I came across a similar piece of pottery to the Theban Athenaíí portrait in the collection of the Archaeological Museum of Ancient Corinth. Young women with musical instruments are common enough in Ancient Greek art, but I noticed a resemblance between the figures in each of these pots: a small, shapely figure, delicate features, and hair neatly arranged in an elegant chignon. In the Theban portrait, the figure is standing and strumming her lyre. She appears to be topless and wearing only a wrap or skirt around her hips and waist. The figure in the Corinthian portrait is more modestly dressed in a Doric chiton. She is seated in a more relaxed pose, her lyre under one arm and the rest of her body turned towards something. I imagined her taking a break from her music to make a witty remark to the person sitting next to her. Both portraits are inscribed with the word "Αθηναίή" (Athenaíí), the feminine version of "Αθηναίος" (Athenaois), meaning "Athenian" or "From Athens." The confusing detail about these two works of art is that they were created over three hundred years apart from each other: the Theban portrait was painted around 800 BCE while the Corinthian portrait was painted around 490 BCE.
After discussing the artifact with one of the curators, she was kind enough to show me some documents from the museum's archives which offered more information about the illusive Athenaíí.
The Corinthian Athenaíí was born around three hundred years after her Theban counterpart and is believed to have been around nineteen or twenty years old in 490 BCE when the portrait was painted though the exact date of her birth was lost to history. There appears to be some confusion between the two women since a number of details about their lives overlap: their fathers were both called Sophos of Athens and were employed as pedagogues (slaves tasked with the care and education of their master's children) and both Athenaíís were poets famous for their sharp wit and skill with the lyre.
We have more details about the life of the Corinthian Athenaíí and miraculously for a woman from the ancient world, fragments of her words have survived the centuries. She may have even written down her verses herself as she appears to have received some education. For an Athenian father, educating a daughter would have been an odd thing for Sophos to do. Education for women was seen by the Athenians as irrelevant at best and dangerous at worst. Silence was considered a woman's greatest ornament. The Corinthian Athenaíí gives this explanation as to why she received an education: "Since my father could not keep me silent, he thought it would be best to give me something intelligent to say." A number of her poems mention Athena, goddess of wisdom, the arts, and the polis of Athens, who she credits with her voice and mind.
Aside from her father, Sophos, the Corinthian Athenaíí's family consisted of a mother named Agape, who worked as a lady's maid to a wealthy noblewoman, and an older brother named Theron, who was a slave that looked after and drove his master's chariots. Theron had a wife named Gaiana, who tended her master's gardens. No husbands or lovers are mentioned in connection with her but the scraps of her poetry which survive mention that she was the mother of a daughter named Sophi, named after the child's grandfather. We can assume that Sophi's father was one of her masters or a man who had been a guest in their household. Judging by her poetry, the Corinthian Athenaíí had a dismissive and cynical view on men and romantic relationships. We can imagine that the circumstances of her daughter Sophi's conception were a sore spot for her.
The largest fragment of poetry attributed to the Corinthian Athenaíí deals with her experiences during the Greco-Persian War, specifically with the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE, around the time her portrait was painted. They consist of pleas to the gods to protect her brother Theron, who accompanied his master to the battle of Marathon as his charioteer. Corinth, the polis in which she was staying, was allied with Athens, Sparta, and the other city-states who were joined together in defense of Greece from Persian invasion. Corinthian troops were involved in the major battles of the war: Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis. The Corinthian Athenaíí proudly describes how her brother's master fought bravely with the Athenians during their celebrated victory at Marathon. For a fifth-century Athenian, fighting at Marathon would have been considered as heroic as storming the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. She also mentions missing her mother, who had been sold to the family of an Argive nobleman, and father, who was living in Olympia.
A common figure in the Corinthian Athenaíí's verses is a woman called Aphrodisia the weaver, another slave in the household of her masters who serves as a sort of comic relief with her "tangled tresses" and "disheveled chiton, stained with whatever she has eaten recently," who she teases for her sloppiness and for being boy crazy. These verses are most likely meant to be all in good fun since Aphrodisia and the Corinthian Athenaíí were probably good friends. Aphrodisia is presented in a more sympathetic light in the verses on the battle of Marathon, where she inconsolable with worry for her lover, an Egyptian mercenary named Mantu, whose child she is pregnant with. The Corinthian Athenaíí spent many hours comforting her friend through this difficult time.
We cannot tell if Theron or Mantu or any of the Corinthian Athenaíí's loved ones made it through the Greco-Persian war but we can imagine that the experience greatly affected her. She would have watched men she knew leave for war, knowing that some will never come back and waited for news of the battles and feared a possible Persian invasion. It is likely that she also lived through the later Peloponnesian War.