CORINNA, a Greek poetess, born at Tanagra in Baeotia, of interest for the influence which she exerted on Pindar. The fragmentary traditions which have been preserved represent her now as the poet’s friend and instructress, and again as his rival and competitor. By her he is said to have been advised to adorn his poems with the Greek myths, and then when he employed them too lavishly, to have been warned that they ought to “be sown by the hand and not poured forth from the sack.” She also blamed him for having used an Attic idiom in one of his lyrics. The victory which she gained in the poetic contest with her friend in the public games at Thebes is ascribed by Pausanius to her beauty and the free use she made of the local Baeotian dialect; and the story goes that Pindar gave expression to the same opinion by calling her in the heat of his chagrin a “Baeotian swine,” with allusion to a common Greek proverb. By the Greeks she was esteemed as the first of the nine lyrical muses. The fragments of her poetry have been collected by Ursinus, Wolf, Schneider, and Bergk.

See Leopold Schmidt, Pindar's Leben und Dichtungen, 1862.