The Seba library treats Mount Helicon in 8 passages, across 7 authors (including Hesiod, Julian Jaynes, Kerényi, Karl).
from the Heliconian Muses let us begin to sing, who hold the great and holy mount of Helicon, and dance on soft feet about the deep-blue spring and the altar of the almighty son of Cronos
The locus classicus establishing Helicon as the Muses’ sacred dwelling, their dancing-ground about the spring and altar of Zeus, and the origin-point of inspired song.
, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700thesis
The beautiful Muses with their unison ‘lily-like’ voice, dancing out of the thick mists of evening, thumping on soft and vigorous feet about the lonely enraptured shepherd, these arrogances of delicacy were the hallucinatory sources of memory in late bicameral men
Jaynes argues that the Heliconain Muses encountered by the shepherd-Hesiod were not poetic fiction but genuine auditory and visual hallucinations characteristic of the pre-conscious bicameral mind.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976thesis
They also had a dancing-ground on the summit of Helicon, near the hippou krene, ‘the fountain of the horse’, and the altar of Zeus. Whenever they went thence in procession to Olympus, they were wrapped in clouds.
Kerenyi’s mythographic account anchors Helicon as the Muses’ topographic center, specifying the Hippocrene and the altar of Zeus as its cultic focal points and tracing the nine Muses’ names and attributes.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951thesis
My prayers and entreaties will I now send forth from heart and hands aloft to Helicon, to that ninefold throne whence the fountains spring from which the gift of words and meaning flow.
Campbell cites Gottfried von Strassburg’s invocation of Helicon and the nine Muses alongside Apollo to demonstrate the persistence of the Hellenic inspiration-complex at the heart of medieval creative mythology.
, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968thesis
It is the Muses generically who are patrons of this verbal technique. NOTES 1 I concur with Solmsen (p. 4, n. 13) as against Jacoby in refusing to excise lines 80-103
Havelock reads the Hesiodic Muses — whose residence is Helicon — not as theological personages but as functional symbols of the oral-formulaic verbal technique that governed archaic Greek performance.
, Preface to Plato, 1963supporting
it is their task, as daughters of Mnemosyne, Memory, to enlarge the recollection of the poet. All this is simple enough, and it represents in comparatively plain terms what the generation of Homer had to say on the subject of knowledge.
Snell treats the Muses — the Heliconians invoked from their mountain — as epistemological agents whose function is to supply the poet with a reliable mental image that transcends ordinary mortal recollection.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
Do Hesiod and the truth of the Muses really fall into the province of a ‘science of literary works’ as represented by the hermeneutists?
Detienne poses the critical question of whether the truth-claim embedded in Hesiod’s Heliconain Muse-invocation belongs to literary hermeneutics or to an archaic epistemic category irreducible to modern textual interpretation.
, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, 1996supporting
Helicon, 543, 681; tripod dedicated by Hesiod to - 587, 691
An index entry recording Helicon as the site to which Hesiod dedicated a tripod, preserving the cultic-biographical tradition linking the poet personally to the mountain.
, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, -700aside