Role Poet Name Praxilla Praxilla | ||
Similar People Li‑Young Lee, William Stafford, Coleman Barks, Theodore Roethke, Mark Strand | ||
Praxilla - The Hymn to Adonis fragment
Praxilla of Sicyon (Greek: Πράξιλλα), was a Greek lyric poet of the 5th century BC. A late author puts her floruit at about 450 bce. She was from the prosperous and cultured Greek city of Sicyon, on the Gulf of Corinth. She was a contemporary of Telesilla. Antipater of Thessalonica lists her first among his canon of nine "immortal-tongued" women poets She was highly esteemed in her time; later authors testify that her verses were widely admired. Evidence of this is also shown in that Lysippus, a famous sculptor, made a bronze statue of her. In addition to this statue a vase was found with the first four words of a poem, she had written, on it. Further evidence for the reception of her work in the fifth century BC comes from the comic playwright Aristophanes, who parodied lines from her poetry both in the Wasps (1238) and the Thesmophoriazusae (528). Not only did he know her work, but his parody implies that he expected his Athenian audience to recognize it too." Not much of her work survives, only a dozen or so fragments of her verses quoted or paraphrased by later Greek authors. Her talents were varied: she wrote drinking songs (scolia), hymns and dithyrambs (choral odes performed at festivals of Dionysus). She composed a hymn to Adonis from which one fragment survives, in which Adonis, in response to a question from the shades in the underworld ("What was the most beautiful thing you left behind?"), answers:
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This fragment survives because Zenobius quoted it to explain the proverbial expression "sillier than Praxilla's Adonis" (because the inclusion of cucumbers alongside the sun and moon could seem incongruous). "An apparent pun in line three between cucumber (in Greek sicyos) and the name of Praxilla's own city suggest we can read more than one level of meaning into Adonis' lines.
She invented a dactylic metre that became known as Praxilleion.
Because drinking songs were a popular form of entertainment, Praxilla's works were enjoyed into the 2nd century BC. "That Praxilla wrote poetry of this type, intended to be sung at parties from which respectable women would be excluded, has led to the speculation that she may have been a hetaera, or courtesan, as women of this class did attend such parties." As the years progressed Praxilla's works were not all received as well. "Tatian (Against the Greeks 33) states that she said nothing useful in her poetry, but his criticism is of little value to us, as the moral Christian standpoint he adopts causes him to criticise all Greek works of art." A general evaluation of Praxilla is difficult given the amount of surviving works.
Testimonia and fragments may be found in David A. Campbell, Greek Lyric, vol. 4, pp. 374–381 (Loeb Classical Library, 1992).