Sappho, by a freedman of Cicero

 7.17
TULLIUS LAUREA

You friend that passes this Aeolian tomb,
Do not report I lie among the dead,
The bard of Mytilene: for this stone
Was raised by mortal labour. Such works go
Into oblivion so speedily;
But if you gauge me for the Muses’ sake,
From each of which great ladies I did take
A bloom to place within my ennead,
Then you will see that I escaped the dark
Of Hades’ realm, and there will come no day
When lyric SAPPHO’s name has passed away.

Tullius Laurea was once a slave owned by Cicero; he may have been freed in his master's will. If 'Laurea' was his slave name, which is my guess, it points towards him being already recognised as a literary talent -- the laurel was sacred to Apollo. He was a fluently bilingual poet: in his book of Natural History on water sources, Pliny the Elder cites and commends an epigram he wrote in Latin about a hot spring at a villa estate owned by Cicero.

The 'ennead' of Sappho to which Laurea refers was not her own arrangement of her work, but the standard edition compiled by scholars at Alexandria in the Hellenistic age. They divided her works into nine books, one for each of the Muses.

Literary epitaphs for Homer and Erinna

7.2
ANTIPATER OF SIDON

He was Persuasion in a mortal guise,
A mighty voice, a genius who sang
Works that the Muses might have called their own.
This craggy isle of Ios boasts its claim,
For on no other island, only me,
He breathed his sacred last, o wayfarer:
The breath with which he told of Kronos’ son
Of will invincible, Olympus too,
And Ajax mighty at the naumachy,
And Hector dragged upon the Trojan plain
By colts of Pharsalus, Achilles’ team.
If I am small to hold so great a one,
Consider poor bare Ikos, wherein lies
The husband who claimed Thetis as his prize.

7.13
LEONIDAS, OR SOME SAY MELEAGER

Young and unwed, a bee among the bards
Who gathered nectar from the Muses’ blooms —
ERINNA, she whom Hades snatched away
To take in marriage. All too apt and true
Those words she sang, that girl, alive and well:
‘You are a jealous one, you lord of Hell.’