When to her lute Corinna sings,
Her voice revives the leaden strings,
And doth in highest notes appear,
As any challeng’d echo clear;
But when she doth of mourning speak,
Ev’n with her sighs the strings do break.
And as her lute doth live or die,
Led by her passion, so must I …
THOMAS CAMPION, “When to Her Lute”
In northern Boeotia are the meagre ruins of Anthedon. There the “sweet-voiced Myrtis”1 is said to have lived, her remains even more meagre than those of her city. Plutarch claims that Myrtis taught Pindar to compose. Do we believe the Suda, which says that she also initiated Corinna, nicknamed “the Fly,” into the art of verse? Or did Corinna, a Boeotian, too, of Tanagra, not far from Pindar’s Thebes, honour her as a foremother with such familiarity as to make us believe they were close in time rather than in spirit? Myrtis starts with confidence: the first poem in what may have been the first book of her work declares: “Terpsichore calls on me to sing pleasant tales for Tanagra’s white-gowned women.”2
Though Myrtis’ poems do not survive, Plutarch summarises the narrative of one of them, a kind of epyllion about love, lying, and a heroine who betrays her unresponsive lover and then plunges from a cliff to her death. It is a more exhilarating story than those of the main fragments of Corinna that survive. Plutarch, several centuries after the events he recounts, says that Corinna, like Myrtis, counselled the young Pindar. Your poetry, she tells him, is too poor in myth and legend, too dependent on obscure diction, over-stretched meanings, periphrasis, mere prosodic virtuosity—all patterned icing, as it were, with no cake underneath. Taking her words to heart, he came back with a poem so freighted with myth that she burst out laughing.3 A poet should “sow with the hand, not the whole sack.”4 The poem becomes, in her image, a furrow or field, and composition is part of an organic process, an approach quite at odds with the mature poetics of Pindar.
Ancient Tanagra is situated three or four miles from the modern town, on a round hill. To the north flows the river Asopos, whose daughter-bearing god is the subject of one of Corinna’s poems. Gazing down from the round summit a modern traveller sees, but must be careful not to photograph, a Greek Airforce airfield and, further off, an airplane factory built on the site of an extensive necropolis. The military installations have a certain appropriateness: this is the area where Sparta famously defeated the armies of Athens and Argos in 457 BC. Further off, to the south, the brow of Mount Cithaeron, protagonist of Corinna’s other surviving fragment, can sometimes be seen. In her day the crown of fir trees with which the gods garlanded the mountain’s brow survived. Critics surmise that, in keeping with the regional dialect of her poems, the themes she chose were strictly local, even parochial. The people of Tanagra were civilised provincial folk, known for their good husbandry, their loyalty and their open hospitality. The land was not notably fertile: little wheat was produced, but some of Boeotia’s finest wine came from the area. Tanagra was also noted for its fighting-cocks.
What remains of Corinna’s world? There are covered and not very dramatically uncovered remains at Tanagra: one can make out the shape of the theatre, and partly exposed are outer fortification walls dating from around 385 BC. If one crosses the Asopos, to the east of ancient Tanagra is the Church of Saint Thomas which has built into it much ancient fabric. Tanagra pottery artists produced human figurines of terra-cotta, expressive and delicately executed, showing stately, draped matrons, but also lively figures: dancers, music makers and figures of less certain virtue.5 In one tomb eight gilded angels were discovered, with little hanging devices: they must have been suspended above the sarcophagus, as if flying; one offers a ball, one a fan, one wears a little cape. One Eros carries a bird, and another Eros sports a Phrygian cap, both figures charred in parts as if touched by the flames of a pyre. There is a boy with ginger hair and a hat or wreath, wearing a long blue cloak, and a little girl bearing a bag of knucklebones. The figurines must all have been richly painted, suggesting in miniature what the now bleached marble statuary might have looked like. Such pieces were intended as votive offerings at temples or tombs, and the name “Tanagra” became generic for all such figures produced within and beyond the borders of Boeotia. There is a “realness” about the world they reflect: seeing them, we get close to the world from which Corinna’s rather stiff legendary narratives emanate. The beautiful female figures and children in particular haunt the imagination. Lord Leighton’s portrait of the poet, on display at his house in London, is altogether too formidable and forbidding.
Taking Plutarch and other classical accounts seriously, for centuries scholars assumed Corinna to be contemporary with Pindar, writing in the fifth century BC, her poems then lost until the second century BC. She was reputed to have triumphed over Pindar in a poetry contest. This is how Pausanias tells it. “The memorial [tomb?] of Corinna, the only Tanagran composer of songs, is at a conspicuous point of the city; in the training-ground [gymnasium?] there is a picture of Corinna tying her hair with a ribbon for the victory she won over Pindar at Thebes.”6 The portrait Pausanias saw, and the memorial, if they were in the spirit of the Tanagra figurines, would have touched the heart of any man or woman. Aelian, an abundant and unreliable witness in the third century AD, went one better than Pausanias and declared that Corinna triumphed over Pindar five times, which given the quality of her surviving work seems implausible, as does his allegation that Pindar, “by way of exposing [the Boeotian audience’s] lack of poetic judgement,” called her a “sow,” presumably in his Olympian Ode VI, in which he alludes to the traditional rusticity of Boeotia.7 This contradicts the poem in which Corinna reproves Myrtis of Anthedon for being so unfeminine as to compete with Pindar.
If Corinna did in fact triumph over Pindar, Pausanias has two plausible explanations, neither of them much to the credit of her verse: “I think it must have been her dialect that won, her songs not being in Doric like Pindar’s, but in the language Aeolians would understand, and the fact (if this portrait is anything to go by) that she was the most beautiful woman of her time.”9 Statius refers to her as “slim Corinna” whose language is full of “mysteries.”10
Confusions and contradictions are removed if we take Corinna’s celebrity to have been a Hellenistic invention. The first surviving mention of her dates from around 50 BC and is itself “insecure”—that is, not entirely dependable. Unless she was ignored, or her work went missing, she belongs to a later age. Her editor David Campbell declares, “The terminus ante quem for her poems is 200 BC ± 25 years, since they are spelled in the Boeotian orthography of that date.” Of course the transcription may have been modernised to conform to later Boeotian norms, but the language in which we have the poems is the given from which scholarship must take its bearings. As time passed, she became more real. Propertius knew her work; Ovid may have named his Corinna after her. The first-century elegiac poet Antipater of Thessalonica,11 father of the dedicatees of Horace’s Ars Poetica, includes her in his list of Mortal Muses. There are nine, and they are arranged neither chronologically nor alphabetically but, since they are listed in an epigram, to be accommodated in the metre: Praxilla, Moero, Anyte, Sappho, Erinna, Telesilla, Corinna, Nossis and, last of all, one of the first, the familiar “sweet-voiced Myrtis.”
Peter Levi favours a late date for Corinna, arguing from the evidence of the poems. She writes in a period when local mythology had been systematised (fourth century) “and the personification of mountains as amiable savages which occurs only on late nymph reliefs” was accepted.12 For Edgar Lobel, she is a Hellenistic poet affecting an archaic style. He judges this from the orthography, and the victory over Pindar he regards as fantastic and anachronistic. Had it occurred, there would surely have been accounts of it from the fifth century, yet the first surviving account dates from virtually half a millennium later.
Corinna’s most famous fragments were discovered on a papyrus from the second century AD. The first, judging from the concluding passages, which are all that remain, told of a singing contest. In the Boeotian corner was the underdog, Mount Cithaeron, famous not only for separating Boeotia from Megaria and Attica, but as the place where Actaeon was hounded to death, where Pentheus perished, and where the infant Oedipus was exposed and left to die. Opposite Cithaeron is ranged the favourite, Mount Helicon, sacred to the Muses, who taught Hesiod to sing. We do not hear even a fragment of Helicon’s song, but Cithaeron is delivering the closing lines of his account of how baby Zeus, concealed in a Cretan cave, survived the murderous wrath of father Cronus. Immediately the song is over, the Muses as returning officers require the gods to choose between the rival singing mountains. Hermes declares Cithaeron victor, a cry goes up, and Helicon, enraged, heaves up a huge smooth boulder and hurls it down. It bursts into pebbles, like the pebbles the gods used to cast their votes in the contest.
In two reliefs, Levi says, higher mountains peek over the rims of lower mountains and we see Helicon as a “shock-haired giant peeping over the mountain top”13 on a third-century votive tablet. Disputes between mountains were apparently not uncommon in later Greek folk-song and verse right down to the nineteenth century. Corinna’s contest, with the underdog victorious, is a paradigm for the contest between herself and Pindar: plain provincial simplicity pitted against the elaborated strains and the stilted diction of cosmopolitan convention.
The second major fragment is about a father and his nine daughters. The river Asopus, a god in the same way mountains are, by means of personification, rises in Mount Cithaeron near Plataea, passes through or near several towns and cities named after his daughters, then feeds into the long, narrow gulf of Euripus, near Oropus. All nine of his daughters have vanished. A human seer, Acraephen, reassures him. Don’t fret, he says, they have been kidnapped and you are in luck, because the kidnappers are divine: Zeus has three, Apollo three, Poseidon two and Hermes one. (Hermes had Tanagra herself.) The gods, spurred on by Venus and Cupid, sneaked into your house and removed them. All will be famous: they will breed, and thanks to the divine stud farm, “a race of heroic demigods” will result, “and shall dwell in faraway places.”14 Acraephen then spends some time giving his own credentials. He is “the best of my fifty valiant / brothers,” all sons of Orion. He and his progeny make an appearance in other fragments, for he was a Tanagran, and he reclaimed the land and cleared the wild beasts from it.15
Reflecting on the history of prophecy, Acraephen claims that he has been endowed by Apollo with skills and instincts first visited upon Euonymus, then on Poseidon’s son Hyrieus. He was himself divine and is now starry Orion’s most distinguished son. Corinna’s seer speaks some haunting and memorable words, an Orphic echo perhaps: “Your part is to yield to the gods, / freeing your mind from grief.” Asopus grasps him by the right hand and responds with a gratitude that disintegrates with the papyrus into a stutter of unconnectable phrases.
It may well be that “Corinna’s style was simple, like Bacchylides.”16 But the critic who declares that she drew parallels between the world of mythology and ordinary human behaviour stretches a point. There is nothing ordinary about her gods, be they mountains or rivers; and the petulance of Mount Helicon, the easy consolation of Asopus for his nine raped daughters, suggest the great distance between the divine, mythological sphere and the human.
In total, about forty fragments survive, Asopus being the longest, with some fifty mauled lines. Even though there is so little, Corinna is second in quantity only to Sappho among women writers. Several critics wishfully insist that she “wrote for women.” She declares this intention, but her writing is not exclusively for them. Some verse she composed for choral use at religious festivals; beyond that we can affirm little to support a feminist reading. She deploys local topography, plays variations on familiar legends, and develops a way of writing which can be seen either as subtly combining dialect with a “high style” or as bastardising the high style with Boeotian elements. Her work relates inevitably to Homer’s, and also to Sappho’s “Aeolic forms.” Her effects are not, as earlier critics declared, “naturalistic” but highly artificial.
Not all women readers like her. The classicist Sarah Rudden finds the conventions in which Corinna writes risible. “I don’t think she even deserves the dignified treatment she gets. She tells, for example, of two mountains having a singing contest and then a fight, with one of them heaving chunks of himself at the other … as in a comic animation sequence.” This over-reads: Helicon’s frustration is that of an angry, not an aggressive, child. Rudden continues: “it would probably be impractical to represent Corinna’s grandiose bad taste with appropriate language.”17 A harsh verdict: Corinna is read only because she is female. This won’t quite do.
In the first place there are unusual moments not only in the diction of Corinna’s poems but in the wider terms of expression. If there is something comical about a pair of mountains having a poetry contest judged by the gods themselves, is it impossible that the conceit was humorous in intent? To have so large an object as Mount Helicon throwing an infantile tantrum is a classic reductio ad absurdum, the “defeat” robbing that most poetic mountain of any poetic dignity, and leaving Corinna’s favoured mountain to inherit all that Helicon has shed. There is a kind of psychology at work in the poem as in Asopus’ consolation, that inheres less in the characters than in the nature of the incident, which is rendered emblematic. If we had more of the poem to consider, we might ask whether it parodied the apocryphal contest between Hesiod and Homer, not least because Hesiod’s mountain is bested.
Though only fragments of two of her story poems survive, she seems to have been a maker of verse narratives. Her books bore the title Tales, and she may have been responsible for a Seven Against Thebes, of which three words survive. “… I, for my part, celebrate the distinctions of heroes and heroines,” she declares elsewhere.18 Though she comes from Hesiod’s neighbourhood, she is resolutely impersonal in her narratives. There are attributed voices, none defined as her own, none specifically female. This is, in a sense, what makes Corinna more a disciple of Homer than of Sappho: we come away from the thin evidence of her poems less with a sense of having met a handsome and brilliant woman than of having read some curious, rather beguiling poems, not without folk charm in the traditional elements deployed. In an age of increasing personalisation of poetry, Corinna’s work seems in a genre of its own: self-effacement, the foregrounding of plot, character and subject-matter, the use of dialogue and attributed speech, are skills we associate with dramatic rather than narrative writers—as we do the evidence of a frail psychology.