Agallis

Who is Agallis?

Agallis of Corcyra was a female grammarian who wrote about Homer, according to Athenaeus. Some scholars believe her to have belonged to the hetaerae class. She attributed the invention of ball games to Nausicaa, one of her countrywomen, and most later writers took her bias in this matter as self-evident. Her writings are no longer extant.

Some have supposed from two passages in the Suda that we ought to read "Anagallis" in this passage of Athenaeus. The scholiast on Homer and Eustathius mention a grammarian of the name of Agallias, a pupil of Aristophanes the grammarian, also a Corcyraean and a commentator upon Homer, who may be the same as Agallis, or perhaps her father.

For a time in the 19th century, the name "Agallis" was thought to be the subject of one of the poems of Sappho. Later scholarship showed this to have been an erroneous interpretation of a corrupted text.