ABSTRACT
Pseudo-Plutarch On Music quotes from Pherekrates' comedy Cheiron a long speech by the personification Music (Mousike) – at one point apparently called instead Poetry (Poiesis). She had come on stage looking bruised and battered and been met by Justice, who asked her how this had happened; and in reply she blamed her sorry state on four lyric poets – Melanippides, Kinesias, Phrynis and Timotheos – who had successively 'taken' her, i.e. lived with her as their wife or mistress. In the fourth-century comedy Poiesis by Antiphanes, to be sure, somebody speaking on behalf of comedy complains that tragic poets have an unfair advantage over comic ones because their audience knows the plot in advance, and it has often been supposed that the speaker is Comedy herself. Whether or not that is the case, nothing in the 23-line quotation suggests that the speaker is to be imagined as involved in any kind of sexual relationship with a poet.
