Amreeta Das
UG III
Roll 31
Dept of English
I want to begin by posing a simple question: Did the oral poet believe in the Muses? However, far from being able to formulate a conclusive answer, I want to examine the ways in which the relationship between the oral poet’s method of composition and the belief in divine intervention can be approached. I will be looking at the representation of the Muses in the Iliad and the Odyssey in detail but before doing so, it is important to enumerate the all the possible sub-questions which need to be addressed in order to answer the larger question of belief. Some of these questions would be as follows:
- Who is an oral poet in late 8th century Greece and how did he come to compose the kind of poems he did, that is, superbly long and richly detailed songs, qualifications (i.e. of length and complexity) which has baffled Homeric scholars for the longest time?
- What sort of deities are the Muses and how were they worshipped in archaic Greece?
- What was the relationship between worship of the Muses and the training of the oral poet and what about the nature of belief and ideas of divine inspiration can we infer by examining this relationship? (note: disjunction between the representation and actual belief etc.)
- Within the poems, when do the Muses appear and could that indicate the nature of belief in the Muses outside the text?
Before proceeding to answer these questions, I want to qualify the term ‘belief’. Religious belief is undoubtedly not easy to define in general terms. Like many words, the term ‘belief’ is used loosely to indicate a variety of affective alignments. But across these, one impulse we associate with the use of the word ‘belief’ is a sense of conviction which exceeds mere rationalization or justification. The word has an emotional aspect to it which partakes of a kind of immutability, and this particular flavour of the word lends itself to utterances as varied as “I believe in a God” and “I believe in Human Rights”. Clearly these two statements don’t mean the same thing because they use different methods of justification and are founded upon different axioms. As far as the method through which both these statements are made, it would seem as if the two words would mean different things. They do not share the same nature of conviction. But it is the affective force of the word, its association with a sense of emotional excess, a firmness exceeding logical reasoning that makes the word easily applicable to a variety of statements belonging to wholly different categories of utterances. And what is often difficult to address is that the word is often used to explain convictions which the speaker claims to be unanalysable or exceeding the analytical categories available to us to ascertain the meanings of sentences. In debates about opposing claims, it is precisely in this manner that the word is often used, to identify axiomatic differences, or to claim that it is not possible to argue beyond this. The protean nature of the terminology infects claims made about religious belief as well. That is why when someone utters the statement “I believe in the existence of so and so supernatural deity/force” it is not a simple statement of conviction. It is important to assess what the nature of this claim is in the given time and place and in the particular religious culture within which this statement is uttered, this person’s other opinions about the meaning of life and morality, this person’s way of enacting or not enacting her beliefs.
Keeping all these concerns in mind, Tim Crane in his book “The Meaning of Belief From An Atheist’s Point of View”(quite contrary to the title, Crane is critical of popular atheistic understanding of religion and tries to look at what ‘belief’ means in practical terms, what are those aspects of a religious life which are adequately described by this word) identifies the following features of religious belief: 1. It should be systematic, by which I mean that religious belief should not only involve a vague sense of the spiritual or the transcendental but it should include a collection of ideas or narratives which are designed to fit together. 2. Religious belief should be practical, in that, it does not only include the belief in propositions or doctrines but also acting in a particular way, which could either be through participation in rituals collectively or individually and performing a set of actions directed towards other people, such as codes of behaviour and practices of morality or charity. 3. Religious belief should attempt to find meaning in human life. 4. Religious belief should appeal to the transcendent, i.e. to an Unseen Order which is responsible for organizing the world in a certain way. An essential element of the belief in the transcendent might involve the conviction that the way in which the Unseen Order operates in the material world is unknowable by human beings. So the belief includes in its ambit an element of mystery which reinforces the strength of the Unseen Order. [i](Crane 6-8)These are very broad principles and not all of them could be easily applied to the particular case of the Muses. This issue will be further explored in the section where I attempt to identify what sort of deities were the Muses.
We cannot hope to establish a direct correspondence between genuine belief in divine intervention and the claim made in the invocations. While some scholars like W.W Minton seems to suggest that the invocations were necessitated solely by traditional structure of the poems themselves, that is, they were tools in the bag of the oral poet,[ii] Penelope Murray suggests that belief in divine inspiration is not incompatible with the formulaic nature of the invocation and affirms that the oral poets genuinely believed in the Muses.[iii] (Murray, 90) While I agree with Murray’s point, I would say we cannot make either assertion simply by looking at the invocations within the texts themselves. And here I would like to present an important qualification. It is important to distinguish between the way divine inspiration is represented in the epics, what the representation intimates about the nature of the poet’s relationship with the Muses and the way these claims were understood by the oral poet and his audience in the scenario of actual performance. This latter understanding will refer to things outside the text, for it is unlikely that even a highly pious audience would believe in divine intervention in exactly the way it is represented in the text. Transactions between the way a particular thing is represented and the way it operates under practical circumstances is seldom easy. I am not trying to suggest that this indicates a lack of belief. But the texture of belief would be different, and it has to be assessed in the shared knowledge between the poet and his audience of the way the songs were produced and what the audience knew about the oral poet’s training. This distinction might not be consciously evident to the oral poet and his audience and due to the paucity of empirical evidence the inferences would be highly conjectural. Despite these methodological gaps however, I think we ought to remember this difference.
- Training of the oral poets
The work of Milman Parry with the living oral poetic tradition of Yugoslavian singers[iv] and his analysis of the formulaic epithets used by Homer firmly established that the two epics belonged to a predominantly oral tradition. His research was backed by empirical insight into the process of training that an oral poet in an existing tradition received. A.B Lord, who published a modified version of Parry’s work in “The Singer of the Tales”[v] states that one of the most important conceptual breakthroughs achieved by Parry’s work was fixing notions of memory, text and its transmission which had baffled Homeric scholars for the longest time.
Lord explains the three-stage process through which the oral poet received his training. (Lord, 21-25)
- In the first stage, he would sit beside the elder singers of the community. Before he begins to sing, this long period of listening would lay the foundation. He would be learning stories and become acquainted with the names of Heroes, faraway places and the habits of long ago. While the themes of poetry become familiar to him, he would be imbibing the rhythm of the thoughts as they are expressed in the songs. The oft-repeated phrases or formulas would slowly be absorbed.
- The second stage begins when he opens his mouth to sing. The first difficulty he encounters is to fit his thoughts into the formulaic constraints of the form. Lord adds “We must remember that the oral poet has no idea of a fixed model text to serve as his guide. He has models enough, but they are not fixed and he has no idea of memorizing them in a fixed form. Every time he hears a song sung, it is different.” He characterizes this second stage as that of imitation, when the singer simply learns the formulas of the trade. He passes this stage when he is able to perform a complete song before a critical audience.
- In the last stage of the training, the repertory of the singer increases and the singer is more and more deftly able to manipulate the length of the song, creatively assimilate themes and formulas and his training comes to an end when his repertory is large enough for him to sing for several nights.
James A. Notopoulos[vi] terms this as the ‘creative’ use of memory as against the static use,(468-471) which he mainly characterizes with the second stage of training, when the singer is learning the techniques of the song. In Hesiodic myths Mnemosyne is the mother of the Nine Muses and according to Vernant [vii]she is a deity in the Greek pantheon who directly represents a psychological function.(Vernant, 115) Notopoulos reads the sacral status of Mnemosyne, as a Titan Goddess, as a reflection of the importance of Memory in an oral culture and quotes Marcel Jousse, who described men in primitive Greek society as ‘mnemotechnicians’. (Notopoulos, 467)The importance of memory in an oral culture should be too obvious to require explanation. But what should be kept in mind is that this importance or the almost sacral nature of Memory should not be interpreted necessarily as that of a culture anxious of losing its sense of the past or forgetting its literature due to the absence of writing. Lord emphasizes that this anxiety of loss with reference to a more fixed, permanent method of preservation would be more in a culture, where the hierarchy of written over oral has already been established. Among the oral bards, they would not have been anxious of forgetting their songs, as long as the bardic tradition continued. In a community where the written has not been recognized as the carrier of tradition, Mnemosyne would be worshipped for reasons different than what we would assume with our notion of memory founded upon the written text.
In a short digression I would like to point out why Lord is of the opinion that we probably should not apply the word ‘improvisation’ to explain the transmission of these songs because our concept of improvisation is founded upon a notion of the fixed text which then gets transmitted through alterations and modifications. But in the tradition of the oral narrative songs, there is no such thing as a fixed text or even the need to fix a text by the carriers of this tradition. When we think of oral poets with our notions of literary composition which is shaped by written literature, the picture we have of the epic poet is often of a cruder version of the literary poet, someone who is in some rudimentary stages of literary development and who is also carefree or indifferent to preserving the songs in his repertory because of his backward state of thinking. Against this assumption, we have the idea of a slightly developed oral poet, who is at the cusp of becoming a written poet, who realizes the importance of fixing his text in order to prevent it from being forgotten. But as Lord shows, this understanding is fundamentally flawed at several levels. Firstly, the composition of oral poetry is determined by years of training and the experience of living in a culture where the person grows up listening to stories rendered in songs, each of which varies every time they are sung. The performance of the song is not different from the moment of creating the song. By virtue of living in this culture, the person learns formulas and formulaic expressions while he listens to elder singers singing, he also learns similar themes rendered in different ways. By the time he is grown up enough to begin performing on his own, he has a complex structure of formulas and themes, similar themes rendered in different ways through small changes in detail, similar songs heard from different singers with different kinds of emphasis on different thematic moments. This is a large complex of elements, all mingled in his mind and reinforced as he tries to perform on his own, first in front of his friend, or in a private gathering. Every time he sings a song he had learnt from his teacher, he will subtly change details of the themes, expand on narrative moments, apply formulas differently, and all this happens not because he wants to consciously depart from the way he has heard the song from his elders but because he does not try to rote learn the song he hears from his master at all. Despite the traditional oral singer considering himself as a carrier of tradition, someone who would avowedly claim that the song he is singing, is quite rightly, one simply he has learnt from his teacher, the wide variations between the versions between a teacher and student, or between two singers when one of them sings the same song in the span of a day, aptly demonstrates that his idea of his creative dependence on his teacher is not by any sense a complete or deterministic one. By virtue of growing up in the tradition, he is already a repository of multiform versions of the same themes and formulas. When he hears a specific application of them in the song of a teacher or a fellow singer, he does not attempt to reproduce it verbatim.
The invocations to the Muses that we find in Homer, falls under the category of the formulas. The formulas used by oral poets were not static phrases which were merely transmitted through the tradition with minimal change. Lord defines them as the “offspring of the marriage of thought and verse. Whereas thought in theory at least, maybe free, sung verse imposes restrictions varying in degree of rigidity from culture to culture, that shape the form of thought”.(Lord, 31) The complex of themes and patterns almost forms a separate language, and just like the rules of language produces thoughts under constraints, so does this language, where following the rules and adhering to structures of themes and patterns do not undermine the creative effort of the individual.
- So, how who were the Muses and how were they worshipped?
There is some scholarly agreement regarding the association of the Greek word “mousa” with the ideas of memory or reminding. The Muses are associated functionally and genealogically with the act of remembering and the first genealogical explanation of this is derived from Hesiod, who presents the Muses as the daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne,[viii] even though competing genealogical accounts exist. In Homer and Hesiod the Muses also feature as part of the retinue of the greater Olympian deities. They dance and sing near hills, springs and in the festivities of Zeus at Olympus. The Muses belong to the class of nymphs, who occupy a large spectrum of functions but are almost always associated with pleasure, music, dance, fertility and sensual power. This picture of the Muses is very evident in the epics. They sing and mourn the death of Achilles and they dance in the festivities at Olympus. The Muses were essentially cultic entities, worshipped along with the other vast number of nature deities.[ix] Sanctuaries of the Muses have been excavated at Mt.Helikon in Beotia, Thrace, Lydia, Lykia and Sicily.(Larson, 8) For the purposes of the present discussion, what must be considered is the aspect of worship and its link to divine inspiration which brings us to the concept of nympholepsy. Many of the sanctuaries mentioned above probably functioned as oracular sites, often for common people who could not afford the votive gifts that a site like the Oracle of Delphi would demand. A good example is the Korykian cave of the nymphs at Delphi. Around 23,000 astragaloi, or knucklebones of goats and sheep have been excavated from the site. The objects would serve the dual purpose of votive gifts and tools of divination, used much like the way in which Tarot cards are used now.(Larson, 11) Nympholepsy is a broad term which refers to a heightening of awareness and elevated verbal skills due to the influence of a nymph on a susceptible individual. Oracles inspired by nymphs circulated in verse collections under the name of Bakis which does not so much refer to a single individual as much to a separate class of prophets.(Larson, 12) From the archaeological evidence, what can be discerned is that nymph sanctuaries were primarily local in nature, and the specific texture of belief would differ based on the information on such cults we have about Homer’s purported location in Ionia. H Versnel[x] thinks that one of the reasons poetry and prophecy were identified was because both were delivered in verse.
However, since the Muses were worshipped as cultic entities across Greece, tied to broader practices of nymph-worshipping, what can be said with a degree of certainty is that the Muses were not solely personified deities of poetic inspiration. This is an important qualification, since the boundaries between personified abstract forces like Luck, Strife, Eros and the lesser Olympian deities are always porous. The issue of personification is especially important in the present discussion because, as Walter Burkert[xi] points out the oral poets were responsible for giving a more palpable shape to some archaic Greek personifications. Due to the pressure of poetic convention, the oral poets treated them as anthropomorphic beings in conformity with the grammatical gender of the abstract nouns, mostly as young maidens. Therefore these abstract concepts functioned as mediators, receiving personal and mythical elements from the Gods and in turn giving the Gods part in the conceptual order of things.(Burkert, Greek Religion, 236) As Emma Stafford[xii] argues that given the extremely nebulous nature of the substantiality of personified abstractions, it is the fact of cult observation which can provide a degree of certitude about whether such a figure was worshipped as a full blown deity.(Stafford, 72) It could easily be assumed that the Muses were a fuller version of the personification of creativity but it is not so because the Muses feature in their traditional cultic and mythological function in the texts.
It is also important to consider the general culture of worship in Greece which would give us some insight into the way, on an everyday basis they looked at themselves in relation to their Gods. Joseph M. Bryant[xiii] is of the opinion, that the Greeks lacking an organized hierocratic class of people who were responsible for shaping the theological attitude of the citizens and the cultic enterprises were primarily controlled by the lay citizenry. That is why Greek religious life remained embedded in the traditional practices of ritualism and magic, the basic aims of which were utilitarian.(Bryant, 270-273) This is not to suggest of course that their religious beliefs were weaker or less firmly rooted because they did not have a coherent theological grounding. They believed in religion in the way thousands of other people connects to religion on an everyday basis. This practical and calculating ritualism was the basis of all everyday mass religiosity. The sanctuaries are proof that the Muses were the deities of regular worship.
But within the poems they are also more than the deities, they figure as points of transition in the narrative, and from what we know about an oral poet’s method of training, it is unlikely that he invoked the Muses at those points for some extra power or force because he was going to change the course of the story. What seems more likely to me is that the invocations were used as traditional strategies to mark turns in the story but their status is complicated by the inset stories of Demodocus and the punishment of Thamyris, who was punished by the Muses for boasting that he could rival them. I would argue, that in the epics the Muses occupy an uncertain place between the cult figure and its use as literary device which partakes of the idea of personification. This tension between the status of the Muses in the invocation as traditional and their larger religious significance runs throughout the epics.
3. This brings us to the third question; how are the poets related to the Muses? J.P Vernant in his essay “Mythic Aspects of Memory and Time” discusses the sacral functions of Mnemosyne as a cult figure. Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, was worshipped in the brotherhoods of poets and prophets. “Poetry represents one of the typical forms of divine possession and madness, the state of “enthusiasm” in the etymological sense of the word. “The poet through being possessed by the Muses, is the interpreter of Mnemosyne, just as the prophet, through being inspired by Apollo is the interpreter of the God.”(Vernant, 116-117) This association of the poet and the prophet is premised upon the idea of knowledge, of the past and future, both of which are unavailable to ordinary mortals. Mantic frenzy, therefore becomes a way of establishing the truthfulness of this otherwise unavailable knowledge. This association is the primary trope through which the lives of the poets are mythologized. However in the light of the information we possess about the way oral poets received their training, it is important to distinguish between the way they were popularly imagined to have communicated with the Muses and the way they actually believed in the Muses. This distinction is evident in the epics themselves, as I later argue, that the Muses in many places are primarily associated with the craft of song rather than with knowledge. A young aspiring oral poet would most likely visit the sanctuaries of the Muses to offer prayers or participate in cultic rituals if he belonged to a group of poets who did so. H.P Versnel’s study “Faith Hope And Worship” studies the everyday religious attitudes of antiquity through votive inscriptions, oracular tablets and magical lead plates found near the oracular sites. In his opinion, many of the epithets of Gods found in the epics evolved from the problems of offering prayers in a polytheistic system. He says that in order to formulate a prayer “one had to know the name of the god and the precision could be increased by way of a defining predicate. It is perfectly possible that this was one of the manners in which the series of epithets in epic poetry denoting place and function originated.”(Versnel, 14-15) The oral poet’s consciousness would also be embedded in narratives of mythic and semi-mythic poet-prophet figures like Orpheus and Epiminedes who underwent various kinds of mantic possession and had direct and exclusive access to divine knowledge. Intervening in all this would be the way he listens to and learns the songs from the older members of the community. The training would involve singing parts of the same songs again and again, first before private gatherings and then as the oral poet matured in his craft, before larger public gatherings. In this context, the nature of the invocations as exclusive personal prayers would inevitably wear off as their ritualistic reference to the cultic status of the deity would be intervened by a number of other interests related to the production of the song.
In the popular imagination even though the poets and prophets are clubbed together as similarly inspired creatures, I would argue that despite the association between the poets and the prophets, they are members of distinct communities with very different functions. Even if the audience believed after a fashion that the poets were capable of being seized by divine frenzy, that belief would be fundamentally different from the way they believed in the word of the prophets. This difference results from the nature of expectation the audience would have from the oral poets and the poets’ awareness of that expectation along with how much the community already knew about the stories that the oral poets sung about. Like, the two bards Phemius and Demodocus curiously sings about the Trojan War and the return of the heroes, stories which are not even remote in the memory of the audience of the bard. So the praise bestowed on Demodocus is that of skill, of being able to describe the experiences of the heroes without being there himself and especially being blind. The content of the songs sung by the epic poets would not be exclusive or novel. These stories would already be collectively known by the community of audiences. This knowledge crucially alters the notion of the kind of knowledge that the poet promises to offer. As, Penelope Murray points out that it is wrong to assume that all kinds of appeals to the Muses were of a mantic nature and this is especially evident in Homer.
4. In the two epics there are three categories into which the representation of the Muses can be divided:
a. Direct invocations by the narrative voice of the epics, where they are invoked at different points as events unfold.
b. Muses invoked by characters of bards within the stories.
c. Stories about the Muses, where they either feature as lesser deities at Olympus or perform other characteristically ritualistic activities.
Here I want to mainly discuss categories b and c. I argue that if we have to infer anything about the poet’s belief in the Muses, we have to find the complex of myths and cultic practices through which both the lives of the poets and their connection to the Muses were imagined. Here, I give a very brief and by no means an exhaustive argument as to why I would not be looking at category a. The direct invocations occur for about seven times in the Iliad and only once in the Odyssey, in the opening invocation. Critics like Penelope Murray argue that the reason is clear if we look at the moments at which the Muses are invoked in the Iliad. They are almost always invoked before catalogues or lists of some sort, the kind of knowledge which puts a great strain on memory.(Murray, 91) Such lists are more or less absent from the Odyssey and hence the invocations do not occur there.
But I want to read Murray’s argument in the context of the analysis furnished by Lord of the two epics. The invocations and the lists are traditional associations which may or may not be based on a once genuine appeal made before such catalogues. According to Lord, every part of the song is related to every other part through a complex structure of thematic strategies, inversion, mirroring, stories drawing elements from other folk narratives, vestiges of ritualistic practices and so on. Given what we already know about the first stage of training of the epic poet, the lists and genealogies of the names of heroes would be one of the first things the young child would learn to memorize, not verbatim of course, but enough to re-render them in his own song. By the time he is an established singer, it is unlikely that he would genuinely need to summon the Muses and include that summoning in the narrative, for lists and inventories he has been learning and singing of for ages. But it is likely that he uses these invocations because they are traditionally associated with these catalogues. As they stand in the epic, the invocations are literary devices, tied firmly to the structure of the poem, through both formulaic and thematic forces. W.W Minton provides a detailed analysis of the way all the invocations in the Iliad follow specific patterns.(Minton, 293-294) But we cannot conclude from here that the appeals to the Muses did not refer to any genuine belief because, the Muses compellingly reappear in other parts of the narrative through a series of interconnected stories.
The manners in which the Muses appear in the epics outside the direct invocations are linked to myths of the dying-poet, dying-hero and ritual lamentation, all of which are connected to cultic practices and rituals. However, the relationship between myth and ritual is not a very forthright one. According to Walter Burkert,[xiv] “myth is a traditional tale applied; and its relevance and seriousness is largely derived from its application.” This applied aspect of the myth is what distinguishes it from other traditional stories like folk tales. But this application is not a direct one. Burkert says that it is always ‘partial’ since tale and reality will never be quite isomorphic. These myths are fundamentally the verbalizations of a complex reality, and this verbalization is utilized by a collective.(Burkert, Structure and History, 23) They help individuals to come to terms with the way their individual lives interact with social institutions, often deal with recurring events like death, loss, warfare or other important commonly shared changes in life like puberty, menstruation, pregnancy etc. So at the base of myth lies a basic human experience. Ritual, on the other hand, is “stereotyped action redirected for demonstration’’. Which means, that there is always an ‘as if’ aspect in a ritual. For example, a ritual involving lamentation would involve the participants imagining as if someone had actually died. Myths can be told and retold without rituals and not all myths have corresponding rituals. But a myth and a ritual can share a symbiotic relationship and help sustain each other because, the “apparent nonsense inherent in redirected activity” the as if element, can be given context through a myth. Whereas, a myth can be stabilized and preserved through a ritual, because a ritual is always based on a fundamental anxiety which lends it a degree of seriousness.(Burkert, Structure and History, 56-57)
The complex of Phemius-Demodocus-Thamyris in the two epics are connected to myths of the lives of poets and the elevation of the dead poet to a Hero cult. Linked to this are also rituals of sacrifice associated with the figure of the Pharmakos or scapegoat, someone who is killed or sacrificed to purify or salvage the society in a certain way and then in certain cases in the aftermath of the rituals the victim is given cult figure posthumously. All the bard-poet figures in the epic are linked to each other through these mythical associations.
In the Odyssey, the episode of Phemius and Demodocus are connected through strategies of inversion and mirroring. The point at which the story begins to be narrated is when Odysseus leaves Calypso’s island and lands in Phaecia as a stranger. This is also the point at which Telemachus is prodded by Athena to search for Odysseus. The song of Phemius occurs in Book one and Demodocus appears in Book Eight.
In Book One of The Odyssey[xv], we first get to see Phemius, who is coerced to entertain the guests
A herald placed an ornate lyre in Phemius’ hands,
The bard who always performed among them there;
They forced the man to sing.(Fagles, Lines 178-180)
Naturally, no Muses are mentioned here because Phemius is a pathetic figure, a sorry version of the lofty Demodocus. About two hundred lines later, Phemius is seen singing again and this time the content of his song is mentioned, “he performed The Achaean’s Journey Home from Troy”(Line, 375) and this stirs Penelope into tears and she cries out “But break off this song—/the unendurable song that always rends the heart inside me…/the unforgettable grief, it wounds me most of all!”(Lines, 387-388) Even though the song moves Penelope, at this point, all hint we have of the Muses inspiring the bard is through the phrase “inspired strains”. Phemius is one of the few men who are spared by Odysseus later when he embarks on his revenge killing spree. It is interesting but not surprising that the content of the songs sung by Phemius and the other bard who appears in the Phaecian King Alcinous’ court is almost the same. They narrate different parts of the Trojan War. But that his strains are qualified as ‘inspired’ could suggest that he was a skilful bard, enough to move Penelope to tears, again directly mirroring Odysseus’ reaction to the song of Demodocus. One notices a neat pattern. Phemius, who is part of the intruding guests, moves Penelope to tears by singing about the return of her husband’s fellow warriors. The absence and her state of confinement torments her. In the Phaecian court, Odysseus is a foreigner, but unlike the intruding guests, he is someone who is being received hospitably by Alcinous. Hospitality against the cruel subversion of hospitality is thrown into focus by the appearance of the two bards and their near identical songs.
But what is most striking, is the content of their song. Here both the bards don’t seem to sing about the distant and remote past, which is only accessible through divine intervention. They are singing about events which happened twenty years back. The stories would have been told and retold by returning soldiers or singers in the Greek army. In fact, the bards seem to stir the main characters to tears by intensifying their present pain, and their recent misfortunes. The mystical knowledge of the past that Vernant talks about, for which the Muses or Mnemosyne needed to be invoked seems to be absent. Why do they sing about the recent past instead of the remote? Could we assume that this was one of the earliest stages of a new story being rendered into song? The content of the song seems to affirm Murray’s argument that bards in the Odyssey are not transported by mystical rapture into the past; they do not get exclusive visions or passively subject themselves to the Muses for inspired knowledge. In fact, it seems that here the Muses are mentioned solely with respect to performative skill; the ability to sing well, whatever is sung.
Demodocus is almost the opposite of Phemius and he plays a crucial role in the disclosure of Odysseus’ identity. The first time Demodocus appears he is described in these words:
“Call in the inspired bard
Demodocus. God has given the man the gift of song,
To him beyond all others, the power to please,
However the spirit stirs him to sing.”(Book Eight, Lines 51-53)
This traditional association establishes the importance of Demodocus’ importance in the unfolding of the narrative and here the mention of the Muses, a given fact, seems to certainly belong to the formulaic ways of introducing important characters. I argue that the Muses are specifically mentioned here and not in the case of Phemius not only because the latter was performing under coercive conditions but also because Demodocus is more important to the narrative and to Odysseus’ final return to Ithaca. The narrator also introduces the theme of the blind bard as:
….the faithful bard the Muse adored
Above all others, true, but her gifts were mixed
With good and evil both: she stripped him of sight
But the gave the man the power of stirring, rapturous song (Book Eight, Lines, 73-75)
Blindness and second sight is an important thematic element which ties together prophets and poets. Homer’s life itself is mythologized through the trope of blindness. It is not clear however why Demodocus was struck blind, since in the only other place in the Iliad[xvi] where the Muse appears as a punishing Goddess, the reason is made clear:
Next the men who lived in Pylos and handsome Arene.
Thryon. the Alpheus ford and finely-rnasoned Aepy,
men who lived in Cyparisseis and Arnphigenia.
Pteleos, Helos and Dorion where the Muses met
the Thracian Thamyris, stopped the minstrel’s song.
From Oechalia he came, from Oechalia’s King Eurytus.
boasting to high heaven that he could outsing the very Muses,
the daughters of Zeus whose shield resounds with thunder.
They were enraged, they maimed him, they ripped away
his voice, the rousing immortal wonder of his song
and wiped all arts of harping from his mind. . (Book Two, 685-693)
It seems that that Demodocus’ blindness has something gratuitous about it; the Muses were almost making him pay the price of his skill. The famous deeds of the fighting heroes that the Muses inspire to sing, moves Odysseus to tears and leads Alcinous to suspect that he is not what he claims he is. The final revelation of Odysseus happens when he himself pays tribute to the bard and proclaims “From all who walk the earth our bards deserve/esteem and awe, for the Muse herself has taught them/ paths of song. She loves the breed of harpers.”(Book Eight, Lines 538-540) And further, he is overwhelmed by Demodocus’ ability to render the sufferings of the heroes so real:
…How true to life,
All too true…you sing the Achaean’s fate,
All they did and suffered, all they soldiered through,
As if you were there yourself or heard one who was. (Book Eight, Lines, 548-550)
Odysseus’s praise however should not be taken to mean that the he actually believed that the Muses transported Demodocus to the scene of battle, or that his ability to render this so vividly is due to some rapturous experience. This is a very familiar register of praise for verisimilitude.
Thus in the accounts of these poets the figure of the Muse emerges here primarily as a Goddess who improves the technique of singing. She is not explicitly associated with the content of the song at all. She oversees the craft of song and inspire the bards to sing better or sing with greater effect. This function is clearly not the same as the function that the Muses seem to perform in the invocations in the Iliad. Consider the most important and long drawn invocation before the catalogue of the ships:
Sing to me now, you Muses who hold the halls of Olympus!
You are Goddess, you are everywhere, you know all things—
All we hear is the distant ring of glory, we know nothing—
Who were the captains of Achaea? Who were the kings?
The mass of troops I could never tally, never name,
Not even if I had ten tongues and ten mouths,
A tireless voice and a heart inside me bronze,
Never unless your Muses of Olympus, daughters of Zeus
Whose shield is rolling thunder, sing, sing in memory
All who gathered under Troy. Now I can only tell
The lords of ships, the ships in all their numbers. (Book Two, Lines, 573-583)
Here the crucial role played by the Muses is to enable the poet to enumerate the impossible, to remember and represent a stupendously long genealogy. Book 2 has three other instances of such invocation before smaller lists. The Muses are attributed a hyperbolic omniscience and omnipresence which otherwise does not feature in the other invocations. However, this is not to suggest that these two functions are incompatible. Creative use of memory is as much a part of the skill of an oral poet as the ability to produce proper emotional response. I am merely pointing out this distinction to suggest that the way the Muses are invoked in the Iliad seems to be different from the way the Muses are represented in the Odyssey even with respect to other bardic figures. This gestures towards a more functionally heterogeneous meaning of belief, which is further enriched by the network of mythical stories through which the Muses appear in the epics.
Coming back to the Phemius-Demodocus complex, Phemius is shown mercy by Odysseus when he pleads for his life by presenting himself as receiving divine favour:
“I hug your knees, Odysseus —mercy! spare my life!
What a grief it will be to you for all the years to come
if you kill the singer now, who sings for gods and men.
I taught myself the craft, but a god has planted
deep in my spirit all the paths of song —(Book Twenty Two, 363-367)
Demodocus-Phemius stories are connected to the myths and legendary stories about the lives of poets. One important pattern is the punishment of the poet either directly by the Muses or by Apollo or some other Olympian deity, due to his pride or desire to rival the Muse. Phemius is of course almost punished by the returning Hero. The punishment is often followed by the elevation of the mythical poet to cultic status.[xvii] For instance, Marsyas who was a satyr, a semi bestial creature in some accounts, is an important mythical precedent to the legends of the Greek poets. In his myth the hero is explicitly the victim of the Muses. Marsyas, having found the pipes which Athena had thrown away because they disfigured her face, engaged in a musical contest with Apollo. They agreed that the victor should work his will on the vanquished and when the trial took place Apollo turned his lyre upside down in the competition and bade Marsyas to do the same. But Marsyas could not, so Apollo was judged Victor and killed Marsyas by hanging him on a tall pine tree and stripping off his skin. Later accounts from Ovid tells us that the lamentations of the fauns, satyrs, nymphs, shepherds, and rustics produced such an enormous amount of tears that the river Marsyas results and finally Apollo ends up possessing the lyre of Marsyas. Pausanias also says that the Phrygians “repelled by the army of the Gauls by the aid of Marsyas, who defended them against the Barbarians by the water of the river and the music of his flute.”(Compton, 166) Both details strongly suggest hero cult being awarded to the story. Thus a pattern emerges, the singer receiving the instrument from a Goddess, rivalling Apollo himself in making beautiful music, resulting in a competition, trial followed by punishment and death by the God, leading eventually to the possession of the instruments of the slain poet which had initially led to enmity, by the God. Thamyris is a somewhat frustrated example of this pattern even though is completely maimed by the Muses but not entirely killed thereby blocking the possibility of him receiving cult status.
Connected to this theme of punishment is the mourning of Achilles by the Muses. Achilles too is somewhat a poet figure in the Iliad:
…and they found Achilles delighting his heart in a lyre, clear sounding
Splendid and carefully wrought, with a bridge of silver upon it,
Which he won out of the spoils when he ruined Etion’s city (Book Nine, Lines 224-226)
Later traditions bring together other cultic functions, that of inventor of the art of lyre, healer and mantic, in the picture of Achilles. But in the Iliad itself, he chooses to die young, avenging Patroclus. And Apollo, the God he resembles so closely guides the arrow which kills him. Pindar represents Achilles’ hero cult as connected with the Muses: (Compton, 174)
Even in death, songs did not leave him
But, standing beside his pyre and his grave, the maidens
Of Helikon let fall upon him their abundant dirge
Even the immortals were pleased to bestow a brave man, though he was dead, the
Song of goddesses.
In Odyssey, the Muses mourn his death and the song stirs communal mourning among the Greek army:
And the Muses, nine in all, voice-to-voice in choirs,
Their vibrant music rising, raised your dirge
Not one soldier would have seen dry-eyed,
The Muses’ song so pierced us to the heart. (Book Twenty Three, Lines 64-67)
Thus, the death of Achilles and the manner of his mourning resembles the way poets are killed by Apollo and then raised to hero cult status. Not surprisingly Achilles was singing about the deeds of heroes, the stuff of what Demodocus, Phemius and perhaps even Thamyris sung. The inset stories about the Muses seem to share a complicated relationship with the Muses of the invocations.
When I pointed out that the Muses seem to be performing different functions, within the same context, they are sometimes being invoked as supreme possessors of knowledge and sometimes being associated purely with the craft of song, I am not trying to suggest that any of these functions are incompatible. In fact, in a polytheistic system, deities accrue functions, through the way they are worshiped in specific localities. So functional incompatibility is not the issue here. Another interesting question would be, how did the belief in the Muses or the oral poet’s specific concept of the divine with respect to his craft, feature in his moral life? In what ways did it influence his relationship with fellow poets or determine other principles or injunctions within the group. I am not sure where I can begin looking for these answers but they would definitely give great substance to understanding the stuff of belief. All this is of course conjecture since we know very little about the mental life of people in archaic Greece.
As mentioned in the introduction, this is by no means an exhaustive study of the categories explored above but I have tried to demonstrate the ways in which the question of belief can be approached. The features of religious belief that I have outlined in the beginning can be more or less found in the picture of the Muses that emerges. There is a systematic and complex set of myths surrounding the Muses, found both in literary texts and other forms of artistic representations. There is some evidence of cult worship of the Muses, and these deities help the oral poet link his craft to other aspects of his mental life. But clearly, this is far from any conclusive picture. The study would require accumulating extensive archaeological evidence about specific rituals performed in the sanctuaries, and would demand an extensive thick description of the religious culture of the oral poets. I have merely laid out the outlines of this method. These stories uncover competing myths surrounding the relationship between the poets and the Muses. Using the definition of myth by Burkert, at the base of these stories about the Muses lie multiform experiences; the inability to understand the origins of creativity, conflicting notions of technique and the role of Gods in the lives of men, anxieties surrounding the loss of memory, the need to classify and organize data within narratives. What emerges is a more or less systematic set of stories, in which Muses appear to be sharing a family resemblance of actions, powers and associations. What we can say, not with a great degree of certainty, is that the oral poet found his imagination negotiating all the above factors while growing up in the community of the bards. His image of himself is definitely not a simple one, that of the servant of the Muses. The lived experience of performance along with the circulating myths about the lives of the poets, the cult status attributed to some mythical poets, along with the particular ways in which his own community conceives of the divinity in relation to their technique, would together constitute what could perhaps in the absence of better explanatory term called ‘belief’.
[i] Crane, Tim. The Meaning of Belief: Religion From An Atheist’s Point of View. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2017.
[ii] Minton, William W. “Homer’s Invocations of the Muses: Traditional Patterns.” Transaction and Proceedings of the American Philological Associations, Vol. 91, 1960, 292-309
[iii] Murray, Penelope. “Poetic Inspiration in Early Greece.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies. Vol. 101, 1981, 87-100
[iv] Parry, Milman. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Edited by Milman and Adam Parry. New York, Oxford University Press, 1971.
[v] Lord, Albert. The Singer of the Tales. Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1971.
[vi] Notopoulos, James A. “Mnemosyne in Oral Literature.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Associations, Vol. 69, 1938, 465-493
[vii] Vernant, Jean-Pierre. Myth and Thought Among the Greeks. New York, Zone Books, 2006.
[viii] The Works of Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns. Translated by Daryl Hine. London, University of Chicago Press, 2005.
[ix] Larson, Jennifer. Greek Nymphs: Myth, Cult, Lore. New York, Ooxford University Press, 2001.
[x] Versnel, Straten, H.S, F.T Van. Faith, Hope And Worship: Aspects of Religious Mentality in the Ancient World. Edited by H.S Versnel. Netherlands, E.J Brill, Leiden, 1981.
[xi] Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Translated by John Raffan. USA, Blackwell Publishing, 1985.
[xii] Stafford, Emma. “Personification in Greek Religious Thought and Practice.” A Companion to Greek Religion. Edited by Daniel Ogden. USA, Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 71-85
[xiii] Bryant, Joseph.M. “Intellectuals and Religion in Ancient Greece: Notes on a Weberian Theme.” The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 37, No. 2, 1986. 269-296
[xiv] Burkert, Walter. Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual. London, University of California Press, 1979
[xv] Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles. England, Penguin Books, 1996
[xvi] Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York, Penguin Books, 1990
[xvii] Compton, Todd. A. Victim of the Muses: Poet as Scapegoat, Warrior and Hero in Graeco-Roman and Indo-European Myth and History. Hellenic Studies Series 11. Washington D.C, Centre for Hellenic Studies, 2006.
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