attributed Sappho the invention of this mode, but this remains a dubious claim. The classicist Stefan Hagel speculated that perhaps instead Sappho first popularized the association between mixolydian and mournfulness. While there are no attestations that she used other modes, she presumably varied them depending on the poem's character. When originally sung, each syllable of her text likely corresponded to one note as the use of lengthy melismas developed in the later classical period. Sappho chiefly wrote for two formats: solo singers and choirs. With Alcaeus, she pioneered a new style of sung monody (single-line melody) that departed from the multi-part choral style that largely defined earlier Greek music. This style afforded her more opportunities to individualize the content of her poems; the historian Plutarch noted that she "speaks words mingled truly with fire, and through her songs, she draws up the heat of her heart". Some scholars theorize that the Tithonus Poem was among her works meant for a solo singer. Only fragments of Sappho's choral works are extant, and of these, slightly more of her epithalamia wedding songs survive. The later compositions were probably meant for antiphonal performance between either a male and female choir or a soloist and choir. In Sappho's time, sung poetry was accompanied by musical instruments, which usually doubled the voice in unison or played homophonically an octave higher or lower. Her poems mention numerous instruments, including the pēktis, a harp of Lydian origin, and lyre. Sappho is most closely associated with the barbitos, a lyre-like string instrument that was deep in pitch. Euphorion of Chalcis reports that she referred to it in her poetry, and a well-known fifth-century vase by either the Dokimasia Painter or Brygos Painter includes Sappho and Alcaeus with barbitoi. Sappho mentions the aulos, a wind instrument with two pipes, in fragment 44 as accompanying the song of the Trojan women at Hector and Andromache's wedding, but not as accompanying her own poetry. Later Greek commentators wrongly believed that she had invented the plectrum. Sexuality The common term lesbian is an allusion to Sappho, originating from the name of the island of Lesbos, where she was born. However, she has not always been considered so. In classical Athenian comedy (from the Old Comedy of the fifth century to Menander in the late fourth and early third centuries BC), Sappho was caricatured as a promiscuous heterosexual woman, and it is not