Mnemosyne

Mnemosyne (μνημοσύνη, Memory) is, in Hesiod, the mother of the Muses. She is not memory as we conceive it — the chronological reconstruction of past events — but a power that makes the past present to the one who remembers. jean-pierre-vernant: “To remember, to know, and to see are all interchangeable terms. A commonplace in the poetic tradition is the contrast between the knowledge of the ordinary man (knowing by hearsay, based on information provided by others and reported speech) and the knowledge of the inspired, which, like that of the gods, is a direct, personal vision. Memory transports the poet into the midst of ancient events, back into their own time” (Vernant 1983, p. 117).

marcel-detienne formalizes this into the archaic system of Aletheia (truth as the unconcealed) opposed to Lethe (forgetting). The Muses, as daughters of Mnemosyne, stand on the side of Memory-Light-Praise-Truth; Lethe stands on the side of Oblivion-Darkness-Blame-Forgetting. The poet who is “a master of Truth” is one who remembers in this Mnemosynic sense — who is present to what he sings (Detienne 1996).

This archaic understanding of memory is the classical root of the philosophical anamnesis that Plato will elaborate in the Meno, the Phaedo, and the Phaedrus: learning is remembering what the soul already knew.

Relationships

• muses
• aletheia-archaic
• dichterweihe
• anamnesis

Primary sources

• theogony (Hesiod, c. 700 BCE)
• vernant-myth-and-thought (Vernant 1983)
• detienne-masters-truth-archaic (Detienne 1996)
• snell-discovery-of-the-mind (Snell 1953)