#moero

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.

Ζεὺς δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἐνὶ Κρήτῃ τρέφετο μέγας, οὐδ᾽ ἄρα τίς νιν ἠείδει μακάρων: ὃ δ᾽ ἀέξετο πᾶσι μέλεσσι. τὸν μὲν ἄρα τρήρωνες ὑπὸ ζαθέῳ τράφον ἄντρῳ ἀμβροσίην φορέουσαι ἀπ᾽ Ὠκεανοῖο ῥοάων: νέκταρ δ᾽ ἐκ πέτρης μέγας αἰετὸς αἰὲν ἀφύσσων γαμφηλῇ φορέεσκε ποτὸν Διὶ μητιόεντι. τὸν καὶ νικήσας πατέρα Κρόνον εὐρύοπα Ζεὺς ἀθάνατον ποίησε καὶ οὐρανῷ ἐγκατένασσεν. ὣς δ᾽ αὕτως τρήρωσι πελειάσιν ὤπασε τιμήν, αἳ δή τοι θέρεος καὶ χείματος ἄγγελοί εἰσι. - Great Zeus was raised in Crete, and none of the blessed gods knew of him; and he grew strong in all his limbs. Shy doves nourished him in a sacred grotto, bearing ambrosia from the streams of Ocean; and a great eagle, ever drawing nectar from a stone, brought to and fro in its beak a drink for Zeus the wise-counselor. Far-seeing Zeus, after conquering his father, Kronos,   made this eagle immortal, and gave it a place in heaven. Even so he granted honor to the shy doves, who are the messengers of summer and winter.