Hesiod and the Divine Voice of the Muses

The Muses atop Mount Helikon (line 10) and atop Olympos (lines 43, 65, 67) are said in the Theogony to sing, emitting a beautiful (ossa) "voice."¹ In 1915, T. L. Agar proposed that the term ossa used to describe the Muses' voice in Hesiod was "an innovation and importation of later times" because its usage was inconsistent with that of the Homeric poems. In particular, Agar noted that ossa in the Theogony is used to denote the clash of heaven and earth (701) and also one of the sounds Typhoeus makes (a bull bellowing, 833), which, at first glance, appear to have nothing in common with the voice of the Muses. By contrast, in Homeric poetry, ossa means "rumor, report" rather than "voice" and can be personified as Ossa, the Dios angelos, "messenger of Zeus." What Agar did not see is that the Hesiodic and Homeric ossa can be reconciled with one another at a deeper level of unity and that their convergence in meaning has important implications for Hesiod's Theogony. Agar does not consider, for example, that ossa in Hesiod is specifically a divine voice suitable only for divine beings and that it is not equivalent to, say, the audê, "human voice" that Hesiod says the Muses breathed into him (31). Nor, as the scholiast to Theogony 10 would have it, is it the case that "Hesiod calls every kind of voice [phônê] ossa,"² otherwise Hesiod himself should have been given an ossa by the Muses. I submit that there is more rigor to Hesiod's usage than Agar allows, and much more discrimination in the use of the term than the scholiast allows.

I propose to examine the attested usages of ossa in Hesiod, Homeric poetry including the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, and Pindar's Olympian 6 to show that archaic Greek poetry is consistent in its denotation of ossa and, further, that Hesiod's employment of ossa to describe the Muses conforms with their equivocal self-characterization in the Theogony at the famous couplet, lines 27–28, which scholars have discussed extensively.³ There has been at least one recent attempt to explain Hesiod's ossa,⁴ but no attempt has been made to connect it directly with the Muses' willingness to communicate "truth" or "lies" at Theogony 27–28. Yet precisely this equivocation is implied in the archaic Greek meaning of ossa.

It is well known that Hesiod's Theogony, and archaic Greek poetry in general, make the relationship between mortal poets and the divine Muses one of dependency and patronage.⁵ The poet (aoidos), like his counterpart the Muses, sings the songs of heroes and, most importantly, can be called the "servant" of or "ritual substitute" (therapôn) for the Muses themselves.⁶ Muses and mortal poets may even be said to be two reflections in archaic Greek poetry, divine and human, of a single poetic function.⁷ The dependency of the mortal poet on the divine Muses can be expressed metaphorically in poetry by having the poet instructed by the Muses. So we learn from Hesiod, for example, that he was taught song by the Muses (Theogony 22): , "[The Muses] who at one time taught Hesiod beautiful song."⁸ The phrase pertaining to poets, kalên edidaksan aoidên, "taught beautiful song" recalls an earlier line where Hesiod says that the Muses pass the night emitting lovely ossa, which up to this point I have been translating as "voice" (Theogony 10): , "By night, they would proceed emitting a very beautiful ossa." A certain parallelism of Theogony 10 and 22 would seem to lie in the notion that just as poets are taught kalên aoidên, "beautiful song" by the Muses, what the Muses themselves emit to the poet is a perikallea ossan, "very beautiful voice." In fact, the relationship between beautiful song and a beautiful voice is even more direct in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (442–43), which will be discussed later. However, as I shall argue in what follows, there is a sharp distinction to be made between the ossa of...