Ovid has left the building - Metamorphoses and breaking the Pax Ovidiana

A sunny pre-noon in Las Vegas 2289..AD, you put on your chem- suit and an extra synthetic lung (high grade Kazakh of course) and hover down the strip past Caesars Palace..on the way your attention is caught by the dreamcam ads for a new show at Homerz Bar..’OVID!-THE MUSICAL’ – so of course you slide in and take a seat to see what all the fuss is about. The matinee show is a chaotic psychedelic melange of images, scents and textures designed to evoke the myriad transformations of the gods and heroes of the Graeco-Roman past..turntablist par excellence Tad Hayes takes centre stage amongst a heaving mass of holographic dancers weaving through billows of luminous orange smoke laced with mescaline vapour – the crowd go wild at the centre piece, featuring the apotheosis of the sexually polyvalent and dual-merged character Emperor Augustus/Marsyas as he is flayed alive the skin looping off in long wet crimson strips, festooning the heaving audience, many of whom are rapidly succumbing to the tangerine fumes and being carried out into the fresh air of the foyer by drone-stretcher. Staggering out to avoid the worst of the psychotropic mayhem..the last thing you hear as you fall out of the building iris valve onto the sidewalk is the insane bellowing of the revellers still standing…OVID, OVID OVID! A short sweaty figure scampers out beside you wearing a six armed business leotard..he chirps enquiringly into your sonically hammered eardrum..’That Ovid Guy! He sure knows how to put a show on! Do you know where this guy is based?, I mean I gotta get hold of his agent!!’ For him Ovid has left the building – or has he?

A bizarro vision of the future? But could it also be our present, one in which the works of Ovid rather than the man or his poetical wizardry have been refined out themselves into something altogether different, leaving merely the endearing and compelling accounts of fantastic mythic episodes? In effect a 'Pax Ovidiana' has resulted ;a canon of the poets works, almost a literary credo of what the myths are about and what they tell us through his lens, stained indelibly into the fabric of the English cultural history and beyond in perpetuity.

The Metamorphoses are tales that are viewed through ever increasingly obscured refracting lenses of successive poets eager to make their mark on the English tradition  – Ovid or rather his elegiac-epic is firmly hardwired into our understanding of Greco-Roman myth but has he ‘left the building’? Is it no longer necessary to engage directly with his linguistic pyrotechnics in order to savour and utilise the true essence of his work, as many succeeding poets have done with a superficial at best or at worst no understanding of the original languages in which the masterwork was written? Does it matter anyway when the stories themselves are so popular? How much if any of the original Ovidian DNA remains..and perhaps Nietzsche-like should we be experiencing a Twilight of the Idols moment and try to momentarily tear out the Ovidian co-axial cable and try to come  face to face with the myths themselves through alternative routes or like Ted Hughes attempt to solder some Anglo Saxon into the motherboard and subvert the elite Roman quantum logic from within?

To try to answer these questions we need to return to Ovid’s English literary future, through the prism firstly of the earliest translations into English of the metamorphoses, in particular the puritan versifier Arthur Golding (tr.1567), father of the so-called’ Shakespeare’s Ovid’, passing through Frank Miller’s 1916 Loeb edition in order to try to enter the mind of Ted Hughes who used both texts as galleys during his own re-configuring of Ovid and arrive at some answers not only to the continuing relevance or obstruction of Ovidian myth in the literary landscape..or the legacy literature industry, but possibly even hints as to what translation itself might be, what it can do and how much of the originator’s blood genome is required to prevent full on textual zombification or cloning..a process equally as mercurial and protean as the masterpiece of Ovid himself.

A thought which constantly strikes me as I write this..it is simply never enough to’ like’ or ‘dislike’ Ovid..it is far more pressing an issue for us as readers, interpreters if you will, to locate him and then decide what me might then do about or with him in the context of our ongoing literary canon – iconoclastic as that may seem I deem it not only advisable but a wholly necessary enterprise.

We start then with Golding whose work must be seen in the light of his other translations and his staunchly Christian outlook  and its impossible to overlook the effect on Ovid of his puritan cast of mind- the other works I am particularly thinking of are the those of the sermons of John Calvin which were instrumental in spreading the Protestant doctrines through the English speaking world at the time. Golding was responsible for around 30 translations in all and its interesting to note that he was not as famed at the time for the Ovid translation as his Caesars Commentaries. Shakespeare then seems to have had a hand in promoting him to posterity by using some of his lines in his plays as he referenced and utilised what he admired of the translation. Even on a cursory reading of the opening dedicatory Epistle to 'Robert Earle of Leycester' reveals a moralising and Christianising slant on the Metamorphoses. We are instructed how the various tales might alert us to the ' wicked sinnes' they represent : '

'The piteous tale of Pyramus and Thisbee doth conteine

The headie force of frantick love whose end is wo and payne

The snares of Mars and Venus shew that tyme will bring to lyght

The secret sinnes that folk commit in corners or by nyght'

(l.109-112 Golding - Dedicatory Epistle to Ovid's Metamorphoses)

Every other line of the entire work is laced with puritan 'trigger' words or codes for christian moral instruction or warning to the unwary. To give but a few examples, in the prefatory epistle alone I came across 'filthy pleasures of the flesh', 'heathen', 'repentance', 'wicked sinne', 'wicked lust', 'prodigality', 'flithy whoredome'. You get the idea even from this limited sampling of the opening stanzas.

To be fair to Golding he was trying to convince other Christians ready to cast disdain if not outright damnation upon the evil works of 'paynim' authors, explaining that although produced from a dark age of pagan philosophy, if read prudently (probably with a bible at your side!) it could offer much wisdom and moral instruction. He may not have been totally convincing to his puritan contemporaries who would have preferred to read the Calvinist sermons no doubt, but the curious side effect is that his clear and lucid verse rendering inspired the undoubtedly less religiously minded Shakespeare and his contemporary poets (Marlowe perhaps) to take up Golding's pioneering work and embed it into their own works - ensuring some of the puritan DNA to bleed into the metamorphoses and in the later development of the treatment and use of the tales contained in the Metamorphoses in later plays, poetry and later on operatic works. This has come to colour, albeit faintly, our understanding and reception of Greco-Roman myth in the context of Western European literature.

It might be interesting now to look at how Ted Hughes used Golding's Tudor period translation as well as a later Loeb version by Frank Miller (1916) when working on his 'Tales from Ovid '(Faber and Faber 1997). I think the reason that Ted Hughes used Miller was that it was the easiest available version of a really flat and word for word translation (Loeb at that time was well known for accurate if dull renderings of many of the Greek an Roman authors, poetry in particular) acting for him as a crib from which he could create his own literal translation from the Latin text and then hack and whittle something into shape from the result. Interestingly, Golding's 'Shakespeare's Ovid' as reprinted by the De La More Press, London is listed in the Loeb edition under VII. TRANSLATIONS.

The cross wiring as we can see is deep and extensive!

A helpful insight into Hughes's attitude to the Classics is provided by John Talbot who wrote a review of Ted Hughes , Collected Poems by Paul Keegan, ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2003) which was published in Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Third Series, Vol.13, No.3 (Winter 2006) pp. 131-162. In it, Talbot tries to answer the question as to what kind of Classicist Hughes was.

Talbot argues that Hughes was using other intertexts upon which to base his understanding of the classics, not just the originals but other English poems, including his own backlog, resulting in a more complex and nuanced relationship with the Greek and Latin authors works and in turn a more compromised and ambivalent attitude to the legacy of the Mediterranean Roman cultural influence upon English literature - in this way perhaps Ted Hughes has come to mirror our own stance when confronting the Classics - how to understand and accommodate them. Hughes had a strong affinity with Norse and Celtic mythic traditions and is on record of speaking up for trying to push back the Graeco-Roman space a bit to let the older more blood born myths back into the English literary space so as not to do away completely with the classical inheritance but to hack away at the resultant weeds and undergrowth and let the other roots shine through.

Talbot focuses on three areas of Hughes's approach to the classics. Firstly, his relative ignorance of the classical languages, secondly his ambiguous attitude toward Graeco-Roman civilisation, and thirdly his use of English poetry including his own earlier works as source material for his 'translations'. The last of these areas has tended to be ignored by classical scholars looking at Hughes which Talbot maintains is a mistake since it is a area which informs his engagements with ancient authors such as Ovid or Euripides etc. It appears that Hughes had no knowledge of Greek and only enough Latin to pass the then required Latin exam for entrance to Cambridge University and his own accounts of his schooldays Latin felt some resistance to it. This attitude of resistance both informs and defines Hughes engagement with the Classics and as early as his work in The Hawk in the Rain (1957) his ambivalent attitude can be sensed when he imagines himself as the captured 1st Century BC British Chieftain, taken to Rome as part of the triumphal booty in celebration of the subjugation of the northernmost extent of the empire:

In your generous embrace,

As once, in rich Rome,

Caractacus,

I mourn.

(from 'Two Phases', 30)

Another approach Hughes adopts is to insert his own mythic elements into the soil of Ovidian myth - a god example of this is the passage dealing with the rape of Hermaphroditus where Salmacis' entanglements of Hermaphroditus are described. Ovid's imagery includes serpents, ivy, squids...but Hughes adds an otter:

'Like a sinewy otter

Hunting some kind of fish

That flees hither and thither inside him'

[Hughes, Tales from Ovid]

The otter as a mythic figure features in earlier poems of Hughes - in Lupercal, the otter:

'Brings the legend of himself

From before wars or burials, in spite of hounds and vermin-poles;

Does not take root like the badger. Wanders, cries;

Gallops along land he no longer belongs to;

Re-enters the water by melting.'  (Lupercal 79)

Its difficult to say exactly what Hughes is up to here. Is he inserting the otter as a invader from his own mythic universe to stake a claim upon the Ovidian soil? Or is he attempting to bring traditional English countryside creatures of northern Europe to add a hint of other mythos, such as the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic inheritance which he felt was overshadowed by the blanket of Mediterranean culture which Ovid represented for him? Perhaps Hughes is engaged in nothing less than a metamorphosis of Ovid himself - bring us to face the question of what translation is anyway - the carrying over from one era to another of part or whole or even merely echoes of a coded message contained in the great writings of the past for the instruction and inspiration of the human future.

The scholarship on these aspects of Hughes relationship to the Classics is in its infancy and much of it has up until now been overlooked. One reason is that it is only relatively recently that Hughes' entire published catalogue has been brought together in an accessible format, Keegan's Collected Poems being a case in point.

Talbot concludes his investigation into Hughes and the classics with a sort of manifesto banner or a thrown gauntlet   with regards to the future translations in English of the Classics:

'We have to get used to a new type of classical poet; one who both needs the classics and needs to fend it off; who does not know Latin or Greek but who can gather the energies of English poetry-his own and others'-in a pitch he could not have done without the classical perspective.'

I would add that there is a obstruction danger of the 'front of shop' classical authors, Ovid especially, who take up a lot of 'advertising space' in the English imagination and this also should be challenged by succeeding poets and translators, both those with a knowledge of the ancient languages and those without. The translators themselves must resist the received wisdom of the preceding cultural elite accretions and avoid the dead-end conclusion that 'everything is simply marvellous and a wonderful masterpiece' without at the very least giving the texts a fierce poke in the ribs with a very sharp stick - and hold them up to more rigorous investigation and evaluation. It might even be time to explore the Greek and Roman myths from other avenues - through other lenses. Where those other paths might lie, Hughes gives us a tentative hint. Its up to us as readers to follow the hints of this and other poet/translators and bring up new gods from the fertile soil of the less travelled lands of the classic texts available to us.

As for Ovid and his continuing reception in Western literature, I leave you with a quotation from the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek:

'The more opera is dead, the more it flourishes'

Euge!

Classical Gas...

Salve and Euge!

It's the month of Janiarius...Looking back to the old year and forward to the new..I have decided to use the Oxford Classics edition of Classical Literary Criticism.edited by D.A Russell and M. Winterbottom ( could there be a more apposite name for this season?). I think that it differs from the Penguin in the areas of translation as well as textual notes and introduction. This should give us some interesting angles from which to examine , evaluate and ultimately enjoy the work. I look forward to delving into this selection of texts with you all soon!

January Legendum meet

Salve or Chaire!

There are two options for January meeting of Legendum. Classical Literary Criticism...as in Plato, Longinus and Horace..or...Boethius - The Consolation of Philosophy. Let me know which one you prefer either in the comments section or the other standard comms channels.

Have a great Saturnalia!

Domitian Creep - Martial's Epigrams

Salve!

Saturnalia is almost upon us, where boys nervously play for nuts at the risk of their buttocks, the cap wearing dice player looks over his shoulder for any swiftly approaching buffoon, intent upon throwing him in the nearest pond for a laugh, and the rod brandishing schoolmaster seeks in vain to control his particularly unruly class at this festive time.

At such times we could do worse than turn to the witty epigrams of Martial to provide the cheeky tocsin and mood music of ribaldry and outrageous bawdiness for such frivolous pursuits.

Martial (40 CE-104CE) like a couple of his famous near contemporaries hailed from Spain and after a standard Roman education in the provinces came to Rome in his early twenties to seek his fortune. He reminds me of Lucian in that despite a great eloquence and mastery of language, rather than follow a career at the bar or elsewhere, Martial decided to apply his verbal talents to the page and in particular the epigram – a brief, well-crafted witticism covering almost any subject, a person, object, occasion and gradually (if we believe his own trumpet blowing) making quite a name for himself. There are 12 books extant as well as other collections which don’t fall neatly into the finished epigram format – On Spectacles, Apophoreta, and Xenia.

Martial tells us where his works can be bought and it appears from this that there did indeed seem to be a growing readership for his ribald verses and witty if rude character portraits – although he states that he never uses real names, it might have been possible for those in the know to read between the lines, unless some of the epigrams are mere exercises in ‘types’ rather than any particular individual. Reading through the books of epigrams, you get a variegated and rich picture of life in Rome from the angle of the client, constantly on the run to dinner of a rich patron to curry favour, perhaps get a decent bite to eat, perhaps even some money, following your patron to the baths, or assisting in his own legacy hunting or favour currying with even higher-ups..a veritable sweating pyramid of amicitia! There are shades of Juvenalian tropes, the simple rustic life versus the noisy crowded and expensive city, but Martial fares better as he withholds invective judgement and just gives us jewel-like visions of the odd, bizarre, amusing and disgusting aspects of Roman life at the time. He revels in the obscenity rather than rails moralistically at it.

For me the books appear to take us through Martial’s career arc (if they are in more or less chronological publishing order) and hence the title, it has been noted by many that the increasingly nauseating Imperial panegyric aimed at Domitian tend to cast a shade over his other work.  The Imperial bum licking epigrams are shouldered by an increased traditionalist tone, mere empty praise of gods or mythological figures, something which an earlier Martial would have steered away from as old hat in favour of some good old cock and cunt quips. The earlier books have a more anti-establishment air, a time before he came to the notice of a wider readership and thus the Imperial entourage and the emperor himself. Later on he appears to tone himself down and is finally content to turn out what amount to ready made to order, factory production line pieces: the Apophoreta have a list of random gift labels/fortune cookie-esque vibe, almost listlessly executed, like an experimental spare button box to be stored away and rummaged through later on a rainy day. Perhaps he ran out of steam and retired to the country – but finding the boondocks too quiet, returned to the capital for one last roll of the sheep’s knuckles.

Amongst the ribaldry and ribbing there are some genuine moments of pathos, a series of epigrams to Erotion. I am not sure whether he addresses the same Erotion in all the instances her name appears, from what we can glean from the texts themselves, she is a young girl who tragically died at the age of six (?) but the epigrams contain some very vivid element of pathos that strikes a contrast with Martials other work – which despite being very witty and punchy have a very canapé effect upon the poetic palate. The Erotion epigrams hint at other depths in Martial, hints that he could have turned his talent to works of higher literature.

But he preferred to carve out a career of two or three liners, possibly on a commission basis as his little collections sold more and more and he became more in demand and further under the Imperial radar and patronage, always the master of the bon mot, adept at turning out a well-wrought punchline for a staggering variety of situations – striking a very realist stance as he brings the vicissitudes and joys of Roman life vividly to life. The epigrams are like bright little gems whose glint has not faded even after the odd couple of millennia.

I look forward to assaying their brilliance when we next meet. In the meantime here is a list of some of the epigrams I particularly liked or found interesting for one reason or another.

Book/Number Notes/Docket Note

1/43               60 men to a tiny boar!

1/33 ‘ille dolet vere qui sine teste dolet’

1/83 Dogs like to eat shit

2/29              A well dressed ex-con

2/36 Doggy Bags

3/60 Host v Guest dole fare

3/93   (4/13)             Images of marriage age

4/42                           Martials perfect boy

5/13                          I can be you but you cannot be me

5/20                         ‘quisque, vivere cum sciat, moratur?’

5/24                          Hermes, Hermes, oh get on with it!

5/34+37             Death of Erotion

5/78             Dinner at Home

7/20                         Santra rakes it in

8/27                           Legacy hunters

9/1                              In the hall of fame?

9.25           Wandering eyes

9.68                          A Noisy bastard

9/91                        Domitian dinner invite?

10.47                          The Good Life

10.61          Erotion’s Tomb

11.99          Wardrobe Malfunction

12.10          The Emptiness of Riches

12.13         Hating comes cheaper than giving

12.70         An Acquired taste for Luxury

Vale! And Happy Saturnalia!

Ancient Historiomachy -Hobbes contra Dionysius in defence of Thucydides

Xaire!

Can we ever talk about Thucydides (460-c400 BCE) without mentioning Herodotus in the same breath(484-425 BCE)? I think it would be very difficult indeed, for however much we consider his account of the Peloponnesian War to be a unique departure from the work of the Halicarnassian ‘Father of History’, there are oblique references in it to the earlier work and it could even be said that there are certain subtle influences. Could Thucydides be the stylistic wayward son of Herodotus? It’s a curious thought.

Scholars until recently have focused predominantly upon questions such as the accuracy of the history or the veracity of the speeches and how truthful Thucydides might have been as a historian – but ultimately undecidable issues have been on the whole abandoned in favour of closer investigation into the history as a work of literature in its own right, its artistic merits, its architecture and its affinity to other forms of literature, in particular tragedy and epic.

Be that as it may, nowadays the consensus on the whole of readers of the two historians is that Thucydides is more akin to modern historiography and as such is considered to be more recognisable to us, rendering him in some way a better historian than the’ mere teller of fantastic fables’ as some have disparagingly described Herodotus (Thucydides amongst them - see I.20). But it was quite a different story as reflected in earlier criticism.

Reading the introduction to Rex Warner’s translation of the Peloponnesian War, I came across the classical era essayist and critic, Dionysius of Halicarnassus (60 BCE-7?BCE), who amongst other writings on rhetoric and literature wrote a deeply critical essay of Thucydides. Perhaps Dionysus’ comments resonated with some scholars at the time, or were in tune with what the ancients thought good history should look like – it is telling that for a long time after Thucydides no other historian wrote history using his approaches to structure and the deft arrangement of factual information. Nearer to our times, the political thinker Thomas Hobbes made the first direct translation from the ancient Greek of The Peloponnesian War and takes umbrage at Dionysus in his introduction of 1628:

Hobbes looks specifically at six points of contention that Dionysius makes against Thucydides. It is well worth reading all of them but in the interests of time and space our perpetual Rhadamanthus and Minos, I am going to give just the first two as a taste of Hobbes sense of umbrage and outrage at Dionysius’ pontifications:

1. Dionysius: ‘The principal and most necessary office of any man that intendeth to write a history, is to choose a noble argument, and graceful to such as shall read it. And this Herodotus, in my opinion , hath done better than Thucydides. For Herodotus hath written the joint history both of the Greeks and barbarians, to save from oblivion, &c. But Thucydides writeth one only war, and that neither honourable  nor fortunate; which principally were to be wished never to have been; and next, never to have been remembered nor known to posterity. And that he took an evil argument in hand, he maketh it manifest in his proeme, saying : that many cities were in that war made desolate and utterly destroyed, partly by barbarians, partly by the Greeks themselves: so many banishments, and so much slaughter of men, as never was the like before , &c.: so that the hearers will abhor it at the first propounding. Now by how much it is better to write of the wonderful acts both of the barbarians and Grecians, than of the pitiful and horrible calamities of the Grecians; so much wiser is Herodotus in the choice of his argument than Thucydides.’ Hobbes: Now let any man consider whether it be not more reasonable to say: That the principal and most necessary office of him that will write a history, is to take such an argument as is both within his power well to handle, and profitable to posterity that shall read it, which Thucydides, in the opinion of all men, hath done better than Herodotus: for Herodotus undertook to write of those things, of which it was impossible for him to know the truth: and which delight more the ear with fabulous narrations, than satisfy the mind with truth: but Thucydides writeth one war; which, how it was carried from the beginning to the end, he was able certainly to inform himself: and by propounding in his proeme the miseries that happened in the same , he sheweth that it was a great war, and worthy to be known; and not to be concealed from posterity, for the calamities that then fell upon the Grecians; but the rather to be truly delivered unto them, for that men profit more by looking on adverse events, than on prosperity: therefore by how much men’s miseries do better instruct, than their good success; by so much was Thucydides more happy in taking his argument, than Herodotus was wise in choosing his.

I think it better to leave to the reader to savour the arguments and rebuttals as they are without me putting too much of a gloss on it by way of superfluous comment. Hobbes robust eloquentia does the job admirably enough upon close reading.

2. Dionysius: ‘The next office of him that will write a history, is to know where to begin and where to end. And in this point  Herodotus seemeth to be far more more discreet than Thucydides. For in the first place he layeth down the cause for which the barbarians began to injure the Grecians; and going on, maketh an end at the punishment and the revenge taken on the barbarians . But Thucydides begins at the good estate of the Grecians; which, being a Grecian and an Athenian, he ought not to have done: nor ought he, being of that dignity amongst the Athenians, so evidently to have laid the fault of the war upon his own city, when there were other occasions enough to which he might have imputed it. Then in the ending of his history, there be many errors committed. For though he profess he was present in the whole war, and that he would write it all: yet he ends with the naval battle at Cynos-sema, which was fought in the twenty-first year of the war.’ Hobbes: To this I say, that it was the duty of him that had undertaken to write the history of the Peloponnesian war, to begin his narration no further off than at the causes of the same, whether the Grecians were then in good or in evil estate. And if the injury, upon which the war arose, proceeded from the Athenians; then the writer, though an Athenian and honoured in his country, ought to declare the same; and not to seek nor take, though at hand, any other occasion to transfer the fault.

Hobbes goes on to list Dionysius arguments against Thucydides, including his unique approach to writing the history by time rather than by episode in linear order, his negative attitude to the section known as The Archaeology at the beginning of the history where Thucydides outlines periods before the war he has chosen to describe, his problems with Pericles’ funeral oration (contrived in his opinion) and the one sidedness of the recording of the speeches in the (in)famous Melian dialogue, summing up his writings on these issues with the words, ‘I think there was never written so much absurdity in so few lines’.

After his elegant destruction of Dionysius, Hobbes muses openly on why the rhetorician would have tried to denigrate such a great work in this way.

‘Some man may peradventure desire to know, what motive Dionysius might have to extenuate the worth of him, whom he himself acknowledgeth to have been esteemed by all men for the best by far of all historians that ever wrote, and to have been taken by all the ancient orators and philosophers for the measure and rule of writing history. What motive he had to it, I know not: but what glory he might expect by it, is easily known. For having first preferred Herodotus, his countryman, a Halicarnassian, before Thucydides, who was accounted the best; and then conceiving that his own history might perhaps be thought not inferior to that of Herodotus: by this computation he saw the honour of the best historiographer falling on himself. Wherein, in the opinion of all men, he hath misreckoned. And thus much for the objections of Denis of Halicarnasse.’

I look forward to hearing of your own reckonings of the man and the history when we next meet!

Euge!

Corinna of Tanagra - The Tenth Lyric Star?

Xairpe!

Corinna of Tanagra (5th or 3rd BCE?) in Boeotia is not included in the list of great lyric poets by the Alexandrian scholars – it’s not known for sure why. Extant only in the form of a few papyri fragments and in ancient testimonia, it’s still not clear whether she is from a later era in the Hellenistic age or a contemporary of Pindar.

From the little we do know her works centres on the retelling and praise of myth and it retelling in a ritual context. One fragment (664(b) PMG give us a clear indication of what she is driven to song by,

[hionei d’eiroon aretas cheiroadov]

‘..but I have come to sing of heroes and heroines..’

In another fragment (664 PMG) she takes another lyric poet Myrtis to task for daring to square up against her hero Pindar, further underlining her devotion to the praise of myth and ritual choral hymns. It is here where the argument over dates is centred. From the fragments and available testimonia Corinna refers to the details of choral and ritual performance in connection with places she is familiar with, e.g. the Boeotian town of Thespia and this sounds  more like the earlier type of lyric, ritual setting, choral performances and a retelling of a myth or hymn in praise of a god.  The muse of choral dance is also referenced in her work, lending weight to the theory that she was a poet predominantly known for choral performance work in a ritual or festival setting rather than the more personalised ambience of a synposion. She could even be referred to as a ‘public poet’ as opposed to a proponent of more personal touches that the later lyric poets excel in.

But in other fragments there are potential personal touches, signs of self-deprecation  or irony, an over exacting attention to detail that perhaps would have been common knowledge in the earlier contexts to which she is alluding or placing herself. Or it could just be down to the fact that the fragments were written in a different form and modernised from her original work – although this is unlikely given the distinct Boeotian linguistic style in which they are written.

As usual with such scanty evidence to go on we are left with endless scholarly debate, at least that is , until some more fragments emerge from the sands of Egypt and we have more poetry and doubtless more questions in its train. I thought nevertheless that we should include Corinna. I for one would not want to find her standing outside the banquet hall during the Greek Lyric poet’s reunion synposion scolding me for neglecting her. So here's in praise of Corinna. The tenth Greek Lyric poet…may she live forever!

Euge!