Let me begin at the very end with one of the more curious testimonia to the life of a poet surviving from antiquity.1 Early in the sixth
century ce, Christodorus of Coptus in Egypt composed an ecphrastic account of more than eighty bronze statues adorning the baths of Zeuxippus at Constantinople.2 His descriptions now comprise the entire second book of the Greek Anthology.3 Among those statues stood one of Homer—not the epic poet, Christodorus explains, but a namesake And there stood another Homer—whom I deem to be not the foremost of epic poets, the god-inspired son of the well-flowing Meles, but him that by Thracian shores his mother Moero bore, the renowned Byzantine, she whom, while still a little girl, the Muses brought up to be skilled in heroic epic. For he himself practiced the learned craft of tragedy, honoring with his verses his native city Byzantium.Homerus of Byzantium was indeed a noteworthy figure, celebrated
not only in his birthplace but also at Alexandria, where he was included as one of the “Pleiad,” a group of eight outstanding Hellenistic tragedians.4 Yet in subsequent literary history his own accomplishments are frequently overshadowed by those of his mother, Moero—as seen here, where she intrudes into the description of her son’s honorific statue and claims three of its seven lines for herself. While it is not uncommon for the sons of illustrious
Greeks to be identified by their more distinguished fathers, to be designated as the offspring of one’s mother is highly unusual and,
in classical Athens at least, would have been a terrible insult. This in itself indicates that Moero had a substantial reputation in antiquity, one that persisted, if only at second or third hand, into Christodorus’ time and even beyond.5 In this chapter I propose to review the evidence
for her literary activities and reexamine the admittedly scanty remains of her work. There are grounds for revising the date of
Moero’s literary activity downward, which could in turn explain the close association of mother and son in the biographical tradition.
This hypothesis has a further corollary: despite the all but complete loss of what was apparently a large and varied corpus of writings, we may also recover an aspect of Moero’s artistic self-fashioning that casts light on that of yet another female poet, the Roman elegist Sulpicia. Information about Moero’s life and career is scattered, and assembling it is made somewhat more difficult by divergent spellings of her name. In a marginal annotation to Parthenius’ Erotica Pathemata 27, and at Athenaeus’6 Deipnosophistae 11.490e and 491a and several passages in the Palatine Anthology, she is called MoirQ.7 Other sources, mostly late, transmit the name as MurQ.8 Baale’s attempt (1903, 32–33) to show on the basis of inscriptions and literary parallels that the spelling with upsilon was the correct one runs into trouble because, in the commonly occurring masculine proper name Myron, the first vowel is always short.9 Likewise, Geffcken’s effort (1932, 2512) to explain the alternative form as a simple case of vowel substitution fails to account for the difference in quantity. As the lectio difficilior, MoirQ must be the right form. The existence of the variant Myro can be traced back to the occurrence of the name in Anyte’s epigram Gow and Page (G-P) (Anth. Pal. 7.190), which, I argue, is probably a playful hommage to the poet from Byzantium. Moero’s date can be roughly established by the Suda’s specification
of the one hundred and twenty-fourth Olympiad (284–281 bce) as the floruit of her son.10 She would therefore have been born in the last quarter of the fourth century, at least one generation after Erinna, author of the Distaff, and perhaps a little earlier than the epigrammatists Anyte and Nossis, two other canonical female poets.
The Suda entry on her is brief, identifying her as a Byzantine, a writer of epic, elegiac, and lyric verse (poi}tria \pv]n kaì \legeívn kaì
melv]n), the daughter [sic] of Homerus thetragedian, and the wife of Andromachus, nicknamed “the philologist.”12 None of her lyrics survive, but we know of a hymn to Poseidon, mentioned by Eustathius (ad. IL. 2.711 van der Valk). We do possess a ten-line hexameter fragment of her epic or epyllion Mnemosyne; a prose summary of a tale from an episodic poem, the Arai or “Curses,” composed in either hexameters or elegiacs; and two elegiac quatrains preserved by Meleager in his Garland. Since the majority of the testimonia have to do with her longer works, we can begin with those.
EPIC NARRATIVE
In the course of his description of Thebes, Pausanias records that Myro of Byzantium claimed its founder, Amphion, was rewarded
with a lyre by Hermes in return for setting up the first altar to the god (9.5.8).13 The context suggests she was following the lead of an
anonymous epic predecessor who had portrayed Amphion as the earliest harpist, taught by Hermes himself. Her poem thus offered a rationale for the divine favor bestowed upon the young musician.
In Euripides’ Antiope, the most influential treatment of this myth, Amphion had defended the contemplative life in the face of objections
by his twin brother, Zethos, the man of action.15 Like Orpheus, he had accordingly become a stock type of the creative artist. If the
figure of Amphion played a prominent role in Moero’s poem, its theme may have been consciously self-reflexive, in the fashion of
much other Hellenistic poetry.This notion is admittedly speculative, but we can speak more
confidently about the hexameter narrative Mnemosyne, ten lines of which are quoted by Athenaeus in the Deipnosophistae The title Mnemosyne obviously refers to the mother of the nine Muses, which would lead us to believe that the poem was concerned with aspects of poetic creation. At first glance, however, this episode, which rehearses the sacred tale of Zeus’ boyhood on Crete, seems unconnected
with such issues. Yet Athenaeus has already informed us (490e) that matters of Homeric scholarship are being addressed here, because
Moero is proposing a solution to a famous crux.16 Warning Odysseus about the Clashing Rocks in book 12 of the Odyssey, Circe states that nothing can fly between them safely: t+]mén t& o[dè pothtá parérxetai o[dè péleiai/ tr}rvnew, taí t& ámbrosíhn Diì patrì férousin
(by that way no winged things pass through, not even the timid doves [peleiai] that bear ambrosia to father Zeus, 62–63). Alexandrian
commentators, preoccupied with epic decorum, had thought it unseemly (ƒsemnon gár, Ath. 11.490b) that mere birds perform the office of bringing Zeus ambrosia to drink.