Hellenistic Women PoetsAuthor(s): Sylvia BarnardReviewed work(s):Source: The Classical Journal, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Feb. - Mar., 1978), pp. 204-213Published by: The Classical Association of the Middle West and SouthStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3296687 .Accessed: 15/05/2012 03:54

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HELLENISTIC WOMEN POETS

Although the famous Alexandrian canon of nine lyric poets includes only one woman, Sappho, and, in some late versions, Corinna, there is a separate listing of nine outstanding Greek women poets, drawn up by a male poet in imitation of the canons of the scholars, but in the form of an epigram. (Anthologia Palatina IX, 26). It is not known what moved this poet, Antipater of Thes- salonica, who lived in the Roman period, to draw up a list of this kind. Possibly it was an effort to demonstrate to his sophisticated Roman friends that Greece had had women of learning, even if they had lacked the social freedom of their later Roman sisters. Of the nine women whom Antipater names, at least four are generally agreed to fall within the Hellenistic Age, even if we do not include Corinna in this category.

These four women all appear in the Greek Anthology and reflect the widen- ing of the Greek world in their geographical distribution. Moero was an epic poet, whose son was also a poet. The son went to Alexandria and became part of a quasi-canonical grouping of third century poets too modern to have been included in the proper canons drawn up by their scholarly contemporaries.1 However, Moero herself spent her life and wrote all her poetry in Byzantium, so far as we know. Anyte wrote several types of poetry and carried on from Telesilla and Praxilla the tradition of women poets in the Peloponnese. She was a native of Tegea in Arcadia, one of the most rural and conservative areas in Greece, but, because some of her poems refer to the sea, people assume that she travelled out of Arcadia at least as far as the Peloponnesian coast.2 Nossis was a poet from Locri in southern Italy and represents the importance of the western Greeks in the period just before Rome and Carthage fought over their coun- tryside. Erinna, the most fascinating but in many ways the most mysterious of these poets, seems to have come from the island of Telos near Rhodes, since that is the one of her several traditional birthplaces of which the local dialect best fits the language of her poetry.

It is all very well to have the names of a number of women poets handed down to us but what of their actual works? One can summarize rather briefly some of the main sources for fragments and short preserved poems. One important place to look is Athenaeus, the source of a number of fragments of Sappho and other eminent poets of both sexes, although his particular value lies in being the only source for some of the obscurer women, such as Hedyle and the rather questionable Philaenis. A rather large number of complete but short epigrams by women have been preserved in the large and amorphous collection of Greek poetry known as the Greek Anthology. This anthology gives us a very respectable number of poems for Anyte and Nossis and a few examples of other

1For this "Pleiad," see Albin Lesky, A History of Greek Literature, London, 1966, p. 743 ff.

2Gow, A.S.F. and Page, D.L., The Greek Anthology: Hellenistic Epigrams, Cambridge, 1965, Vol. II, p. 89.

204

HELLENISTIC WOMEN POETS 205

women's poetry. The third source has been the fragments of literary papyri, which have been discovered and edited in the twentieth century, for the most part. Papyri are not normally found in good enough condition to yield complete poems with certain texts, but we owe to the papyri many long fragments of Sappho, the long fragment of Corinna which has given us some idea of her style, and a fragment of the mysterious Erinna, often thought to come from her long poem, "The Distaff."3

Leaving Sappho out of consideration because of her extraordinary fame and her very early date, the classical women poets do not, from what little we know of them, have anything especially feminine in their subject matter. In the Hellenistic period, women seem again to have written about matters which concerned them as women. In examining this phenomenon, one might begin with one long fragment of Erinna's hexametres

With uncontrolled feet you leapt into the sea, "I have you." I called, "My friend." And playing tortoise you ran along the yard of the great hall. Remembering these things, poor Baucis, I grieve for you, these images of you still warm in my heart, girl. The things that we once took pleasure in are now hot coals of memory. As little girls we slept with dolls in our rooms like women without their worries, but in the morning your mother, who had to assign the wool-working to her maids, came calling you about the salted meat. What fear the monster Mormo gave us then as children! With big ears on its head, it walked on four feet and constantly made faces. But when you went to the couch of a man, you forgot all that you learned from your mother as a baby, dear Baucis; Aphrodite put forgetfulness into your heart, so, weeping over you, I must still omit your funeral. My feet are not so impure as to leave the house, it is not right for my eyes to see a corpse, nor for me to lament with loosened hair but the shame of my blushing tears me in two.

(My own translation of the decipherable part of the text, published in D.L. Page, Greek Literary Papyri, 1942, p. 486-9.)

The subject matter of this fragment is explained in part by two of Erinna's poems in the Greek Anthology and by a poem in that collection, written about

3Sappho, Papyri Oxyrynchi , passim; Papyrus Haun; Corinna, Berlin Papyrus, edited by Wilamowitz, Berliner Klassiker-Texte, V, 2, 1907, no. 284; Erinna, Papiri Greci e Latini, IX, 1929, no. 1090, edited by Vitelli-Norsa.

206 SYLVIA BARNARD

her by Asclepiades of Samos. The two poems by Erinna herself (Anthologia Palatina, 7, 710, 712) are both funeral epigrams for Baucis, described as a friend of Erinna's, and tell us that Baucis came from the island of Tenos or Telos-Telos is preferable in view of Erinna's dialect-and that she died so soon after marriage that the marriage torches were used to light her funeral pyre, an interesting reversal of Hamlet's lines about his father's funeral meats.4 The poem about Erinna (A.P. 7, 11) by Asclepiades tells us that she died unmarried at the age of nineteen; this poem is followed by two others (A.P. 7, 12 and 13) which are less informative but add to one's feeling of this young poet's importance.

In other parts of the Palatine Anthology there are other poems about or references to Erinna. One might particularly cite Christodorus of Coptus's early sixth century hexametre listing of the statues in the gymnasium of Zeuxippus in Constantinople which tells us that Erinna's statue was included in this group. (A.P. 2, 11, and 108-110).

In any case, the long fragment which we have of Erinna's poetry is of enormous importance to us for its description of the lives of little girls in antiquity. We find that they went swimming in the sea and that, as we suspected, the courtyards enclosed by upper-class Greek houses were the scenes of vigorous physical activity. These lines parallel the pottery oil flasks which are decorated with pictures of girls and young women swinging and spinning tops, presumably in their courtyards. The reference to the sea, however, suggests that at this date and place girls were not restricted to play within the house walls, but the lines at the end of the fragment where Erinna regrets her inability to attend her friend's funeral suggest the familiar notions of women being confined at home. Certainly even under the most restricted conditions women were ordinarily permitted to attend funerary rites, as we know from the admonition to the women present at the end of Pericles's funeral speech for the first casualties of the Peloponnesian War. (Thucydides II, 45). Furthermore, it is clear that the reference to "lamentation with loosened hair" signifies the ordinary sort of feminine mourning from which Erinna finds herself barred. The suggestion has therefore been made that the adult Erinna was a certain kind of priestess who would incur impurity from the sight of a corpse and perhaps even from any form of travel.5 Such religious taboos have many parallels and are not imposed solely on women, since, for example, the chief priest of Jupiter at Rome was subject to these kinds of restrictions. The fragment, brief as it is, also gives us glimpses of the activities of the house, the doll play, the early rising, the mother-daughter closeness, the assigning of wool to the maids again with overtones of the Roman matron, and the preparation of meat which must, of course, be heavily salted against the Mediterranean sun. The game "tortoise" is a girl's name otherwise known to us through the Hellenistic lexicographer Pollux.6 Thus in a few words a great many images of the daily feminine round are drawn.

4See Giuseppe Giangrande, "An Epigram of Erinna", Classical Review, March 1969, p. 1-3. New Series Vol. XIX, Old Series Vol. LXXXIII.

5See discussion by C.M. Bowra in Greek Poetry and Life; Essays Presented to Gilbert Murray on his Seventieth Birthday, Oxford 1936, p. 334-335.

6Ibid., p. 328.

HELLENISTIC WOMEN POETS 207

Many questions about Erinna are still left unanswered. Her ancient biog- raphical notices are most confusing. Suidas gives four possible nationalities for her: Telian, probably the true one; Tenian, based perhaps on the same sort of manuscript reading which makes Baucis a Tenian7 in A.P. 7, 710; Rhodian, which is a way of defining her in terms of the nearest major cultural centre (a Telian being called a Rhodian in the same way that Corinna may have come from Tanagra and still have been called a Theban), and finally and most interestingly, Lesbian. The last statement represents a persistent notion about Erinna, which seems not to be borne out by her dialect. Suidas recognises this problem and says that she wrote in Aeolic and Doric dialect, but the poetry we have of hers is in Doric except for a few Aeolic forms and could hardly have been written on Lesbos. The manuscripts of the Greek Anthology also fre- quently refer to her as Erinna the Mytilenian as if she had been a native of the capital city of Lesbos. The last sentence of Suidas's entry under her name says that she was a friend of Sappho and lived at the same time, a possibility which is given no credence today. The two reasonable dates for her are the middle of the fourth century, the date given by the chronicler Eusebius8 who makes her "floruit" three years after Alexander's birth, and the beginning of the fourth century.9 In neither case could her connexion with Sappho be explained by her dating.

Another question is the nature of her poetic corpus. Other than the three epigrams in the Greek Anthology, we have no evidence for any work except a long hexametre poem, presumably the one from which we now have a fragment. Suidas says that she wrote epigrams, and "The Distaff". Although he does not specify that she wrote hexametres, he suggests it by saying that her verses were compared to Homer's. This remark comes from one of the anony- mous epigrams to Erinna (A.P. 9, 190) where it is specified that she wrote three hundred verses equal to Homer's. This epigram says that she wrote lyrics as far inferior to Sappho's as her hexametres were superior to Sappho's. Here we have a statement that she did indeed write hexametres-in fact three hundred of them. They are not here said to have been called "The Distaff", but it is said that "she stayed by her distaff and loom for fear of her mother", an ambiguous sentence in which the poem rather than the implement may be meant. Another of the epigrams about her says that she was driven to the underworld by "Fate, the mistress of the distaff", (A.P. 7, 12) and the Greek word for "distaff" even appears in the fragment which we now have of her long work although not in the

7Another Byzantine source, Stephanus of Byzantium, does make Erinna herself a Tenian.

"St. Jerome, Interpretatio Chronicae Eusebii Pamphili, Olymp. 106. 9Averil and Alan Cameron accept Eusebius's date in their article "Erinna'sDistaff,"

Classical Quarterly, 1969, Vol. XIX, New Series, p. 286, footnote 6. Donald Levin ("Quaestiones Erinneae" in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 1962, Vol. 66, p. 194) likes this date or would accept one slightly earlier. Gow and Page (op. cit., p. 282) include Erinna in their Hellenistic Epigrams on linguistic evidence. See also Bowra, op. cit., p. 337-339, and Georg Luck, in Das Epigramm, edited by G. Pfohl, Darmstadt, 1969, p. 86. Sarah Pomeroy chooses Erinna to represent the re-emergence of women poets in the Hellenistic era (S.B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, New York, 1975, p. 137-139.)

208 SYLVIA BARNARD

decipherable portion of it. Thus the conclusion seems to be that the long poem about her girlhood with Baucis is the chief thing she wrote before her early death,10 augmented by a few epigrams and perhaps by a few lyrics, although the mention of the latter probably only comes from her association with Sappho. In the case of Erinna, this association, which seems to be made with other women poets as well, may be peculiarly appropriate since she did focus her life upon a relationship with another young woman who then betrayed her by marrying and then afterwards by dying, a circumstance that Erinna parallels with the cir- cumstance of her marriage. As far as we can visualise Erinna's psychological makeup, she seems to have been a Lesbian in the modem sense, if not physically, at least psychologically. If the fragment preserved in the Collec- tanea Alexandrina (J.V. Powell, editor, Oxford, 1925, p. 186) is hers, then she may have been a priestess of Demeter,11 in which case her identification with the feminine would be even more pronounced.

Unlike Erinna, Anyte is the author of at least nineteen extant poems, and they cover a wide range of topics. Four are epitaphs for girls who died young. (A.P. 7, 486; A.P. 7, 490; A.P. 7, 646; A.P. 7, 649). Three of these epigrams refer to the fact that the girls died before marriage, and in no case is marriage viewed unfavourably. In A.P. 7, 490, there is reference to many suitors who had begun to frequent Antibia's father's house and to how the hopes of all were dashed by fate, here referred to by the feminine name "Moira". Since "Moira" is doom personified as a female and is therefore a sinister aspect of woman, she takes Antibia away from her natural male suitors in this case. In A.P. 7, 649, the language becomes more directly like that used by Erinna and Hamlet, and the opposition between marriage and death is more explicit. Thersis's mother gives her, instead of a marriage chamber and bridal hymns, an elaborate monument, apparently including a tomb-statue. Whether or not one wants to say literally that the money intended for Thersis's dowry and marriage festival went into this monument, marriage and death are here juxtaposed with the definite idea that marriage is the desirable and natural lot of women. In Erinna's poem, Baucis's marriage was, on the contrary, a lesser death, followed by a greater one. The forgetting of her happy childhood which was induced by Aphrodite is paralleled by the forgetfulness that descends upon the dead when they drink from the River Lethe. In Anyte, there may indeed be the notion that Thersis's mother would have lost her teen-age daughter by the one means or the other, but the vocabulary leaves no doubt of the pleasant associations attached even to loss if it be by reason of marriage.

Anyte, like Erinna, describes the activities of children. The difference, however, is that Anyte treats of them as an impartial observer. There is in Anyte none of the overt yearning for the lost Eden of childhood that pervades Erinna's writing. There are no reliable clues to the length of Anyte's life. However, a poet's premature death is usually noted in biographical sources, as in Erinna's case, and so we may assume that Anyte lived to an average age.

1oAlthough people have found the title odd, Averil and Alan Cameron, art. cit. defend it sensibly and suggest that the distaff referred to is the one on which the Fates spun the life of Baucis. This agrees with Levin's conclusion, art. cit. p. 200.

"1Bowra, art. cit. p. 334.

HELLENISTIC WOMEN POETS 209

Thus we may also assume that in writing of children she is watching them from the vantage point of comfortable maturity rather than tormented adolescence. Indeed, her interest in them may stem from having been a mother herself.

What may be the best of Anyte's poems about children is quite unlike any other poem known to us and gives a vivid image of Greek village life at this period.

The children have put purple reins on you, goat, and a noseband around your shaggy face, and they are playing horse games around the god's temple where he can watch them enjoying themselves.

(My translation)

These lines show immense sympathy for the small goat-riders. We have an understanding of the natural affinity of children for nature and animal life, and we have a perceptive view of the relationship of children, even more helpless than other human beings, to the gods. Here the relationship is benevolent, but in A.P. 7, 190, cruel Hades steals the pets of a girl called Myro and de- monstrates the random hostility of the gods.

Although we have more of Anyte's poems than of any other woman poet's after Sappho, we have no reliable information about her life. Her approximate date comes only from the style and nature of her poetry.12 Besides references in her writing to Tegea and to the Arcadian god Pan, we have, included in Pollux, the epigram which she wrote to her dog Locris, and the declaration that it was written by "Anyte of Tegea" but we have no other precise statements as to her birthplace. We have no record of her family and only one anecdote about her life.13 This one tale connects her with Naupactus across the Corinthian gulf from the Peloponnese but does not imply that she lived there. She is said to have received in her sleep a sealed tablet from the god of healing Asclepius, telling her to go to Naupactus and deliver it to a blind man called Phalysius. When she did so, his eyesight was restored and he rewarded Anyte and built Asclepius a temple at Naupactus. This story is like many of the miracle tales told about poets of which the most famous is probably that of Arion being rescued from drowning by a dolphin. Anyte has one poem about a temple of Aphrodite which overlooks the sea and is sited therefore in a coastal town like Naupactus (A.P. 9, 144). This temple has an ancient wooden statue like the one on Aphrodite's precinct at Patrae, across the Corinthian Gulf from Naupactus on the Pelopon- nesian side. The late travel writer Pausanias saw the statue at Patrae and remarked upon it,14 so that it is an easy conclusion to make that this is the statue that Anyte is talking about. However, Pausanias lived four hundred years after Anyte, and there must have been many more such wooden statues preserved in

12See discussion in G. Luck, art. cit. p. 89. "3Pausanias X, 38, 13. 14Ibid. VII, 21, 10.

210 SYLVIA BARNARD

her day than in his. Moreover, the anecdote about Naupactus might reflect a real connexion of the poet with that city. In Pausanias's account of Naupactus (X, 38) where he speaks of Anyte going there to cure Phalysius, he speaks of the worship of Aphrodite in a cavern there and of an actual temple of Aphrodite close by at Oeanthea. By his day the statue at Oeanthea was of stone, but at some point it had probably replaced a wooden one. Thus Anyte's wooden statue might actually have been in the Naupactus area.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to say anything about Anyte's status in daily life. Nothing indicates that she was, like Erinna, a priestess, or, like Sappho, some sort of instructor in music. Nothing prevents us from thinking of her as a wife and mother, and nothing in her poetry indicates that she would not have welcomed that role. In any case Anyte represents a stable kind of world where children, animals, fountains, trees, and gods live in harmony.

The other late Greek woman poet of whom we have a considerable literary corpus extant is Nossis, the author of twelve epigrams preserved in the Greek Anthology. Two-thirds of her poems concern women, and her lineage is recorded in the female line, her mother being Theophilis and her maternal grandmother Cleocha. This seems to have been the custom in her home city, Epizephyrian Locri,15 a southern Italian colony of one of the Greek cities called Locri. The Italian Locri has been the subject of a great deal of discussion about its matriarchal practices.16 This paper is not concerned as to whether these customs originated from the native Italians who lived on the site or whether they were connected with the temple prostitution which also went on at this Locri, but it is important to realise that Nossis came from a city where the status of women was in a number of ways radically different from their status in the rest of the Greek-speaking world. Her national origin is not in doubt, because one of her own poems, (A.P. 7, 718) although it is one which has been the subject of a great deal of discussion, does clearly seem to say that she is a native of Locri. Her date is also not in very much doubt since she writes an epitaph for another early third century poet, Rhinthon, whose "floruit" is given by Suidas. (A.P. 7, 44; Suidas, s.v. Rhinthon).17 The details of her life are again not concretely known, but interesting suppositions can be made, based on her poems and the peculiarities of Locrian society.

Like Erinna and Anyte, Nossis is occasionally compared to Sappho, and, unlike them, she herself fosters the suggestion. In the very corrupt epigram (A.P. 7, 718) which tells us that Nossis was a Locrian, Sappho is referred to and the sense seems to be that a voyager sailing towards Mytilene is to take a message of respect to Sappho. This has, of course, given rise to the idea that Nossis and Sappho were contemporaries, that a literal message is being sent from Nossis to her friend Sappho, but this seems not to be the case. It is rather

15The late historian Polybius (XII, 5) records this fact, which he attributes to the Locrians being of mixed race, and takes special note of the fact that a girl held the sacred office of cup-bearer.

16See discussion in T.V. Dunbabin, The Western Greeks, Oxford, 1948, p. 183 ff. 17G. Luck remarks that she seems to be the youngest of the four poets of Antipater' s

canon who themselves appear in the Greek Anthology. G. Luck, art. cit., p. 102.

HELLENISTIC WOMEN POETS 211

that a woman poet concerned with women's lives is saluting another woman poet with similar preoccupations.

One clue to Nossis's self-identification with Sappho is that she seems to be devoted to Aphrodite and speaks of love as the most important of all human activities. In one of her poems, (A.P. 5, 170) obviously modelled upon Sappho's long fragment in which she says that love is far finer than chariots of war,1" Nossis tells us that

Nothing is pleasanter than love. Wealth and everything come second to it. From my mouth I have spat even honey. Nossis declares this. Whomever Aphrodite has not loved does not know the flowering of her roses.

(My translation)

Sappho speaks of love and specifically of the cult of the goddess Aphrodite in many other works. While one cannot say what the nature of the cult was in archaic Lesbos, we do know a certain amount about the cult of Aphrodite in fifth century Locri. Justin, who summarised the lost histories of Trogus Pompey, tells us that in 477 or 476

When the Locrians were attacked by the aggression of Leophron of Rhegion, they vowed, if they were victorious, to prostitute their virgins on the feast day of Aphrodite.

Justin 21, 2. (My translation)

This sacred prostitution did not continue for a long time but was revived in the mid-fourth century by the tyrant Dionysius II of Sicily, when Locri was part of the Sicilian Empire. Although Nossis writes after the loosening of the ties with Sicily, when the native Bruttii were attacking the Southern Italian Greeks,19 the revival of sacred prostitution would probably have been no more than fifty years before her birth and the notion of the sacredness of physical love would still have been prevalent in the atmosphere of the town. This poem, in the context of Locrian society, might mean that Nossis herself was a prostitute. Gow and Page discuss this possibility, noting however that Wilamowitz ob- jected to it.20

Another of Nossis's poems (A.P. 9, 332) shows that even if she was not herself a prostitute, she would not be shocked at the suggestion, for it is a dedicatory poem for a statue of Aphrodite erected by the prostitute Polyarchis

18Sappho, fragment 16, in Lobel and Page, Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, Oxford, 1955.

190ne of her poems (A.P. 6, 132) commemorates a victory of Locri over the Bruttians.

20Gow and Page, op. cit., p. 436.

212 SYLVIA BARNARD

from the earnings of her profession. If Polyarchis was not a personal friend of Nossis, she was certainly a member of the community whom Nossis respected enough to write a poem for her. This poem is attributed in its manuscript introduction to "Nossis of Lesbos", here clearly with no reference to love between women, but apparently because of the praise of Sappho's favourite

goddess. Polyarchis dedicates her statue at a temple of Aphrodite. Gow and Page

express puzzlement at the reference to the temple21 and say that nothing was known of such a temple at Locri, although presumably there was one. One would indeed assume that the sacred prostitutes functioned in a cult building, but there is much more to be said on the subject than that. Archaeologists are at

present attempting to determine which Locrian temple can be assigned to the

love-goddess and Helmut Pruckner22 attributes to her the so-called Marasa

Temple, overlooking the sea like Anyte's Aphrodite temple.23 The Marasa

Temple goes back to the seventh century but was rebuilt in the fifth at about the time the sacred prostitution began. Pruckner's book associates with the cult of

Aphrodite many of the fifth century "Pinakes" or terra-cotta plaques which

archaeologists have found in great numbers on the site of the city. Many of these

plaques are of uncertain subjects, but some of them are surely connected to the worship of Aphrodite, and the literary evidence of Nossis's poems bears out the

importance of this goddess. Apart from the two poems just referred to, two other poems are written for dedications of objects to Aphrodite. In one case (A.P. 9, 605) Callo dedicates a portrait of herself, reminiscent again of the "Pinakes" and in the other (A.P. 6, 275) Samytha dedicates a head-dress. It has been thought that Callo cannot have been a prostitute24 since she is described as someone "of blameless life", but in a society where prostitution is not a source of shame, this does not seem an impossible epithet for one. In any case, she is a votary of the goddess of the "Pinakes" and the evidence of Nossis's poetry is doubly interesting since it comes two centuries later than the

plaques we have found and in a period when it has been conjectured that the cult of Persephone was overtaking that of Aphrodite at Locri.25

No mention of Persephone appears in what is left of Nossis's work, and, indeed, the only epitaph by her is that dedicated to her fellow poet Rhinthon. Most Hellenistic poets represented to the same extent in the Greek Anthology give us a wide range of epitaphs, a favourite genre of the day, so that it is curious that Nossis's work is so free from this preoccupation if she lived in a

city where Persephone was becoming the major deity. Two goddesses other than Aphrodite do appear, however, Hera and Artemis. These goddesses represent respectively family life and childbirth, and the poems in which they appear carry out these motifs.

21Ibid., p. 438. 22Helmut Pruckner, Die Lokrischen Ton-Reliefs, Mainz, 1968, passim. 23Aphrodite's temples often overlooked the sea, because the goddess was supposed to

have been born from sea foam. 24Gow and Page, op. cit., pp. 437, 439. 25Russell Scott and Brunilde Ridgeway, "Notes on the Locrian Pinakes,"

Archaeology, New York, January 1973, p. 47.

HELLENISTIC WOMEN POETS 213 The poem to Hera accompanies a robe dedicated by the poet and her mother

at the great temple of Hera at Croton. This temple had a long and colourful history and was the place where Hannibal left an inscription describing his forces and his exploits,"6 and where Hannibal, according to legend, massacred those of his southern Italian troops who took sanctuary there in order to avoid retreating with him into Africa.27 The Roman historian Livy describes this temple as "revered by all the people of the region" in the late third century28 and the evidence of the two Locrian women going there a half century or so before Hannibal's day shows us that the worship of Hera was paramount in southern Italy long before the coming of the Carthaginians. The offering of a new robe to a statue is, of course, part of a very ancient Greek tradition. The women of the Trojan royal family make such an offering to Trojan Athena in the Iliad and the real offering of a robe to Athena which took place annually in Athens is, of course, depicted in the Parthenon frieze. Such offerings seem rarely to be made by private people, however, particularly at such a famous temple as that of Hera in Croton, and the fact that Nossis and her mother wove and dedicated such a garment seems to point to a high status on their part. The fact that they made the robe together may point to its being an offering in behalf of their family or household, perhaps made to Hera as patron of the family.

The poem to Hera stresses the closeness of a mother and an adult daughter. A brief poem describing the portrait of someone called Melinna (A.P. 6, 353) stresses her resemblance to her mother and by implication praises the mother- daughter relationship. The poem to Artemis is connected to these in that it reminds us of the painful beginnings of every mother-daughter relationship, for in elegant language it summons the goddess:

Artemis of Delos and lovely Ortygia, leave your sacred bow in the care of the Graces. cleanse yourself from Inopus and come to free Alketis from her fearful pains.

(My translation) One can say in conclusion that Anyte, Erinna and Nossis, three major

post-classical women poets of ancient Greece, followed the tradition of Sappho in writing with the elegance and learning of their male colleagues, while including among their themes a number of matters of interest to women of all classes and centuries.

SYLVIA BARNARD The State University of New York at Albany

26Polybius, III, 33, 18; Livy XXVIII, 46. 27Livy, XXX, 20. 28Ibid., XXIV, 3.