statement it is notable that this anomaly is commonly in only one eye and as a rule does not interfere with vision.1 In passing to the phenomenon of the pupula duplex, we may define the physical basis for the superstition much more narrowly and I hope quite convincingly. While it is probably a fact that there is no such thing among human beings as a double pupil, that is to say, as two real pupils, in one eye, each opening possessing a sphincter muscle enabling it to contract and dilate,3 there are appearances of the eye which would lead an ancient to discern two pupils 1 Consult, e.g., Reference Handbook of the Medical Sciences, V, 216 ff.; De Schweinitz, op. cit., p. 398. 2 I would urge that the method that I am using in this paper is the proper one for the elucidation of other types of the evil eye. The urentes oculi (Persius ii. 34), like all sorts of "bloody eyes" in later superstition, refer to various diseased or anomalous conditions of the eye known to ophthalmologists. The ẞλeredalμwv (Pollux i. 21) was probably merely squint-eyed (Suidas s.v.). Well-known pathological conditions are sometimes responsible for a protrusion of the eye, which has been recognized even in insects and animals as a sign of the "evil eye." Eyes that double the image are still known to medicine as well as to superstition. On the latter cf. Böttiger, Kleine Schriften, III, 405. › See esp. Franke, "Über Angeborene Polykorie," Klinische Monatsbl. f. Augenheilkunde, XXVII, 299; cf. p. 311. 4 We must not confuse, as some scholars (e.g., Salmasius) have, the díkopoɩ with the διαστύρακοι, whom Hesychius s.v. describes (οἱ τὴν μὲν κόρην καὶ τὴν ἅλω μέλαιναν ¿xovtes, tǹv dè lpɩv ěvwxpov) as having the lighter iris (e.g., of a gray or a blue eye) banded on its ciliary edge with a narrow zone almost as dark as the pupil itself. Such a double-ringed eye is common enough and passes today in some parts of the world as a mal'occhio. Should we not identify as one of the diaσrúpakai the woman celebrated in Chronicles and Characters (London, 1868), I, 66, "She mused a little, and her intricate eyes, orb within orb, grew dark with cruel light"? Dr. Smith, AJP, XXIII (1902), 368, quotes it in connection with Nysia. The appearance that our ancient informants had in mind could scarcely have been one that involved a halving or a cleaving in any way of the pupillary orb. For this and other reasons I gave up my first thought that they were referring to cases of a persistent pupillary membrane (see above p. 344 n. 6). Much less should we think of such unnatural conditions as may be produced by a postnatal disease like iritis. For instance, an inflammation may cause "the formation of posterior synechiae or attachments between the layer of pigment covering the posterior surface of the iris and the capsule of the lens" (De Schweinitz, op. cit., p. 401). The tag or tags that protrude into the pupil may give it, if dilated, a cleft appearance or even the so-called ace of clubs" shape. See particularly Seligmann, op. cit., I, 71; II, 156, and Fig. 126 on p. 121. He certainly is wrong in identifying the pupil of the eye on a ship that is represented on the altar frieze at Pergamon as one of these. (Cf. his Fig. 114 with Fig. 6 a in Assmann's article, Jahrb. d.k. deutsch. Arch. Inst., IV [1889] 99–100); the artist was merely showing the point of light on the pupil. Finally there can be, of course, no reference to such extra "pupils" as iridectomy creates, or wounds may cause. where there existed only one real one, or to regard a twofold (duplex) enlargement of the normal opening as practically the equivalent of two. I have in mind two forms of coloboma of the iris, in the first of which there is a radial fissure in the iris tissue so that the pupil appears to be elongated, as it were, to perhaps twice its normal size;1 and in the second of which the cleft in the diaphragm is annular, this round pseudo-pupil being separated from the real one by a more or less considerable band of the iris, which gives it its name of "bridge coloboma." Whole families possessed a pupula duplex, says our ancient authority, and that is just what modern ophthalmological experience would lead us to expect, since coloboma of the iris is persistently hereditary, like a great many other eye troubles.3 Moreover, curiously enough, coloboma quite commonly occurs in only one eye. That leaves the other free to have an equi effigiem, if the fancy so requires. Best of all for our theory, colobomata do not disturb the eyesight. Would that science could assure us that for some mysterious reason the extra opening would actually improve the vision, so that we might still further rationalize Ptolemaeus Chennus' description of the fair Nysia as one who was δίκορον καὶ ὀξυωπεστάτην. UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 1 Many clefts of this sort are pictured on the plate at the back of A. Gescheidt, De colobomate iridis. Most works on ophthalmology give at least one picture of it. 2 This sort is strikingly illustrated in F. A. von Ammon, Klinische Darstellungen der Krankheiten und Bildungsfehler des menschlichen Auges, Series III, Taf. IX, No. XXIII; Taf. X, No. XIV. Sometimes we find more than one coloboma, i.e., polycoria, not dicoria. 3 De Schweinitz, op. cit., p. 400: "Much evidence has been brought to show that there is an hereditary tendency in this defect." 4 Reference Handbook of the Medical Sciences, V, 217, s.v. "Coloboma"; oftener in both, however, according to De Schweinitz, op. cit., p. 399. 5 F. Arlt, Die Krankheiten der Sclera, Iris, Chorioidea, und Linse (1863), p. 123; Soelberg-Wells, Diseases of the Eye (trans. by Bull), p. 226. 6 I might also remark that the pseudo-pupil would, of course, be immovable, and so perhaps arouse suspicion among those who feared the evil eye. A pupil that does not dilate and contract worries Jews even now. Seligmann, op. cit., I, 71. SAPPHO BY WILLIAM K. PRENTICE There are two reasons for our difficulty in understanding Sappho. The first is that we have very little of her poetry by which we can judge. The second is the more important: our judgment is perverted by false traditions about this poetess. Many of these traditions we know to be at least unreliable; yet we preserve them with the utmost scrupulousness because they are ancient, and it is very difficult to rid ourselves of the prejudices which they create. It was apparently common knowledge in antiquity that she lived in the island of Lesbos some six hundred years before Christ. The only biographical information about her in any extant writing earlier than 400 B.C. is in Herodotus ii. 135. He tells us that Sappho had a brother Charaxus, a merchant, who once sailed to Egypt on business and there fell in love with a girl who appears to have been either a slave or a courtesan, on whom he squandered much money. The same story is given by later writers on the authority of Sappho's own words. It is not probable that the poetess herself or any of her contemporaries left any written record of her life. Certainly we know of none. If so, then nothing was known about Sappho or her family in Herodotus' time or later, excepting what was derived from her own poems or through oral tradition. How much is known about any poet through oral tradition, two centuries or more after the poet's death? From Sappho's poems, however, some facts have been collected, and that not alone from those poems which are still preserved, but also from those now lost which ancient writers still possessed. Athenaeus, for example, in the third century of our era, said that he knew all of Sappho's songs by heart. He tells us the story of her brother Charaxus, citing these songs as the source of his information. He also says (x. 425): "The beautiful Sappho in several places celebrates her brother Larechus as cup-bearer to the Mytileneans in the town hall"; and a scholion to Iliad xx. 234, contains the statement: "It was the custom, as Sappho also says, for well-born youths [CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY XIII, October, 1918] 347 of good appearance to pour the wine." From these statements, attested in this way, it seems clear that Sappho's family had a good social standing in Mytilene, the chief city of Lesbos, and it is probable that the family was wealthy. On the other hand a great deal has been made out of these poems which the poems, as far as we can judge, did not contain; and much more has been added to this which has no other source than the imagination of its authors. This process is due to two impulses with which we are thoroughly familiar. One of these proceeds from a perfectly sincere and laudable desire to say as much as possible about interesting persons. Under the influence of this desire many, and especially ancient, writers have accepted literally statements meant figuratively, have treated as fact what the poets meant for fiction, have made generalizations from particular instances, and have applied to the poets themselves words intended for the characters in the poems. For example, there is a well-known fragment (No. 85 in Bergk) which is translated by Merivale as follows: I have a child, a lovely one, In beauty like the golden sun, Or like sweet flowers of earliest bloom; I Lydia's treasures, were they mine, As far as we know this is the only source for the statements that Sappho had a daughter named Cleïs, that she was married, and, since Greek parents frequently named their children after their own parents, that her mother was named Cleïs. Suïdas gives the husband's name, Cercolas, and says that the fellow came from Andros, supposed by some to mean "Mansland"; but no one knows whence Suïdas got this information, and certainly Cercolas does not seem to be a very good name for anybody, least of all for a husband. What the fragment in question really says is this: "There is a pretty girl named Cleïs, whom I love, as fair of form as golden flowers: for her I'd not (exchange) all Lydia or (Lesbos ?)." No word implies that Cleïs was the speaker's daughter, or that this speaker was Sappho. Such words have been spoken even by men, about young women who were not related to them by birth at all. The fragment was preserved by Hephaestion, who quoted it for its meter only. Of course, Suïdas may have had some other authority for his statement about Sappho's marriage and her daughter. He may, for example, have had the complete poem, and this may have shown that Sappho was speaking in propria persona. But evidence no better than this fragment contains has been the sole basis of a great many similar statements by ancient writers. We are not justified in assuming that there was any other evidence in this case, and this is really no evidence at all. When a woman has written about love as beautifully and passionately as Sappho did, it is natural enough to believe that she had much experience thereof. As a matter of fact nothing whatever is known of any love affair of hers, in the ordinary sense of that term. A great deal, however, has been written about her love for a certain Phaon, and of how she followed him to distant Sicily or cast herself from the cliff in Leucas, on the western coast of Greece, in her despair at his desertion. The fifteenth Heroïd is based upon this legend. It seems to me quite certain that Phaon was a fictitious if not a mythological character, and that Sappho's leap from the Leucadian Rock is pure fiction. That some metaphor in Sappho's poems gave rise to the story is possible, but wholly without reliable evidence. Neither Phaon nor Leucas is mentioned in any extant verse of hers. The Parian Chronicle, composed in the third century before Christ, mentions as a fact that Sappho fled to Sicily. This is also possible but improbable. Other Greek poets and writers went to Sicily, one perhaps as early as her time; but that is all we know; there is no word of hers, or of anyone even approximately contemporaneous, which suggests that she was ever there, and the Parian Chronicle is not a very reliable source of information about such matters. Some of the ancients have said that Sappho loved or was loved by other poets, Archilochus of Paros, Alcaeus of Lesbos, Hipponax of Ephesus, and Anacreon of Teos. This is in accord with the general practice of ancient writers to bring into some sort of connection with every distinguished person others of similar distinction, either as friends or in the relation of teacher and pupil, whether there was any evidence for such an association or not. So many of these associations have been disproved on chronological or other grounds that |