Cirrus@Austlit

'A central curiosity of the Western tradition, rooted in Greek thought, is the habit of invoking the muse or muses at the inauguration of a work. Who were or are the muses? What do we know about them and how are we to understand them today? Homer speaks indiscriminately of the muse and the muses and doesn't name them; Hesiod says they are nine, naming all, though without giving them the specific attributes common only since the Renaissance, and is explicit about just one, Calliope, whose name means 'beauty of voice' (Skarsouli 2006: 212). The nine, he says, are the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, or memory - one of those 'abstract ladies' (Kirk 1974: 118) of Greek thought.' (Author's abstract)