Born: Unknown (circa 200 CE), Greece (assumed)
Died: Unknown (200s CE)
Country most active: Greece
Also known as: NA
This biography was originally published in the World History Encyclopedia and was written by Joshua J. Mark. It is shared in line with the Encyclopedia’s policies under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Anyte of Tegea (l. 3rd century BCE) was one of the female poets listed by Antipater of Thessalonica as one of the Nine Earthly Muses (with others such as Sappho of Lesbos and Telesilla of Argos). Anyte was among the first poets of Greece to emphasize the natural world in her work (as opposed to supernatural subjects such as the gods) and to write the epigram. She was best known for her epitaphs, especially those for animals.
These were not her only artistic contributions, however, and her poetry was so impressive that it was compared in ancient Greece to the works of Homer. Her epitaphs for pets were very popular, and she was much sought after to write them. An example is this one for a pet dog:
You died, Maira, near your many-rooted home at Locri, swiftest of noise-loving hounds;
A spotted-throated viper darted his cruel venom into your light-moving limbs.
Another poem is written as an epitaph for a locust and a cicada for whom a young girl constructed a tomb:
Myro, a girl, letting fall a child’s tears, raised this little tomb for the locust that sang in the seed-land and for the oak-dwelling cicada; implacable Hades holds their double song.
More of Anyte’s works survive in the present day than any other female Greek poet and are still admired as they were by her contemporaries. She is thought to have run a school for the study of poetry in the Peloponnesus though the exact location is unknown. Anyte was later attached to a legend in which it was said she once had a dream that the god of healing, Asclepius, told her to deliver a message to a man named Phalysius who was going blind.
She woke and found a sealed writing tablet she had never seen before resting by her bed and, at her own expense, traveled a significant distance to deliver it to Phalysius. His eyes were healed, and when he opened the message, it instructed him to give Anyte 2,000 gold coins, which he promptly did. Whether there was any truth to the story is not as important as the message it would have imparted to its hearers: when the gods tell one to do something, one should do it.