The Silence of the Muse

Abstract

Homeric scholarship has tended to take the Muse at her word—she who is the daughter of Memory, the all-knowing, the keeper of tradition—or rather, more correctly, specifically not at her word, since she never speaks. But the Homeric Muse must speak: she must bring the words and knowledge of the epic past to the singer at the moment of performance and thus underwrite the relationship between the Homeric poet and the Homeric tradition. In the wake of Milman Parry, the general consensus that the Homeric poems are the product of a long performance tradition and yet are also to be read as literary texts has only made the Muse all the more important in her role as the mediator between the individual poem and its tradition. In what follows, I propose to examine the connection between the figure of the Muse and the presuppositions of Homeric scholarship. How is the way in which we understand the voice and the silence of the Muse linked to the ways in which we think about Homer and the Homeric tradition? Next to the voice and the silence of the Muse, which serves as an image of or an emblem for questions of origin, continuity, and authority in the Homeric tradition, the core of my argument is the concept of kleos, meaning “fame, glory, or rumour.” If kleos is what, in important ways, holds the Homeric tradition together—since kleos is what the hero wants and what the Homeric poet celebrates—then how we understand kleos is intimately connected with how we understand the Muse. It is possible, although I do not think anyone does this, to bring together Muse and kleos in a very literal configuration and say that the Muse conveys the kleos of the hero to the poet who celebrates him, thus guaranteeing the continuity and authority of the Homeric tradition with the Muse as its origin. Against this configuration of Muse, kleos, and tradition, we might raise the most basic and most trivial objection: “Sing of the wrath,” says the poet of the