Anyte of Tegea

Recently a FaceBook friend posted a Sappho poem.  It started me wondering about how many other Classical female poets had left fragments of work, and today I discovered Anyte of Tegea.

To be honest, she seems to be so well-known and famous that I'm more than a bit ashamed not to have come across her before.

The following are my attempts at a few translations, followed by a bit more info on her, followed by the Greek texts.


"A lament for Antibia, a maiden:
Many bridegrooms
(in their own imagination, at least)
flocked to her father's house.
Word of her beauty brought them,
and her wisdom's growing fame.

But Fate, the destroyer,
swept all such hopes away."


Apparently Anyte was the first to also write epitaphs for animals.


To a dog

"You too met your doom, like those great ones of old,
in this many-rooted thicket.
Oh, Locri,
Noise-loving barker,
Speediest of pups,
into your lightly-leaping paw he stabbed his sharp poison,
that speckle-banded snake."


Three Girls  (victims of war?)

"We lived, O Miletus, beloved homeland,
spurning the lawless violence of the wild Galatians.
Three girls, fellow-citizens, brought to this fate
by the violent war-god of the Celts.

For we did not await their bloody, impious embraces,
but chose Death as a more kindly bridegroom."



From Encyclopedia Britannica:
Anyte,  (flourished 3rd century bc, Tegea, Arcadia), Greek poet of the Peloponnesus who was so highly esteemed in antiquity that in the well-known Stephanos (“Garland”), a collection compiled by Meleager (early 1st century), the “lilies of Anyte” are the first poems to be entwined in the “wreath of poets.” Anyte’s fame persisted, and Antipater of Thessalonica, writing during the reign of Augustus (27 bc–ad 14), called her “a woman Homer” and placed her in a list of nine lyric poetesses. Of 24 extant epigrams assigned to her, 20 are believed to be genuine. In her dedicatory epigrams her verse is akin to that of Theocritus and Leonidas, her contemporaries. Her dedications for fountains and to the nymphs of the springs show the Greek feeling for a quiet landscape that is so often illustrated in the Greek Anthology. She wrote epitaphs, perhaps literary rather than for actual use, on various animals. She gives no suggestion of herself in her poems and never employs the theme of love. Her love of nature and interest in animals mark her as typical of the early years of the Hellenistic period.


Texts:

Antibia:
    παρθένον Ἀντιβίαν κατοδύρομαι, ἇς ἐπὶ πολλοὶ
          νυμφίοι ἱέμενοι πατρὸς ἵκοντο δόμον,
    κάλλευς καὶ πινυτᾶτος ἀνὰ κλέος· ἀλλ᾽ ἐπὶ πάντων
          ἐλπίδας οὐλομένα Μοῖρ᾽ ἐκύλισε πρόσω.

    (Anthologia Graeca, VII, 490)

Locri:
    ὤλεο δή ποτε καὶ σὺ πολύρριζον παρὰ θάμνον,
          Λόκρι, φιλοφθόγγων ὠκυτάτη σκυλάκων·
    τοῖον ἐλαφρίζοντι τεῶι ἐγκάτθετο κώλωι
          ἰὸν ἀμείλικτον ποικιλόδειρος ἔχις.

    (Pollux, V, 48)


Three Girls:
    οἰχόμεθ᾽, ὦ Μίλητε, φίλη πατρί, τῶν ἀθεμίστων
          τὰν ἄνομον Γαλατᾶν ὕβριν ἀναινόμεναι,
    παρθενικαὶ τρισσαὶ πολιήτιδες, ἃς ὁ βιατὰς
          Κελτῶν εἰς ταύτην μοῖραν ἔτρεψεν Ἄρης.

    οὐ γὰρ ἐμείναμεν αἷμα τὸ δυσσεβὲς οὐδ᾽ Ὑμέναιον,
          νυμφίον ἀλλ᾽ Ἀίδην κηδεμόν᾽ εὑρόμεθα.

    (Anthologia Graeca, VII, 492)

A Persian Slave:
Μάνης οὗτος ἀνὴρ ἦν ζῶν ποτε· νῦν δὲ τεθνηκὼς
      ἶσον Δαρείωι τῶι μεγάλωι δύναται.

(Anthologia Graeca, VII, 538)