Corinna of Tanagra and Her Audience Author(S): Marilyn B
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University of Tulsa 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 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/464203?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of Tulsa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 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. 10 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 11 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.