Hedyle

Hedyle (Greek: Ἥδυλη, Hḗdylē; fl. 4th century BC) was an ancient Greek poet. She is known only through a mention in Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae.[1] According to Athenaeus, Hedyle was the daughter of an Attic poet, Moschine, who is otherwise unknown, and the mother of Hedylus, another poet.[1] Hedyle was probably Athenian, like her mother.[1]

The only surviving fragment of Hedyle's poetry consists of two and a half couplets from her elegiac poem Scylla, quoted by Athenaeus.[1] The poem is about the myth of Scylla, a human woman who was courted by the merman Glaucus.[2] In the version of the story told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, Scylla was turned into a sea-monster by Circe, who was jealous of Glaucus' love for her.[3] Dunstan Lowe argues that Hedyle's version of the myth of Scylla was the inspiration for Ovid's version of the myth.[4] Josephine Balmer argues that Hedyle's choice of subject is part of a tradition of Greek women poets reinterpreting the dangerous women in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in a more sympathetic light, comparing it to the sympathetic portrayal of Helen of Troy in Sappho 16.[5]