Note 33 — Women in Greek Poetry

The fragments which may with some confidence be assigned to these, probably early, poems, are 29 and 94. Besides this, the mention of Tantalus (87, to which belongs 100) may well have been introduced by the story of Ganymede; that of Niobe’s children (109) by the story of those loves of theirs of which Sophocles afterwards wrote. The expression ἐν Θεσσαλίῳ κλείτει (85) might well in such a poem have had reference to Apollo and Admetus, whose love is held up as a model, like that of the lovers in Theocritus xii. But most striking of all, perhaps, to the modern reader, is the feeling that prompts Alcman to speak of the Spartan girls as his “female boy-friends.” (καὶ Ἀλκμὰν τὰς ἐπεράστους κόρας ἀΐτας λέγει. Hypoth. ad Theocr. xii.)