A Heritage of Her Own?

This book is a response to the highly controversial discussion surrounding the potential existence of a women’s poetic legacy in Greek antiquity. It has long been argued in scholarship that ancient Greek women writers predominantly composed within a private, wholly female subculture for a wholly female audience, thus initiating a poetic tradition of their own – the female poetic tradition. Although this is most certainly possible, it is frustrating to note how often such a tradition is assumed by researchers working with female-authored texts when we have yet to truly define such a tradition and how it may have manifested in women’s writing.

It was postulated that women poets wrote within this tradition when they alluded specifically to their female poetic predecessor, Sappho, or when they composed on ‘feminine’ topics such as love, childbirth, motherhood, and nature, or in feminine genres such as choral songs, dirges, and love lyric. Moreover, women poets would belong to this tradition of poetry if they produced female-centric literature that predominantly challenged the patriarchal societies to which they belonged by ‘rewriting’ male-authored myths in a way that reclaimed women as subject. Contrarily, women poets whose works strayed too closely to the masculine poetic tradition in theme, diction, or genre have had their ‘authentic’ female voices questioned on grounds that their works were simply not womanly enough to belong to the ranks of Sappho, Praxilla, Telesilla, and Nossis.

I have since hoped to shed some clarity on this matter, for women’s literature is not as easy to classify as one would think. In fact, women often composed on a variety of themes and motifs – from love and loss, to weapons, war, bloodshed, and sex – that did not easily fall within the category ‘women’s poetry’. For example, Sappho was not only a poet of sensual graces, but also wrote on masculine matters such as politics and family feuds. Anyte writes on Echecratidas’ bloody, man-slaying spear with such realism that it initiated an entire epigrammatic tradition of similar poems by renowned male epigrammatists. So well did Nossis adopt and adapt the motif of casting one’s shield aside in the heat of battle that it sparked a small tradition of its own in Meleager’s Garland. Erinna’s emulation of Homer’s ekphrastic tradition inspired many male and female poets who came after her, and Moero’s amalgamation of different epigram types instigated a tradition of hybrid epigrams that stretched well into the late Roman Republic. How, then, do we define a ‘suppressed’ women’s poetic heritage when the majority of ancient Greek female poets whose works have survived did not write to combat the patriarchy? How do we define a ‘suppressed’ women’s heritage when gender did not always determine genre? How do we reclaim a ‘suppressed women’s heritage’ when the most intimate of female practices could so easily be expressed by the male poet and vice versa?

With these thoughts in mind, I undertook a daunting, three-year research project in which I translated and examined the multiple works of the Hellenistic poets Erinna, Anyte, Moero, and Nossis, who were all active in the period between 350 BC and 270 BC, expertly preserved in the Greek Anthology. After all, if a tradition of women’s poetry were to exist, it would best be observed in the literary age, which saw most of women’s writing conserved in the form of anthologies and epigrammatic collections. Surely, within the forty-one epigrams ascribed to female poets, we may ascertain – even to the smallest extent – whether these women poets composed for a private female poetic tradition that reflected their own lived experiences (as suggested by Skinner 1993), or whether they composed for a wider, more public audience that would better ensure the survival of their works (as suggested by Bowman 1998 and 2004). To accomplish this aim, I traced various instances of allusion (generic allusion, imitatio, and aemulatio) prevalent in these literary pieces back to their original source (as much as is possible), for what is tradition if not the deliberate imitation and adaptation of a former author’s works within another’s, to determine which literary networks Hellenistic women poets wished to evoke, and ultimately, whether it is justified to perceive them as poets on the periphery of the mainstream poetic tradition, or as participants, perhaps even progenitors, of a literary heritage shared by all.