#anyte

In Memory of a Hunting-Hound

“For the cricket (nightingale of the field) and oak- dwelling cicada, Myro made a common grave, the girl weeping a virgin tear, because immovable Hades went away holding her two pets.”

Her constant pleasure is to watch the sea as it shimmers from the shore.

These women with the voices of gods were raised by the Helikon and Macedonian Pieria's peak, on a diet of songs: Praxilla, Moiro, Anyte's poetry (the female Homer); Lesbian Sappho with her fair hair in beautiful tresses; Erinna, glorious Telesilla, and you, Korinna, who sang of Athene's shield when she rushed to war; Nossis with her woman's tongue, and sweet-sounding Myrtis: these are the craftswomen of everflowing verse. Nine Muses on great Olympos, and for each a woman born on Earth: to we mortals, an eternal delight.

These four women all appear in the Greek Anthology and reflect the widening 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. However, Moero herself spent all 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 Peleponnese. 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. 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 countryside. 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.