Fragment 94 (Voigt 105b)

Οἴαν τὰν ὐάκινθον ἐν οὔρεσι ποίμενες ἄνδρες
πόσσι καταστείβοισι, χάμαι δ’ ἐπιπορφύρει ἄνθος.

Compare Catullus, xi. 21-24:—

Think not henceforth, thou, to recall Catullus’
Love; thy own sin slew it, as on the meadow’s
Verge declines, un-gently beneath the ploughshare
Stricken, a flower.
— (Robinson Ellis.)

And Vergil, Aeneid, ix. 435, of Euryalus dying:—

And like the purple flower the plough cuts down
He droops and dies.
Pines she like to the hyacinth out on the path by the hill top;
Shepherds tread it aside, and its purples lie lost on the herbage.
— Edwin Arnold, 1869.

One Girl.

(A combination from Sappho.)

I.

Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough,
A-top on the topmost twig,—which the pluckers forgot, somehow,—
Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now.

II.

Like the wild hyacinth flower which on the hills is found,
Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound,
Until the purple blossom is trodden into the ground.
— D. G. Rossetti, 1870;

in 1881 he altered the title to Beauty. (A combination from Sappho.)

Quoted by Demetrius, as an example of the ornament and beauty proper to a concluding sentence. Bergk first attributed the lines to Sappho.