Note 18 — INTRODUCTION

Can anyone really suppose that it is only by chance, only by a trick of fancy such as may occur in the elaboration of a fairy-tale that the Muses who “celebrate in song first of all the reverend race of the gods from the beginning, those whom Earth and wide Heaven begot, and the gods sprung of these, givers of good things.... And again ... chant the race of men and strong giants ... [and] sing the laws of all and the goodly ways of the immortals,”—can anyone really suppose, I say, that it is merely by chance that the Muses are said to have been the daughters of Mnemosyne (Memory)? See Hesiod, Theogony, 43–67.