Erinna

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Erinna (Greek Ἤριννα Ērinna ) was an ancient Greek poet. She lived in the 4th or early 3rd century BC. Chr.

Life

Little is known about Erinna's life. The Byzantine Lexicon Suda reports that she died at the age of 19. The island of Telos is given as their home, but also the island of Rhodes , to which Telos belonged politically at the time. Occasionally, however, tenos and teios are also found as home indications. Already in antiquity, but also in the 19th century, she was known as a friend and student of the poet Sappho . Eusebius of Caesarea set her creative period to 353/352 BC. Chr.

As a traumatic experience, the death of her childhood friend Baukis was the trigger for her work. Baukis was married to another island at the age of 19 and died there shortly afterwards. Erinna commemorates her in two grave inscriptions and in her main work, the verse epic Die Spindel . Ancient evidence - including an epigram from the Anthologia Graeca - also mention that Erinna suffered greatly from her hard mother, who was constantly driven to work.

Erinna writes in the Doric dialect , which, however, is heavily interspersed with Aeolians .

Works

The spindle

The epic, highly praised in antiquity, due to which Erinna was celebrated as the second greatest poet after Sappho, was considered lost for a long time. It was not until 1928 that a papyrus fragment was found that contained 37 verses from the spindle written in hexameters - not a single one of them, however, complete. According to ancient sources, the entire work is said to have comprised around 300 verses. Erinna describes her youth together with her friend Baukis, her games and, above all, the common manual work with the eponymous spindle. Memories of a child’s play turtle and a kind of child- frightening figure Mormo can be read from the fragment .

Epigrams

Altogether three epigrams of Erinnas are handed down in the Anthologia Graeca. Two of them are grave inscriptions for the tomb of Bauki's friend. In it, she impressively describes how the pyre for the deceased was lit shortly afterwards with the wedding torch, describes the grave decorated with steles and sirens and accuses the god of the dead Hades of being jealous of the Baukis' happiness. One of the two poems ends with the name of the author.

The third epigram depicts a picture that probably shows a childhood friend. The name of the portrayed is called Agatharchis. The painting is so similar that the artist comes close to the divine Prometheus in art, the only thing missing to perfection is that the picture begin to speak.

Fragments

Two fragments have survived in the Stobaios collection , which may have come from the spindle . One speaks of eternal silence and eternal darkness in the realm of the dead, the other of the gray hair of old age.

Doubtful

In Gelehrtenmahl of Athenaios an escort poem is quoted, which assumes an unnamed girlfriend on their voyage to the conduct of the fish Pompilos. However, Athenaios himself expressed doubts about Erinna's authorship. The tone of voice is much more stilted than Erinna's simple tone, the poem is probably of a later date.

Pliny the Elder mentions in his book on metallurgy that Erinna wrote a poem about a memorial that the sculptor Myron created for a cricket. But there seems to be a confusion with a poem by the poet Anyte . Anyte described how her friend Myro buried a cricket and a cicada.

Finally, a poem An Rom is occasionally attributed to Erinna. But Rome was not yet significant enough in Erinna's lifetime to write a poem about it, and Erinna would hardly have received any more detailed information from a city in Italy on her remote island. Melinno , a Greek poet from Locri Epizephyrii in southern Italy, who probably lived at the time of Pyrrhos or the First Punic War , would be considered a poet .

It is also assumed that the Italian city is not meant, but that the Greek title "Eis Rhomen" translates as "An die Kraft". The poem is written in five sapphic stanzas .

Afterlife

Antiquity

  • Erinna's example had a great influence on the Hellenistic poets who followed. They praise a total of nine epigrams in the Anthologia Palatina .
  • The epigram of the bride Kleanassa, which the poet Antonios Thallos wrote in the first century BC and in which the image of the torch is taken up again, is clearly inspired by her.
  • When Antipater of Thessalonike , analogous to the canon of the nine great poets - Alkaios, Sappho, Anacreon, Alkman, Stesichoros, Ibykos, Simonides, Pindar and Bakchylides - compiles a catalog of the great female poets, Erinna is also included as a canonical poet.

Modern times

  • The idea that Sappho and Erinna were contemporaries and even friends can also be found in the poem Erinna to Sappho by Eduard Mörike .
  • Rainer Maria Rilke wrote two poems - Eranna to Sappho and Sappho to Eranna - about the two poets.
  • Stefan George wrote a poem Erinna that appeared in The Books of Shepherd and Prize Poems, Sagas and Songs and the Hanging Gardens (1895).

Text editions and translations

  • Anthologia Graeca . Greek-German. Published by Hermann Beckby . Munich 1957. 2nd edition 1965.
  • Anthologia Lyrica Graeca . Published by Ernst Diehl. Volume 1, Leipzig 1925, pp. 486-488.
  • Supplementum Hellenisticum . Edited by Hugh Lloyd-Jones and Peter Parsons. Berlin 1983.
  • Ancient poetry . Published by Carl Fischer. With an afterword by Wolf-Hartmut Friedrich and explanations by Klaus Ries. Munich, 1964. Translation by Weber, pp. 233-234
  • Greek poetry . German by Emil Staiger. Explained by Georg Schoeck, Zurich 1961, p. 143.
  • Poets of Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages . Bilingual text output. Introduced, translated and provided with a bibliographical appendix by Helene Homeyer . Paderborn u. a. 1979.

literature

Overview presentations and introductions

  • Herwig Görgemanns : Erinna. In: Herwig Görgemanns (Hrsg.): The Greek literature in text and representation. Volume 3: Classical Period II. Reclam, Stuttgart 1987, p. 42 f.
  • Albin Lesky : History of Greek Literature. 3rd, revised edition, Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11423-0 , p. 715 f.
  • Doris Meyer: Erinna . In: Bernhard Zimmermann , Antonios Rengakos (Hrsg.): Handbook of the Greek literature of antiquity. Volume 2: The Literature of the Classical and Hellenistic Period. CH Beck, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-61818-5 , pp. 45-48

Investigations

  • Kurt Latte : Erinna. In: News from the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen. I. Philosophical-historical class. 1953, pp. 79-94.
  • John Rauk: Erinna's Distaff and Sappho Fr. 94. In: Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 30, 1989, pp. 101-116
  • Felix Scheidweiler : Erinna's complaint about Baukis. In: Philologus 100, 1956, pp. 40-51
  • Udo W. Scholz: Erinna. In: Antike und Abendland 18, 1973, pp. 15–40
  • Martin L. West : Erinna. In: Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 25, 1977, pp. 95–119.

reception

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Erinna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ἤριννα
BRIEF DESCRIPTION ancient Greek poet
DATE OF BIRTH 4th century BC Chr.
DATE OF DEATH 4th century BC Chr.