Note 123 — Women in Greek Poetry

One or two points are perhaps worth noticing in this connection. It is usual to assume that the Battis of Philetas was an Hetaera; but the evidence seems rather to suggest that she was his wife. The way in which she is spoken of in Ovid, Trist. i. 6, 2, Pont. iii. 1, 57, (in the former place coupled with the Lyde of Antimachus,) seems to support this view; and, at any rate, there does not appear to be any evidence to the contrary. The personal character of Philetas, as we learn it from various notices of him, seems also rather to point in the same direction; though this is not, of course, an argument that can be pressed. (It would be interesting to know whether the fact that Philetas is apparently never alluded to under a nickname, like so many others of the Alexandrian writers, was due to this austerity of character.)

Whether these elegies were as sober and as little sensual in tone as those of Antimachus (cp. infra, p. 110), it is impossible now to say; though the two passages cited from Ovid both seem indirectly to imply that they were, and there is certainly nothing in the fragments of Philetas which would lead one to infer that they were not. It need hardly be added that the passage in Ovid, Ars Amat. iii. 329 seqq. proves nothing, for the “lascivia” there ascribed to Sappho is obviously not meant to apply to all the other poets mentioned in the list, or Vergil’s name would hardly appear in it.