Search Results

This chapter looks for a deeper affinity between Plato and Hesiod in this study of the myth of the races of man in the Republic. The central idea is that Plato does not just ‘rework’ the Hesiodic narrative of the five races, but reads its contribution to the Works and Days as an antecedent to, and a model for, his own, self-critical practice of philosophy. In this sense, it can ask us to think of Hesiod's races as ‘our own’ too (546e): they set the pattern for our continued philosophical reflection.

This chapter explores in detail how Plato's creation narrative in the Timaeus is presented as a ‘scientific’ reworking of the Theogony, taking up and transforming the primal figures from that work, and central polarities embodied by them (especially male/female).

This chapter examines the famous “Catalogue of Ships” from Iliad (2.484–760). It argues that the catalogue functions as a kind of episode that caps off the narrative and thematic structure of Book 2. The difficulties of the catalogue’s introduction, usually taken as a testament to the bard’s close relationship to the Muses, at the same time establish the poet as an autonomous and responsible agent. The problems of the invocation are reflected by peculiarities of the catalogue itself; these call into question the breadth of the poet’s undertaking and his own traditional role as guardian of memory and kleos, such that the poet uses his catalogue to explore some of the problems inherent to epic as a genre. In the final part of the catalogue, which includes Achilles’ entry, there is a fundamental change that addresses these problems and repositions the poet’s own story in relation to the larger tradition.

Leaving the city of Athens in the classical period, chapter 6 turns to the countryside of the Hellenistic poets. Hellenistic poets highlight the indeterminacy of nympholeptic encounters, which can result in blindness, death, disappearance, or poetry. For Theocritus, the death of a nympholeptic herdsman, Daphnis, becomes the beginnings of a new genre, bucolic poetry. Callimachus plays on the paradigm of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite to tell a story of divine punishment that leaves the mortal Teiresias blinded but endowed with a prophetic gift. The pastoral nymph, a goddess who lives in the human landscape, displaces the more traditional Muses as the source of inspiration for this new genre of poetry that fuses folk narratives and archaic models into a new poetic and religious landscape, where the nympholept becomes a central figure simultaneously as he disappears.

Yeats's relationships with nine exceptional women profoundly influenced his poetry. These relationships were especially fruitful because Yeats experienced them in terms of his belief in Muses as sources of inspiration. The Introduction introduces these nine women and relates them to Yeats's poetry.

The Finale discusses Yeats's final years of life and how those years were enriched by the memories he held of his Muses. The Muse notion was Yeats's way of arranging his experience of women in terms of his desire to be a poet who spoke in the role of lover. Over his lifetime, his Muses taught him that, for a poet of genius, a Muse knows no limits of age or gender. His Muses were essential to his becoming the love poet he always wanted to be.

Starting from the song of Phemius in Odyssey 1, with the divergent reactions to it of the suitors, Penelope, and Telemachus, this chapter introduces some of the competing views of poetry which developed in ancient Greek culture. In particular, it formulates the book's organizing contrast between the values of ‘ecstasy’ (poetic experience as a transformative act of imaginative and emotional engagement) and ‘truth’ (whether descriptive or normative). In considering ideas of poetry's relationship to reality, the chapter also poses the complex question whether ancient Greeks had a concept of fiction. The themes of the book are illustrated through two preliminary case studies: the Muses' message to Hesiod in the Theogony, and the counterpoint between poetry and history in Thucydides. There is also a full synopsis of the remaining chapters.

This chapter offers a probing reinterpretation of Homeric scenes and motifs relating to poetry (as ‘song’). Among the material considered is Achilles' solo song in Iliad 9, the Greek army's paeans in Iliad 1 and 22, the imagined role of the Muses in the creation of song, the conflicting feelings of Eumaeus in Odyssey 14 and 17 (which are read as displaying an uncertainty about emotional authenticity and narrative truth), and the reactions of Odysseus to the Trojan songs of Demodocus in Odyssey 8. It is argued that there is no pure ‘poetics of truth’ in Homer and that both epics share an awareness of how the psychological effects of song vary according to particular contexts and audiences. Underpinning these variations is a sense of poetry as something that can touch deep needs and arouse a quasi-erotic desire for its expressive beauty.

This chapter discusses the origins of this book. The book takes its title from the hill of the Muses in ancient Boeotia and the spring located there, and also from an anthology of English poetry — the first of such — which appeared in 1600. The date and patriotic sentiment of the latter seems fitting, as does its intention of assembling a new whole out of apparently disparate fragments. The book is not a simple motif study of fountains in English Renaissance literature: it is, rather, an investigation of how literary fountains both inform and are informed by real fountains in early modern literature and culture and, more, what sort of modus legendi might be (re)formulated that would take account of the interpenetrations and elisions of the textual, visual, material, and experiential in early modern England. While its focus remains the literature of the late 16th century, this book recognizes that intertextuality and influence can be material as well as literary.

Petrarch is rarely seen as a poet of exile, but wrote exile poetry, not to secure his own recall, but on behalf of a greater cause: the restoration of the Roman Church to its ancient seat from Avignon. In a series of letters to successive pontiffs, Petrarch presents the case for returning the Holy See to Italy; this chapter examines how, in two of his metrical epistles addressed to Benedict XII (Epystole metrice 1.5 and 1.2), the humanist uses language and imagery from Ovid’s exile poetry to cast his personified Rome in the role of an Ovidian exile, and the pope as an Augustus-figure, distracted from the exile’s pleas by weightier business. The chapter also considers how Petrarch, through programmatic allusion and self-referential vocabulary, integrates these poems within his wider, Renaissance project of restoring the Muses to their place on Helicon ‘after long exile’.

This introductory chapter explains the rationale of the volume, which is not about music in the modern sense, but about mousike, that union of song, dance, and word to which the Muses gave their name. This book departs from the hitherto standard practice of examining the various components of mousike in isolation and investigates the significance of mousike as a whole in the social, religious, and educational practices of the polis. Focusing mainly on classical Athens, the chapters show that mousike and culture were deeply intertwined in the lives of the ancient Greeks.

This chapter examines the role of music in mystery cults. Looking at relationships between the Muses, Orpheus, Dionysus, and initiation rites such as those at Eleusis, it argues that choreia was an essential component in bringing about that contact with the divine which initiands sought. Also significant is the fact that Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses, plays an important part in the eschatology of mystery religions, thus establishing a link between immortality in Muse-inspired poetry and the blessed afterlife promised by initiation. The chapter further argues that mousike in such cults was understood to contain cosmic and eschatalogical symbolism through which the harmony of the cosmos could be revealed. Hence, poetic claims to divine wisdom inspired by the Muses should not be regarded merely as metaphor: the boundaries between the ‘sacral’ and the ‘literary’ were less clear-cut than is commonly supposed.

This chapter investigates the meaning of the Muses in Greek culture. Their sphere is mousike in general, but the activities over which they preside change over time. Their connection with poetry remains constant, but a crucial development took place when Plato appropriated them for the new discipline of philosophy, a prose art-form. Rhetoric, on the other hand, a self-styled techne, dispensed with the Muses, despite the early association of these goddesses with eloquence in Hesiod's Theogony. The process of differentiating between Muses and ascribing specific functions and attributes to each of them began to take shape in the Alexandrian era when collectively they represented paideia. But their significance varies in accordance with the prevailing art forms of different periods. Hence, in the prose-dominated centuries of the Second Sophistic, the absence of a relationship between the Muses and rhetoric becomes problematic.

The first chapter opens with a famous excerpt from Sartre’s La Nausée where the musical ‘object’ is positioned as resolutely independent of the material props upon which the reproduction of its sounding depends (the gramophone/record), whilst also mapping specific identities (the Jew and the Negress) and their attendant sufferings onto nothing more than its sounding. Thus Sartre, via Roquentin, highlights the way music seems to be both material and immaterial, mediated and autonomous, real and ideal, and deeply and viscerally human but also beguilingly transcendental. It develops this issues that arise from this well-known passage to sketch out some of the key issues in any thinking about music, introducing crucial tropes and associations as well as drawing on the musicological literature that has sought to deconstruct in critical and political ways what it is we mean (or often do not mean) when we think or speak about ‘music.’ Key considerations include music’s essence, definition and location, as well as its emotional and psychological impact (its effect and affective capacity more broadly), its similarities and differences with language, and the roles of composers, performers, listeners and, of course, technology, alongside music’s relationship to identity, society, culture and politics.

This chapter establishes the connection of philosophy and poetry. It argues that poetry and rhetoric are intertwined as components required for the presentation of philosophical ideas. It also introduces the Muses — the Greek deities of poetry, literature, music, and dance. Later on, the Muses became associated with astronomy, philosophy, and all intellectual pursuits. The chapter thus considers who the Muses are and what connection they have to philosophy and to philosophizing. Here, the philosopher seeks the knowledge of the Muses — of what was, is, and is to come — but the philosopher, unlike the poet, seeks this order not simply as a temporal “before and after” but as the Daughters of Necessity would have it, as an unvarying or necessary sequence whereby the whole of things is determined and the causes of all are known.

This chapter offers a philosophical commentary on Giambattista Vico’s notion of poetic wisdom (sapienza poetica), which forms a section of the New Science. Poetic wisdom is a wisdom of the senses that is presupposed by philosophic wisdom (sapienza filosofica), a wisdom of the intellect. In On the Study Methods of Our Time, Vico endorsed the need for proper education to be based on a wisdom of the whole. He argues that among the ancients a single thinker was a whole university, whereas among the moderns students are taught by various specialists without what is taught being governed by a vision of the whole. This chapter examines Vico’s two schemes in which to organize the fields of knowledge in their original poetic form: as a tree of knowledge and as the nine Muses. It also considers why Vico identifies the nine Muses with the nine sciences of his poetic tree of knowledge.

This chapter discusses the section on poetic metaphysics in Giambattista Vico’s New Science. Poetic metaphysics, being the source of poetic sciences, corresponds to the mother of the Muses—Mnemosyne or Memory. The full source is Mnemosyne and Jove, since it is through their union on nine nights that the Muses are born as their daughters. This chapter examines Vico’s articulation of the nature of the giants in the New Science as well as his list of seven corollaries or principal aspects of the new science that concludes the section on poetic metaphysics: the new science is a “rational civil theology,” a “philosophy of authority,” a“history of human ideas,” a “philosophical criticism,” an “ideal eternal history” of all the gentile nations, a “system of the natural law of the gentes,” and a science of “the principles of universal history.”

This chapter traces the pre-history of Western poetry as revealed in the two Homeric epics, which contain vivid representations of oral poets in archaic Greece performing epic poems to court audiences as well some other evocations of poetic song. By examining these representations, some conclusions are reached about the nature of the performances and the experience of the audiences. Although this verse was different in important ways from the poetry of later periods, notably in its association with music and the practice of composition-in-performance, the effects on hearers suggest a similar pleasurable response to its poetic art. The poems attributed to Hesiod from around the same time reveal a different performance context, that of the poetry competition, and imply a more sharply defined singer. The trope of the Muses in both poetic corpuses throws light on the role and perception of the poet-singer.