Invocation, the Mouseion and the Word Museum

A Greek poem does not begin with the poet. It begins with a request that the Muse sing, or tell, or bring the account to the singer, and the request is not decoration. It transfers the burden of truth: what follows is offered as knowledge received rather than as something the speaker worked out. That is why Hesiod has the Muses tell him on Helicon that they know how to say many false things resembling the truth, and also how to speak the truth when they choose. The formula survives long after anyone believed it literally, through Virgil and Dante to Milton, and its persistence is a fair measure of how much authority a poet was willing to disclaim in order to be believed.

Their places were real. Helicon in Boeotia held a sanctuary with the spring Hippocrene and a contest; Pieria in Macedonia gave them the name Pierides; Parnassus and the Castalian spring at Delphi tied them to Apollo, who leads their chorus under the title Musagetes. A mouseion was a shrine to them, and the word came to name a place where learning was housed under their protection. The Mouseion at Alexandria, founded under the early Ptolemies beside the library, gave a salaried community of scholars meals, quarters and a priest, and it is the ancestor of both the modern museum and the endowed research institute. Music carries the same root. Two of the most ordinary words in the modern vocabulary of culture are, etymologically, the property of nine goddesses.