As Sylvia Barnard has observed, Anyte’s poetry has received scant critical attention.1 Indeed, the work of Anyte’s Hellenistic contemporaries
Erinna and Nossis has provoked feminist scholars to investigate their peculiarly feminine forms of discourse and to see in their
poems evidence of an alternate female poetic tradition reaching back to Sappho. Anyte’s epigrams, on the other hand, have often
been viewed as reflecting the concerns and sensibilities of patriarchal culture. Some recent scholars, however, have sought to define the
feminine qualities in her poetry and to establish Anyte as a distinctly feminine writer whose work merits significant attention. Kathryn
Gutzwiller (1998) argues persuasively that Anyte’s focus on feminine concerns and her deviation from masculine themes and values
found in traditional epigram identify Anyte’s literary voice as particularly feminine. My own analysis is an attempt to map out a middle
ground between earlier views of Anyte as a writer who merely apes prevailing patriarchal values and more recent discussions of Anyte
that emphasize the feminine sensibilities and values in her work.5 I argue that Anyte’s art lies in her innovative use of conventional
literary genres, her ability to blend the personal and domestic with the “high” art of the heroic. The set of concerns and points of view
expressed in Anyte’s poems may be identified as feminine, yet much of Anyte’s work can be linked to traditionally masculine forms of
expression.I will focus primarily on Anyte’s laments and pet epitaphs, and more specifically on how Anyte’s transposition of Homeric vocabulary to the personal and domestic sphere deflates heroic conventions and, at the same time, elevates the domestic to the heroic. While
Anyte wrote her poems in the form of traditional epigram and largely confined herself to its dedicatory and funereal genres, she
nonetheless introduced important innovations into the epigram that appear to have had a significant impact on later writers—particularly
her pet epitaphs and pastoral poems.6 As D.
Geoghegan (1979) has shown in his commentary on Anyte’s epigrams, we find numerous references to and borrowings from Greek literary culture in Anyte— particularly an abundant use of Homeric vocabulary. Indeed, Geoghegan points out that in antiquity the phrase yêlun %Omhron (female Homer) may have been applied to Anyte.7 Her use of Homeric imagery and her laments for slain warriors and their horses have contributed to the view of Anyte as a poet who merely imitates the dominant literary tradition. Yet Anyte transforms traditional epigram through her application of the heroic language of Homeric
verse to a context that is often personal and idiosyncratic. Unlike Sappho and Erinna, whose work may reflect a parallel women’s literary
tradition, Anyte, at least in some of her poems, maintains the tensions of “high” and “low” art and thus creates a unique interplay between established male literary culture and the domesticity typically associated with women.
My investigation begins with a discussion of three of Anyte’s four epitaphs for young unmarried women—whose deaths are
lamented either through the voice of the speaker or through the voice of the deceased girl’s mother.
Anyte’s focus on female concerns appears to figure most prominently in this group of epigrams, and thus it is reasonable to assume that in these poems we would most likely be able to discern a distinctly feminine voice and poetic identity. Indeed, four out of five of Anyte’s human epitaphs represent
a mother’s grief for a deceased unmarried daughter. These epigrams, as Gutzwiller 1998 has shown, clearly express an affirmation
of the worth of women’s lives and particularly attest to the value of the mother-daughter relationship. In the process, Anyte’s poems
often invoke the Homeric tradition and thus overturn masculine genres of epic and epigram and the celebration of masculine heroic endeavor so integral to those genres.