Corinna
Translated by I. M. Plant, 2004
This rare fragment comes from a poem by Corinna, a female poet from central Greece, and describes two mountains, Helicon and Cithaeron, engaging in a song contest. The mountains have just sung their songs, one of which described Rhea hiding her son Zeus away in a cave so that his father Kronos would not swallow him as he did his other children. It is now time for the gods to decide which mountain is the winner. Historically, Corinna was believed to have been a near contemporary of a sixth–fifth-century BC male poet named Pindar, and this poem a sort of allegory of the rivalry between them, but many scholars now believe that she lived hundreds of years later, in the third century BC.
At once the Muses told the blessed gods
to cast their secret votes
in the golden-glowing urns
and together they all rose up.
Cithaeron took the majority
and at once Hermes shouted out and proclaimed
that he had taken the victory he so desired,
and the blessed gods crowned him
with a victor’s garland of fir,
and his mind was full of joy.
But Helicon was seized
by bitter pains and
ripped out a shinning rock
and the mountain shook. In pain
he cried and from above he smashed it down
into ten thousand pieces of stone.