Content area
Full Text
An analysis of the functions of the Muses in early Greek poetry cannot begin with a conventional literary textual analysis. Although both the Homeric epics and Hesiod's Theogony are literary works, their inspiration and composition lie in a nonliterary tradition. The transformation from performance-based composition to purely textual literary composition radically affects the relationship between the reader and the composition. Therefore, to understand fully the narrative functions of the Homeric and Hesiodic invocations of the Muses, our analysis must extend back beyond the text into the realms of oral poetry.
1
The three Muses' as the inspiring deities of song provide the oral poet on a basic level with the eloquence and ability to sing.2 An analysis of the nature and degree of this form of divine intervention will illustrate to what extent the Muses are narrative devices and to what extent they are constructed as divine characters. The references to the Muses in Homer take the form of traditional verbal formulas.3 Apart from Iliad 1 and 2 all the references to the Muses introduce them with the same repeated formulaic pattern: 'Tell me now, you Muses who have your homes on Olympos' (7/. 11.218; 14.508; 16.112).4 These techniques of oral-formulaic composition allowed the bard time in performance to recall to mind and collate formulations for the forthcoming passages of the song. This fact becomes crucial to our understanding of the Muse reference when we observe that this formulaic invocation precedes some of the longer and more complex catalogues and listings in the Iliad. When the bard needed to remember these lists, he called on the Muses' assistance:
Tell me now, you Muses, who have your homes on Olympos
For you, who are goddesses, are there, and you know all things,
and we have heard only the rumour of it and know nothing.
Who then of those were the chief men and the lords of the Danaans?
I could not tell over the multitude of them or name them,
not if I had ten tongues and ten mouths, not if I had
a voice never to be broken and a heart of bronze within me,
not unless the Muses of Olympia, daughters
of Zeus of the aegis, remembered all those who came beneath Ilion.
...