The Muses

The Muses (μοῦσαι, Mousai) are the nine daughters of Mnemosyne (Memory) and Zeus. In Hesiod they are named for the first time in surviving Greek: Clio, Euterpe, Thalia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polyhymnia, Urania, Calliope. eric-a-havelock reads their names as a typology of the poet’s function: three “symbolise what might be called the psychological effects of minstrelsy”; three suggest its themes; two name the song and dance that accompany performance; and “only Calliope carries the name that identifies the verbal shapes which poetry commands. She is pre-eminently the symbol of its operational command of the formulas” (Havelock 1963).

The Muses give the poet a knowledge structurally identical to that of the diviner. Snell and Vernant both note that the formula Homer applies to the seer Calchas — knower of “all that has been, all that is, and all that is to be” — is transferred to the Muses and their mother Mnemosyne (Snell 1953; Vernant 1983, p. 117). Detienne develops this into his full theory of archaic Aletheia: the Muses, daughters of Memory, are the guarantors of Truth-as-unconcealment, the opposite of Lethe (Detienne 1996).

The Muses are therefore not decorative. They are the structural principle by which the archaic poet claims access to the divine and the past — the classical root of what the later tradition will name the imaginal.

Relationships

• mnemosyne
• aletheia-archaic
• dichterweihe
• theogony

Primary sources

• theogony (Hesiod, c. 700 BCE, proem)
• havelock-preface-plato (Havelock 1963)
• snell-discovery-of-the-mind (Snell 1953)
• vernant-myth-and-thought (Vernant 1983)
• detienne-masters-truth-archaic (Detienne 1996)