This thesis applies to Archaic Greek literature the medievalist's concept of "women's songs," that is, love-poems given to a female persona and composed in a popular register. In the Greek context a distinct type can be recognised in poems of women's affections (not necessarily love-poems as such) composed in an ingenuous register and created for performance, choral or solo, within a women's thiasos. The poems studied are those of Sappho, along with the few surviving partheneia of Alcman and Pindar. The feminine is constructed, rather mechanically by Pindar, more subtly by the other two, from a combination of tender feeling, personal and natural beauty, and an artful artlessness. / It is not possible to reconstruct a paradigmatic thiasos which lies behind the women's songs, but certain characteristic features merge, especially the pervasiveness of homoerotic attachments and the combination of a personal, affective, with a social, religious function. In general, women's groups in ancient Greece must have served as a counterbalance to the prevailing male order. However, while some of the women's thiasoi provide a vehicle for the release of female aggression, the function of the present group is essentially harmonious and integrative.

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