Muses

Summary

The Muses are nine sisters in Greek myth, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, Memory, who give poets and singers what they say. Hesiod opens the Theogony with them: they hold Mount Helicon in Boeotia, dance about its spring and the altar of Zeus, bathe in its streams, and go out by night veiled in mist, singing with lovely voices of all the gods.

Then Hesiod tells how he became a poet. He was shepherding his lambs under Helicon when the Muses spoke to him first: "Shepherds of the wilderness, wretched things of shame, mere bellies, we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things." They plucked him a shoot of laurel for a staff, breathed into him a divine voice to celebrate what shall be and what was before, and bade him sing of the deathless gods and always sing of them first and last. Zeus, the poem says, lay with Mnemosyne for nine nights in Pieria, apart from the gods, and when the year came round she bore nine daughters, "a forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow", whose hearts are set on song. Their names are Clio, Euterpe, Thaleia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polyhymnia, Urania and Calliope, the chief of them, because she attends on princes.

They have two gifts. The first is for the king: if they honour a prince at his birth, they pour sweet dew on his tongue, and gentle words flow from his mouth with which he settles causes with true judgments, ends even a great quarrel, and sets the assembly right when it goes astray. The second is for the singer: a man may have fresh sorrow in his heart, but when a servant of the Muses sings the deeds of the men of old and of the gods, he forgets his heaviness and remembers his sorrows no more.

The idea their story turns on is that song is knowledge that comes from memory. Their mother is Memory; they know what was and what will be, and the poet does not know by himself. So the poet of the Iliad says before he lists the Greek ships: tell me, Muses, for you are goddesses and are present and know all things, while we hear only a rumour and know nothing. And the daughters of Memory are also the ones who make the grieving forget their grief.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Μοῦσα, Mousa, plural Μοῦσαι, Mousai, leaves mous- once the feminine ending is removed. The Greek essay reads it as mass, to touch and to strike: inspiration is a divine touch, and the Muse is she who touches the mind with inspiration. In Lane massahu is he touched it, massahu al-maraḍ and al-kibar, sickness and old age befell him, and massathu al-jinn, the jinn touched him, meaning they struck him with madness; hence mussa, he was touched with madness, mamsūs, as though the jinn had touched him. This is what Plato says in the Ion: the Muse inspires the poet, and the inspiration passes from him to others as the magnet's power passes through a chain of iron rings; good poets compose not by art but "inspired and possessed", and a poet cannot compose until he has been inspired and put out of his senses. M is m and s is s. The limit of the reading is given under the linguistic root.

Linguistic Root

LSJ gives Μοῦσα with Aeolic Μοῖσα and Doric Μῶσα, says the Iliad makes them the Olympian daughters of Zeus, that they are first nine in number in Odyssey 24.60, and that Hesiod names them. The word is also a common noun for music and song, as in Euripides: "what strain is this?" LSJ, Μοῦσα.

We read the name from mass: m is m, s is s, and the long vowel between them is Greek. In Lane massahu is he touched it with his hand, said of good as well as evil, massathu al-jinn is the jinn struck him with madness, and mamsūs is a madman, as though the jinn had touched him. In the Greek story poetry comes from outside the poet: the Muses breathe a voice into Hesiod, the Muse moves the singer Demodocus to sing of heroes' deeds, and Plato says a poet cannot compose while his mind is still his own. Arabic mass and Greek inspiration describe one act: something touches a person and he says what he would not otherwise say.

The essay offers a second reading, mūsā, the sharp blade that cuts the silence; it is further from the story, which makes the Muses inspirers, not cutters. It reads their mother's name, Μνημοσύνη, from manna in the sense of counting and keeping, together with mass. That division crosses the Greek suffix -οσύνη, which forms abstract nouns, and what remains of the name is μνημ-, remembering.

The limit of the reading is that the Aeolic and Doric forms lengthen the vowel before s, which in Greek usually marks a consonant lost before it, as πᾶσα, "all", is Aeolic παῖσα from a form with n. The old name may therefore have had an n or another letter that mass does not count; the reading takes the two letters that remain in the written form.

Key Mythic Narratives

Thamyris

The Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad names a place in Pylos where the Muses met Thamyris the Thracian on his way from the house of Eurytus. He had boasted that he would beat them even if they sang against him; in their anger they maimed him, took from him his wondrous song and made him forget his playing.

Demodocus

In the Odyssey the blind singer Demodocus is led to the feast of the king of the Phaeacians, and the poet says the Muse loved him above all men and gave him both good and evil: she took his sight and gave him sweet song. Then the Muse moves him to sing of the quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles, while Odysseus sits listening and weeps.

The Muses mourn Achilles

When Achilles died the daughters of the old man of the sea stood round him wailing, and the nine Muses led the dirge, answering one another, so that there was not a Greek who did not weep; they mourned him seventeen days and burned him on the eighteenth.

Among the Muses' sons is the singer Orpheus, son of Calliope, and the Muses sang at the wedding of Cadmus and Harmonia at Thebes.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In India Sarasvatī, in the oldest hymns a river and a goddess at once, became the goddess of speech, learning and the arts, and the Brāhmaṇas linked her name with vāc, speech. What flows and gives life passes in her from water into speech, and the Muses live on a mountain, bathe in its streams and dance about its spring; the Horse's Spring on Helicon is one of their places.

In Sumer Nisaba was "chief scribe of An", with a lapis-lazuli tablet in which she reads the stars of heaven, and scribes closed their literary tablets with "Nisaba be praised". Hesiod is told to begin and end with the Muses, so in both traditions the poem opens or closes with the name of the one who gave the word.

In Egypt Seshat is the goddess of writing, counting and measuring, who stretches the cord with the king at a temple's foundation and records numbers on a tablet. The Greek Muses are for song and memory and Seshat for writing and reckoning: knowledge kept in the voice in the one case and in the script in the other.

In the North Bragi is the best of poets, as Grímnismál 44 says; he sits beside the guest Ægir and tells him the gods' stories, and poetry is called bragr after him. Among the Norse, poetry comes from a drink made of the blood of Kvasir, something drunk; among the Greeks it is something breathed in and poured on the tongue as dew.