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“wrote nothing of worth.”
    Myrtis of Boeotia, according to the
Suda,
was the tutor of the acclaimed poet Pindar, and another of her pupils, Corinna of Tangra, beat him in competitions, and rebuked him for adopting the Attic dialect. Neither has survived.
    Praxilla of Sicyon, who wrote drinking songs; the “female Homer” Amyte of Tegea; Nossis of Locri; Moero of Byzantium; and Erinna have all been eradicated, with the exception of a few quotations and fifty-four lines of Erinna’s poem
The Distaff.
    Perilla, whom Ovid thought second only to Sappho, has joined the mute muses of antiquity, along with most of the work of Sulpicia and the
Miscellaneous History
of Pamphila. Whether it was Plutarch or his wife, Timoxena, who wrote the book
On Cosmetics
does not matter, since it no longer exists.
    Instead of an array of possible roles, from political activist to theoretician of practical beauty, we are left with Sappho, most famous, as the
Edinburgh Review
noted, for “her love, her leap, her looks and her lyrics.” It is not an image without its pernicious, darker side; an insinuation that self-destruction is the natural corollary of female creativity. With Sappho: Letitia Landon, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Charlotte Mew, Virginia Woolf, Marina Tsvetaeva, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Sarah Kane.

K’ung Fu-tzu
    {551–479 B.C.E.}
    â€œFROM THE BIRTH of mankind until now, there has been none to equal him.” So said Mencius, an early interpreter and one of the foremost followers of K’ung Fu-tzu, known in the West as Confucius. The historian Ssu-ma Ch’ien in the first century B.C.E. claimed that ten generations had venerated Confucius, a commoner, while the memory of countless princes had vanished. The academic William Theodore de Barry in 1960 could likewise assert that “if we were to characterise in one word the Chinese way of life for the last two thousand years, the word would be ‘Confucian.’”
    He is an endearingly unlikely revolutionary. Although countless fables have accreted to his name, we can safely say that he was born into a low-ranking family in the state of Lu, did not hold high office, traveled for a while and attracted disciples. After his peregrinations, he eventually returned home, and edited the “Six Works”:
The Book of Poetry, The
Book of Rituals, The Book of Music, The Book of History, The Book of
Changes,
and
The Spring and Autumn Annals.
He did not claim a divine provenance for his pronouncements, nor did he justify his propositions from an investigation into first principles. His work is not a manifesto, nor a prophecy, nor a tractatus. The closest possible analogy is a curriculum. Knowledge of the so-called Confucian Classics was central to the examination system, in which one’s results determined one’s place in the bureaucracy of China for two thousand years.
    At the center of Confucius’ vision is a concept that defines his difference from other epochal figures:
jen
or “humaneness.” Translating concepts from Chinese is a perilous business, and various authors have suggested perfect virtue, magnanimity, altruism, and goodness. Confucius, when asked about
jen
by his pupil Fan Ch’ih, defined it as “to love others.” It connotes a virtue embedded in being human, which expands to encompass how one should behave toward others.
    A closely aligned and similarly slippery concept is
li.
Originally,
li
meant “correct ceremony,” but again, the term enlarged to include the secular as well as the religious: somewhere between politeness and propriety, ritual and decorum, is
li.
Moreover, it was a fundamental aspect of good government. It was not merely a diplomatic stance, but a reflection of the smooth order between ruler and subject.
    On another occasion, Confucius advanced a refinement on the interrelation between these attributes. “What has a man to do with the
li
if he lacks
jen
?”