Corinna (fl. 5th or 3rd c. BCE)

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Corinna (fl. 5th or 3rd c. bce)

Ancient Greek poet of Boeotia who is said to have been the teacher of the lyric poet Pindar and to have defeated him in competition. Name variations: Korinna; nicknamed Myia, "Fly." Pronunciation: KOR-inna. Born in either the 5th or the 3rd century bce in Tanagra or Thebes in Boeotia; daughter of Acheloodorus and Procatia; pupil of Myrtis(?), another female poet of Boeotia. Almost all details of Corinna's career and dates are doubtful or disputed.

Verse:

in antiquity, five books of her poetry, perhaps called weroia, "Tales" or "Narratives" on mythical subjects were collected. Only fragments remain, three of which are fairly large and continuous. These are collected (with a translation) in Greek Lyric IV: Bacchylides, Corinna, and Others, Loeb Classical Library, ed. and trans. D.A. Campbell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).

Our appreciation of female poets in antiquity is hampered by the scant remnants of their work. One of the most intriguing aspects of the Boeotian poet Corinna is the disparity between the ancient testimonials that describe a grand career in her lifetime and an extant corpus that bears surprisingly little relation to the literary tradition in which she stands. Her fragments manifest such an atypical poetic voice, in fact, that scholars are still debating—with no decisive arguments on either side—whether to place her as an older contemporary of Pindar in the 5th century bce or some 200 years later in the 3rd century.

The various ancient accounts of her life and activities all date to 50 bce or later; most of these, though fantastic and amusing, are less than factually reliable. Her relationship with Pindar of Thebes (518–438 bce), the greatest lyric poet of Greece, is the grounds for the most tantalizing and frustrating evidence about her career. The Greeks celebrated many of their athletic and religious festivals with competitive choral presentations of lyric poetry on mythical themes. Several testimonials state that Corinna defeated Pindar in competition at Thebes as many as five times. The accuracy of this assertion is impossible to verify, but the story of Pindar's sour grapes, which tells of his revenge by calling Corinna a "sow," has been shown by C.M. Bowra to be based on late misreading of Pindar's notoriously difficult verse. The notion that the two poets were acquainted in some way has always been attractive. A humorous passage of Plutarch, for example, describes an elder Corinna's criticism of a young Pindar's work: apparently he preferred bombastic ornament to well-told myth, the true substance of poetry. This story is probably at the root of the popular (and apparently post-classical) supposition that Corinna was actually Pindar's teacher. Whatever their actual connection, it should be noted that when Corinna herself names Pindar in a couple of brief fragments, she shows clear admiration for him.

The debate over Corinna's dates revolves around an issue internal to the texts themselves. Her poems are written in a Boeotian dialect, but the texts we possess use a system of spelling that dates to within 25 years before or after 200 bce. Those scholars who like to preserve the spirit of the ancient testimonials claim that what we have are late transcriptions of Corinna's original compositions in 5th-century orthography; those who reject the ancient consensus claim that she actually wrote in the Hellenistic era. Even if it is impossible to decide how her dialect is relevant to dating, it does say a good deal about the idiosyncrasies of her work. In addition to using a dialect that is not often found in other authors in this genre, Corinna seems to preoccupy herself almost exclusively with Boeotian myth and myth variants. This fact, coupled with her limpid, uncomplicated narrative style and simple, though not naive, meters, has led some to speculate on the correctness of seeing her work as choral lyric at all. Scholars West and Kirkwood have suggested that it might have been composed to serve the cause of regional patriotism.

Of the three best preserved fragments of her poetry, the first tells of a singing competition between the personified Boeotian mountains Helicon and Cithaeron. Judged by the gods in a secret ballot, Cithaeron's song about the concealment of the infant Zeus from Cronus wins the day. The last readable lines of this fragment (some 17 connected lines) has the defeated Helicon ripping rock from himself and hurling it to the ground. The second continuous fragment (about 40 complete lines) narrates the prophecies of a certain Acraephen to the river-god Asopus concerning the marriages of his nine daughters to Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, and Hermes. The third discernible nugget of text (about 20 lines) appears to be autobiographical in nature; it begins, "Terpsichore [a muse] bids me sing my lovely tales to the women of Tanagra gowned in white, and the city takes great delight in my clear-chattering voice." The fragment continues with a list of some of the stories that the poet has told in the past.

Though reference to Tanagrian women (and further on, "maidens") in the quoted fragment suggests a context of choral performance, it is very difficult to place Corinna in the wider context of Greek literature at either of the time periods proposed for her. There is no doubt that she gained a fair degree of renown in antiquity: she was a late addition to the canonical list of nine Greek lyricists and was popular enough throughout the classical world to receive the un-equivocal praise of the Latin poets Propertius and Statius. It is also probable that Ovid named the central female figure of his Amores after her. Yet Corinna's individualistic subject matter and style make it difficult either to pinpoint definite precursors to her work or to identify later authors who show her influence. In this she differs markedly from Sappho , the most famous Greek woman poet, who not only defined the genre of love lyric for the rest of antiquity but also manifested a distinctive feminine voice. Corinna tells us little about the place of a woman poet in society, with the exception of one rather disheartening fragment on Myrtis , a 5th-century bce poet dubiously said to have been Corinna's teacher: "I reproach also clear-voiced Myrtis, because, a woman, she went into competition with Pindar." This fragment goes against the grain of those ancient accounts of Corinna's own competition with Pindar.

Are you forever asleep? You were not drowsy in the past, Corinna.
—Corinna

The fact that we have so few reliable materials for placing Corinna is grounds enough for calling her one of the greatest enigmas of ancient Greek literature; the fact that she is a rare female name in a genre and epoch dominated by men only increases the mystery. Barring the possibility of the discovery of more papyrus fragments of her works, it seems likely that Corinna and her "Tales" will remain an open book.

sources:

Bowra, C.M. Pindar. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.

Campbell, D.A., ed. and trans. Greek Lyric IV: Bacchylides, Corinna, and Others. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Clayman, Dee Lesser. "The Meaning of Corinna's Weroia," in Classical Quarterly. n.s. 28, 1978, pp. 396–397.

Kirkwood, G.M. Early Greek Monody: The History of a Poetic Type. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974.

Lefkowitz, Mary R., and Maureen B. Fant. Women's Life in Greece and Rome: A source book in translation. 2nd. ed. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Segal, Charles. "Choral lyric in the fifth century," in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, vol. 1.1: Early Greek Poetry. Edited by P.E. Easterling and B.M.W. Knox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.