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
Greek name Greek name In the modern world, personal names among people of Greek language and culture generally consist of a given name, a patronymic and a family name. Ancient Greeks generally had a single name, often qualified with a patronymic, a clan or tribe, or a place of origin. Married women were identified by the name of their husbands, not their fathers. Hereditary family names or surnames began to be used by élites in the Byzantine period. Well into the 9th century, they were rare. But by the 11th and 12th centuries, élite families often used family names. Family names came