Introduction

Abstract

In his Metamorphoses Ovid mentions Mnemosyne only once, in the context of Arachne’s weaving in which she depicts, in competition with Athena, a number of Zeus’ indiscretions with women mortal and immortal: Zeus had taken Mnemosyne in the form of a humble shepherd.¹ Arachne is changed into a spider for her trouble, but the image of Mnemosyne, or Memory, as the mother of the Muses was a classical commonplace. Apparently there is justice in, and mythological precedent for, Mary Carruthers’ statement that “all art, at some basic level, must engage the procedures of human memory…”² The fullest classical account of the Mnemosyne’s bearing of the Muses can be found in the Theogony of Hesiod, where Zeus presents himself in Helicon to Mnemosyne, queen of the Eleutherian hills, as a shepherd taught by the Olympians. Zeus lies with her nine nights, and the nine Muses she bears combine civic and aesthetic virtues. Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry (one of the only two Muses mentioned by name in Ovid), is presented as having the highest standing, and her particular virtue is to smile on the just leader:

it is she who attends on the respected barons…

upon his speech, they make a distillation of sweetness³