ABSTRACT
GREEK MYTHOLOGY CELEBRATES MNEMOSYNE, THE GODDESS OF memory, as the mother of all art. She bore the nine muses to Zeus.1 Centuries after the origin of this myth, Plato banned poetry, the child of memory, from his ideal state as being idle and seductive. While lawmakers, generals, and inventors were useful for the common good, the fact that Homer was nothing but a wandering minstrel without a home and without a following proved how useless he was.2 In the Odyssey the voices of the Sirens tempt Ulysses:
For never yet hath any man rowed past This isle in his black ship, till he hath heard The honeyed music of our lips, and goes His way delighted and a wiser man. For see, we know the whole tale of the travail That Greeks and Trojans suffered in wide Troy-land By heaven's behest; yea, and all things we know That come to pass upon the fruitful earth.3
