Erinna

Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene by Simeon Solomon

Erinna (/ɪˈrɪnə/; Greek: Ἤριννα) was an ancient Greek poet. Biographical details about her life are uncertain. She is generally thought to have lived in the first half of the fourth century BC, though some ancient traditions have her as a contemporary of Sappho; Telos is generally considered to be her most likely birthplace, but Tenos, Teos, Rhodes, and Lesbos are all also mentioned by ancient sources as her home. Erinna is best known for her long poem, the Distaff, a three-hundred line hexameter lament for her childhood friend Baucis, who had died shortly after marriage. A large fragment of this poem was discovered in 1928 at Behnasa in Egypt. Along with the Distaff, three epigrams ascribed to Erinna are known, preserved in the Greek Anthology.

Life

Little ancient evidence about Erinna's life survives, and the testimony which does is often contradictory. Her dates are uncertain. According to the Suda, she was one of Sappho's companions, placing her floruit in the sixth century BC.[1] The latest date given for Erinna in the ancient testimonia is that provided by Eusebius, who suggests the mid-fourth century BC.[2] Scholars now tend to believe that Erinna was an early Hellenistic poet.[1]

Ancient testimony is divided on where Erinna was from: possibilities include Teos, Telos, Tenos, Mytilene, and Rhodes.[3] Sylvia Barnard argues that Erinna was from Telos on the grounds of her dialect,[4] though Donald Levin notes that while based on Doric, Erinna's dialect is a literary creation and does not accurately reflect her own native dialect.[5] It is likely that Erinna was born into a wealthy family, and would have been taught to read and write poetry – Teos, one of Erinna's possible birthplaces, is one of the few places in the ancient Greek world where epigraphical evidence that girls were educated survives.[6]

Three epigrams preserved in the Greek Anthology suggest that Erinna died young – according to Asclepiades shortly after composing the Distaff aged 19, though the earliest source to explicitly fix her date of death at age 19 is the Suda.[7] Marylin B. Arthur, however, argues that though the character of Erinna in the Distaff was 19, it is not necessarily the case that she did compose the poem when she was that age.[8]

Works

The Distaff

Only a few fragments of Erinna’s works remain but she is most noted for the heartfelt and elegiac style poem The Distaff, written in the local Dorian Greek dialect. Although it is unclear as to the nature of their relationship, it has been assumed that Baukis (Baucis) is a childhood friend that either died or married someone else before she and Erinna could consummate their love. However, the popular consensus is that Erinna’s poem is solely about the death of her childhood friend Baukis (Baucis). The poem may have played on the irony of her early death, as Erinna may have indicated in her poem that she wanted or expected such a fate as well.[9]

In The Distaff, Erinna plays on the theme of weaving by using it as a metaphor to assist in her personal retelling of a childhood friend. Weaving is a metaphor for writing poetry and alludes to the thread of life spun by the Fates, as well as referring to a traditional female activity. Erinna recalls her childhood and the games they used to play—the recollection of a shared past is a theme found also in Sappho.[10] Erinna’s mourning seems to have been for the loss of her friend, to marriage, as well as her death. These two themes, death and marriage, are united as early as the myth of Persephone.[11] Erinna’s poem has also been deemed important by scholars for the glimpse it gives us of a girl’s view of her relationship with her mother.

Epigrams

There are three extant epigrams attributed to Erinna. Two of these epigrams (2 and 3) are epitaphs for Baucis and focus on death and marriage, a popular theme in Hellenistic poetry. The dialect, vocabulary and subject matter of the epigrams are reminiscent of the works of earlier Hellenistic poets like Asclepiades, Theocritus and Anyte.

‘’1. This portrait was made with delicate hands; Prometheus my good friend,
There are people with skill equal to your too.
Anyway, if whoever drew this girl so-true-to-life,
Had added speech, Argathrchis would be complete.

2.
My gravestone, my Sirens, and mourning urn,
Who holds Hades’ meager ashes,
Say to those who pass by my tomb ‘farewell’,
Both those from my town, and those from other states.
Also, that this grave holds me, a bride. Say also this,
That my father called me Baucis, and that my family
Was from Tenos, so that they may know, and that my friend
Erinna engraved this epitaph on my tomb.

3.
I am the tomb of Baucis, a young bride, and as you pass
The much lamented grave-stone you may say to Hades:
‘Hades, you are malicious’. When you look, the beautiful letters
will tell of the most cruel fate of the Baucis,
how her father-in-law lit the girl’s funeral pyre
with the pine-torches over which Hymen sang.
And you, Hymen, changed the tuneful song of weddings
Into the mournful sound of lamentations.

"A Hexameter"
4.
We came to mighty Demeter, nine
Young girls, all wearing our beautiful clothes,
Wearing our beautiful clothes, and even bright necklaces
Sawn from ivory, just like the light of the sun… ’’

Debate about the Epigrams

West again argues against their authenticity, pointing out that they are derivative and only contain certain information that was in ‘’The Distaff’’ itself. He sees them as fictions ‘’inspired’’ by Erinna’s work, claiming that “’[t]hey seem to have been intended for inscription’, though this in itself does not mean that they were not written by Erinna”. The epigram on Agatharchus is of a quite a different tone and is similar to the poems of Nossis. West argues on the bases that the poem should be attributed to Nossis, but it is possible that Erinna wrote on more than one theme. Nevertheless, the epigrams were included in the Greek Anthology under Erinna’s name, and it is clear that in antiquity readers accept them as her work.

Praises

In the Greek Anthology Asclepiades, Leonidas and an anonymous poet sing her praises. Meleager honored her with a place in his “‘Garland’ of poets”, likening her work to a “sweet, maidenly colored crocus”. Antipater of Sidon says that, “although she wrote few verses, her work was inspired by the muses, and she would always be remembered” (7.713). Her work is compared favorably both with Homer and Sappho, introducing a link between Erinna and more famous poets. Antipater of Thessalonica included her in his canon of nine female poets.[12]

Notes

  1. 1 2 Levin, Donald Norman (1962). Quaestiones Erinneanae. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology. 66. p. 193.
  2. ↑ Levin, Donald Norman (1962). Quaestiones Erinneanae. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology. 66. p. 194.
  3. ↑ Arthur, Marylin B. (1980). The Tortoise and the Mirror: Erinna PSI 1090. The Classical World. 74. p. 57.
  4. ↑ Barnard, Sylvia (1978). "Hellenistic Women Poets". The Classical Journal. 73 (3): 204.
  5. ↑ Levin, Donald Norman (1962). Quaestiones Erinneanae. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology. 66. p. 195.
  6. ↑ Pomeroy, Sarah (1978). Supplementary Notes on Erinna. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik. 32. pp. 19–20.
  7. ↑ West, M. L. (1977). Erinna. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik. 25. pp. 95–6.
  8. ↑ Arthur, Marylin B. (1980). The Tortoise and the Mirror: Erinna PSI 1090. The Classical World. 74. p. 56.
  9. ↑ Paton, W. R. (1913). The Greek Anthology (Anthologia Graeca). New York: W. Heinemann; G.P. Putnam's Sons.
  10. ↑ Pomeroy, S. B. (n.d.). Chapter 17: Women and Ethnicity in Classical Greece: Changing the Paradigms. Rhodes University. Retrieved April 27, 2014, from http://ruconnected.ru.ac.za/pluginfile.php/255346/mod_resource/content/1/Women%20and%20Ethnicity%20in%20Classical%20Greece%20-%20Pomeroy.pdf%5Bpermanent+dead+link%5D
  11. ↑ Richardson, N. J. (1974). The Homeric hymn to Demeter,. Oxford Eng.: Clarendon Press.
  12. ↑ Fernandez Robbio, Matías S. (2014) «Musas y escritoras: el primer canon de la literatura femenina de la Grecia antigua (AP IX 26)». Praesentia, v. 15, 2014, pp. 1-9. ISSN (en línea): 1316-1857. (online)

References

  •  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Erinna". Encyclopædia Britannica. 9 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 744–745.
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