[32] Edited by E. Lobel in POxy . 24 (London, 1957), no. 2390, frag. 2; published as Alcman frag. 5 in D. L. Page, ed., Poetae Melici Graecae (Oxford, 1962); more recently as frag. 81 in C. Calame, ed., Alcman (Rome, 1983). Known to us only through a tantalizing commentary, Alcman's poem has been assumed by modern scholars to be an early cosmogony and has been interpreted as such, following the reading of its ancient commentator, according to whom the poem envisaged a sequence of creation in which at first only undifferentiated matter existed; then Thetis, the genesis panton , appeared and generated Poros , "the way," and Tekmor , "the sign." Darkness existed as a third feature, later followed by day, moon, and stars. With Thetis the creatrix as demiurge, this cosmogonic process involved not so much the bringing into being of matter as the discrimination of objects, the ordering of space, the illumination of darkness with light: an intellectual rather than a physical creation. In the commentator's reading, Alcman presented Thetis as the primal, divine creative force—the generative principle of the universe. This aspect of Alcman's poem has been discussed by M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant, who argue for a close connection between Thetis and Metis. See Detienne and Vernant's Les ruses de l'intelligence: La Métis des grecs (Paris, 1974), 127-64, which develops a number of ideas first presented in Vernant's "Thétis et le poème cosmogonique d'Alcman," in Hommages à Marie Delcourt , Collection Latomus 114 (Brussels, 1970), 219-33. In various versions of their mythology, Thetis and Metis have associations with bonds and binding; both are sea powers; both shape-shifters; both loved by Zeus; both destined to bear a son greater than his father. Some scholars, like M. L. West, have seen the name of Thetis as defining her role in Alcman's poem; see West's "Three Presocratic Cosmologies," CQ 57 (1963): 154-57; "Alcman and Pythagoras," CQ 61 (1967): 1-7; and Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient (Oxford, 1971), 206-8. Detienne and Vernant, Métis des grecs , suggest that it is the power of metamorphosis as an attribute that disposes these goddesses of the sea to a crucial cosmological role: they "contain" the potential shapes of everything created and creatable. More recently, G. Most, "Alcman's 'Cosmogonic' Fragment (Fr. 5 Page, 81 Calame)," CQ 37, no. 1 (1987): 1-19, has argued that although the extant commentary is cosmogonic, Alcman's poem was not. According to Most, Alcman's poem was a partheneion, whose mythic section contained—appropriately for its genre—an account of Thetis's metamorphoses when Peleus attempted to ravish her; it was her transformations that were allegorized by the ancient commentator as a cosmogony. If, as Most suggests, the partheneion context required some erotic narrative element—such as the "erotic rivalry" between the Tyndarids and the Hippocoontids in the fragmentary opening lines of the Louvre Partheneion—then it seems to me conceivable that Alcman may have used the framework of the Thetis-Peleus story as Isthmian 8 gives it to us: including not only the episode of the metamorphoses but the background rivalry of Zeus and Poseidon that necessitated assigning Thetis to a mortal mate.