Some twenty-five hundred years ago, the Greek lyric poet Sappho lamented the inevitability of change, “You, children, pursue the violet-laden Muses’ lovely gifts / and the clear-toned lyre so dear to song; / but for me—old age has now seized my once tender body,” tempered by reference to the cautionary tale of Tithonus, a mortal granted immortality by the gods but still subject to the ravages of age, now endured for eternity. A final line that some scholars believe to be the true ending of the poem—“Eros has granted to me the beauty and the brightness of the sun”—suggests that through her
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