The Muses

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?

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Paul Cartledge 22 episodes
  Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture and AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge
• Angie Hobbs 25 episodes
  Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy, University of Sheffield
• Penelope Murray No other episodes
  Founder member and retired Senior Lecturer, Department of Classics, University of Warwick

Reading list

• The Muses and their Afterlife in Post-Classical Europe
  Kathleen Christian, Clare Guest and Claudia Wedepohl (eds.) (Warburg Institute, 2014) Google Books →
• A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics
  Pierre Destree and Penelope Murray (eds.) (Wiley Blackwell, 2015) Google Books →
• Theogony
  Hesiod (trans. M. L. West) (Penguin Classics, 2000) Google Books →
• Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical Athenian City
  Penelope Murray and Peter Wilson (eds.) (Oxford University Press, 2004) Google Books →
• Iliad
  Homer (trans. E. V. Rieu) (Penguin Classics, 2014) Google Books →
• Odyssey
  Homer (trans. E. V. Rieu) (Penguin Classics, 2009) Google Books →
• Early Socratic Dialogues
  Plato (trans. Chris Emlyn-Jones and Trevor Saunders) (Penguin Classics, 2005) Google Books →
• Phaedrus
  Plato (trans. C. J. Rowe) (Penguin Classics, 2005) Google Books →
• Laws
  Plato (trans. Trevor Saunders) (Penguin Classics, 2005) Google Books →
• Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Literature
  Efrossini Spentzou and Don Fowler (eds.) (Oxford University Press, 2002)

Related episodes

• The Artist
  
  28 Mar, 2002 700 Arts
• The Greek Myths
  
  13 Mar, 2008 290 Other religions
• Greek and Roman Love Poetry
  
  26 Apr, 2007 880 Classical and modern Greek literatures
• The Metaphysical Poets
  
  3 Jul, 2008 820 English and Old English literatures
• Mathematics and Music
  
  25 May, 2006 780 Music
• Sappho
  
  9 Apr, 2015 880 Classical and modern Greek literatures
• Imagination
  
  28 Nov, 2002 150 Psychology
• Aristotle’s Poetics
  
  27 Jan, 2011 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Paganism in the Renaissance
  
  16 Jun, 2005 940 History of Europe
• Bohemianism
  
  9 Oct, 2003 700 Arts

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: b07bft7v

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07bft7v

Auto-category: 800 (Literature and rhetoric)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

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.