The Women Poets of Ancient Greece

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And then in the first century, a man named Antipater of Thessaloniki, with Thessalonica, if you prefer, looked at the list and thought it might be a little bit limited in its focus. Because it featured only one female poet and that was Sappho. So Antipater made a new list of women poets to even things out. They are Glursus, divine-voiced women that, Helicon, that's the home of the muses, fed with song. In other words, just like their male counterparts, these poets were so remarkable that they must have been nurtured by the muses themselves. We have only fragments of these poets work. So I decided I would put them all together and do a show about all nine of them, beginning with the earliest and most famous, who was, of course, Sappho. Now, you may remember we did a show about Sappho, but I will give you a recap. Sappho lived in Mittellini on the island of Lesbos from late 7th to the early 6th century BCE. We know almost nothing about her. She had two, maybe three brothers. Her mother may have been called Clase. She may have had a daughter of the same name. And none of that matters. Because what we do know about Sappho is that she wrote magnificent, beautiful poetry. Perhaps 10,000 lines or so, of which we have one completeish poem, probably, and about 200 fragments, some of which are several lines, some of which are a few words, some of which are pieces of words. Translators, poets, other academics have spent lifetimes trying to fill in some of the gaps around these fragments. And Sappho writes with such intensity about love and desire. She examines the power of memory and the bond between mother and daughter. She is the first poet anywhere, I think, to suggest that desire can take on the characteristics of a medical condition. In other words, she had the fever long before Peggy Lee. And Sappho also subverts some of the conventions of the poetry that came before her, and particularly of Homer. So in one poem, she examines the question of what is the most beautiful thing on earth? And her answers are going to be slightly surprising to you, I think. Some people, she says, say that it's an army on horse. Some say it's an army on foot. And some say it's an army of ships. Now, this is obviously a nod to Homeric poetry, and especially to the Iliad, where most of one whole book of book two, for those of you who haven't gone to the trouble of memorizing the Iliad, luckily one of us has. Most of book two is dedicated to cataloging the Greek ships and the armies of the Trojans and their allies fighting on the opposite side, in glorious grand Homeric verse. But Sappho isn't trying to compete with Homer. What she's doing is offering a different kind of answer to a different kind of question. So she says, some people say it's these different types of army, but I say the most beautiful thing is what you love. Right. And then she illustrates her point by using the example of Helen, who we saw in the Iliad, again, trying to make a life with Paris and deeply regretting her choices, full of grief and remorse for the life she's abandoned, not really fancying Paris anymore, but being sort of made to, by the goddess Aphrodite, Sappho's Helen, on the other hand, isn't full of guilt or misery. She doesn't spare one single thought, not my words, those of Sappho, for her child or her parents that she left behind. Ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome to the stage my guests, Edith Hall and Nikita Gill. Edith Sappho offers a counterpoint to Homer and to Hisiod, so her Helen has ditched her old life for a new one without much regret. And when she writes wedding songs, she gives us the idea that the groom is a really lucky guy to be making a really positive change in his life, whereas Hisiod is like, it's the end of days, it's worse than death. We are missing those voices from a lot of antiquity. When you read those fragments of Sappho, it still thrills me every time. Certainly, for example, she wrote this one line, always gets to me, which is Nairobi and Lito, would there is difference? Now, in mythology, Nairobi and Lito absolutely hated each other's. First of all, yes, absolutely hated each other's guts. So we've just got this one line, where she's done a poem where maybe they went off each other, but she's set it up emotionally, completely differently. You all know, most women know the pain of falling out, with somebody who's been incredibly close to you. She's immediately come in and that one line just tells us that. She can write a poem that Helen turned her heel on, and she actually puts the child first, I think, on her beautiful daughter and her husband and her parents. I've always thought that's so brave, because in fact, my view on Helen, it's perfectly fine to leave another man who's better in bed if you haven't got children. To me, her mind is a real sticking point. Divorce pre-children, yes, you know, darling myself. So you want to have many ways in which you are like Helen and Sparta? I would launch a minimum of two thousand ships to record. A minimum of two, but she always has a complete general dangle. Nikita, female parents in antiquity are moldbreakers by definition. Literacy is limited, it's certainly limited among women. Do you think that women have created poetry throughout history? Absolutely. Obviously, education was gate kept from us, all of education, and across the ages, which just goes to show the resilience. I like to say that women have created despite and out of spite, you know, because why not? So, Sappho's work was valued very highly in antiquity, and ever since, she is, after all, the only poet to feature on both of these lists of great poets. But if you think we don't know much about her, she is a household name. Relative to Mertus, Mertus with the sweet-toned voice, as Antipater puts it, we have literally none of her poetry. There is a paraphrase in Plutarch of one story she told about why women couldn't enter a sacred grove. That's it. But we do know other things about her, which is that she lived in Beosha, in Central Greece, in the 6th century BCE, and she was important enough for there to have been a statue of her sculpted by Boiscus, an artist about whom we also know absolutely nothing at all. But even though we don't know the artist or the artwork or the poet on whom this artwork was based, it still manages to have inspirational qualities now in the 21st century. So there's a 21st century work by the German artist Anson Kiefer, called Women of Antiquity, and one of these women, it's three sculptures that are women's bodies with different things in place of heads. Because obviously, when you get a statue from antiquity that survived to us to now, they often don't have heads anymore, because sometimes the heads have been removed if somebody was unpopular in replace with a different head. The heads were never that stable, is what I'm saying. But Mertis is in this version, she's wearing this beautiful, floor-length gown with a lovely bodice, and balanced on her neck is an open book with the pages. It's so beautiful, a beautiful tribute to a poet whose work doesn't survive. I can't think of anything more great. The tradition of Mertis is that she not only wrote or composed poetry, she also taught it to Pindar, one of those great male poets, and to Karina, one of Antipater's great female poets, so let's look at her next. Karina lived in Tanagra, also in Beosha, that's how she could be taught by Mertis, if she was, and about 40 fragments of her work survive of classical women poets, only Sappho has more work surviving to us today. Karina wrote about myth, just like Sappho before her, and again, she goes for quite a different, unexpected angle, so she tells the story of a contest. So far so reasonable, the Iliad is full of them, but not between two warriors or two gods, but between two local mountains. Right? Kethyron, the mountain just outside Thebes, where spoiler, baby edipus is abandoned, and other nasty things happen there. And hellican, which is the home of the muses, right? So these two mountains, each play a song on the lyre, I don't know how. I don't know how big the lyre is, I don't know if they use trees for fingers, I don't know. It's poetry, you'll have to work it out for yourselves. The gods get to vote on who's the winner, and it is Kethyron, for anyone who has money on that, hellican is furious. So angry that he crushes one of his own boulders and rains it down on the land beneath him like snow, well like hailstones I suppose, but anyway. So you could see this as I do as a kind of funny alternate take on these grand mountains. Kethyron is usually the location for violent death in myth. Hellican is where Hisiad has his first encounter with the muses and with poetry, so you could do that, or you could read it in the spirit of 20th century academics. And accuse Karina of being parochial and simplistic. That one please. Or you've also got another option of going second century sexist like Pazania's. I normally like Pazania, so he's let me down here, who notes that Karina beat Pindar in a poetry contest, and she must have done it by influencing the judges with her beauty. I mean, here is my problem with that besides the grindingly obvious. Another of Karina's poems berates Mertis, her teacher if you recall, and Pindar's teacher, for doing the exact same thing, for beating Pindar in a poetry competition. And the tone of the poem is like I blame Mertis for invading Pindar's territory. And so with what I would describe as an almost mesmerising degree of abduceness, quite a lot of academics chose to read that literally, rather than noticing the quite high possibility of, and this is a radical, important piece of technical terminology, irony. I mean, maybe Karina is teasing her friend. Maybe she is teasing Pindar. Maybe he's in on the joke. Obviously it made more sense to assume that she was parochial, doggiedly literal, and not funny, but imagine if instead you assumed that maybe it was fun, and also that Karina didn't cheat, she was just better at poetry contest than Pindar. He might be great at poetry and just not bring it on the day. We don't know. Maybe he didn't have game. We don't know. Nikita, the poetic techniques used by women in antiquity are not very different from ones used today. Are they? There's alliteration and assulance and wordplay and creating new words. How much do you think this is a conscious echo of earlier poets? I think women specifically are always breaking forms and then being told off for it, which is at least my experience as a poet, is that if you break things which are considered tradition and you're a woman, that's very bad. But when a man does it, it's amazing and brilliant and innovative. You can see I'm not very angry or salty about this at all. But I think that women have, it's really beautiful because I think what a lot of women do is when women write fragments today, they are echoing Sappho and they're holding and being homage to her and her beautiful work. And it's a kind of legacy, isn't it, to pass down poetry or pass down these forms between women to each other and also learning form and structure and then breaking them apart and making a brand new thing. Several poets on Antipater's List lived around the turn of the third century, though they were geographically far flung, so didn't know each other. So first up, Moirot, she lived in Byzantium, Greek at the time, around 300 BCE. She was a really versatile poet. She wrote Lyric, Hexamata, Hims and more of her work, only two epigrams survive and ten lines from what may have been an epic poem about Zeus. I know just two epigrams, obviously that didn't stop academics from describing her work as stilted. Even though one of those epigrams is like a really sweet sad poem about grapes left as an offering to Aphrodite and wondering if their mother the vine misses them. Is that stilted or might it be allegorical? I just don't know. Perhaps this might be why the ancient poet Meliega described her poems as lilies. So lovely. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life and all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Then there's Anate. Anate lived in Arcadia. That's the Peloponnes. We have over 20 of her epigrams, which were a really popular literary form in the third century BCE. Anate is a hugely sophisticated writer. She's paying homage to everyone from Homer to xenophon via 5th century Athenian drama. She's also really playful. So she'll take the language used to describe a mighty warrior and use it instead to describe a yapping puppy. And she's also the first poet as far as we know to create pastoral works. So it's no accident that her home of Arcadia is still a byword for a bucolic idol. She focuses on the sorts of rural scenes that would be delightful on a hot day in Greece, shade and coolness, breezes and streams. She examines death in a really unusual way. The form of the epigram, which is a really popular verse form in the 3rd century, 2nd century BCE, comes originally from epitaphs, from tombstones. But when Anate looks at them, she looks at things like the grief of parents for a lost daughter. It's just beautiful but kind of devastating, a really specific grief. Rest assured though, modern critics have come along to dismiss her as trivial and domestic. Yeah, because for example, she echoes the language used by the Trojan andromache in the early, at the end of the early ad when she welcomes back the body of her dead husband Hector. But when Anate does it, she uses it about a tragic puppy that has trodden on a snake. I know, and only a trivial poet would write about a pet dying. Say her critics. Serenely overlooking the tragic end of Odysseus' pet dog, Argos. In book 17 of The Odyssey. Do you know, yeah, I did read it. Nikita, I think, women's interior lives are such a crucial part of ancient poetry. And yet over and over again, we see that it gets dismissed as therefore being trivial and domestic. There is no one more trivial and domestic than Hesiod on a bad day. Yes. That justice too. So, similarities? There is one person more trivial than Hesiod on a bad day. How do we get rid of these double standards in which we expect, you know, when men write about a dead dog, then it's devastating and full of pathos, but when women do it, it's somehow trivial. Oh, it's very simple. We just tear everything down. Okay, good. We've built it all over again. But seriously speaking, I think it's just, I keep saying this, the more women in a room, and the more loud women in a room. That's how we break those double standards down. Then we come to Nossus, contemporary of Anate, but she is writing in Magna Grykia. I think they sometimes prefer it to be called Southern Italy, anyway. We have 11 or 12 of her epigrams, and Nossus explicitly compares herself to Sappho, and she does so in the third person as well. Nossus was right there at Sappho. She does do this and Rest assured also doing this are Hellenistic comedians, so a little bit later in the second century, that's right, isn't it? Yeah, BCE. There's a guy called Herodas, who tells a story about Sappho and Nossus and Irina of whom more in a moment, going shopping together for Dildos. You see when you laugh, it sounds like that's not what we all do all the time. You're lucky I've made time in my schedule today. Sometimes I like guessing what exactly is going to go out immediately after the today program. 50/50? I don't know. She also presents a subversion of male poetic norms. So when Nossus writes about Cortezans, for example, they are beautiful, spiritual women, making their offerings to Aphrodite in a really appropriate way. When male poets have written about Cortezans, they tend to portray them as vain and greedy, so it is a really different picture. You get a different idea. Also, men have historically written at the time that Nossus is writing, men have written about the heroic qualities of armour. So in the Iliad again, for example, there's a whole chunk about the armour made for Achilles by the god Hephaistus. So Nossus writes a short epigram from the perspective of some armour that has been ditched by the battlefield by a warrior running away. It's kind of a great alternative. Let's move on to a winner. She's a bit earlier than Nossus, probably mid-fourth century BCE, and until about a hundred years ago, we only had a handful of quotes in ancient commentators and just three of her epigrams. And then in 1928, just over 50 lines of her poem The Disdaph, a lament for her beloved childhood friend Balkis, were found among the Oksa Rincus papyri in Egypt. So this is a place in Egypt where there was a rubbish tip. Oksa Rincus means the place of shot-nosed fishes. And the rubbish included lots of papyri, which hadn't degraded over time. And so we found lots of exciting things and a great deal of receipts. And these 50 lines are beautiful, plaintive lines of remembering Irina and Balkis's shared childhood games. The devastation that Irina felt when Balkis left to be married. The greater devastation she felt when Balkis died, aged perhaps just 19. You are probably wondering how those 20th century academics might have reassessed her work in light of this extraordinary find. Because up to that point, even though there are references to her in other ancient sources, plenty of scholars had disputed her existence altogether. When the Disdaph lines were discovered, they pivoted and said her work was too accomplished to be by a woman. So it must have been a persona created by a male poet. If you're wondering if the phrase "this quarrelous Cinderella" was used, the answer is yes. And if you're thinking surely, surely Natalie, no one could have been stupid enough to suggest that a woman who spent her days weaving wouldn't have also been able to write poems as though weaving weren't a creative, cultural endeavor in its own right. Well, I have awful news for you. Our penultimate poet is Teller Silla writing in Argos in the early 5th century BCE. Antipater tells us that her fame was wide-reaching, but all except one, I think, of the fragments of her work to survive to us are just one single word long. Still, Pazania's, back in my good books, records a story of her rousing the women of her city of Argos to defend against an attack by chlamonies of Sparta in 494 BCE. He describes a statue of her. He's writing hundreds of years later. He describes a statue of her with her books at her feet and a helmet in her hands. Did that impress those 20th century scholars? No. No, they said it was an apocryphal story to explain a festival where men and women swapped clothes. Right, and put their books down while they did it. And they do this before the city is attacked because they "What? I've literally read all of theucidities. That doesn't happen before one single battle. What are you talking anyway?" That brings me to Praxilla, who lived in Sikion on the Gulf of Corinth in the 5th century BCE. She wrote poems where she compared cucumbers to the sun. She was, I know, she was quoted and referenced by the comic playwright Aristophanes in the 5th century more than once. So like she wrote a line about how there was a scorpion under every stone and he borrowed it and changed it so that there was a rare politician under every stone. He obviously knows that his audience is familiar with her work and like it. Otherwise there's no point referencing her. So did later writers? Like, for example, the 2nd century, I think he's some sort of aureters, Zenobeus, realized that she was joking in her poems and that's why a comic playwright might have quoted her work. No, no, he didn't do that. He concluded that she was an idiot because cucumbers are stupid. Still good news at last. Modern critics have been much smarter in appraising her work. I'm joking, of course. They saw that she wrote drinking songs for occasions when women weren't likely to be present unless they were quarters and so they concluded that she must herself have been a quarters and or she wouldn't have been there in the first place. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to those scholarly papers of the future explaining that, let's say, Andrew Lloyd Webber was both a cat and a train. I've been cross for weeks, literally hurled a pencil across a table at one time. I was like, you're kidding me. And I'm damn sure they did go to some of those drinking parties. We know from Polybias that there are certain places, not Athens, where it was perfectly normal for women to go to a drinking party. Of course, they can write these drinking songs that both Proxilla and Tellacilla I sometimes think those illinates because they're a bit drunk. Okay, but I think they wedged those and you know what the ancient Greek for drinking song is. Not many of you will be old enough in the audits to appreciate this. It's a scollion with a K because they used to go skull skull skull skull That's how I always remember the difference between a scholarly on with a K which is a drinking scollion which is a scholarly remark made in Alexandria on a text. I once said that to a professor at Oxford and he asked me to leave the lecture hall. I would like it to go on record that you could both be singing at a drinking party and making a scholarly remark about Greek poetry because I've heard you do it many times. No division is required where you're going. I could write a scollion, a very learning one about a scollion. Yeah and we even with Proxilla, they've got a meter, you know, Sapphire's got her own meter. This is another thing. Women had their own rhythms for their songs, they're creative. So they don't just use that incredibly boring old text amateur. I mean, please, you know, all those Greek. So do you want to know what the rhythm of the drinking songs are Tellacilla Yes, okay, three duck tilts, three duck tilts and two trokeys which in English goes "Dar did he, dar did he, dar did he, dar did he, dar did he, dar did he." That is a Tellacillaan. That sounds great. Yes, I expect Nikita to be composing verse in this meter, imminently. 100%. Can I be you when I grow up? To go back to Antipater, the heavens gave birth, he says, to the nine muses, and the earth gave birth to these nine, the deathless delight of mortals. Natalie Haines stands up for the classics, was written and performed by me. Natalie Haines, my guests, Eda Paul and Nikita Gill and our producer was the marvellous smooth Betho D. Like hell that that for a tagline for the show. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.