Anyte (fl. 300 BCE) was a Hellenistic Greek poet from Tegea, a Peloponnesian town in the region of Arcadia. She was a pioneer of pastoral poetry, a genre that pays homage to her Arcadian birthplace. In antiquity she was nicknamed the “female Homer,” but none of her epic or lyric poetry survives. Nevertheless, her extant corpus of between twenty-one and twenty-five literary epigrams (the authorship of four is contested) contains more complete poems than that of any other ancient Greek woman. These poems commemorate girls who died young, women who died in childbirth, warriors returning home, sanctuaries and statues of the gods, bucolic landscapes, and domestic and wild animals. The last category, Anyte’s animal epigrams, is the focus of the present selection.
(Bio by Mary Hamil Gilbert.)