"Most lovely of the things I have loved and lost; the sunlight,
"next, bright stars, the moon,
ripe gourds, the fruit of apple trees, the pears."
- Praxilla, circa 441 BCE
Anyone who has read about ancient Greece has probably heard of Sappho of Lesbos. Born around 630 BCE, Sappho lived for approximately six decades; her lyric poetry earned her the sobriquet "the Tenth Muse." Higher praise cannot be imagined.
Praxilla was a native of Sikyon, a city-state on the Gulf of Corinth. It wasn't until Judy Chicago's Dinner Party that proper tribute was paid to Praxilla of Sikyon, one of thirty-nine women honored with hew own specially designed place setting at a non-hierarchical triangular table. You can see in this photo some of the 999 women whose names are inscribed in gold on a white tile floor. More than four hundred women participated in the making of The Dinner Party.
Lesser known than Sappho, in her day Praxilla was called "immortal tongued'", in a time and place where women participated in public and religious events. Today her lyric poems survive only in fragments and paraphrases; primarily "table songs" they were meant to be sung after dinner as guests imbibed wine from drinking gourds.
Image: Judy Chicago - Praxilla, (from The Dinner Party), ceramic, textile, porcelain with rainbow and gold luster, 1974-1979, Brooklyn Museum, photo courtesy of the museum.
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