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In Our Time

The Muses

45 min episode · 2 min read
·
Penelope Murray,Angie Hobbs,Paul Cartlidge

Episode

45 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Relationships, Philosophy & Wisdom, Science & Discovery

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • Divine Authorization: Hesiod describes meeting the Muses on Mount Helicon around 700 BC, where they breathed divine voice into him and declared their power to speak truth or convincing falsehoods, establishing poets' authority through divine connection rather than personal skill.
  • Memory as Foundation: The Muses are daughters of Mnemosyne (Memory) and Zeus, making memory central to creativity. Ancient bards memorized all 24 books of Iliad and Odyssey, demonstrating how cultural transmission in oral societies depended on mnemonic capacity enabled by divine inspiration.
  • Plato's Hierarchy Shift: In the Ion dialogue, Plato reframes poets as passive, irrational vessels in magnetic chains of influence, placing philosophers above poets as true servants of the Muses, fundamentally challenging earlier views of poets as active, skilled creators with divine partnership.
  • Gender and Creation: The Muses remain exclusively female across traditions, possibly reflecting ancient Greek views linking creation to childbirth, with male poets requiring feminine divine midwifery to produce their works, though the Muses themselves wielded active power to grant or revoke creative gifts.

What It Covers

The Muses in Greek mythology trace their evolution from divine inspirers of poetry and creativity through Homer and Hesiod to Plato's philosophical reinterpretation, examining their role in memory, artistic creation, and cultural authority.

Key Questions Answered

  • Divine Authorization: Hesiod describes meeting the Muses on Mount Helicon around 700 BC, where they breathed divine voice into him and declared their power to speak truth or convincing falsehoods, establishing poets' authority through divine connection rather than personal skill.
  • Memory as Foundation: The Muses are daughters of Mnemosyne (Memory) and Zeus, making memory central to creativity. Ancient bards memorized all 24 books of Iliad and Odyssey, demonstrating how cultural transmission in oral societies depended on mnemonic capacity enabled by divine inspiration.
  • Plato's Hierarchy Shift: In the Ion dialogue, Plato reframes poets as passive, irrational vessels in magnetic chains of influence, placing philosophers above poets as true servants of the Muses, fundamentally challenging earlier views of poets as active, skilled creators with divine partnership.
  • Gender and Creation: The Muses remain exclusively female across traditions, possibly reflecting ancient Greek views linking creation to childbirth, with male poets requiring feminine divine midwifery to produce their works, though the Muses themselves wielded active power to grant or revoke creative gifts.

Notable Moment

The scholar Thamyris challenged the Muses to a singing contest and was punished with blindness and loss of musical ability, illustrating how claiming equality with divine powers constituted fatal hubris in Greek culture, a cautionary tale depicted widely on vases and in Sophocles' lost play.

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Episode Transcript

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside The UK. Okay. Only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line. But first There. The last one. Enjoy a Coca Cola for a pause that refreshes. Your charitable giving stack just called, and it wants a glow up. Donor advised funds or DAFs are the fastest growing giving vehicle for a reason. Wren Technology is already used by the top institutions in the country for their DAFs. With Wren, you can oversee your charitable accounts, recommend grants, and deep dive on your giving history, all in one place. Wren just makes giving a lot less taxing. Learn more at reninc.com. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to bbc.co.uk/radiofour. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. The Muses have been associated with creativity and inspiration for three thousand years, even before the time of Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey. The poet Hesiod, writing around 700 BC, tells us that there were nine of them, that they were the daughters of Zeus and of memory, and that they were the ones who inspired him and gave him the right to compose his verse. Their names and numbers changed, but consistently, the muses became a way to explore the relationship between the poet or creative imagination and inspiration. Did the poets and other thinkers have to join the muses at their home on Mount Helicon to be inspired? Could they do anything to make themselves open to inspiration? What's the role of memory, the mother of the muses, in creativity? With me to discuss the muses are Angie Hobbs, professor of public understanding of philosophy at the University of Sheffield, Penelope Murray, founder member of the department of classics and retired senior lecturer at University of Warwick, and Paul Cartlidge, Emeritus professor of Greek culture and AG Levante senior research fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge. Paul Cartlidge, we're reaching back to prehistory here. How deep are the roots of the muses in Greek mythology? Obviously deep. But as far as the ancient Greeks go, our earliest evidence, written evidence, is of course, Homer and Hesiod, and we're going to come back to them more than once. But their etymology, the words, the names, which Hesiod is the first to give the individual nine muses, are thought to be Indo European, and those of you who believe in Indo Europeanism as a sort of generic term, will say that, well, perhaps they go back as far as you said three thousand years in your introduction, which, if my maths are right, that's to about a thousand BC. Well, some would say they go actually back even further than a thousand BC. But Homer is the result of a long, long Bardic tradition, which is, totally oral until, miraculously, it becomes, written. And it goes back at least five hundred years. …

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