Mnemosyne

A name that is also a word

Mnemosyne is a Titan, one of the older gods who held power before the Olympians. Her name is also the ordinary Greek word for memory. In the early Greek poet Hesiod’s roll of the children born to Gaia, the earth, and Uranus, the sky, Mnemosyne stands between her sisters Themis and Phoebe, and Kronos is born last of the whole brood.

She has almost no story of her own. Hesiod does not place her on either side of the war that set the Titans against the Olympian gods. She appears twice in his poem and acts in neither place: once in that birth catalogue, once in the catalogue of the women Zeus, the son of Kronos, lay with. Outside Hesiod she appears as the mother of the Muses and in a rite on one hillside in Boeotia, a district of central Greece.

The nine nights in Pieria

The birth of the Muses, the nine goddesses of song, is the one event the sources give her. At the opening of his poem Hesiod puts her in Pieria, a district in the north of Greece, and says she reigns over the hills of Eleuther. Zeus came to her there, to a holy bed set apart from the other immortals, and lay with her for nine nights. When a year had passed, the seasons had come round and the months had waned, she bore nine daughters, all of one mind, their hearts set upon song, a little below the topmost peak of snowy Olympus. Hesiod calls them a forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow.

He comes back to her later in the same poem, in the roll of the unions of Zeus, and states the outcome in one line: Zeus loved Mnemosyne of the beautiful hair, and the nine gold-crowned Muses were born of her.

Two lists of the Titan daughters

The ancient lists of the Titans do not quite agree. Hesiod’s catalogue of the children of Earth and Heaven runs Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe and Tethys, with Kronos last. Apollodorus, an ancient compiler of the myths, lists the daughters on their own: Tethys, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Dione and Thia. Mnemosyne holds her place in both. Dione holds a place in one, and Hesiod does not count her among these daughters at all. Neither list says anything about Mnemosyne beyond her presence in it.

Mnemosyne’s water at Lebadeia

At Lebadeia in Boeotia, the modern town of Livadia, the river Herkyna runs through a deep gorge with abundant springs on both sides of the valley. The grove of the oracle of Trophonius stood apart from the city, divided from it by that river. Modern descriptions of the site put the oracle itself in the gorge upstream of the town.

Pausanias, who travelled Greece and wrote down what he was shown, describes what a man did there before he went down. He drank one water so that he would forget everything he had been thinking of until then, and a second so that he would remember what he saw below. English renderings call these the water of Forgetfulness and the water of Memory, which turns two names into two nouns. The Greek has their names: Lethe, forgetting itself, in the first, and Mnemosyne in the second, each in the possessive. Whether the two were separate springs or one spring taken twice, the account does not settle.

The throne on the way up

The second half of the rite names her again. When the man came back up, the priests took hold of him and set him on a seat standing not far from the inner shrine, and asked him there everything he had seen or learned. In the Greek that seat is the throne of Mnemosyne. Pausanias says he was paralysed with terror and unconscious of himself and of his surroundings, and that his relatives then lifted him and carried him to the building where he had lodged before. He recovered afterwards.

So the goddess stands at both ends of the descent. Her water goes down with the inquirer so that he will remember what he sees, and her seat receives him when he comes up, where the priests ask him to tell it.

Honoured first in the Hymn to Hermes

Her daughters’ side of the office shows in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, an anonymous early Greek poem about Hermes, the son of Maia. Hermes has stolen the cattle of the god Apollo, and he takes the lyre on his arm and plays it to soften him. Apollo laughs for joy at the sound. Hermes then sings the story of the deathless gods and of the dark earth, how they first came to be and how each one received his portion. The first god he honours in that song is Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses, and the poem gives the reason in the same breath: the singer was of her following.

Mnemosyne among the statues in Athens

Pausanias also saw her as an image. In Athens, he says, the god Dionysus had a precinct where the Athenians called him Melpomenus, the Minstrel, on the same principle as they called Apollo the Leader of the Muses. There he records images of Mnemosyne and of the Muses, an Apollo that was the votive offering and the work of Eubulides, and figures of Zeus and of Athena under the title Paeonia, the Healer. The notice runs to a single sentence in his walk through the city, and of that group only the Apollo carries the name of its maker.