The poets Corinna Erinna and Sappho coffee painting

The poets Corinna Erinna and Sappho coffee painting

13.09.2017
19:11



Sappho was the best known female poet in the ancient Greece but not the only one.
By that time there was a culture of the feminine poetry and art and young women and girls were organized in groups  ruled by poets like Sappho were they were writing poems, they were singing in chorus, they were dancing.
Corinna from Tanagra, Boetia was a poet too. She wrote epic poems about the daughters of Minyas, Oedip and Orion and an invocation to  Therpsichore, the muse of dance and chorus. Like Sappho did, Corinna has ruled a group of young maidens.
Corinna has inspired the poet Ovid too and I'm proud to bear her name. The name Corina has her story behind it.
Erinna was one of Sappho's followers.
She has written Distaff, a poem about her childhood friend Baucis who has died shortly after the wedding. Was marriage something unwanted  for Baucis? Erinna died shortly after she has written the poem. She was just 19.
This is my coffee painting of Corinna, Erinna and Sappho.

Corinna from Ovid's Amores

Corinna, oil on canvas painting

This is my oil on canvas painting of Corinna, Ovid's muse, the woman who has inspired him to write Amores. I am proud to bear her name. The roman poet Ovid described her as a very beautiful and sexy woman.
This is Ovid's poem.

        Book I Elegy V: Corinna in an Afternoon

It was hot, and the noon hour had gone by:

I was relaxed, limbs spread in the midst of the bed.

One half of the window was open, the other closed:

the light was just as it often is in the woods,

it glimmered like Phoebus dying at twilight,

or when night goes, but day has still not risen.

Such a light as is offered to modest girls,

whose timid shyness hopes for a refuge.

Behold Corinna comes, hidden by her loose slip,

scattered hair covering her white throat –

like the famous Semiramis going to her bed,

one might say, or Lais loved by many men.

I pulled her slip away –not harming its thinness much;

yet she still struggled to be covered by that slip.

While she would struggle so, it was as if she could not win,

yielding, she was effortlessly conquered.

When she stood before my eyes, the clothing set aside,

there was never a flaw in all her body.

What shoulders, what arms, I saw and touched!

Breasts formed as if they were made for pressing!

How flat the belly beneath the slender waist!

What flanks, what form! What young thighs!

Why recall each aspect? I saw nothing lacking praise

and I hugged her naked body against mine.

Who doesn’t know the story? Weary we both rested.

May such afternoons often come for me!