A new study has attempted to reconstruct a lost poem by the ancient Greek poetess Corinna of Tanagra in Boeotia. According to an ancient source, she described the shield of Athena. This study examines the evidence for what that poem may have looked like. What has this new research uncovered?
Corinna of Tanagra
Corinna of Tanagra was a poetess from Tanagra in Boeotia, central Greece. Ancient sources commonly made her a contemporary of Pindar in the fifth century BC. However, modern scholars have cast doubt on this common claim. The consensus these days is that she could have lived anywhere between Pindar’s time until as late as the third century BC.
Unfortunately, not much of Corinna’s poetry has survived. Nevertheless, we do have a few fragments of her poems, including some of their titles. This gives us an idea of the kinds of poems that she composed, and how she engaged with existing Greek traditions.
One notable reference to Corinna comes from Antipater of Thessalonica, writing in the first century AD. He mentions nine female poets who served as counterparts to the nine Muses of Greek mythology. Interestingly, Corinna is the one to whom he gives the most prominence, assigning more words to her than to any of the others. And while his comments regarding these nine women are generally quite vague, he tells us something very specific about Corinna.
According to Antipater, Corinna “sang of the impetuous shield of Athena”. Although the poem that Antipater was referencing is now lost to us, a recent study has attempted to reconstruct as much information about it as possible.
A new study re-examines Corinna’s poem
On September 21, Cambridge University Press published the new study by Dr Thomas Nelson, from the University of Oxford. In this examination of the evidence, Nelson considers the context in which Corinna’s description of the “impetuous shield of Athena” might have appeared.
Firstly, what do we know about Corinna’s preferred genre of poetry? What types of Greek traditions did she engage with and sing about? The evidence from surviving fragments of her poetry indicates that she liked to highlight the role of women in Greek mythology.
For instance, a myth dating back to Hesiod’s Theogony describes how Zeus rose to power and overthrew his father Cronos. In a fragment of Corinna’s poetry, she describes these same events, but focuses on Rhea’s role in saving Zeus and enabling him to eventually triumph over Cronos. In other words, Corinna shifted the focus from Zeus to his mother, Rhea.
From this and other evidence, it appears that Corinna engaged with existing Greek traditions by shifting the focus from the male characters to the female characters. Indeed, this is indicated by Antipater’s very reference to the shield of Athena. It was common within Greek poetry to give a detailed description of a warrior’s shield. We see this in Homer’s Iliad, for instance.
Therefore, the very fact that Corinna apparently provided a noteworthy description of Athena’s shield indicates that she applied to a female character a literary tradition normally applied to male warriors.
What was the shield of Athena?
To understand what Corinna’s poem was apparently about, we need to understand what Athena’s shield actually was. According to Greek mythology, Perseus killed the gorgon Medusa by cutting off her head. He later gifted her head to Athena, so that she could use it as a weapon, since anyone looking at her would be turned to stone.
Athena is then said to have put Medusa’s head on her shield, thus transforming it from a defensive piece of equipment to an offensive weapon.
A complication arises when we consider the words of Homer. As Nelson points out, Homer portrays Athena’s aegis as occupying the same role as a warrior’s shield. The aegis is normally understood to be a type of protective garment, but given Homer’s description of it, there is a good case to be made that at least in the Iliad it is supposed to be a shield. In either case, it clearly fulfils the role of one.
In the Iliad, Homer describes Athena’s aegis as having the head of the gorgon – that is, Medusa – on it. Furthermore, he describes it by calling it ‘impetuous’. This is the same word that Antipater used when referring to Athena’s shield as described by Corinna.
Therefore, it seems very likely that the shield of Athena as described by Corinna was the same as Athena’s aegis in the Iliad.
What was Corinna’s poem about?
However, this does not tell us what Corinna’s poem was actually about. Do we have any information about what the narrative or greater subject matter of the poem was? Of course, it could simply have been a short poem focused entirely on Athena’s shield. However, this is not a very satisfying conclusion.
As it happens, Nelson identifies several plausible myths that Corinna could have been telling while describing Athena’s shield. The most likely, however, is the myth of a woman named Iodama. According to Pausanias, Iodama was a priestess at the temple of Athena Itonia in Boeotia. One day, she looked upon the head of Medusa that Athena bore, and she was turned to stone.
There are a number of reasons to think that Corinna may have described this myth. For one thing, it prominently features the gorgoneion of Athena, providing a natural reason for Corinna to have described it in detail. Furthermore, Corinna gives evidence of being particularly interested in the traditions of her own region, which was Boeotia. Finally, the myth centers around female characters, aligned with Corinna’s attested interests.
One complication arises from the fact that Pausanias actually describes the head of Medusa as being on Athena’s tunic. However, given the evident confusion surrounding the nature of Athena’s aegis in antiquity, this is not a meaningful issue. As Nelson points out, it is entirely possible that the original version of the myth spoke of Medusa’s head being on Athena’s aegis, in the sense of a shield, and this was only later turned into a type of garment.
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