Norwich bulletin., 1916-11-09

! whose wise and beneficient reign of | ten years earned for him immortality l as one of the Seven Stages of Greece, at the age of 39 had, with the aid of
 the brothers Of the poet Alcaeus, over l thrown the txrant of the island. Aft CT staying the Athenian commander Phyron in single combat, he was. en-
 trusted with despotic power by the Mytileneans. It was his life work to | maintain balance of power. between
 the nobles and the commons. Pitta- GUS is famous for two of his favorite sayings: 1t is hard to be good and Know when to act
 The career of the great Mytilen- can poetess has been so widely ad- vert1sed through the ages by dramas and novels that recent research has tended to brighten to some extent a sadly tarnished reputation. The story of Sappho's leap into the sea from
 the lofty Leucadian promontory, be- cause of her unreGuited love. for
 Phaon, has never been proved While
 no one will contend that the gifted
 hesbian's morals were impeecable, it
 is highly possible that posterity has visited upon her head the sins of some of the more licentious pupils of
 her great poetic school. In any event, her position as a poetess is un-
 assailable The ancients accorded her place alongside Homer, designating her as the poetess', him as the poet Writers who followed her called her the tenth Muse and the miracle
 The appellation the beautiful,' which
 not ilttrequently occurs, is said to
 have referred to her verses only, for ] personally she was small, dark and l unprepoSsesSing.
 Shortly after the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war in the fifth cen tury, B. C., the ruling nobles of Mytilene forced the city to side with
 Sparta against the Athenians to whom they were under an agreement to furnish naval contingent. For this revolt the city suffered bitterly and the story of the punishment | ineted out to the rebels after a long | siege is one of the most dramatic in i Hellenic history.
 Athens at the time of Mytilene's equalization was still weeping for the l matchless Pericles, he who on his deathbed considered it his greatest prise that he had never caused an Athenlan to put on mourning,' and the | government was in control of the mob element, led by such demagogues as Cleon. When the fate of the Mytilen- cans was presented for discussion be- 1 fore the Athenian Assembly, CIeon proposed that all the men Of the city, 5000 in number, should be slain, the women and children sold into slavery l The proposal was adopted ard a ship despatched to bear the sentence to the conquered community. The next | morning, however reason and justice returned and the Assembly hastily re- l scinded the neartless decree. The 1 f1eetest trireme of the Athenian navy | was ordered to try to overtal1e the | first vessel, which had a twenty four | hours start. It was a thrilling race, with the lives of thousands of inno-
 cent people as the stake. The trireme arrived just in time to prevent the wholesale slaughter. But even the | modified decree was barbarous. A thousand nobles were executed, the | city destroyed and much of the land given to Athenians
 'Twenty-two years after this tragic
 event (406 B. O, one of the closing
 episodes of the Peloponnesian War
 occurred in the harbor of the stricken
 city, where Conon, one of the ten Athenian generals chosen to succeed
 the traitor Alcibiades, was defeated by
 the Lacedanemonian admiral Callicra-
 tidas.
 "Mytilene sided with Mithradates VI of Pontus in his conflict with Rome
 in the first century B. C., but in spite
 of this Pompey gave the city its free
 dom, out of fcndness for his close
 friend Theopnanes, a native of the is- land"