Corinna of Tanagra and Her Audience Author(S): Marilyn B

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Corinna of Tanagra and Her Audience Author(s): Marilyn B. Skinner Source: Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring, 1983), pp. 9-20 Published by: University of Tulsa Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/464203 Accessed: 27-03-2019 12:40 UTC

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This content downloaded from 136.244.193.92 on Wed, 27 Mar 2019 12:40:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Corinna of Tanagra and Her Audience

Marilyn B. Skinner Northern Illinois University

Current scholarly perception of Corinna seems to be colored by an awareness of her sex: it matters much whether she is being regarded as an ancient Greek poet or as an ancient Greek woman poet writing for other women.1 Although her work was popular in the early Roman empire? surprisingly so, in view of its dismissal by many modern critics?nothing survives outside of brief quotations and a few tattered papyrus fragments. Still, the remnants do permit us to form an impression of its general content and style. One fragment (PMG 655), which served as a programmatic introduction to a collection of her poems, is of particular value, for there she informs us that she will recount the legends of Boeotia, her native province, to the girls of Tanagra, her own city. Her professed choice of a local, indeed circumscribed, audience appears to determine not only her themes but her treatment of them.2 She composes in a literary dialect closely resembling that of the Homeric poems, regionalizing it by the introduction of Boeotian vernacular and pronunciation. Her narrative technique is artless and direct; her metrical schemes are correspondingly simple, reminding some readers of folk poetry. On the surface, her verses certainly seem designed to entertain the daughters of her ne ighbors. In the opinion of many Hellenists, Corinna's poetry is uninteresting.3 Because it seeks only to please undemanding listeners, her art is often deemed naive or shallow, while her concentration upon local legend is attributed to a limited artistic perspective. On the other hand, mention of an audience of young girls has lately caught the attention of feminist literary historians, who do not hesitate to assign her work to the established tradition of Greek "women's poetry"?poetry aimed exclusively at female hearers, preoccupied with quintessentially feminine experience.4 Excepting the corpus of Sappho's poetry, larger but equally fragmentary, we possess no other explicitly certified representative of that tradition.5 Consequently, Corinna, along with Sappho, is regularly cited as the exemplar in feminist discussions of Greek women authors. By virtue of her very survival, she has become central to the study of the "female voice" in ancient literature. Yet, despite their contrary opinions of her importance, both feminist and "main-

This content downloaded from 136.244.193.92 on Wed, 27 Mar 2019 12:40:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms stream" classical scholars (if one may be permitted the distinction) agree in their methodology. Each group takes Corinna's declaration of her intended audience at face value and then uses that declaration as a point of departure for approaching her work* Belief that Corinna is actually writing for the young girls of Tanagra also plays a significant part in the continuing controversy over her date. Plu? tarch, Pausanias, and Aelian, writing at various times during the first three centuries of the Roman Empire, place her in the fifth century B.C., making her a poetic rival of her fellow-countryman Pindar.6 Anecdotal information such as they provide is not always reliable: ancient biographies contain certain instances of famous personages attracting into their temporal orbit lesser figures who lived at a later time.7 Nevertheless, the supposed archaic quality of Corinna's verse appears to support the external tradition and so continues to reinforce belief in its validity. The alternative view finds technical or historical grounds for assigning her to the Hellenistic period, possibly as late as 200 B.C.; on this hypothesis, her style would not be archaic but consciously archaizing.8 It has been observed, however, that an interval of 250-300 years need not make much difference to our reading of her poetry.9 Even if we accept the late dating, we can still regard her as an extraordinarily conservative author whose use of old-fashioned techniques was suited to her listeners, unsophisticated village maidens on whom Hellenistic literary finesse would doubtless have been wasted. Our image of Corinna thus owes a great deal to her programmatic statement about her intended audience. In the following essay, I wish to demonstrate the problematic nature of that statement. As we will see, Corinna does indeed associate her work with the tradition of Greek women's poetry. Unfortunately, a comparison of her writings with those of Sappho reveals that the two artists have radically different concepts of what "women's poetry" must be like. While Sappho's work is intensely female- oriented, Corinna's is not. Instead, her treatment of legendary material pays marked deference to the canonical, male-dominated literary tradition and presents its narratives from a frankly patriarchal perspective. This discovery has important consequences for the debate over her period, and will likewise alter our notion of her literary objectives. The opening lines of Corinna's poetic manifesto explicitly connect her verse not only with a female audience but with a quasi-feminine genre:

Upon me Terpsichore [calls] to sing lovely tales (weroia) to the white-robed girls of Tanagra, and the city rejoices greatly in my clear-teasing voice.

This content downloaded from 136.244.193.92 on Wed, 27 Mar 2019 12:40:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms For that great. .. false...... the spacious land and having ornamented stories from our fathers for unwedded girls. .. {PMG655.L11)

The invocation of Terpsichore, muse of dance, immediately subsumes these pieces under the category of choral lyric, the same field in which Pindar achieved panhellenic prominence. However, the dialect term weroia, "nar? ratives," localizes her material as peculiarly Boeotian.10 The poet depicts herself singing her tales to the girls of her city, but the syntactical ambiguity of the Greek dative and the descriptive detail of their white robes allow us to infer that the songs are being composed for the girls, in turn, to perform at religious festivals in formal holiday dress. Boasting of Tanagra's pride in its native daughter further suggests that the girls' chorus she taught has success? fully represented the municipality in regional competitions. The stylistic epithet ligourikotilos, "clear-teasing," once again emphasizes the feminine quality of Corinna's poetic voice.11 Finally, in a badly damaged section of the papyrus, we are told that the weroia before us are old stories, stories handed down "from our fathers," which have been embellished "for unwed? ded girls," parthenysi.12 Corinna thereby relates her compositions to the ancient genre of partheneia, songs written, sometimes in provincial dialects, by professional artists for public performance by maidens' choruses, in a traditional going back to the seventh-century Spartan poet Alcman.13 The texts created by Alcman and his successors ostensibly express the chorus' own thoughts and feelings?or, rather, the thoughts and feelings of young girls as imagined by contemporary adult male society. Corinna, too, assigns her chorus a specifically feminine concern: the transmission of ancestral legend. Having resurrected and recast Boeotian myth, the woman artist now communicates it to a younger female generation, so that they may tell it to the community. In this way, poet and audience fulfill women's task of preserving the oral culture of the tribe. On these grounds, her work has a legitimate claim to call itself "women's poetry." That last inference is confirmed by one more programmatic fragment that may have come from the same manifesto: "And I myself blame clear- voiced / Myrtis in that, being a woman, / she strove against Pindar" (PMG 664a).14 Myrtis, the sources inform us, was another Boeotian poet. Her "strife" with the great Pindar must refer to literary competition, and more precisely to emulation of his chosen style of self-expression. Corinna would not have rebuked Myrtis for being a woman poet per se?that would have

This content downloaded from 136.244.193.92 on Wed, 27 Mar 2019 12:40:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms been most hypocritical of her. Her condemnation therefore rests upon a distinction between kinds of writing appropriate to gender. The type of verse in which Pindar specializes is perceived as a fundamentally masculine exercise of the poetic art; that was why Myrtis was wrong to attempt it. Corinna must have gone on to proclaim her own vehicle, her weroia, more suited to a woman author. Implicitly, then, she would be defining her work as "women's poetry" and inviting readers to compare it, certainly not with Pindar's, but with that of her renowned female predecessor Sappho, the primary model for lyrics composed by a woman for women.15 Accordingly, it is proper to inquire into how her verse actually conforms to that model. The crucial fact bearing upon the interpretation of Sappho's poetry is the degree to which it has been shaped by the extreme sex segregation of archaic Greek society.16 Rigid distinctions between the social and economic func? tions of the sexes prevailed: for males, defense of home and country and the conduct of state affairs were paramount obligations, while females were wholly responsible for child care and the internal management of the home. Sex-role stereotyping was enforced by physical apartheid. Women had almost no opportunity for contact with members of the opposite sex outside of close kin; even interaction with husbands may have been limited. They did, however, associate on a regular basis with a wide circle of other women, relatives, friends and neighbors. That female gatherings were jealously guarded from male observation is evident from the chronic prurient specula? tion about what pastimes women indulge in among themselves: wineswill- ing and lewd gossip head the list. Barred from direct participation in the dominant and public "male culture," and deriving what power, prestige and satisfaction they enjoyed from involvement in same-sex networks, archaic Greek women seem to have developed a "female subculture" affirming values essential to their own activities.17 As for the values celebrated by the public culture, they may have internalized them to some extent. Still, those values might well appear hostile and alien if they were to come into direct conflict with the most cherished norms of female society. This is precisely the situation in Aristophanes' Lysistrata, where women organize to prevent further display of masculine competitiveness and aggression in the belief that those behaviors are posing an immediate threat to the continuance of the family.18 The ribald fantasy of a sex-strike underscores the serious assumption that men and women living in the same society nevertheless subscribe to mutually opposed cultural ideals. Although the play mirrors the topical realities of life in Athens at the time of the Peloponnesian War, its basic premise derives from a sexual code much older, and ubiquitous throughout archaic Greece.19 The tendency to expose values unquestioningly accepted in the public

This content downloaded from 136.244.193.92 on Wed, 27 Mar 2019 12:40:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms culture to the criticism of a detached, even alienated, female consciousness has been widely remarkedin Sappho's poetry.20 Her ready assumption of an egalitarian relationship between lover and beloved repudiates the "domi? nance-submission" pattern universally found in erotic literature written by Greek men.21 Adapting epic formulas in order to express her special vision oieros, she makes whimsical or perverse use of the earlier literary tradition, most notably Homer.22 For example, in the "Hymn to Aphrodite" (LP 1), the epiphany of the goddess recalls occasions in the Iliad when divinities visit the battlefield to aid favorite warriors; the allusion is enhanced by the speaker's request that Aphrodite become her symmachos, "battle-compan? ion," in the present love affair. Similarly, LP 31 details the speaker's reaction to the sight of the beloved in language otherwise appropriate to the Homeric champion confronting his enemy. A decisive rejection of the militaristic ideal occurs in the "Helen of Troy" poem, LP 16. The first stanza trivializes male debate over the relative goodness of various kinds of combat force by asserting that the fairest thing on earth is "whatever one loves." Helen is then introduced as a paradigm: simply by the act of preferring her own object of desire, Paris, to husband and child, she set the entire Argive panoply in motion. That the speaker's sympathies are not with the lovers of war but with Helen, the cause of war, becomes clear at the last, when she voices her own preference for Anactoria's enticing step and shining face above the armies of Lydia. In each of the three poems, reminiscences of the Iliad suggest that the female experience of intense romantic passion pos? sesses a cultural value and claims a divine sanction equal to that of the central male ritual of war. Deeply ingrained though it is in the public culture, misogyny itself can be extracted and corrected. At LP 132, Sappho pointedly reverses the customary devaluation of female children by applying to her daughter Cleis an epithet elsewhere reserved for the cherished only son and heir of a household.23 Much more could be said on this subject, but I think it is now evident that Sappho's poetry is responding exclusively to the concerns and the experiences of her female audience; male values, as transmitted through the canonical literary tradition, are introduced only to be modified or cast aside. Corinna's work departs radically from Sappho's in this particular, a fact manifest even in her programmatic poem. In one fragment (PMG 664b) she promises to speak of the excellences of heroines as well as heroes. Yet at PMG 655.12-16 her interest is focused only upon the latter. As examples of stories she will treat later, she names the legends of "Cephisus the founder" and of the hero Orion and his fifty sons whose mothers were nymphs. The foundation of a new settlement or a dynasty is of course a masculine achievement, while the motif of a hero's multiple progeny glorifies the

This content downloaded from 136.244.193.92 on Wed, 27 Mar 2019 12:40:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms virility proven by impregnating numerous females, often through rape. If these legends illustrate the content of Corinna's book, it would not seem to have been particularly sympathetic to women's interests. Something more can be learned from the "Berlin Papyrus" (PMG 654), which preserves two short remnants of weroia. The first legible section narrates a singing contest between Helicon and Cithaeron, the eponymous heroes of two Boeotian mountains.24 It opens with the last few lines of one contender's prize song describing how the infant Zeus was stolen away by his mother Rhea and nursed in a Cretan cave. The gods then vote on the winner and unexpectedly award victory to Cithaeron over his more re? nowned rival. Helicon promptly throws a stupendous tantrum. The playful tone of the narrative warns us not to take its implications too seriously, but two minor points may be noted. First, the song of the last contestant incorporates several straightforward, apparently honorific, reminiscences of the Theogony of Hesiod.25 Hesiod's epic glorifies the patriarchal rule of Zeus, imposed upon a universe formerly dominated by chaotic female powers.26 Second, Corinna quickly passes over the triumph of the winning candidate to dwell upon the loser's berserk rage. In the missing part of the papyrus, the Muses, who have presided over the contest, may well have consoled the defeated party by making his own mountain the site of their principal shrine. Such a plot would follow the familiar Greek mythic pattern in which evil consequences arise from an outrage offered to a hero?Achilles for example?whose esteem must be restored at some cost. Obsession with the external manifestation oitime, honor, is characteristic of the public culture. If Corinna expects her listeners to empathize with Helicon's excessive anger and chagrin, she is assuming their full acceptance of the male value-system. The second more or less complete passage of the papyrus contains an interview between Acraephen, prophet of Apollo at his sanctuary on Mount Ptoios, and Asopus, a Boeotian river god.27 Asopus has come to the oracle to inquire into the whereabouts of his nine missing daughters, and the prophet obliges him. The actual text of the poem reads:

Of your daughters, father Zeus, king of all, possesses three, and three are wed to Poseidon, lord of the sea; over the beds of two Phoebus is master,

and Hermes the good son of Maia has one. For so Eros and the Cyprian persuaded the gods, that secretly going into your house they took for themselves your nine daughters.

This content downloaded from 136.244.193.92 on Wed, 27 Mar 2019 12:40:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms In time your daughters will produce a race of heroic demigods; they will be fruitful and ageless... (PMG 654.iii. 12-25)

After recounting how he himself came to be prophet at the sanctuary, Acraephen advises the bereft parent to yield to the divine will. Weeping but joyful, as befits a new father-in-law of the Olympians, Asopus is about to reply when the text breaks off. The Asopids are the eponymous heroines of nine Greek settlements, and the story is obviously an aetiological account of how those towns came to be associated with their special patron divinities.28 The author surely intended us to regard her female figures as mere personifications and accept the rape as a standard plot device of aetiological fable; while conceding that point, we should nevertheless take a hard look at the social postulates underlying the myth. The daughters of Asopus are forcibly abducted from their father's house and violated. However, the only party injured by this action is Asopus himself, who is mollified as soon as he learns that the rapists were gods. For each divinity, the number of brides obtained corresponds to his fixed place in the Olympian hierarchy; meanwhile, both Acraephen and Asopus con? sider the girls fortunate to be the destined mothers of a heroic race. The poem assumes, then, that females are not legal persons but property, objects of exchange between males. They exist to serve male sexual needs, desig? nate male status, and bear children to continue the male line. All this is an accurate reflection of Greek patriarchal thinking as evidenced in many works of literature conceived by men. In fact, it is only as a specimen of women's poetry that the piece is remarkable: women's lives, insofar as they enter the picture at all, are viewed wholly through masculine eyes. There are no grounds for supposing that Corinna was treating her subject matter ironically or that she ever questioned the myth's underlying assumptions. Accordingly, we must label her own poetic attitude "patriarchal." Corinna's notion of what and how a woman is to write is likewise very different from that of Sappho. We have observed the earlier poet setting up the public culture and its competitive values as a negative foil to her own private world of emotional intensity. Women's poetry thus provides a corrective counterstatement to the dominant literary tradition. Corinna, on the other hand, has fully internalized male values. As a woman, she is aware of her second-class status within the public culture. Unlike Sappho, she does not disavow accepted cultural norms; instead, she creates a female poetic that implicitly acknowledges her inferiority to men. To attempt Pindar's grand resonances, his meditations upon human morality and achievement, would be unseemly. Her songs will embody the maiden

This content downloaded from 136.244.193.92 on Wed, 27 Mar 2019 12:40:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms innocence of the girls who sing them. They will be charmingly direct, but with a touch of naive gaiety, and will recount little-known legends in a primitivistic sytle. This concept of "women's art" presupposes that women are by nature more conservative and parochial, less psychologically com? plex, less inclined to sublimity or profound thought. Corinna's poetic voice does not express feminine nature as it exists in herself or other women, but feminine nature as Greek men idealized it.29 For whom, then, was she writing? The answer to that question is bound up with the obvious fact of her socialization into the male community. She had been exposed enough to the standard poetic tradition?Homer, Hesiod, Alcman, Pindar?and to the dominant culture as a whole to accept its sexual stereotypes without hesitation and construct her own poetic persona from them. The conditions for such complete indoctrination do not appear to have existed in Pindar's time, when women were still cut off from extensive contact with the male cultural sphere. Hearing Homer, Hesiod, and choral lyric performed at civic festivals, Pindar's female contemporaries would have understood those works in terms of their own personal experi? ence, just as Sappho and her friends had. Their response to poetry and their view of themselves as women would probably not have been shaped to fit a masculine consciousness. By the late fourth century, however, strict sexual apartheid was on the wane, and girls throughout the Greek-speaking world were beginning to receive the same educational opportunities as boys.30 In the Hellenistic period, females, like males, studied the poets as part of the ordinary school curriculum and learned how to respond to them from schoolmasters?who would have passed on long-established male senti? ments and prejudices as articles of faith. Corinna, I submit, is a product of Hellenistic unisex education. Having absorbed enduring patriarchal values as part of her upbringing, she defines herself as a poet in those terms, conveying a subtle message of female inferiority to an audience of younger women whose self-image has been molded in similar fashion. Yet the girls of Tanagra are not the ultimate audience she must have had in mind. The existence of a programmatic poem designed to introduce a book presupposes a reading public with some literary sophistication. We need not doubt that Corinna did compose festival songs for girls, but we must also recognize that she eventually compiled them for publication, prefacing them with a precise explanation of their style, content and place in the literary tradition. The volume was patently destined for circulation in the larger world beyond Boeotia, and probably aimed specifically at the learned readers of the great academic centers of Alexandria and Pergamum, who might be intrigued by its combination of affected simplicity and antiquarian interest. In reading these poems, then, we should be conscious

This content downloaded from 136.244.193.92 on Wed, 27 Mar 2019 12:40:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms of a latent gap between ostensible and real audience.31 Granted that her weroia may originally have been sung by girls, Corinna now intends them for a predominantly male readership, which will be delighted by the picture of innocent femininity she presents?a picture that conforms to its own pre? existing stereotypes. I do not mean to suggest that she was deliberately trying to ingratiate herself with a male audience; the trade-off was not that explicit. She published her weroia because, as the historical tradition and her own programmatic poem inform us, they had proven successful at Boeotian festivals; and they must have been successful partly because their underlying concept of femininity, a concept fundamental to her art, was acceptable to her original listeners. Later, perhaps for the same reason, they became quite popular outside Boeotia, especially among literary men.32 For internalizing a male concept of the woman artist, Corinna was rewarded by the public culture. The phenomenon is not confined to antiquity. The subsequent reputations of Sappho and Corinna are instructive for students of women's literature and for women practitioners of the art. At the time when Corinna was starting to enjoy a minor succes d!estime, Sappho's personal life came under virulent attack, for it was precisely then that she began to be maligned as a homosexual.33 This sudden hostility to the supreme female literary figure of antiquity may signal a major shift in attitude toward women writers: they were now to be judged favorably to the degree that male readers could find them psychologically congenial. Mod? ern reactions are analogous, even though the relative popularity of the two poets may seem to have been reversed. Nowadays Sappho is of course recognized as an artist of the first rank, whereas Corinna , if she is noticed at all, is condemned as dull. Yet a morbid fascination with Sappho as a sexual deviate continues to excite the scholarly imagination and runs like a lavender thread through much recent discussion of her work.34 By compari? son, Corinna may seem dull to us because she is less exotic. In each case critics would be responding to these women poets not as poets but as women, and subliminally as objects of sexual fantasy. That is scarcely fair to either one, and particularly hard on Corinna, whose adoption of a persona sanctioned by Greek patriarchal mores demanded the suppression of those very traits that give the Sapphic persona its singular interest. Like Sappho, Corinna must be interpreted within her cultural context. We have seen that she is a product of the dominant culture, as much as Alcman or Pindar were. Some may indeed suppose that her poetic talents were crippled by that culture, and wish for a few lines of the blameworthy Myrtis, who at least essayed higher things. However, the evidence does not permit such conjecture: had she been a pupil of Sappho, her art might still have been limited. Within the limitations she imposed upon herself, she

This content downloaded from 136.244.193.92 on Wed, 27 Mar 2019 12:40:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms really does very well. Her narratives are brisk, economical and witty, with the occasional deft stroke or delicate flight of fancy. They display consider? able erudition, yet wear their learning lightly. As choral compositions, they must have been engaging to hear and fun to sing. Altogether, Corinna's weroia are pretty poems?only we must not call them "women's poetry."

NOTES

1 The following studies are cited by author's last name: G.M. Kirkwood, Early Greek Monody: The History of a Poetic Type, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, 37 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1974); D.L, Page, Corinna (London: The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, 1953); S.B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schocken Books, 1975); C.P, Segal, "Pebbles in Golden Urns: The Date and Style of Corinna," Eranos, 73 (1975), 1-8; MX. West, "Corinna," Classical Quarterly, N.S. 20 (1977), 277ST. References to the text of Corinna are to Poetae Melici Graeci, ed. D.L. Page (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), hereafter PMG, The fragments of Sappho are cited according to their numbering in Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, eds. E, Lobel and D.L. Page (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), hereafter LP. Abbreviations for the works of classical authors are found in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, second edition. 2 On Corinna's dialect, see especially Page, pp. 46-59; on her meters, Page, pp. 61-64 and West, 280-82. 3 K. Latte, "Die Lebenszeit der Korinna," Eranos, 54 (1956), 67 describes her art as "stiff' and "wooden"; for Kirkwood, 193, her style possesses "a rather barren simplicity." CM, Bowra, "Early Lyric and Elegiac Poetry," in New Chapters in the History of Greek Literature, 3rd series, ed. J.U. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933) p. 30, characterizes her work as "bound to tradition and local association, narrow in its outlook and unadventurous in its artifice." 4 For the tradition of women's poetry in Greece and Corinna's important place in that tradition, see Pomeroy, pp, 52-56, and J,P. Hallett, "Sappho and Her Social Context: Sense and Sensuality," Signs, 4 (1979), 460. M.R, Lefkowitz, "Men and Women on Women's Lives," in Heroines and Hysterics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), pp, 26-31, analyzes the marked differences between the presentation of women's experience in texts written by Greek males and Greek women's autobiographical accounts of their lives.

5 For Sappho's audience of female companions, see LP 160. It is true that we have fragments and even complete epigrams by several other women poets, but none identifies herself as writing in the tradition of women's poetry. A possible exception is Nossis* epigram AP 7.718, although there the artist appears only to be invoking Sappho as a model, without postulating a female audience. For women's themes in the post-classical writers Erinna, Anyte and Nossis, see S. Barnard, "Hellenistic Women Poets," Classical Journal, 73 (1978), 204-13. 6 Plutarch, De glor. Atk 4.347F-348A retells a story in which Corinna instructs Pindar in the literary use of myth. At Tanagra, Pausanias saw a painting of her in victory pose and was told that it depicted her triumph over Pindar (9,22.3). Pausanias' single victory becomes five separate defeats of Pindar in Aelian, VH 13,25 and in the Suda, a Byzantine encyclopedia. 7 For instance, the Suda, compiled in the tenth century, asserts that Erinna was a contempo? rary of Sappho, even though the third century A.D. chronographer Eusebius had assigned her to Ol. 106.4-107.1 (353-352 B.C.). The Palatine Anthology calls Nossis at 7.718 a "companion of Sappho of Mytilene," despite the internal evidence of other epigrams in which she establishes herself as a native of south Italian Locri alive in the third century B.C.

This content downloaded from 136.244.193.92 on Wed, 27 Mar 2019 12:40:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 8 The most comprehensive discussion of Corinna's date is in Page, pp. 65-88. After marshal? ing and weighing all the arguments on both sides, Page concludes that there is simply not enough evidence to settle the matter. Later studies echo his uncertainty, with the exception of West, 286, who presents a strong case for the later dating. I cite additional reasons for a Hellenistic date in "The Provincialism of Corinna," forthcoming. The suggestion that Corinna may be a late poet employing an archaizing style is made by Segal, 7. 9 Kirkwood, 185-86. 10 D.L. Clayman, "The Meaning of Corinna's FepGla," Classical Quarterly, N.S. 28 (1978), 396-97. 11 On the meaning of the epithet, see Segal, 5. The woman poet Myrtis is ligoura, "clear- voiced," at PMG 664a. 1. The verb kdtillein, "wheedle tease" is definitely associated with feminine guile; cf, Hesiod, Op. 373-75 and Sophocles, Ant. 756. 12 I follow H. Lloyd-Jones, Classical Review, 8 (1958), 20-21, who emends MS ep pateron at line 9 to ap pateron. 13 C. Calame's monumental two-volume study, Les Choeurs dejeunesfiU.es en Grecearchaique: I, Morphologie, fonction religieuse et sociale; II, Alcman, Instituto di Filologia Classica, Universita di Urbino, Filologia e critica, vols. 20-21 (Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo & Bizzarri, 1977), provides a complete treatment of Alcman's maiden songs. Reviewing Calame (Classical World, 73 [1979], 56-57, reprinted in Heroines and Hysterics, pp. 50-52), M.R. Lefkowitz makes the important observation that Alcman's girls express feelings projected upon them by the larger society. 14 West, 282, believes that PMG 664a belongs to Corinna's prologue poem. For Myrtis' poetic productions, see Antipater of Thessalonica, AP 9.26.7 and Plutarch, Quaest. Graec. 40. 15 Sappho as the standard model for women poets: Nossis, AP 7.718 and cf. the Aeolic element in the dialect of Erinna's Distaff, which was intended "to echo Sappho and so emphasize the female sex of the writer" (M.L. West, "Erinna," Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 25 [1977], 117). 16 Hallett, 455-56. 17 For the duality of Greek women's cultural consciousness, see J. Winkler, "Gardens of Nymphs: Public and Private in Sappho's Lyrics," Women's Studies, 8 (1981), 65-91. 18 At Lys. 588-97 the heroine defends her actions with the argument that war is detrimental to marriage and childbearing. 19 M.B. Arthur, "Early Greece: The Origins of the Western Attitude toward Women," Arethusa, 6 (1973), 7-58. On the related question of women's position in classical Athens, see the recent study by J. Gould, "Law, Custom and Myth: Aspects of the Social Position of Women in Classical Athens," Journal of Hellenic Studies, 100 (1980), 38-59. 20 Winkler, 68-78. 21 On the unique character of Sappho's model of erotic relations, see E.S. Stigers, "Sappho's Private World," Women's Studies, 8 (1981), 47-63. 22 J.D. Marry, "Sappho and the Heroic Ideal: 'epcoTos&periy," Arethusa, 12 (1979), 71-92. 23 J.P. Hallett, "Beloved Cleis," Quademi Urbinati di Cultura classica, N.S. 10 (1982), 21-31. 24 Useful discussions of this passage are found in Page, pp, 20-22, pp. 76-78; Kirkwood, 187-90; I. Weiler, Der Agon im Mythos, Impulse der Forschung, 16 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaft- liche Buchgesellschaft, 1974), 80-89; Segal, 1-8. 25 Page, p. 20 n5, discovers in six short lines no less than three direct allusions to the Theogony. 26 L.S. Sussman, "The Birth of the Gods: Sexuality, Conflict and Cosmic Structure in Hesiod's Theogony," Ramus, 7 (1978), 61-77; M.B. Arthur, "Cultural Strategies in Hesiod's Theogony. Law, Family, Society," Arethusa, 15 (1982), 63-82. 27 For the local background to this myth, see Page, pp. 24-27.

This content downloaded from 136.244.193.92 on Wed, 27 Mar 2019 12:40:30 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 28 CM. Bowra, "The Daughters of Asopus," Hermes, 73 (1938), 213-21, reprinted in Problems in Greek Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 54-65. 29 Euripides' martyr-heroines Iphigenia in the Iphigenia at Aulis and Macaria in the Children of Heracles are prototypes of the young girl as feminine ideal. Semonides of Amorgos (fr. 7 Diehl, translation in Pomeroy, pp. 49-52) rounds off a long catalogue of "evil" women, typified as natural elements or animals, with a single "good" type, the bee-woman, who is obedient, hard-working, simple, and sexless. 30 This development is fully documented by S.B. Pomeroy, "TECHNIKAI KAI MOUSIKAI: The Education of Women in the Fourth Century and in the Hellenistic Period," American Journal of Ancient History, 2 (1977), 51-68. Although Pomeroy does not fully commit herself on the question of Corinna's date, she discusses her in the context of a Hellenistic "renaiscence [sic] of women poets" brought about by the expansion of opportunities for education (pp. 54-57). 31 In Hellenistic literature, the speaker of a poem is frequently made to address a fictitious audience whose education or social status is inferior to that of the assumed reader; this device then becomes the occasion for wit or conscious irony. In Callimachus' Bath of Pallas and Hymn to Demeter, for example, the speaker of each poem tells a crowd of devout worshipers a "sacred tale" whose content subtly undercuts their innocent piety. 32 During the first century B.C., Alexander Polyhistor had written a commentary upon her works (Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius 1.551). The elegiac poet Propertius is charmed by a girl whose verses rival Corinna's (2.3.21-22). Ovid invokes her as an exemplar of the puella docta by choosing "Corinna" as a pseudonym for his literary mistress. The father of the poet Statius, a Naples schoolmaster, taught her works to students {Silv. 5.3.158). In the second century A.D., the Alexandrian philologists Apollonius Dyscolus and Herodian used her texts as a source for their analysis of the Boeotian vernacular. 33 See Hallett, 448-49. Sappho's later reputation is the subject of her forthcoming study "Autonomy as Anomaly: Roman and post-classical Greek reactions to female homoerotic expression" (paper presented at the Fifth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women at Vassar College on June 17, 1981). 34 This point is well demonstrated by M.R. Lefkowitz, "Critical Stereotypes and the Poetry of Sappho," Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 14 (1973), 113-23, reprinted in Heroines and Hysterics, pp. 59-68. Recent literary studies that attempt to explain Sappho's poems as mere confessions of sexual abnormality include R. Bagg, "Love, Ceremony and Daydream in Sappho's Lyrics," Arion, 3 (1964), 44-82 and G. Devereux, "The Nature of Sappho's Seizure in Fr. 31 LP as Evidence of Her Inversion," Classical Quarterly, N.S. 20 (1970), 17-31. In contrast, Winkler and Stigers treat her homoeroticism as one aspect of a larger poetic vision.

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