative proof is found in the fact that Ptolemy Hephestion, the author who has collected the most numerous notices of the Leucadian leap, entirely omits the conspicuous name of Sappho from his record. Even Colonel Mure, who is as anxious to prove this deed against her as if it were a violation of all the ten commandments, is staggered for a moment by this omission ; but soon recovering himself, with an ingenuity that does him credit as attorney for the prosecution, he points out that the reason Ptolemy omitted Sappho's name was undoubtedly because it was so well known already; a use of negative evidence to which