Melinno
| Melinno | |
|---|---|
| Native name | Μελιννῶ |
| Born | Mellina (presumed) Epizephyrean Locris (presumed) |
| Died | Epizephyrean Locris (presumed) |
| Resting place | Unknown |
| Pen name | Mellino |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Language | Locrian Greek |
| Nationality | Roman peregrina (presumed) |
| Ethnicity | Italiot Greek (presumed) |
| Citizenship | Locrian (presumed) |
| Period | Hellenistic period |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Subject | Rome |
| Literary movement | Hellenistic poetry |
| Notable works | Ode to Rome |
| Years active | c. 250 BCE |
| Relatives | Nossis mother (presumed) |
Melinno (Ancient Greek: Μελιννῶ) was a Greek lyric poet. She probably lived in the 2nd century BCE, and was probably from Epizephyrian Locris in Magna Graecia, but because little biographical material on her is available, this is uncertain. She is credited with the work commonly called Ode to Rome, which presents unique problems in the analysis of Greek poetry and is viewed as influential in the future course of Greek and Latin poetry. Her work has been characterised as "something of a sport, to which the extant remains of Greek poetry present no parallel."
Stobaeus, who lived approximately four-to-five centuries later, preserved Melinno's work in his Eclogues. He attributes her work to Melinno the Lesbian, but a Lesbian origin is disputed by at least three modern scholars, who note that the stanzas show little trace of the Aeolic dialect used by the Lesbian poets Sappho and Alcaeus, and the few Aeolicisms observed are probably imitative of Sappho. It may be that Stobaeus meant to emphasize her imitation of the Sapphic stanza, not to say that she was from Lesbos, this is the view of George Stanley Farnell, who concludes that while it is possible and indeed probable that she was not from Lesbos, neither can the Locrian connection be proven, and that readers should "remain content to be in ignorance as to the identity of Melinno."CM Bowra denies that she was from Lesbos, but also refuses to take the step of saying definitely that she was from Locri, because the evidence of Locrian Melinna does not explicitly mention her as the poet Melinno.,
If Melinno was Locrian, her native tongue was probably a Doric or Locrian Italiot Greek dialect. The main support for her Epizephyrian Locrian origin is an epigram of Nossis, herself a Locrian, who begins one of her poems by dedicating it her daughter Automellina (Αὐτομέλιννα, which can be read as "Mellino herself"). It is certainly noteworthy that another Greek female poet had a daughter named Melinna, whom Nossis describes in glowing terms as "just like her mother," but as Bowra and others point out, she does not explicitly say that the daughter was a poet, much less the poet who wrote Ode to Rome.
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