Traditional Aesthetics of Erinna's Distaff

Olga LEVANIOUK Traditional Aesthetics of Erinna's Distaff

(olevan@u.washington.edu)

Almost since the discovery of its fragments in 1929 Erinna's Distaff has been recognized as a lament: the "Erinna" of the poem laments for Baukis, who died on her wedding night. The "feminine" themes in the poem are usually seen as a "personal" layer aimed at the contemporary audience. The dialect, a mixture of West Greek and Lesbian, is seen as a separate details suggesting either Erinna's place of origin or her literary persona. I suggest, instead, that the dialect corresponds to the genre of the poem: both the themes and the language define the Distaff in terms of a poetic tradition to which it belongs.

The Distaff is not only a lament but a hymenaios, and many of its "feminine" elements are especially suitable for this genre. Apart from the fact that Hymenaios is invoked, the poem is full of wedding themes, including the forgetfulness associated with Aphrodite, the girl's fear, the figure of the mother etc. Indeed, the title of Erinna's poem, Elakate, and the central theme of weaving, or rather, of not wanting to weave, may have something to do with marriage. Wedding songs have an area of intersection with funeral songs: both have to do with sending someone off (e.g. Xenophon, Hellenika 4.1.9, Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes 1059, Plato, Laws 800e2). The hymenaios, in particular, tends to be a processional song (as opposed to the epithalamion, see e.g. Iliad 18.491-5, Aristophanes, Peace 1331-1357). It is at this point of intersection between the hymenaios and the lament that Erinna's Distaff is positioned. The intersection of the two genres is no doubt itself traditional (Alexiou 1974). In Pindar, Hymenaios himself dies on his wedding night (fr. 128c7-8 Snell-Maehler).

The language of the Distaff correlates with the poem's genre. The combination of hexameter with West Greek and Lesbian has some antecedents: Sappho composed hexameters in a toned-down Lesbian which appear mostly in wedding songs (fr.104, 105 Voigt), and there is epigraphic evidence for hexameters composed in a dialect mixture similar to Erinna's. These examples include a fifth-century inscribed threnos from Boiotia (CEG 114), the "patchwork" hexameter line in a fifth century school scene by Douris (ARV 431.48), Aeolic forms on Corinthian vases (Wachter 2001 COR 36 and COR 96) and dedications containing the imperative divdoi (CEG 326, CEG 334), a badly understood form which has been viewed as a Lesbian feature (Strunk, Glotta 39 (1961)114-23) and which might be a poetic hyper-Lesbianism.which might be a poetic hyper-Lesbianism. The same dialect mixture is exhibited by the prosodion fragment of Eumelos (PMG 696).

There is evidence, then, for a hexameter poetry which uses a West Greek-Lesbian dialectal mixture and which is neither narrative nor heroic, in contrast to Ionic hexameters. This is the hexameter of small occasional genres such as processional songs, prayers, hymenaioi and threnoi. Erinna's Distaff imitates this kind of poetry both in genre and in dialect.