SOURCE: Lesky, Albin. “Songwriters on the Mainland.” In A History of Greek Literature, translated by James Willis and Cornelis de Heer, pp. 177-81. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1966.

In the following excerpt from a work originally published in German in 1957-58, Lesky addresses the nature of Corinna's surviving fragments and the problem of assigning a date to them.

If we treat a group of poetesses together here, it is only to get out of a difficulty. We are concerned with personalities for whom our information is as scanty as it is unreliable, so that it would be difficult to place them in the historical development.

Corinna is the authoress of some verses (15 D. 5 Page [D. L. Page, Corinna, London: 1953]) reproving Myrtis for denying her feminine nature and entering into competition with Pindar. The simplest interpretation of her expressions is that they refer to a contest between contemporaries...