Our assessment of Corinna depends principally on the two long fragments (654.i.12–34, and iii.12–51 PMG) in the 2nd-century Berlin papyrus from Hermopolis (284), one containing the singing contest of Cithaeron and Helicon and the other Acraephen’s reply to Asopus about the fate of his daughters.1 Although they presumably come from two separate poems, these fragments are closely connected by their proximity in the papyrus and, we may assume, by the circumstances of their composition and performance. What those circumstances were remains a matter of debate and uncertainty.2 There has been much discussion about the audience of Corinna’s poems; it seems likely that some of her works were performed before both men and women, and that some of them may have been specifically intended for a female audience.3 Either or both fragments could well be from poems composed in connection with the major cult of Hera in Plataea.4 Although it is clear that the poetry all too briefly visible within these fragments was inscribed within the patriarchal tradition, the style, content, and tone give sufficient indication of an attempt to strike a divergent note; it may not be going too far, in other words, to characterize Corinna’s poetry as significantly “woman-identified,” to use Rayor’s term.5 The anecdotal tradition of Corinna’s rivalry with Pindar, even if not alwaysreliable in its details, is nonetheless indicative of some area of dispute between them, or at least of notable differences between the two poets that were detected, and viewed as significant, by ancient critics.
In some important ways, Corinna’s Boeotian-oriented narratives of myths diverge from, and perhaps even react against, the poetic mode of Pindar’s Panhellenic epinikians.7 It is the purpose of this investigation to examine that reaction in order to recover, so far as the fragmentary evidence allows us to, the distinctive voice that speaks in the poetic narratives about the mountains Cithaeron and Helicon and the river Asopus. The investigation begins with a close reading of each fragment, with particular reference to the motifs of deception, violence, revelation, and loss, which link them together and which may, in fact, constitute a thematic model that Corinna followed in her other narratives. There follows an examination of the cult of Hera at Plataea, especially the Daedala festival, as possible occasions for the performance of the two poems under discussion.
Finally, we move to Corinna’s relationship to Pindar in general, and then to an examination of one particular epinikian, Pythian 9, in connection with the two surviving fragments. By deploying incongruity and irony in her own deft fashion, Corinna appears to blur boundaries between Panhellenic and local, human and divine, truth and falsehood, in a manner that subtly challenges the conventions of the epinikian mode.
THE SONG CONTEST OF CITHAERON AND HELICON
The fragment from the contest of Cithaeron and Helicon begins as one of the competitors is completing his song. This song ends with Rhea hiding the baby Zeus and thereby gaining great honor (tim}) from the gods
“the Couretes hid the goddess’s holy infant in a cave, secretly from crooked-minded Cronus, when blessed Rhea stole him and great was the honor she got from the Immortals.” This he sang. At once the Muses ordered the blessed gods to bring their secret ballot stone to
the gold-gleaming urns; they all got up together. Cithaeron got more votes; quickly Hermes proclaimed with a shout that he [cithaeron] had won a lovely victory, and with wreaths . . . the blessed gods crowned him, and his mind rejoiced. But, filled with harsh griefs,
Helicon [ripped out] a bare rock . . . and the mountain . . . groaning pitifully he hurled it from on high into a myriad stones. Let us look first at the way Rhea is presented. Zeus is not mentioned
by name and hence it is likely, as Rayor argues, that Corinna gave more attention to the role of Rhea than Hesiod did in the Theogony passage (453–506) on which her poem is apparently modeled. 10 It is indeed probable that a song concluding with Rhea’s hiding of Zeus as a baby—rather than with, say, his reappearance when grown or his triumph over his father Cronus, would have focused on the heroic actions of this goddess. Corinna may have portrayed Rhea as a resourceful female, who manages to outwit a powerful and very cunning male deity by her own devices (Rayor
1993, 226–27). In Hesiod’s Theogony (469–71), she asks Gaea and Ouranos to devise a plan for her. It could be argued that it is risky to read so much into such a brief narrative, especially one almost
devoid of tropes. Certain critics have, in fact, censured Corinna for her lack of embellishment, including a lack of novelty in adjectives. 11 But this is to misunderstand the way a deliberately spare narrative of this kind contrives its effects: because of the generally uncluttered mode of expression, any particularly descriptive or polyvalent word draws attention to itself.12 It is clear from other
fragments, such as 655 and 674 PMG, that Corinna uses epithets with more inventiveness and frequency when she wants to: in 674 The spia is described as kalligéneyle filójene mvsofíleite (of beautiful offspring, loving strangers, loving the Muses). Thus ágkulom} thw (used in Theogony 473 and 495) here in the song-contest fragment is not just a conventional epithet: it serves to emphasize Rhea’s intellectual supremacy by reminding us of the formidable abilities of her adversary.
Harvey, in his detailed survey of the lyric poets, notes that “ornamental Homeric epithets were not used indiscriminately” and that Corinna’s diction “shows the same sort of discrimination in the use of Homeric epithets that characterizes archaic lyric . . . the work has been done by a singularly delicate and well-trained hand.”13 The word ˙gkulom}thw also inevitably evokes the world of Homeric epic; for Rhea the act of taking or stealing is concomitant with the getting of tim} and this is reminiscent of male heroes seeking tim} by violent physical action. Such juxtaposing of
male and female figures and qualities we may designate a defining characteristic of Corinna’s method: in another fragment (664B), she claims that she recounts the arete of both heroes and heroines (e¥rQvn ˙retàw xe†rvádvn). In another of her poems, Corinna is
said to have told of the “impetuous shield” (you]rin ˙spída) of the goddess Athena (667 PMG). Such a poem might have recounted Athena’s exploits as a warrior or strategist and relied upon the same collocation of traditionally “masculine” and “feminine” features. A similar promotion of the female role or feminine cleverness is perhaps indicated by Plutarch’s statement (De Musica 1136B) that “Corinna says Apollo was taught to play the aulos by Athena”; this goes against the popular tradition that Athena threw away the aulos in disgust, preserved in Athenaeus 616E.14
If we focus now on the song as a whole, we see that its content is appropriate for a mountain because Rhea’s concealment of Zeus took place in another mountain locale, usually said to be Mt. Ida.15
It is the second entry in the contest and is sung either by Cithaeron or by Helicon; the preponderance of scholarly opinion to date has favored Cithaeron for two main reasons. First, the prominencegiven to geographical locations in the poem invites an aetiological interpretation and there was a well-known cult of Zeus on Mt.
Cithaeron (Paus. 9.3.1–2). Given that Cithaeron wins the contest, it would be fitting that he do so with a song about Rhea and
Zeus.16 Against this, however, the singing contest and its outcome could easily be connected with the cult of the Muses on Helicon.17 The second argument for assigning the song about Rhea to Cithaeron is that the winning song usually comes second in such contexts.18 However, in view of Corinna’s penchant—visible even in these meagre fragments—for surprising details and for reworking the tradition, it is unsafe to assume that the song is Cithaeron’s simply on the basis of what might be “expected” from looking at the available evidence for song contests in Greece. One could reasonably make an argument based on the power of tradition with regard to mythical content and say that to have Helicon lose the contest would be at least very unexpected and perhaps even inappropriate, but this is what Corinna does.