Those who turn to the article "Sappho" in Smith's Dictionary of Classical Biography will find Gorgo and Andromeda mentioned as her rivals. Among her fellows were Anactoria of Miletus, Gongyle of Colophon, Eunica of Salamis, Gyrinna, Atthis, and Mnasidica, "Those," says the writer, "who attained the highest celebrity for their works were Damophylia the Pamphylian, and Erinna of Telos." This last-named poetess wrote a long poem upon the distaff, which was considered equal to Homer himself—the Odyssey being probably intended.
Again, there was Baucis, who wrote Erinna's Epitaph. Turning to Müller's work upon the Dorians, I find reference made to the amatory poetesses of Lesbos. He tells us also of Corinna, who is said to have competed successfully with Pindar, and Myrto, who certainly competed with him, but with what success we know not. Again, there was Diotima the Arcadian; and looking through Bergk's Poetœ Lyrici Grœci I find other names of women, fragments of whose works have readied us through quotation by extant writers. Among the Hebrews there were Miriam, Deborah, and Hannah, all of them believed to be centuries older than the Odyssey.
If, then, poetesses were as abundant as we know them to have been in the earliest known ages of Greek literature over a wide area in Greece, Asia Minor, and the islands of the Ægæan, there is no ground for refusing to admit the possibility that a Greek poetess lived in Sicily B.C. 1000, especially when we know from Thucydides that the particular part of Sicily where I suppose her to have lived was colonised from the North West corner of Asia Minor centuries before the close of the Homeric age. The civilisation depicted in the Odyssey is as advanced as any that is likely to have existed in Mitylene or Melos 600—500 B.C., while in both the Iliad and the Odyssey the status of women is represented as being much what it is at the present, and as incomparably higher than it was in the Athenian civilisation with which we are best acquainted. To imagine a great Greek poetess at Athens in the age of Pericles would be to violate probability, but I might almost say in an age when women were as free as they are represented to us in the Odyssey it is a violation of probability to suppose that there were no poetesses.
We have no reason to think that men found the use of their tongue sooner than women did; why then should we suppose that women lagged behind men when the use of the pen had become familiar? If a woman could work pictures with her needle as Helen did,[6] and as the wife of William the Conqueror did in a very similiar civilisation, she could write stories with her pen if she had a mind to do so.
The fact that the recognised heads of literature in the Homeric age were the nine Muses—for it is always these or "The Muse" that is involved, and never Apollo or Minerva—throws back the suggestion of female authorship to a very remote period, when, to be an author at all, was to be a poet, for prose writing is a comparatively late development. Both Iliad and Odyssey begin with an invocation addressed to a woman, who, as the head of literature, must be supposed to have been an authoress, though none of her works have come down to us. In an age, moreover, when men were chiefly occupied either with fighting or hunting, the arts of peace, and among them all kinds of literary accomplishment, would be more naturally left to women. If the truth were known, we might very likely find that it was man rather than woman who has been the interloper in the domain of literature. Nausicaa was more probably a survival than an interloper, but most probably of all she was in the height of the fashion.
[1] See Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey, by R. C. Jebb, 1888, p. 106.
[2] Bentley, Macmillan, 1892, p. 148.
[3] Homer, Macmillan, 1878, p. 2.
[4] Language and Literature of Ancient Greece, Longman, 1850, Vol. I, p. 404.