Nossis

Abstract

Nossis was among the earliest Hellenistic poets to envision and transform the artform of epigraphic epigram for literary purposes. Rhinthon lived in the late 4th and early 3rd centuries BCE, and Nossis likely wrote her funerary epigram sometime after his death, though one need not assume that the epigram was composed immediately following his decease. The historian Polybius, writing in the Hellenistic period, reported that, on the basis of his own personal visit to Epizephyrian Locris, during which he was given honors by its inhabitants for favors he bestowed upon them, he could confirm the truth of Aristotle’s assertion that the nobility of Epizephyrian Locris descended matrilineally from women, not men, and that these nobles, like those of mainland Locris, were said to belong to the “100 Houses”. The surviving poems of Nossis appear in the A.P., a collection of Greek epigrams collated in the early 10th century CE by Costantine Cephalas.