The First Poet to Say Who Gave Him the Song

The Theogony opens on Helicon. Hesiod says the Muses found him tending sheep on the mountain, addressed him with an insult about shepherds being bellies and nothing else, told him they knew how to speak both falsehoods that resemble the truth and the truth itself when they chose, gave him a staff of laurel and breathed a divine voice into him. It is the earliest surviving passage in Greek where a poet names himself and states where his authority comes from.

Jenny Strauss Clay has drawn attention to how little reassurance the scene actually offers, since the Muses announce their capacity to lie in the same breath as their gift, and the poem that follows is therefore presented as divinely given without being guaranteed. That is an unusual claim for a religious text to make about itself, and it has occupied readers of Hesiod ever since. The location is not incidental. Helicon carried a sanctuary of the Muses in the valley below the peak, with an altar, a theatre and, in the historical period, a festival called the Mouseia at which poets and musicians competed for prizes. A mountain associated with inspiration therefore also had a functioning cult with priests, a calendar and an administration, and the two are the same institution seen from inside and from outside.