Anyte, the poet of Tegea

This is the site of the Cyprian, since it is agreeable to her to look ever from the mainland upon the bright sea that she may make the voyage good for sailors. Around her the sea trembles looking upon her polished image. Anyte, G-P 15 (on a temple of Aphrodite looking out to sea)

The Arcadian poet Anyte of Tegea lived at the beginning of the third century B.C.E. She was so highly esteemed in antiquity that in the well-known Stephanos (“Garland”), a collection compiled by Meleager (early 1st century), the “lilies of Anyte” are the first poems to be entwined in the “wreath of poets”.

She chooses what was, at the time, a typical epigrammatic material: in her twenty or so genuine epigrams, verses expressing pity for the deaths of young women and animals and affectionate delight in children far outnumber those glorifying masculine achievements. She is the acknowledged inventor of the pastoral epigram, introducing evocations of peaceful idyllic landscapes into the repertoire of themes.

Her most important contribution to the construction of the female viewer is her "introspective" approach to ekphrases of paintings and statues. Far from offering a detached, strictly empirical, report of visual experience, they infer, from observed phenomena, the internal disposition of the object portrayed. This epigram illustrates her strategy: Aphrodite's benevolent mood is mirrored in the translucent expanse of water viewed from her headland and transmuted into concern for the mariners she beholds from afar. In the third line, there is an abrupt switch in perspective to the reverent tremor of the water as it, in turn, observes the goddess' glistening statue.

Descriptively, the epigram presents a contrast of emotive reactions to separate ocular experiences linked by the mutual apprehension of a brightly sunlit surface. Anyte's efforts to create audience empathy with the visualized object blur strict boundaries between textual perceiver and thing perceived, and consequently between that perceiver and the reader.