Praxilla

Praxilla was a Greek poet who wrote in Greek and came from Sicyon, a city on the Gulf of Corinth. She lived in the 5th century BC. She is one of the few women poets of antiquity whose name has survived, although only fragments of her work remain.

Very little is known about her life. The historian Eusebius, writing in the 4th century AD, dated her period of activity to around 451-450 BC. She was well regarded in her own lifetime and afterwards. The sculptor Lysippus, also from Sicyon, made a bronze statue of her. Antipater of Thessalonica placed her first in a list of nine women poets with "immortal tongues". A cup has survived bearing the opening words of one of her poems. The comic playwright Aristophanes parodied her verses in The Wasps and Thesmophoriazusae, which suggests that Athenian audiences would have recognised them.

Her surviving output is limited to a handful of fragments and three paraphrases. She wrote in several genres: drinking songs (skolia), hymns and dithyrambs, the choral odes performed at festivals of Dionysus. The most quoted piece is her hymn to Adonis, in which the god, asked by the dead what he will miss most, lists earthly things including cucumbers alongside the sun and moon. This gave rise to the saying "sillier than Praxilla's Adonis". She is also credited with inventing a metre, the Praxilleion.

Her identity has been debated. Respectable women were normally excluded from symposia, so some scholars have proposed that she was a courtesan, others that she was a professional musician, and others that two poets shared her name. Some argue that the drinking songs come from a non-elite oral tradition. Her reputation was mixed over time. Tatian criticised her in the 2nd century AD, while in the 12th century Eustathius still listed her among ancient women poets. In modern art she appears in works by Judy Chicago and Cy Twombly, and Michael Longley adapted one of her fragments. Because so little of her work survives, judging its quality is difficult.