Erinna

She is best known for her long poem The Distaff, a 300-line hexameter lament for her childhood friend Baucis, who had died shortly after her marriage.

[1] The latest date given for Erinna in the ancient sources is that provided by Eusebius, who suggests the mid-fourth century BC.

[2] Ancient testimony is divided on where Erinna was from: possibilities include Teos, Telos, Tenos, Mytilene, and Rhodes.

She speaks of a game the two played, described by Julius Pollux, who calls it chelichelone ("torty-tortoise"), and of their fear of Mormo, a Greek bogeywoman.

[19] The Distaff is a literary version of the goos – the lament chanted by the female relatives of the deceased during the prothesis (laying out the body).

[23] Kathryn Gutzwiller has argued that this incorporation of Sapphic themes into a poem of lamentation is Erinna's way of feminising a work based on a Homeric model.

[25] Diane Rayor, however, rejects this, disputing Rauk's belief that Sappho 94 is a farewell to a companion who is leaving to marry.

[29] The third epigram is described by Rauk as a "commonplace", containing "nothing to support Erinna's authorship",[27] and West suggests that Nossis is a more likely author.

[36] Other scholars, including Sylvia Barnard, Elizabeth Manwell, and Diane Rayor, accept the epigrams as being authored by Erinna without explicitly addressing the dispute.

[31] Several other epigrams collected in the Greek Anthology praise her, and in Meleager's "Garland" her work is compared to the "sweet, maidenly coloured crocus".

[12] In addition, Eva Stehle sees Erinna's poetry as significant as one of the very few sources of evidence about the relationship between mothers and daughters in the ancient Greek world.

[43] Erinna has also been read by feminist scholars as part of a female poetic tradition in ancient Greece, along with others including Sappho and Nossis.