Telesilla

Poetry

Only a few lines of Telesilla's poetry are extant, preserved in quotations by later authors. Various Greek writers have preserved various other single-word quotes from Telesilla, many of which are hapax legomena that preserve a unique word or a unique use of a word that would otherwise be unknown to modern scholars. This is helpful in improving modern understanding of ancient Greek, especially the Argolic Doric Greek dialect in which Telesilla wrote.

One line is preserved by the grammarian Hephaestion, apparently from a parthenion, or song for a chorus of maidens:

«ἐστὶ τοίνυν ἐπίσημα ἐν τῷ ἰωνικῷ ἑφθημιμερῆ (πενθημιμερῆ ci. Edmonds) μὲν τὰ τοιαῦτα, οἷς ἡ Τελέσιλλα ἐχρήσατο·

—ἁ δ᾿ Ἄρτεμις, ὦ κόραι, φεύγοισα τὸν Ἀλφεόν—»

cf. Ench. 4. 4(p. 14 Consbruch), epitom. (p. 361) 1 ἁ δ᾿ bis cod. I: ἅδ᾿ vel ἅδε rell., nisi οὐδ᾿ epitom. κόρα 4. 4 cod. D

17 Hephaestion, Handbook on Metres (on the ionic a maiore)

"Remarkable among the ionic metres are the three-and-a-half foot lines of the following type,(1) used by Telesilla:

'And Artemis, girls, fleeing from Alpheus' . . ."(2)

1.The metre (‒ ‒ ⏑ ⏑ ‒ ⏑ ‒ ). is called telesillean; perhaps read ‘two-and-a-half foot lines’ with Edmonds.

A unique word, philelias, apparently a coinage of Telesilla's, is preserved by Athenaeus in his Deipnosophists:

Description by Pausanias

She was sickly, so she went to the Pythia to consult about her health. Pythia told her: "τὰς Μούσας θεραπεύειν", which means "serve the Muses", and Telesilla devoted herself to poetry.

When Cleomenes, king of Sparta, invaded the land of the Argives in 510 BC, he defeated and killed all the hoplites of Argos in the Battle of Sepeia, and massacred the survivors. Thus when Cleomenes led his troops to Argos there were no warriors left to defend it.

According to Pausanias, Telesilla stationed on the wall all the slaves and all the males normally exempt from military service owing to their youth or old age. Also, she collected the arms from sanctuaries and homes, armed the women and put them in battle position. When the Spartans appeared, they made a battle cry to scare Telesilla and the other women, but Telesilla's army didn't scare, stood their ground and fought valiantly. The Lacedaemonians, realizing that to destroy the women would be an invidious success while defeat would mean a shameful disaster, left the city.

According to Pausanias, at Argos there was a statue in front of the temple of Aphrodite dedicated to Telesilla. The statues depicted a woman who holds in her hand a helmet, which she is looking at and is about to place on her head and books lying at her feet. The festival Hybristica or Endymatia, in which men and women exchanged clothes, also celebrated the heroism of her female compatriots. However, the statue seen by Pausanias may not have been intended for Telesilla; it would equally represent Aphrodite, in her character as wife of Ares and a warlike goddess (the books, however, seem out of place). The Hybristica, again, was most probably a religious festival connected with the worship of some androgynous divinity.

Historicity

Herodotus (vi. 76) does not refer to the intervention of Telesilla, but mentions an oracle, told by a Pythian priestess, which predicted that the female should conquer the male, whence the tradition itself may have been derived. This oracle is also quoted by Pausanias. The oracle was:

"But when the time shall come that the female conquers in battle, Driving away the male, and wins great glory in Argos, Then many wives of the Argives shall tear both cheeks in their mourning;"

The existence of Telesilla and her poetry are unquestioned, but it is difficult to take Pausanias's account of her role in the abortive post-Sepeia siege of Argos at face value. Of all our sources on Telesilla and the aftermath of Sepeia, Pausanias is the most remote in time from the events in question. He viewed a much changed Argive cityscape, and heard stories that were susceptible to exaggeration or muddling of details. On the other hand, even if her role is not quite as Pausanias described it, the information gathered in his visit there proves that Telesilla had a great influence over an important event in Argive history that was still remembered more than half a millennium later.

While disputing the exaggerated dramatic description of women and armed slaves mounting a probably non-existent wall as reported Pausanias, RA Tomlinson thinks that Telesilla could have played in pivotal role in overseeing the distribution of reserve arms from the temples of Argos and organizing a display of readiness that helped convince the Spartans not to attack the city of Argos itself. The story, even if it is incorrect on details, probably preserves a memory of a time of upheaval and social change. The relief of her described by Pausanias shows that the Argives still remembered her for her role in saving the city, even if the details were confused.

Based on his studies of the archaeology of Argos and the analysis of other historians, Tomlinson questions the historicity of Pausanias's account, noting that it is not clear from the archaeological record that the lower city of Argos was walled at this point in time. Nevertheless, an assault on even the unwalled city itself by the Spartans, besides violating taboos against attacking women, would have potentially been very costly to them. For though the city may have lacked walls, it was protected on the west side by fortified hills, with a number of temples and other civic edifices that could double as strong points, and most of the streets were essentially very narrow alleys densely lined with housing and open sewers.

The Spartan army was optimized for fighting in close order on an open battlefield, not for urban warfare. Besides having no room for massed infantry tactics and manoeuvre, there was no reliable way for hoplites to defend themselves against missiles hurled from rooftops. Tomlinson states that it was not unusual in this time period for a Greek a city, walled or otherwise, to be defended by women in this manner when attacked, noting that Pyrrhus of Epirus later failed in his Siege of Sparta, another unwalled city, and shortly afterwards was killed in his unsuccessful attack on Argos after being knocked unconscious by a roof tile hurled down by the mother of one of the armed male defenders. Unlike Pyrrhus, the Spartans were intelligent enough to avoid this kind of costly fighting; in addition, they were probably keen to keep some semblance of political order in Argos in order to keep it as a buffer state against Athens.

Tomlinson also notes that although Herodotus describes Argos after the battle as "emptied of men" and controlled by the "slaves", this likely means that the entire body of landowning male citizens of military age were killed, but not nearly all the men, as Argos was divided into a society of hoplites, craftsmen, and gymentes farmers at this time. As for the slaves, the term doulos used by Pausanias could mean 'slave', or simply "worker", and it is likely that in this instance it referred to the gymnetes, a large body of disenfranchised free agricultural workers of the Argolid, not strictly speaking "slaves" who were bought and sold, in this he cites the evidence of Plutarch, who corrected Herodotus. If so, like the wall, this would be another anachronism from Pausanias's time in which both the physical nature of Argos and its social organization and settlement patterns had changed. Aristotle called the douloi of contemporary Argos the perioikoi, "the outdwellers", a term that at Sparta referred to the free population of non-citizens outside the city. These douloi seized Tiryns, according to Herodotus, but afterwards there was a period of cooperation between them and the "Argives", until the prophet Cleander exhorted the former to rise up and fight.

A civil war ensued, with the end result that the Argives re-conquered the Argolid. Tomlinson interprets this as a time of Argive revanchism when the sons of the former ruling class who were wiped out at Sepeia grew up and reached military age, but also the beginning of a long period of turmoil which led to the end of the Argive oligarchy and the beginning of a transition to democracy, less radical than Athens, but including a larger proportion of free male the population of the Argolid than was formerly the case. Many of the douloi had married the widows of the fallen hoplites, which set the city up for ongoing conflict between the heirs of the deceased former landowning class on the one hand, and the children of these second marriages and the propertyless farmers on the other.This conflict continued even after the civil war ended, and flared up again in the ensuing centuries, most notably during the Skytalismos, a political purge in which 1,200 rich citizens were massacred by clubbing. Although none of these were an instance of slave rebellion strictly defined, they would have evoked much the same reaction of alarm and contempt from aristocratic writers, and the arming of propertiless farm workers in large numbers and as anything but light troops would have been an unusual and remarkable event in Greece at that time.

Other

Lucian at his work Amores mentions that after Telesilla's victory against Spartans, Ares (the God of War) was held at Argos among the gods of the women.

Pausanias also, mentions that Telesilla mentions in an ode the sanctuary of Artemis which is on top of Mount Coryphum in Epidaurus. He also states that the old boundary between the destroyed Argive city of Asine and the territory of Epidaurs may have been a twisted olive tree midway up the mountain.

According to Tatian, Telesilla was commemorated by a statue in the Theatre of Pompey, a work of Niceratus.