Erinna

thumb|Fanciful portrait of Erinna from Finden's Gallery of Graces (1834) Erinna (; ) was an ancient Greek poet. She is best known for her long poem The Distaff, a 300-line hexameter lament for her childhood friend Baucis, who had died shortly after her marriage. A large fragment of this poem was discovered in 1928 at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Along with The Distaff, three epigrams ascribed to Erinna are known, preserved in the Greek Anthology. Biographical details about Erinna's life are uncertain. She is generally thought to have lived in the first half of the fourth century BC, though some ancient traditions have her as a contemporary of Sappho; Telos is generally considered to be her most likely birthplace, but Tenos, Teos, Rhodes, and Lesbos are all also mentioned by ancient sources as her home.

==Life== Little ancient evidence about Erinna's life survives, and the testimony which does is often contradictory. Her dates are uncertain. According to the Suda, a 10th-century encyclopedia, she was one of Sappho's companions, placing her floruit in the sixth century BC. The latest date given for Erinna in the ancient sources is that provided by Eusebius, who suggests the mid-fourth century BC. Due to similarities between her work and that of the third-century BC poets Theocritus and Asclepiades, and an epigram by Antiphanes which groups her with Callimachus, scholars now tend to believe that Erinna was an early Hellenistic poet. However this would contradict Tatian's claim that she was sculpted by Naucydes, who was active around 400 BC.