Erinna’s poetry, written in the fourth century bce, shows a keen awareness of her predecessors Homer (eighth century) and Sappho (seventh century). For example, Erinna’s Distaff, her lament in epic hexameter over her dead friend Baukis, has a clear Homeric model in Briseis’ lament for Patroclus in Iliad 19.287–300 (Skinner 1982, 265). In Erinna’s poetry, the topic of the absent friend as well as some aeolic forms all reflect Sappho’s lyric poetry as Erinna’s direct
literary influence.1 In particular, readers (Bowra 1936, 342; Rauk 1989) have long noticed the similarities in Erinna’s Distaff to Sappho’s fragments 94 and 96.2 These poems by Sappho and Erinna longingly recall absent companions. Both poets focus on women’s
lives and community, and experiences with beloved female friends.
The relationship with the beloved is woman-centered and perhaps could be described as lesbian.3 Their poetry, however, appears more
similar than it actually is on account of untenable assumptions that 94 and 96 are mournful farewells to women who have left to get married. Rather than even mentioning why the women have left, these two poems focus on the continuing bond of the women. In
contrast, Erinna’s poems focus on Baukis’ absence due to her death shortly after marriage. The use of memory itself, moreover, functions differently in Sappho than in Erinna, primarily as a result of the different performance situations and genre expectations.4 As did the other earlylyric poets, Sappho performed her poetry live to the accompaniment of music for an audience of community members. Erinna, on the other hand, was at the forefront of Hellenistic literacy, at the crux of the transition from performance to readership; her poetry, both epigram and hexameter, was written to be read by whoever had a copy of the text. In the fourth century, as Peter Bing (1988, 17) says, “Poetry . . . became a private act of communication, no
longer a public one.
” For Sappho, memory stimulates ongoing
communication and community; for Erinna, memory produces a written record of the past, a memorial. The contrast in functions of memory is sustained by archaic
oral culture and Hellenistic literary culture. As Egbert Bakker (2002, 67) puts it, “‘memory’ is a function of a culture’s dominant medium of communication.” In archaic Greece, the performance of poetry makes present the tale sung, whether the story is from myth
or current events. Sappho’s use of memory aligns with that of Homeric bards, for whom “remembering the song is to enact it, to
ensure the presence of its heroic or divine protagonists” (2002, 71). In the literate culture of the fourth century, however, memory
functions in a modern way as a retrieval system of stored information (2002, 69). For Erinna and us, remembering is a method of
preserving the past.
In Sappho and Erinna, the absent beloved becomes the poet’s muse, catalyzing the creation of poetry. In fragment 16 (3–4), Sappho’s statement on desire that “whatever one loves” is best (kálliston, ¡gv dè kh]n´ ªt/tv tiw ¡ratai) derives from the memory of the absent Anaktoria. In explicating this statement, Sappho uses the story of Helen abandoning traditional values (family and husband) for love, followed by her own example of love: “reminding me now of Anaktoria being gone” (]me˘ ˘nu]n &Anaktorí[aw •]né˘m˘ nais& o[]
pareoísaw, 16.15–16). Fragments 94 and 96 also recall the absent beloveds as their primary subjects. So, too, for Erinna the absence of Baukis, her companion from childhood, provides the impetus for at least three of the six surviving poems and fragments.5 As told in
the hexameter fragment Distaff and epigrams 1 and 2, Baukis died soon after getting married.
In Distaff, Erinna recalls their childhood
together, Baukis’ marriage and death, and her own grief over the loss of her friend.
While we can recognize the common event in the poems that recall absent female companions, a striking difference appears as well. Sappho’s poems mention various women “being gone,” although the extant fragments never state the reason for their absence. In contrast, Erinna recalls her sole companion, whose marriage led to her death. Sappho’s missing women live elsewhere, continue to remember Sappho, and could perhaps return; Erinna’s Baukis is dead.