Telesilla (c. 494 BCE)

     See Raynor's note (184) for another of those tantalizing, frustrating facts of life that confronts the reader of early lyric poetry.  Even this fragment, though tells us something.  The speaker feels free to revise the mythic material, making Artemis the object of the male river god's pursuit, and she addresses an audience of young women ("my girls"), suggesting that the scene of the poetic performance was a female gathering in which a woman singing mythic lyrics was an ordinary part of the event.  Small as these implications are, they will seem surprising when we've reached the portion of the syllabus in which silence descends upon the women of the Clasical Era.