14 Facts About Erinna

Erinna's 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.

Erinna's is generally thought to have lived in the first half of the fourth century BC, though some ancient traditions have her as a contemporary of Sappho; Telos is generally considered to be her most likely birthplace, but Tenos, Teos, Rhodes, and Lesbos are all mentioned by ancient sources as her home.

Little ancient evidence about Erinna's life survives, and the testimony which does is often contradictory.

Scholars now tend to believe that Erinna was an early Hellenistic poet.

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

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Sylvia Barnard argues that Erinna was from Telos on the grounds of her dialect, though Donald Levin notes that while based on Doric, Erinna's dialect is a literary creation and does not accurately reflect her own native dialect.

Three epigrams preserved in the Greek Anthology suggest that Erinna died young – according to the poet Asclepiades shortly after composing the Distaff aged 19, though the earliest source to explicitly fix her date of death at age 19 is the Suda.

Erinna's fame is founded on her 300-line hexameter poem, the Distaff.

Three other fragments of hexameter poetry attributed to Erinna survive, two quoted by Stobaeus and one by Athenaeus.

Erinna's speaks of a game the two played, described by Julius Pollux, who calls it chelichelone, and of their fear of Mormo, a Greek bogeywoman.

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

All of this ancient testimony about Erinna suggests that she was a major figure in Hellenistic poetry.

Today, so little of Erinna's work survives that it is difficult to judge her poetry, though what has survived of Distaff does, according to Ian Plant, bear out the poem's ancient reputation.

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