CORINNA I Life Corinna Was a Boeotian Poet Who Was Identified with the City of Tanagra. Plutarch, Pausanias, Aelian and the Suda

CORINNA I

Life

Corinna was a Boeotian poet who was identified with the city of Tanagra. Plutarch, Pausanias, Aelian and the Suda all connect her with Pindar, thereby situating her in the fifth century B.C.2 Plutarch reports a story in which Corinna advised Pindar on the proper use of myth in poetry. Pausanias describes a painting of her placed in the gymnasium of Tanagra which, he claims, reflected her victory over Pindar in a competition of melic poetry. Aelian and the Suda report that she defeated Pindar not once but five times. The Suda linked the two poets as pupils of Myrtis, and in fr. 664(a) Corinna criticizes Myrtis for competing with Pindar despite the fact that she is a woman. Despite this strong ancient tradition anchoring Corinna in the fifth century, modern readers have been making a case for her being a poet of a much later date, sometime in the third century B.C. Corinna (in the verses which remain) gives us no internal evidence of her date, and beginning with Edgar LobeJ3 questions have been raised about whether one can reconcile the language, vocabulary, metre, style and content of her fragments with what we know of the poetry of the Archaic period. Of significant length we have only portions of three poems contained in two papyrus fragments, numbers 654-655. The earlier papyrus (the "Berlin" papyrus) dates from the third century B.C.; the words are in the Boeotian vernacular, and the orthography resembles Boeotian in scriptions of the 3rd century.4 One way of reconciling the ancient tradition with this evidence is to assume metagrammatism, a third-century scribe's rewriting of a fifth-century text into the com mon speech of Hellenistic Boeotia. As Denys Page pointed out, the difference between Boeotian spelling of the fifth century and that

1 The numbering of Corinna's fragments will follow that of Page in PMG. Testimonia follow the numbering of Campbell 1992. 2 Plutarch De glor. Ath. 4.347f-348a (= test. 2), Pausanias 9.22.3 (= test. 4}, Aelian VH 13.25 (=test. 3) , Suda test. 1. 3 Lobel 356-365. 4 On the dialect and orthography of the papyri of Corinna see Page 46-64. 214 PERSONAL POETRY of the fourth is great; that between the mid-fourth century and later is relatively slight, and therefore it would make sense to have tran scribed the works of a fifth-century poet for ready comprehension in the later period.5 In the fifth century, Corinna's work would have been of local interest only; in the third century, with the rise of a general interest in regional arcana, her songs would have been edited for broader circulation. But others prefer to assume that the form in which the songs occur on the Berlin papyrus is the form in which Cor.inna com posed them, in the third century. A strong voice for this position is that of Martin West,t> who argues that the self-conscious regiona lism of the later period provided a more natural context for the conspicuously Boeotian dialect and local myths which Corinna used. He finds it an implausible hypothesis that Corinna's work survived underground for two centuries, "finally to emerge and become a best seller.'' It would have either found its way into the Panhellenic book trade in the fifth century or have been lost for good.7 Her work is dramatically different from Pindar's, in metre, style and content. Her metres are much simpler, consisting of ionics and glyconics, and the one fragment which bears the most evidence for its being choral (655 fr. 1), with a reference to Terpsichore (the Muse of choral song) and to a group of Tanagran women, does not appear to be strophic.8 Her myths are parochial, unlike Pind.ar's pan-Hellenic versions. Her vocabulary consists of words used more commonly during the Hellenistic period, according to West,9 words like l;,a8£o£;, xpoucrolj>a'i£;, &omv, the verbal dual 7tt8£'tav, and the compound A.tyoupOKC.O'ttA.u<;, whose "over weight" nature West feels is dithyrambic in nature. In West's view Corinna's 655 fr. 1 is a "programmatic piece," appropriate for the introduction to a book, in which she announces the themes she will cover. This is a Hellenistic practice. Her blaming the poet

5 Page 75. 6 West 1970: 277-287, 1990: 553-557. A list of those who argue for the later dating can be found in Snyder 125, n. 1. 7 West 1970: 286. 8 'West 1990: 554. There are no indications in the papyrus of strophic division, as we find in 654 col. i and iii, for example. The (glyconic) lines are stichic, but this does not rule out choral performance. Stehle 102, n. 93, cites parallels for this. 9 West 1970: 284-285.