Types of Women women to different animals in the poem is not an invention of Semonides, but seems to have been based on a pre-existing folk tale. Aesop's fables were attributed in ancient Greece to the sixth-century BCE slave of that name, but many of them are likely to be much older than that; one of these fables, that of Zeus and Prometheus, has a similar premise to Semonides' poem, and may have been known to him. Later poets tell similar stories, probably also inspired by these folktales. An elegiac fragment by Phocylides describes women as having originated from one of four different
Zerahiah the Greek Zerahiah the Greek Rabbi Zerachiah the Greek (in Hebrew, Zerachiah ha-Yavani or ha-Yewani; sometimes known by the acronymistic nickname "Ra'Za'H") was a Greek-Jewish ethicist who resided in the Byzantine Empire in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Of his life no details are known, except that he was the author of an ethical work entitled "Sefer ha-Yashar" (not to be confused with the many other Jewish writings of the same name); this work was confused with Jacob Tam's halakhic work of the same name and erroneously attributed to the renowned tosafist. This error was detected by Menahem Lonzano, who, in his