(), a mythical Greek poetess of the ante-Homeric
period, was said to have been the daughter of Apollo, and his first priestess at Delphi, and
the inventor of the hexameter verse (Strom. i. pp.
323, 334; Schol. ad Eurip. Orest. 1094; Eust. Prol. ad
Iliad. ; and other authors cited by Fabricius). Some writers seem to have placed her at
Delos instead of Delphi (Atil. Fort. p. 2690, Putsch); and Servius
identifies her with the Cumaean Sybil (ad Virg. Aen. 3.445). The
tradition which ascribed to her the invention of the hexameter, was by no means uniform;
Pausanias, for example, as quoted above, calls her the first who used it, but in another
passage (10.12.10) he quotes an hexameter distich, which was ascribed to the Peleiads, who
lived before Phemonoe : the traditions respecting the invention of the hexameter are collected
by Fabricius (Bibl. Graec. vol. i. p. 207). There were poems which went
under the name of Phemonoe, like the old religious poems Bibl.
Graec. vol. i. p. 116); and Pliny quotes from her respecting eagles and hawks, evidently
from some book of augury, and perhaps from a work which is still exttant in MS., entitled