Is anyone who moves the plot on or makes a plan a figure of the Muse? Much hangs on equivocation between the two meanings of ‘plot’. This seems to me an interesting and useful way of thinking about the Argonautica and about gender and epic poetics in general however, the evidence in the text for a metapoetic level underpinning the different plots seems thin. She argues that Medea can be viewed as a dangerous yet vulnerable Muse to Jason as poet figure who steals control of the plot from Apollo (and Apollonius?). Spentzou’s own chapter on Apollonius (‘Stealing Apollo’s Lyre: Muses and poetic ἆθλα in Apollonius Argonautica 3′) is suggestive but not to this reviewer entirely convincing. There is clearly more mileage in the discussion of how the Muses are re-used in the radically different context of dramatic performance. The writing is so dense that it is not clear what in the end she is arguing for overall (although the individual parts use the figure of the Muse for a stimulating insight into the poetics of Greek drama). ‘Re-inscribing the Muse: Greek Drama and the Discourse of Inspired Creativity’ has much more to surprise and excite: truth and lies, gender, initiation and ritual all take a bow, but Ismene Lada-Richards’ offering suffers from the constraints of space. There is a fair amount of overlap between the two chapters without any real sense of a dialogue between them. poetry, she explores the representation of the Muses in the Ion, the cave and the Phaedrus. admirably opens up the issues which will dominate much of the book.Ĭhapters two and three, both on Plato and the Muses, differ most distinctly in style: while Penny Murray’s ‘Plato’s Muses: The Goddesses that Endure’ is a succinct and tightly written survey of Plato’s games with ‘mousike’, comparing the Muses and the Sirens, arguing that Plato’s innovation is to appropriate the Muses for the prose genre of philosophy, Adriana Cavavero’s ‘The Envied Muse: Plato versus Homer’ is much more diffuse and slightly repetitive. This is lively and exciting writing throughout, even when performing the more workaday business of the editor’s introduction, if occasionally characterised by slightly bizarre English. The chapter finishes with a description of the project (‘seeking to surprise and open to surprises’) and summaries of the chapters. These new Muses are complex and vivid characters, lacking confidence and authority but taking on a human reality. She resists the idea that the story of the Muses is ‘the history of a fading metaphor’ and shows how Roman poets produce innovative and exciting new versions, looking at Ovid Metamorphoses 5, Catullus 68, Virgil’s Sibyl and Lucan’s Phemonoe. I will deal with each contribution individually below.Įfi Spentzou’s introduction (‘Secularizing the Muse’) begins from Hesiod and Homer and traces the development of the Muses through a narrative of increasing rationality in Greek society and autonomy of the poet (incorporating a useful survey of secondary literature). The book has a bias towards Latin and poetry (perhaps inevitably), and it is not always quite clear how individual essays are actually about the Muses (Ronnie Ancona’s in particular makes less effort to tie itself in), but whether looked at as a whole or as a collection of parts, this is an important book with many individually important essays. As well as being a thorough survey of the different incarnations of the Muses, it is a valuable exploration of the poetics of many different authors. This stimulating, coherent and wide-ranging collection of essays resulted from a conference at Oxford in 1996 and engages with the Muses as used and abused throughout Greek and Latin literature, exploring issues of gender, genre, power and inspiration from a variety of perspectives. If this book has a Muse, it is the continuing presence of Don Fowler as inspiration in the study of classical literature (a male muse, incongruously given the concern with gender throughout the essays). Declaration of interest: John Henderson was my doctoral supervisor.
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