A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Erinna

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ERINNA,

A Grecian lady cotemporary with Sappho; composed several poems, of which some fragments are extant in the "Carmina Novem Foetarum Seminarum" published in Antwerp, in 1568. She lived about B.C. 595. One of her poems, called "The Distaffs" consisted of three hundred hexameter lines. It was thought that her verses rivalled Homer's. She died at the age of nineteen, unmarried. There is another poetess of the same name mentioned by Eusebius, who flourished in the year B.C. 354. This appears to have been the poetess mentioned by Pliny as having celebrated Myro in her poems.