The Muses

In Our Time: Philosophy

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2016

⏱️ 45 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Muses and their role in Greek mythology, when they were goddesses of poetry, song, music and dance: what the Greeks called mousike, 'the art of the Muses' from which we derive our word 'music.' While the number of Muses, their origin and their roles varied in different accounts and at different times, they were consistently linked with the nature of artistic inspiration. This raised a question for philosophers then and since: was a creative person an empty vessel into which the Muses poured their gifts, at their will, or could that person do something to make inspiration flow? With Paul Cartledge Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture and AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge Angie Hobbs Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy, University of Sheffield And Penelope Murray Founder member and retired Senior Lecturer, Department of Classics, University of Warwick Producer: Simon Tillotson Image: 'Apollo and the Muses (Parnassus)', 1631-1632. Oil on canvas. Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665).

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about in our time, and for our terms of use please go to BBC.co.uk.
0:08.0	UK slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program.
0:11.0	Hello, the Muses have been associated with creativity and inspiration for 3,000 years even before the time of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
0:19.0	The poet Hesseau writing around 700 BC tells us that there were nine of them, that they were the daughters
0:24.6	of Zeus and of memory and that they were the ones who inspired him and gave him the right
0:29.4	to compose his verse. Their names and numbers changed but consistently the muses became a way to explore the relationship
0:35.6	between the poet or creative imagination and inspiration. Did the poets and other thinkers
0:40.5	have to join the muses at their home on Mount Helicont to be inspired?
0:44.0	Could they do anything to make themselves open to inspiration?
0:47.0	What's the role of memory, the mother of the muses, in creativity?
0:51.0	We'd me to discuss the muses are Angie Hobbs, professor of the public understanding of philosophy at the University of Sheffield.
0:57.0	Penelope Murray, founder member of the Department of Classics and retired senior lecturer University of Work, and Paul Cartilage,
1:04.1	a Marietje Leavantis senior research fellow at Claire College University of Cambridge.
1:10.3	Paul Cartilage.
1:11.3	We're reaching back to prehistory here. How deep are the roots of the muses in Greek mythology?
1:15.3	Obviously deep, but so far as the ancient Greeks go, our earliest evidence, written evidence, is of course Homer and Heseod, and we're going to come back to them more than once.
1:25.0	But their etymology, the words, the names which Heseod is the first to give the individual nine muses
1:32.0	are thought to be Indo-European and those of you who believe
1:35.1	in Indo-European ism as a sort of generic term will say that well perhaps they go back
1:40.5	as far as you said 3,000 years in your introduction which if my maths are right
1:45.0	that's to about 1,000 BC well some would say they go actually back even further than
1:49.3	a thousand BC but Homer is the result of a long, long Bardic tradition, which is totally oral,
	...

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