ABSTRACT
Nossis does try her hand at traditionally masculine themes. But even when she expresses patriotic feelings or admires the achievements of a male literary predecessor, she writes in a distinctly female voice. Thus her quatrain memorializing a Locrian victory over the indigenous Bruttians (Poem 2) voices that uncompromising hatred for a defeated enemy that women who had been confronted with the imminent possibility of rape and enslavement would understandably have felt. Similarly, her epitaph (Poem 10) for Rhinthon, author of tragic burlesques, staunchly proclaims the literary value of his supposedly slight productions and calls into question the conventional hierarchy of genres. This defense of Rhinthon is simultaneously a protest against the devaluation of women's writing, likewise confined to "lesser" poetic forms.
