Eleven quatrains accidentally preserved in the Greek Anthology comprise the literary remains of the woman epigrammatist Nossis, a
native of the Greek colony of Locri Epizephyrii in southern Italy active around the beginning of the third century bce.1 Together with
her predecessors Sappho and Erinna, both of whom situated their poetry within the sphere of women’s religious and domestic lives
and created poetic speakers who proclaimed their deep emotional attachments to other women, Nossis may be one of the earliest
Western European exemplars of the recognizably female literary voice.2 Certainly her slight body of texts gives the impression of a forthright personality with an idiosyncratic point of view that upon close reading emerges as strongly woman-identified.
For anyone planning to demonstrate the peculiarly female timbre of Nossis’ poetic voice, however, the fact that she chose to work
within the epigrammatic tradition presents an initial interpretative difficulty.4 The majority of her surviving quatrains are dedicatory, honoring gifts made by women to goddesses. There is nothing particularly unusual in her subject matter, for male poets also wrote about women’s offerings to female divinities. Moreover, the dedicatory epigram is by its very nature a public and impersonal mode of poetic discourse.5 Destined to commemorate a votive offering, usually by being affixed to a temple wall alongside the donor’s present, such testimonial verses necessarily addressed the world at large, and their preoccupation with the votive object itself left scant room for authorial subjectivity. Then too, most dedicatory epigrams were probably commissioned from professional writers.
Although dedicants might have hoped for some share of literary immortality in having their individual offerings memorialized by a Callimachus or a Leonidas of Tarentum, what they surely expected from any poet, no matter
how talented, was no more than a new and clever way of dealing with mandatory formulaic elements—the donor’s piety, the gift’s
value, the god’s consequent obligation. The work of Anyte, another woman epigrammatist who often treats novel subjects—women, children, animals, and the Arcadian landscape—but employs traditional epigrammatic strategies in doing so, indicates that even innovative dedications may still conform to a conventional pattern.6
Contrasted with Anyte’s verse, and with similar verse produced by male epigrammatists, Nossis’ dedicatory epigrams display some
exceptional features. First, the speaker is not a detached observer: she invariably expresses warm personal feeling for the dedicant conveyed in familiar, in fact intimate, tones. Again, she speaks explicitly to an audience of women companions who are themselves presumed to know the donors in question. Finally, in the course of
describing the dedicated object, she sometimes articulates sentiments decidedly at variance with the values inscribed in the mainstream poetic tradition. Thus, despite the overtly “public” character of Nossis’ chosen subgenre, we receive the distinct impression of
writing directed exclusively toward a relatively small, self-contained female community.7 The paradox can be explained if we postulate
that these quatrains operate as literary texts abstracted from theiroriginal commemorative function.
Though they record actual donations,
they would have been written primarily for private circulation among the members of a tightly knit circle rather than for public
display in a temple; and they must accordingly have served a poetic purpose far more complex than merely preserving a dedicant’s name. We shall see that the author herself ultimately issued these pieces in book form accompanied by prologue and epilogue poems: to that extent, at least, she did treat her dedicatory epigrams as purely literary documents. The use of a quasi-public verse form for poetic statements
really designed for a private female readership would draw attention to the culturally meaningful distinction between the sheltered domestic interior and the much more accessible temple precinct.