Praxilla

     Every artifact made by our species is shaped by our nature, inevitably recording human tastes and beliefs as well as needs and desires in the most subtle and precise detail. Thus not only the economy but much of the religion of the Proto-Indo-European peoples has been reconstructed largely through the tracing of the mere ghosts of words in linguistic roots. Poetry is the most densely information-bearing form of code. Every line holds the potential for expanding waves of significance that fade to silence at the margins of the reader’s or listener’s persistence with no clearly defined end.
     The reader wishing to understand the female poets of ancient Greece faces a paucity, though not an absence, of textual data. The twenty-first century knows of the existence, at least, of twenty-nine ancient Greek women who were celebrated in their own era, but of some of them nothing remains beyond the name and, perhaps, a few tatters of legend. The oeuvre of others has diminished to a few indirect mentions or a couple of phrases cited by grammarians to illustrate an unusual dialectical or grammatical usage.
     In antiquity some of these women were among the most highly honored of writers. They appear in vase-paintings and busts as well as in public tributes like statues and coins. Around the time of Christ Antipater of Thessalonika, who was sufficiently a part of the power structure to be appointed a local governor by the Romans, praised nine female poets as earthly Muses providing with their lyrics for “the undying delight of mortals.” They possess, he says, “divine tongues.” [1] The durability of these poets’ reputations is suggested by the fact that Antipater wrote his tribute roughly three hundred years after Nossis, the most recent writer on his list, and roughly six hundred years after Sappho, the earliest.
     Among these nine, Sappho has survived the loss of all but a few pages of her poetry and has today numerous admirers and translators, while the others remain little more than names. While we properly lament the disappearance of so much of the writing of antiquity, the work of women in particular, it is salutary also to make the fullest use of what remains. A close examination of the most fragmentary phrases might reveal unexpected beauty, like the delicate limbs of insects trapped in amber. Even a body of work consisting of only a few words might, like the pinhole lens of a camera obscura, project an entire world-view.
     The first poet Antipater mentions, perhaps because he thought her most eminent, is Praxilla of Sikyon, a poet of the fifth century BCE of whom only five fragments and three brief paraphrases remain from a once substantial body of work. Evidence of her onetime prestige includes the fact that she was honored with a statue by Lysippos, by a portrait and a few words of verse on a pot, and by allusions in Aristophanes. Even in the second century CE, she was popular enough for Tatian to denounce her and for Zenobius to record a proverbial usage making fun of one of her lines. [3]
     The bits and pieces attributed to Praxilla seem to fall into two unlike genres. The dithyramb is a pious public choral song accompanied with dance, sometimes by troupes of fifty, performed on cult or civic occasions. Dithyrambs in their original form were devoted to Dionysos, though they developed from cult usage to literary adaptation, most significantly, according to Aristotle, as the source from which tragic drama grew. Skolia, while also associated with wine, are social songs, sung by individuals at private parties, often passing the lyre around and sometimes “capping” each other’s verses. Though casual and occasional in this original usage, they became a polished genre in the hands of poets like Alcaeus, Anacreon, Sappho, and Pindar, and their characteristic meter was eventually used for more formal compositions praising gods and heroes. The identification of several of Praxilla’s fragments as skolia has suggested to some critics that she must have been a ἑταίρα or concubine as women were not ordinarily included in symposia. [4]

     A single line is all that remains from a dithyramb on Achilles.

i.
But never could I reach your heart inside.


     One can only speculate on the dramatic context, but the words alone suggest a conflict between Achilles’ subjective truth and what may be a well-intentioned advisor. Though the circumstances are unclear, the single line implies the hero’s brooding and sensitivity, his vulnerability to his own sometimes self-destructive moods. [5] The line, though, is nearly identical to passages in the Odyssey referring to Odysseus’ resistance to the perilous charms of Calypso and Circe creating a doubled-edged meaning poised between obduracy and fidelity. [6] Odysseus’ enduring affection for his mate and Achilles’ egotistical pique are both impressive in their heroic strength. This line suggests the ambiguous role of passion in shaping action and the misunderstanding that all but inevitably exists between one human and another.


ii.
O friend, let Admetus teach you to love
the good -- keep clear of thankless craven men.


     Though skolia are drinking songs performed at private parties, they need not have Dionysian or even convivial themes. Athenaeus cites Praxilla’s comment on Admetus as an example of the form, so it is clear that prudential wisdom of the sort found in maxims also appeared in such songs. (Though such content is unlikely in an American pop song, it is common in, for instance, such West African tunes as Prince Nico Mbarga’s “Aki Special.”)
     Admetus is a deeply ambiguous figure. Known as a just king, his role among the Argonauts and as a hunter of the Calydonian boar is clearly heroic. Euripedes’ chorus praises his piety and generous hospitality [7] and he is favored by both Apollo (in late antiquity called Admetus’ lover) [8] and Heracles. Yet to Praxilla he is despicable, so fearful of death that he was, in effect the killer of his own wife. [9] His name signifies “untamed” which might be taken as a heroic boast equivalent to unvanquished, but might also suggest one who had failed to control his own nature. In Euripedes’ Alcestis his father Pheres calls him hubristic and his wife is repeatedly described as outstanding (άριστος) while the epithet is never used of Admetus, yet the chorus continues to praise him to the end when Alcestis returns to the world thanks to Heracles as deus ex machina.
     The ambivalence is dramatized on the divine level. Though aided by Apollo, he is opposed by Artemis whose boar he had helped to kill. [10] On the occasion of his wedding, Admetus had neglected to sacrifice to Artemis who retaliated by filling his bridal chamber, which could represent the harmonizing of male and female, with hostile snakes. Artemis, Praxilla, and his wife’s partisans join in denunciation of the king of Pherae, though Alcestis herself is too loyal to criticize him.


iii.
Take care, my friend, a scorpion lurks under every stone.


     In this cautionary skolion the proverbial metaphor works as well literally as figuratively. The first impression enjoining caution in the natural and presumably the human realm as well, is complicated in the dialectical dance of mythology by a web of associations. Scorpion deities were well-known in the ancient Near East, nearly all of them goddesses. [11] In Greece Orion the hunter is sometimes said to be Artemis’ companion and a scorpion is the instrument of Artemis’ revenge against him. [12] Thus the scorpion is not only potentially arachnid or human, as a beast it is also associated with the same Artemis who was inimical to Admetus. He and Orion are both mortals pursued by the same virgin goddess.


iv.
You look so fine through window frame,
a girl’s fresh face, below a bride.


     The verb ἐμ-βλέπω, “to look,” “look at,” is often used in erotic contexts, and the words παρθένος (“girl” or “virgin”) and νύμφη (“bride,” “recently married”) are definitely sexual. The modern reader might take this skolion, a drinking song at a men's party, as as unkind satire, characterizing a "girl-next-door" type who already possesses experience "below," that is, "below the best." Though the Anthology contains ample misogyny, I find no parallel for such a poem there. A recent critic has made a good case that the fragment is part of an epithalamium, a rite of passage celebrating the transition from girl to married woman, a likelier reading, particularly given  the female author, all the more probable as Sappho is known to have written an entire book of epithalamia. [13]
     The three paraphrased references to Praxilla’s verse do little to clarify the influence of the sympotic setting. All relate to pederasty, one concerns the story of Zeus carrying of Chrysippus (whose rape is usually attributed to Laius) in Athenaeus [14] in a discussion of the origins of homoerotic love and the other two mentioning Canus (or Carneius), the seer who became Apollo’s eromenos.
     The three lines that remain from Praxilla’s dithyramb on Adonis the dying and reborn god of whom Frazer made so much in The Golden Bough are her best-known fragment. [15] Here, however, Adonis speaks not as a semi-divine legendary hero but rather as any mortal might, reflecting on what he most regretted leaving behind in life. To me it seems that ancient Greek poetry generally inhabits this palpable world and rests on perceptions and physical experience. The love for life, for wine and sex and sunshine, is always tinged with the sensualist’s regretful admission that all experience, even life itself, is transient, for all that it may be lit with pleasure and, perhaps in addition, with the glow of some fine abstraction from above. Praxilla begins with bidding farewell to the sun, a conventional way of speaking of death, but she then introduces a surprising trope.


v.
Most lovely I leave -- the light of the sun,
next, the luminous stars and the face of the moon,
then, too, cucumbers in season, and apples, and pears.


     The light of the heavenly bodies is a conventional sign of numinous glory, a glimpse of the divine available to anyone who gazes upwards, but the last line began to sound strange not long after its composition. In Zenobius’ book of proverbs, he records the phrase “more foolish than Praxilla’s Adonis,” presumably because of bathos of fruit following after semi-divine heavenly bodies, and, in particular the mention of one more often featured in salads than lyrics. [16] I think upon reading it of the many catalogues in the dedicatory book of the Greek Anthology which list specific objects – tools, toys, in one case a single quince [17] – that were significant for an individual. For a mystic, any object if considered deeply might be uplifting, and, for an agricultural people, a deep attachment to produce seems quite natural. At any rate, Praxilla’s Adonis expresses an immense affection for the things of this world and the tragic incongruity of mortal attachments.
     Surveying the scanty remains of Praxilla’s poetry, one would look in vain for a dramatic new vision or stylistic innovation (though there is the one original meter, the praxilleion), still less for an anachronistic feminism (though she did have an affinity with Artemis and took Alcestis’ part against Admetus). She has more in common with the didactic proverbialism of Theognis than with the sensual intensity of Sappho. No high-wire juggler of myth like Pindar, she represents for the most part the norms and received ideas of her time, no mean achievement itself. Skolia were popular at the symposia, thus she composed many, very likely on popular themes, including the prudential monitory lines that have been preserved.
     That marvelous cucumber of Adonis stands out, with every reading providing a delightful frisson of surprise. Just as the expected sun and stars do not vanish into insignificance with the mention of the surprising produce, the detailing of wholly conventional Greek beliefs remains richly meaningful, all the more significant due to accumulated tradition. Celebrating marriage and extramarital affairs alike, while also fussing over the imperfection of marriage and friendship, warning about betrayal with the voice of experience, these are all-too-human and very Greek. The most powerful image of Praxilla, though, on which her reader is likeliest to linger is surely her Adonis who loved both the large and small marvels of life. Neither the necessity of eventual farewells nor the sure sweet pain of clinging to the evanescent can dissuade this Adonis, or, presumably, Praxilla from a passionate love for this world.





1. Greek Anthology 9.26. The Greek phrases are “θνατοῖς ἄφθιτον εὐφροσύναν” and “θεογλώσσους . . . γυναῖκας.”

2. See Thesmophorizusae, 528 Wasps, 1238,

3. Against the Greeks, 33 says her “poems contain nothing useful.” In the same passage he calls Sappho “a lewd, love-sick female [who] sings her own wantonness.” He indicts as well a number of other female poets, claiming that Christian women in contrast are “are chaste, and the maidens at their distaffs sing of divine things more nobly than that damsel of yours.” Tatian notes scornfully fourteen women honored by Greek cities with statues. For Zenobius see note 6 below.

4. Wilamowitz was horrified at the idea of a proper lady writing skolia. Some have even suggested the existence of two Praxillas, one more respectable than the other. A somewhat more likely proposal is that Praxilla may have been, not a courtesan, but a sort of professional entertainer, like some of the Troubadours. Other critics have surmised that the skolia were falsely ascribed to Praxilla after her death.

5. Kleist’s Achilles in Penthesilea is dramatically more extreme, almost always in an erotic furor.

6. Speaking of Calypso: ἀλλὰ τοῦ οὔ ποτε θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθεσσιν ἔπειθεν: “yet she could never persuade the heart in his breast,” Odyssey XXIII, 337. Similarly, VII, 258 and IX, 33 referring to Circe.

7. ὃσιος 553 (pious or in accord with nature).

8. See Ovid, Ars Amatoria, 934; Tibullis, Elegies 2.3; Callimachus Hymn 2.47-49; and Rhianus fr. 10 P.

9. The semantic range of the word δειλός extends from cowardly to base, worthless and miserable, unhappy, implying that courage is essential for a good character and that good character is a prerequisite for happiness.

10. In fact the story of the hunt includes on the human level the gender opposition of the gods. Atalanta, a virgin huntress like Artemis, was the first to wound the boar, but her prize, though allowed by Melagar, was taken by other men, jealous of her recognition. (Ovid Metamorphoses, VIII, 425-0450).

11. Among them were the Egyptian Serket (also Hedetet and Ta-Bitjet), the Hurrian and Hittite Ishhara (sometimes identified with Ishtar), and, some dikstance further afield, the Hindu Chelamma. A rare exception are the scorpion men Aqrabuamelu attested in reliefs and described in the Akkadian Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish but these are, after all, creatures of the goddess Tiamat.

12. Odyssey 5.121 ff. The same tradition appears in Hesiod (fragment 4 - Pseudo-Eratosthenes, Catast. fr. xxxii ). According to Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 25 Artemis killed him either for challenging her to a discus competition or for conceiving another love interest.

13. Vanessa Cazzato, “Glancing Seductively through Windows: The Look of Praxilla fr. 8 (PMG 754) in The Look of Lyric: Greek Song and the Visual: Studies in Archaic and Classical Greek Song, vol. 1, edited by Vanessa Cazzato and André Lardinois. Sappho is known to have written many epithalamia.

14. Athenaeus 13.603a.

15. Among the parallels Frazer cites are Osiris, Tammuz, Attis, Dionysus, and Jesus. For others see Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature A192 and A193.

16. Zenobius, Proverbs 4.21. Zenobius wrote in the second century CE. Many critics have offered justifications. Smyth in Greek Melic Poets, for example, suggests the poet was characterizing Adonis’ naivete. In addition cucumber (σίκυος) is surely a play on her city’s name Sikyon (Σικυών).

17. Greek Anthology VI, 252.