Right: Attic black-figure olpe by Euphiletos Painter (c. 520 BCE).
Apollo playing kithara between Muses, some holding flowers. (MET 06.1021.47)
The “Invocation to the Muses” is the introductory element of
Hesiod’s Theogony, an archaic epic
that traces the lineage of the gods from the creation of the cosmos to the
reign of Zeus and the Olympians. The invocation functions as a supplication or
prayer that both glorifies the Muses and asks for their favor. Approximately the
first 100 lines of the poem are dedicated to the Muses. That makes it by far
the longest invocation and introduction to an epic in the surviving Greco-Roman
canon, but the sample size of surviving works is admittedly very small.[1]
The significance of the invocation to theories
of western art cannot be understated. These hundred lines from 7th
century BCE Greece articulate, if not establish, a relationship between art and
culture that underlies all artistic expression. Even in movements that seek to
shirk off or deny the philosophical underpinnings derived from the invocation,
artists must confront it, so thoroughly enmeshed is it in the collective psyche
of western civilizations. This deep-seated philosophy that is derived from the Invocation
to the Muses is an argument for the role of poetry (poiēsis) in society.[2] The basis of the argument is couched in the mythological genealogy that the
mother of the Muses is Memory (Mnēmonsunē) and that their arts (poetry,
music, etc.) serve a vital role in the collection and dissemination of cultural knowledge. Modern approaches to myth, including the functional,
structural, ritual, and psychological, are deeply invested in this social
function of the Muses and their arts. The following essay explores the way in
which Hesiod makes this claim for the role of artists and their art in the
social fabric of Greece and beyond.
The bulk of the invocation details the work done by the
Muses on Olympus. Some reference is also made to poets and their work in human
society. The first step we must make is to identify the various correspondences
between Olympus and earth, on the one hand, and the various arts of the Muses,
on the other hand. The Muses function in Olympian society in the same way that mortal
poets function in human society. So when the poem speaks of the role of the
Muses on Olympus, we can safely draw parallels to poets in human society.
Second, the poem refers specifically to poets, poetry, and song, but we will
extrapolate that to all forms of art rather than restricting it simply to
modern ideas of (written) poetry.
Music is the art of the Muses. That is the literal definition and origin of the term. As we read the poem, it becomes
clear that the Muses are not Shakespearean or Ovidian poets hunched over a
desk or sitting against a tree wistfully dreaming the day away with quill and
parchment in hand. Rather, the Muses are (choral) singers and dancers. Take for
example, the first ten lines of the poem:
Let us begin singing of the Heliconian Muses,
Who inhabit the high, holy mountain of Helicon.
They dance on gentle feet near a violet spring
Around the altar of the might son of Kronos. (1-4) [3]
The Muses are dancers, choral dancers and singers:
They make beautiful and charming choruses atop
Mt. Helicon. Their steps thus strengthened, they
Rise and go forth veiled in a broad mist.
Nighttime dancers spreading their sweet voices. (7-10)
Thus, when we speak of the art(s) of the Muses, we speak of poetry in the sense of creation (poiēsis), and it is performed through song and dance. The favored instrument of the Muses was the lyre. The modern term used to designate words sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument is “lyrics.” This is the legacy of Greek poetry: lyrics were the words sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. These etymologies suggest a very important extrapolation for us as scholars of the poem: this is not a work of modern “poetry” but, rather, poiēsis (that which is created) and, as such, the implications of our analysis are not limited to poetry as we know it today, but all forms of poiēsis, which we moderns would lump under the umbrella of “art.”
The Invocation to the Muses dedicates more lines to explaining what the Muses do and the effect that their art has on their audience than any other topic in the work. The poem also notably chronicles the genealogy of the Muses and offers an example of their interaction with, and relationship to, mortal poets. In narrating these three interrelated facts, the poem establishes two ever-present functions of poiēsis, which is another way of saying the role of the Muses on Olympus and the role of mortal poets. Those two functions are to entertain and to facilitate memory.
That music entertains is so commonplace in the modern ideas
of art that it almost seems redundant to point out. After all, one does not go
to a movie, watch a sitcom, sit through a play, listen to a song, or visit a
museum to torture oneself. Nevertheless, the frequent regularity with which the
poem speaks directly to the entertainment value of the Muses' choral singing and dancing should be noted:
In each instance, the Muses entertain, stimulating visually with dance, audibly with harmonious tones, and intellectually with the content of their songs. It is to the content that we turn for the second function of the Muses.
KLEIO (Clio) was one of the nine Mousai (Muses), the goddesses of music, song and dance. In the Classical era, when the Mousai were assigned specific literary and artistic spheres, Kleio was named Muse of history. In this guise she was represented holding an open scroll or seated beside a chest of books. Her name was derived from the Greek verb kleô, "to make famous" or "celebrate."
Attic red-figure lekythos from Boeotia (c. 435-425 BCE). Louvre CA 2220.
Caption: Kleio. Theoi.com.
Image: Muse Reading Louvre CA2220.jpg, Uploaded by Jastrow(2006) on Wikimedia Commons.
The first hint at the content of the Muses’ songs is that they tell the stories of the gods, lines 10-21 and again at lines 44-52. This initial list concludes with the statement, “And other deathless ones, the divine race enduring forever” (21). The reference to gods as ageless and immortal is commonplace in Greek mythology. It is a defining feature of gods vis-à-vis humans. However, the reference to deathlessness and “enduring forever” carries a deeper meaning in the context of the arts of the Muses. Music and poetry are divine. That mortal poets can participate in the creation of music (the stories or muthoi) is a direct result of inspiration from a divine source. The concept of inspiration is explained within the invocation when Hesiod tells of how he learned the art of story creation (i.e., poetry or myth-making):
Now then, they taught Hesiod their sublime art
While he tended lambs beneath sacred Helicon.
This was the first thing the goddess said to me,
Those Olympian Muses, those daughters of Zeus:
“Field dwelling shepherd, poor test of a man, a mere belly!
We know how to speak many false things that seem true,
And we know, when we wish, to sing the truth.”
So spoke the eloquent daughters of mighty Zeus,
And they gave me a staff with luxuriant laurel,
A wondrous bough that they had plucked and breathed into me divine speech,
That I might celebrate the things that will be and those that have been.
They commanded me to sing of the blessed race that endures forever,
And always to sing of them first and last. (22-34)
The art of the Muses is “sublime.” That
which is sublime is of magnificence or grandeur beyond comprehension, causing
awe. The experience of the sublime is the experience, for mortals, of divinity. Poiēsis, then, is a sublime form of communication. In this sense, it is
very closely related to two other forms of communication between the divine and
human realms: dream and prophecy.
That prophecy in the Greek world is divine
goes without saying. Prophecies and oracles are, by definition, communication
between gods and humans. What makes these forms of communication interesting is
their indecipherability. Communication between humans and gods is always
obfuscated. Oracles are often misinterpreted, confusing, or lead humans to take
actions that result in unintended consequences.[4] Dreams are equally ambivalent. That they are supernatural is never in doubt,
but dreams, like prophecies, can be used by the gods to manipulate human
beings.[5] The arts of the Muses are a similarly double-edged sword: “We know how to speak
many false things that seem true, and we know, when we wish, to sing the
truth.”
That prophecies, dreams, and the songs of the Muses are divine is
undisputed. However, that does not mean that they are true or, more accurately,
that humans have the capacity to interpret the truth of them. In the case of
the Muses and Dreams, they could simply be false things dressed up to be true,
and humans are ignorant of the difference. In other cases, they could be true muthoi (stories) that humans lack the capacity to interpret. Each medium is a form of
communication between the divine and human, and in each case, human ignorance
is contrasted with divine knowledge.
The excerpt continues with Hesiod being inspired by the
Muses. This is not the modern concept of inspiration in which the artist
develops an idea spurred by his contemplation of a beautiful object or action.
Rather, it is tied to the core meaning of inspiration, inspirō, “to
breathe into.” The Muses breathe into the poet their art. The poet is not the
source of poiēsis but, rather, an instrument that the goddesses play
with and through. Plato emphasizes this relationship in the Apology when
Socrates explains why, after interrogating the famous poets of Athens, he is
more knowledgeable than they. Socrates does not dispute that their poetry is
sublime, deeply insightful to the core of human existence. What he disputes is
that the poets are the source of that knowledge. For it is not the poets but
their audience, the modern critic, who interprets and finds meaning in their
art, raising its prestige. In Socrates’ rationale, the poet is a mouthpiece of
the divine, but he is no more a genius than the brass mouthpiece of a horned
instrument, a “mere belly” to be filled or emptied by an external (i.e.,
divine) musician or given meaning by its reader rather than its composer.
Finally,
then, the narrator explicitly addresses the reason that the Muses imbued Hesiod
with their gifts: “That I might celebrate the things that will be and those
that have been. They commanded me to sing of the blessed race that endures
forever.” The purpose of inspiring poets is that they remember the past,
remember and glorify the deeds of the gods in muthoi (stories), and in
doing so, honor (celebrate) them. In
this way, we are returned to the reference of the gods at line 21 as “enduring
forever.” The art of the Muses preserves the past, the deeds of the gods, and
ensures that they endure forever.
The
genealogy of the Muses is employed as an allegory that supports this function of
the Muses (thus poetry and poets) as facilitators of memory:
Mnēmosunē [Memory], who watches over the hills of Eleuthēros,
Mingled with the son of Kronos in Pieria, and begot them,
A forgetfulness of sorrows and respite from cares. For nine nights they joined together, wise Zeus
Going up to her bed, away from the other immortals.
But when indeed a year had passed, and the seasons had turned,
Dwindling months and completing many days,
She begat nine daughters of one mind: a heart to
Put forth song, and possessing a spirit without care or sorrow --
Not far from the high peaks of snow-capped Olympos. (53-62)
The Muses are the children of Zeus, the patriarch of Olympus, and Mnēmosunē, memory incarnate. Their stories (muthoi) preserve the past (memory) and reinforce the power structures of the present going forward.
Muthos, the Greek
term from which the modern word “myth” is derived, has no truth value: it makes
no claim about the veracity of its contents. At its core, the term means
“story” or “narrative.” A story can be true or false, fiction or nonfiction. For
example, history, as 20th Century scholars have proven, is a
narrative, and as the saying goes, history is written by the victors. It was
the rise of philosophy in the latter half of the archaic and into the classical
periods that saw the coloring of muthos as untrue or misleading – in
contrast to logos, the root word for logic that was championed by
philosophers. The truth of the matter lies somewhere in between. As we noted in
Hesiod’s poem, the Muses have always had the power to make false things seem
true and also speak truth when it suits them. This ambivalent relationship
between art and human society was an endless source of frustration for Socratics
like Plato, but it is entirely aligned with the established relationship of communications between gods and humans (e.g., dreams or oracles), and the arts of the Muses
are based upon such divine (mis)communication.
Yet muthos is important for the very existence of truth. The Greek term for
truth is alētheia. It is a derived from the word lēthē,
forgetfulness or vanishing, with the negative prefix a-. In other words, alētheia is “not forgetting” or “not vanishing” – remembering! How do we
remember a thing but to repeat it? We (re)tell the story. Muthos (story)
is an essential building block of memory. The muthoi or the poiēsis (artistic creations) of the Muses, poets, and artists are the tools by which we
remember or prevent knowledge from vanishing. Thus, while muthos has no truth value and can be either true or false, it is intrinsically bound to the
concept of truth (alētheia). There can be no truth, no alētheia,
without muthos (story).
The
connection between the Muses and memory should now come into focus. The
function of facilitating memory is not simply a matter of remembering the past.
It is the mechanism by and through which we filter reality (alētheia).
The arts of the Muses shape, affirm, and question human understanding of the
world, society, the idea of the self, as well as our place in each of them.
That these stories may be of uncertain truth value themselves is a source of
endless frustration, but it is also a vital part of their power: this dynamic
demands constant repetition and re-articulation in the continuing struggle both
to preserve knowledge and also to question it. Thus, painting, theater, lyric,
epic, etc. make, violate, and remake truth in an act that is both preservation
(alētheia, “not forget”) and creation (poiesis, “creation”).
Meaning
is something that is made against the philosophical telos (goal) of
absolute truth. Absolute truth is endlessly frustrating to a mind that demands access to it, but for humans, who swim in the
seas of empirical knowledge, no gift from the gods is more fitting. For only
the gods have access to absolute truth (truth that is beyond contestation,
unquestionable). Whereas humans live in a world of empirical truths, subject to
the limited scope of observation, perspective, discovery, and re-vision...or retelling.
[1] Only four works survive from Archaic Greece (two each by Homer and Hesiod), a
considerably later (3rd century BCE) epic about Jason and the
Argonauts by Apollonius; and then there are the Roman poets, Virgil and Ovid,
who are responsible for two more complete works.
[2]Poiēsis, “poetic
composition, poem.” Based on the verb poieō, “to make, to do.” Henry
George Liddell. Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. revised and
augmented throughout by. Sir Henry Stuart Jones. with the assistance of.
Roderick McKenzie. Oxford. Clarendon Press (1940).
[3]All
translations are mine based on the Greek text, Theogony. Cambridge, MA., Harvard UP; London, William
Heinemann Ltd. (1914). It is available on the Perseus
Project web site. My translation is
heavily influenced by that of Stanley Lombardo (Hesiod Works & Days and
Theogony. Hackett: Cambridge, MA. 1993).
[4] The myth of Oedipus, dramatized most famously in Sophocles’ tragedy, Oedipus
Tyrannus, is an excellent example of this in which the titular character
murders his father and procreates with his mother despite dedicating his entire
adult life to subverting a prophecy that stated he would do just that. Another
popular example is that of the Lydian king Croesus, who received an oracle that
if he went to war with Persia, a mighty kingdom would fall. Croesus
misinterpreted this prophecy to mean he would be victorious; instead, the
mighty kingdom that was toppled was his own.
[5]Iliad Book 2 is a prime example of this. Zeus sends Dream to Agamemnon, promising the
mortal that Troy’s doom draws near, and all he need do is launch an assault on
the Trojans. This is a lie. Zeus merely wishes Agamemnon reignite hostilities
between the two armies so that he can cause the Greeks to lose ground to the
Trojans, thus honoring his pact with Achilles at the expense of Agamemnon.