The most celebrated female poet of Ancient Greece after Sappho, Erinna (fl. c. 350 BCE) left behind only a small body of work. Yet her surviving verses offer a rare glimpse into the emotions and experiences of a young woman in the ancient world.
Inspired by the Muses
Little is known about Erinna apart from what she reveals in her poem The Distaff. At the time she wrote it, she was nineteen years old, unmarried, and mourning her friend Baucis, who had died shortly after her wedding.
One scholar once suggested that Erinna never existed and that The Distaff had instead been written by a man impersonating an uneducated young woman. Today, this hypothesis has been largely rejected. Women did have access to education, particularly in the region of Teos, one of Erinna's possible birthplaces. Moreover, although literary forgeries certainly existed, a male author would have had little to gain from attributing his work to an otherwise unknown woman.
One notable feature of Erinna's poetry is her use of the Doric dialect, something uncommon in literary poetry. This choice makes the emotions expressed in her verses more poignant and intimate.
Although most of her writings have been lost, Erinna's poetry circulated widely throughout the ancient world. Poets and anthologists praised her work, comparing her to the greatest authors of antiquity. Meleager included her in his Garland of poets, likening her poetry to a sweet, maiden colored crocus.
Erinna's voice still echoes today. Mangaka Satou Futaba made her the heroine of the manga Utae! Erinna (Sing! Erinna), portraying her as a young woman determined to rival the greatest poets of her age.
The Distaff
Erinna's best-known work is The Distaff. Only about fifty-four lines of the original three hundred survive, preserved on a badly damaged papyrus. In this poem, Erinna mourns the death of her friend Baucis. The text offers a rare window into the life of a young woman through timeless themes of grief, friendship, family, and domestic life.
She recalls the games she played with Baucis as a child and remembers being frightened by the monster Morpho. Looking back on those memories with tenderness, she draws a parallel between marriage and death. Throughout the poem, Erinna skillfully develops the image of weaving. Weaving was not only a traditional female occupation but also a metaphor for poetry, while simultaneously evoking the thread of life spun by the Fates.
In addition to The Distaff, and three epigrams are attributed to Erinna. All are dedicated to female friends: two to Baucis and one to a woman named Agatharchis.
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Further reading:
Karanika Andromache, Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece
Natoli Bartolo, Pitts Angela, Hallett Judith P. (eds.), Ancient Women Writers of Greece and Rome
Plant Ian Michael (ed.), Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome : An Anthology
Read Erinna's poetry below:
The Distaff:
……………………………………………. girls
……………………………………………. brides
……………………………………………. tortoise
……………………………………………. moon
……………………………………………. tortoise
………………………………………………….
………………………………………………….
with leaves
………………………………………………….
……………………………………………. to card [wool]
……………………………………………. wave
from white horses (you leapt?) with maddened feet
“Aiai,”I shouted loudly, and you then turned into a tortoise
…………………….little yard of a great courtyard;
and, because of these things, poor Baucis, I weep for you, sighing heavily,
these childhood games lie in my heart……….
still warm; but, those (which we once?) used to play are now charcoal,
and (dances of?) dolls and girl-hood friends, brides
in the bedroom………………………towards dawn
mother……………………. wool-workers
them……………………around….sprinkled with salt;
and (with?) little (haste?) …Morpho brought (such great) fear;
… on (her head? were great big) ears, and she stalked about on four
feet, and she shape-shifted from (one) form into (another).
But when (you went into your husband’s bed?), you forgot everything
that belonged to childhood, and then, you heard (my?) mother,
dear Baucis; forgetfulness……….Aphrodite
weeping for you, ………the other things I leave behind;
For, my feet ………….are not permitted (to go?) from the house,
nor (am I able?) to gaze upon your dead body (with my eyes?), nor to lament
with women who have unbound their hair…. blood-red shame
tears at both sides of my cheeks……………….
in earlier times………………………
nineteenth…………………………….
Erinna…………….dear……………………
looking upon the distaff…………………….
know that………………………….
coiled around (Gello?) ………………………….
about these things, shame…. me…………….
with maidens…………….
looking………………….
unbound hair……………….
gentle-speaking grey hairs, the blooms of old age for mortals.
………….dear…………….
Baucis…….weep………….
flame……….her……………
hearing a howling………………….
o Hymenaius……………
many things…………………
……….o Hymenaius…………….
Aiai, poor Baucis………………………
First epigram for Baucis:
My stele and Sirens and mourning urn,
you who hold the little ash belonging to Hades,
say hello to those who go past my tomb,
whether they are my fellow citizens or visitors from other cities;
and say that a tomb holds me, a bride; and, say this, too—
that my father called me Baucis, and my family
is from Tenos, so that they may know, and say also that my friend
Erinna on my tomb wrote this inscription.
Baucis 2:
I am the stele of the bride Baucis. As you pass by this mournful
monument, tell this to Hades beneath the earth:
“you are malicious, Hades.” These words are beautiful to the on-looker,
who reads aloud Baucis’s cruelest fate—
how Hymen sang about the girl among the wedding torches
with which her father-in-law lit the flames of her funeral pyre.
But, you, Hymen, change the mode of your melodious wedding-hymn
into a mournful voice of dirges.
For Agatharchis:
Delicate hands made this portrait; superior Prometheus,
there are humans who rival even your skill.
If only whoever painted this girl so accurately
had also endowed her with a human voice—Agatharchis would be complete.
Yeah I saw the lovecraftian horrors and didn’t succumb to madness. What- no I’m not a cultist, James. For Christ’s sake. What you’re forgetting my friend is that HP Lovecraft wasn’t a flexible man. His brain simply wasn’t stretchy enough to take it all in. I however, have short term memory issues. Flexibility is the name of the game when you can’t remember if you ate lunch or not. What’s the size of the universe? Big. You knew that already, James. Come on now. You don’t need to witness the terrifying ocean at the base of the entirety of reality itself to know that. Pass the brandy.
During a Eldritch Horrors based tabletop RPG my character was a young dandy who wasn't particularly interested in all this monster mystery stuff but his father (my brother's character) was a researcher who WAS very into it, so Bertie went along to make sure the old man didn't get into too much trouble. It was your average Eldritch Horrors RPG in that you don't make your characters with the expectation that they will survive for very long, both the game itself and the genre are very intent on turning your characters inside out, driving them insane, and blowing them up in no particular order.
The thing was, everything in this nightmare hellscape just seemed to keep coming up Bertie because the man was too stupid to realize what genre he was in. Every time he had to roll for a sanity check whenever he saw something crazy, the dice treated him so well that he just... didn't get it. Gee that sure is a funny costume. There's something wrong with that dog. These mean guys in stupid hats are trying to hurt that young lady, we can't have that! I had not built him this way, his intelligence stats weren't even that bad, random chance just made it so that this man was living a scooby doo adventure while everyone else was being consumed by The Horrors.
The final straw was at the end of an adventure when Bertie escaped from the cultist headquarters by breaking out through the mansion's front window on a motorcycle with a hot rescued sacrificial maiden clinging to his back and leading the cultists on a merry chase through the hedge maze while the other adventurers escaped. His sanity score? HIGHER than when the adventure had begun. He had found the whole experience quite thrilling and felt very good about life in general!
Bertie retired from adventuring to marry the maiden he rescued and care for his aging father and delight and bemuse his friends at the gentleman's club with stories of his 'wacky' adventures. I didn't want to risk breaking his ridiculous lucky streak.
This is a me problem not an issue with the new Avatar show, obviously, but I really don't think I'm ready to move on from Korra yet for some reason (I am aware the show finished over a decade ago)
Scientists have developed a breakthrough “superfood” for honeybees by engineering yeast to produce the essential nutrients normally found in
TLDR- Modern agriculture pollen is low in nutrients, and there aren’t enough wildflowers. Science has to develop vitamins to supplement the diets of agricultural bees. So plant some wildflowers for the wild bees near you.
For all that the 1800s etiquette guides are--obviously--derangedly sexist from a modern perspective? They're also mindblowing in how casually they will assert things that MODERN DAY CONSERVATIVES would scream and cry and shit their pants about.
"People back then always married young it's natural!!!" Every single 1800s guide I've ever met casually mentions that, of course, you really shouldn't get married before you're at least 20, and waiting until 25 is usually better.
Or, like. Okay here's a long segment:
Just firmly going "it is crazy sexist to blame The Wife for overspending when thirty seconds of asking questions will immediately establish that her husband was outright lying to her about how much money they had. Talk to your wife like a normal person."
Or--okay, here. A section on being honest and not writing love letters in secret, because that's usually a good sign that there's something untoward going on....
....except that he then immediately acknowledges that sometimes, the reason you're hiding this from your parents is that your parents suck. That there are parents who frankly have not earned the right to approve or disapprove of your partner.
(I realize the phrasing there sounds a lot less strong than my summary, but--trust me on this. When you're familiar with the narrative voice of these kinds of books, this passage is downright radical. The mere acknowledgement that if you treat your kids badly, it's your own damn fault when they don't talk to you? I've genuinely never seen that before in this genre.
Don't freak out over "properly trained", either. It's just a linguistic shift--at the time, "training" was used the way we would say "raising" a child today. )
What do you think made Darth Vader such a cool and interesting villain? Was it the design? The character? Both? Something else?
Signature look, signature voice, signature gimmick (the labored, electronic breathing). He was ruthless, scary, and his costume was not over-designed, silly, or too alien looking.
Darth Vader is, basically, a space samurai. He wields a katana made out of lasers. That's already cool enough by itself. And when you combine that with the commanding voice of James Earl Jones, who at once could sound all-powerful and also extremely gentle, you have something unforgettable.
That, combined with just... the look of Star Wars. Not every movie in 1977 looked like Star Wars. I don't mean just special effects. I mean shot composition. Cinematography. Camera positions.
Go watch Flash Gordon from 1980 and compare it to Star Wars. Go watch The Black Hole. Go watch Richard Donner's 1978 Superman. There's something about Star Wars that looks and sounds like almost nothing of that era. The art direction, the audio design, the way it was shot and put together...
There was only one Star Wars, only one Darth Vader, and it's hard to pinpoint anything beyond that without knowing intricately the film history leading up to that point. It was just a total paradigm shift.
Last year, I befriended a Catholic seminarian. We've gotten to be pretty decent friends. Seeing as he was staying in town for the summer and I wasn't, I entrusted him with caring for my plant.
He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"
"What?"
He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"
"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."
Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.
Listen, totally cool. My plant becoming Catholic is a great deal for her not dying over the summer. But now I must navigate this interfaith household. Keep me in your thoughts.
I should also add- I ran into my rabbi and explained the situation. I then asked, earnestly, if there was a remedy. A mikveh of sorts, or a beit din, or something.
He turned to me, sighed, and said in a very deadpan tone-- "Plants don't have covenants, Joy,"
So Theodora's a free agent according to rabbinic opinion. I guess I'll permit her to be Roman Catholic.
Suddenly struck with a need to explain to you how boat pronouns work (I work in the marine industry).
When you're talking about the design of the boat, you say "it".
When the boat is still being built, your say "it".
When the boat is nearing completion, you can say "it" or "she".
When the boat is floating in the water you probably say "she", unless there is still a lot of work to be done (e.g. no engine yet) then you say "it".
When the boat is officially launched and operating, you say "she". If you continue to say "it" at this point you are not incorrect but suspiciously untraditional. You are not playing the game.
If you are referring to a boat you don't really know anything about you may say "it" ("there's a big boat, it's coming this way"). But if you know its name, it's probably "she" ("there's the Waverley, she's on her way to Greenock").
If you are talking about boats in general, you say "it" ("when a boat is hit by a wave it heels over")
If you speak about a boat in complimentary terms, it's "she" ("she's a grand boat"). If you are being disparaging it may be it, but not necessarily ("it's as ugly as sin", "she's a grotty old tub").
If she has a boy's name, she's still she. "Boy James", "King Edward", "Sir David Attenborough"? The pronoun is she.
If it's a dumb barge (no engine), you say it. But if it's a rowing boat (no engine), you say she.
I hope this has cleared things up so that you may not be in danger of misgendering floating objects.
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