Mnemosyne: Why Memory Is the Mother of the Muses

The Muses had a famous father, Zeus, but in many ways their mother tells you more about them. Her name was Mnemosyne, and it means Memory. The ancient Greeks made the goddesses of song the daughters of remembering.

This guide looks at who Mnemosyne was in the oldest sources, why the pairing of memory and poetry made sense, and how the idea of Memory as a goddess turned up in places far from poetry: an underground oracle, a philosopher's thought experiment and a tiny gold tablet now in the British Museum. Ancient texts are quoted from public-domain translations, with the translator named.

Who Mnemosyne was

In Hesiod's Theogony, quoted here from Hugh G. Evelyn-White's 1914 translation, Mnemosyne belongs to the older generation of gods. Earth "lay with Heaven" and bore a group of children that includes "Themis and Mnemosyne and gold-crowned Phoebe and lovely Tethys," along with Cronos, "youngest and most terrible of her children." In other words, Memory belongs to the generation before Zeus: she is a sister of his father, Cronos.

Hesiod then tells how she became the Muses' mother: "Them in Pieria did Mnemosyne (Memory), who reigns over the hills of Eleuther, bear of union with the father, the son of Cronos." Zeus lay with her for nine nights, and after a year she bore "nine daughters, all of one mind, whose hearts are set upon song." Near the end of the poem, Hesiod repeats it in his list of Zeus's unions: "he loved Mnemosyne with the beautiful hair: and of her the nine gold-crowned Muses were born."

Later poets kept the link. In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, also in Evelyn-White's translation, the god Hermes sings the story of the gods to Apollo, and "first among the gods he honoured Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses, in his song." The Roman poet Ovid, in Brookes More's 1922 translation of the Metamorphoses, simply calls the Muses "those Mnemonian Maids."

Why memory and song belong together

The early poems themselves suggest why. Consider what an epic singer was asked to do. In the second book of the Iliad, before a long list of the Greek commanders and their ships, the poet stops to pray. In Samuel Butler's translation: "And now, O Muses, dwellers in the mansions of Olympus, tell me—for you are goddesses and are in all places so that you see all things, while we know nothing but by report—who were the chiefs and princes of the Danaans?"

He adds that he could not name the ordinary soldiers "though I had ten tongues," unless the Muses "were to recount them to me." The poet presents himself as someone who must remember more than any human can, and who therefore depends on goddesses who saw it all. Daughters of Memory are exactly the helpers such a singer would need.

Hesiod describes the Muses' song in the same terms of time. They sing "of things that are and that shall be and that were aforetime." When they inspire Hesiod, they breathe into him a voice "to celebrate things that shall be and things there were aforetime."

The paradox: Memory's gift is forgetting

Here is the most interesting twist. Hesiod says Mnemosyne bore the Muses as "a forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow." And he describes what happens when a grieving man hears a singer, "the servant of the Muses," chant the deeds of the past: "at once he forgets his heaviness and remembers not his sorrows at all."

So the children of Memory bring forgetfulness, at least of pain. The song remembers the past so the listener can, for a while, let go of the present. It is a useful idea to keep in mind when you read Greek poetry: remembering and forgetting are presented as partners, not opposites.

Mneme: Memory as a Muse herself

Not every tradition made Memory only the mother. The travel writer Pausanias, in W. H. S. Jones's 1918 translation, reports a local story from Mount Helicon: the first people to worship the Muses there "held that the Muses were three in number, and gave them the names of Melete (Practice), Mneme (Memory) and Aoede (Song)."

That list reads almost like a description of how a performer works: practice, memory and song. Pausanias says a later figure, Pierus, "established nine Muses, changing their names to the present ones." The two versions disagree about the number, but both put memory at the heart of the Muses' work.

The waters of Memory

Memory also appears as something you could drink. At the oracle of Trophonius near Lebadeia, which Pausanias says he consulted himself, an inquirer was led to two springs. "Here he must drink water called the water of Forgetfulness, that he may forget all that he has been thinking of hitherto, and afterwards he drinks of another water, the water of Memory, which causes him to remember what he sees after his descent."

After the descent, priests set the inquirer "upon a chair called the chair of Memory" and asked what he had seen or learned. "What I write is not hearsay," Pausanias insists. "I have myself inquired of Trophonius and seen other inquirers."

A similar pairing appears in an object you can still study. The British Museum holds a small gold tablet in a pendant case, found at Petelia, with a Greek text guiding its owner to the underworld. The museum describes the inscription as warning "the soul not to drink from a particular spring in Hades, but to seek one by the Lake of Memory." The museum dates the tablet to the 3rd to 2nd century BC and the case to the Roman imperial period.

A philosopher's version

Plato used Mnemosyne in a thought experiment about how we remember. In the Theaetetus, in Benjamin Jowett's translation, Socrates asks us to imagine "a block of wax" in the mind. "Let us say that this tablet is a gift of Memory, the mother of the Muses," he says, and that we remember "what is imprinted as long as the image lasts; but when the image is effaced, or cannot be taken, then we forget and do not know."

It is a long way from Hesiod's hillside, but the family tree is the same: Memory is still the mother of the Muses.

Key takeaways

• Mnemosyne, whose name means Memory, is in Hesiod a daughter of Earth and Heaven and the mother of the nine Muses by Zeus.
• Epic singers presented themselves as needing the Muses because humans "know nothing but by report."
• Hesiod's paradox: Memory's daughters bring "a forgetting of ills" to listeners in grief.
• A local tradition on Helicon, reported by Pausanias, named three original Muses: Practice, Memory and Song.
• Waters of Memory appear at the oracle of Trophonius and on a gold tablet in the British Museum.

Sources

• Hesiod, Theogony, and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, in Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (1914), Project Gutenberg eBook #348
• Homer, The Iliad, trans. Samuel Butler, Project Gutenberg eBook #2199
• Pausanias, Description of Greece 9.29, trans. W. H. S. Jones (1918), Perseus Digital Library
• Pausanias, Description of Greece 9.39, trans. W. H. S. Jones (1918), Perseus Digital Library
• Plato, Theaetetus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Project Gutenberg eBook #1726
• Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 5, trans. Brookes More (1922), Perseus Digital Library
• The British Museum, Gold tablet in pendant case from Petelia (1843,0724.3)