American Journal of Medical Genetics 62:124( 1996)

Introduction: “Mythos and Logos in Hesiod‘s Theogony , Circa 700 B.C.”

Michael Sexson Montana State University, Bozeman, Montana

It is notable that at the beginning of the Theogony, Hesiod does not merely invoke the Muses, as does Homer in his two famous epics; rather, he evokes them, that is, makes them characters in his imaginative ac- count of the birth of the gods and goddesses. The muses of Hesiod are not abstract powers but flesh and blood realities who appear t o the shepherd as he tends his flocks on Mount Helicon, who actually speak to him and who pluck a branch of laurel to give to the astonished poet and who breathe into his mouth (shades of Yahweh in Hebrew scripture!) the power to speak divinely. The evocation of the muses in the Theogony is, properly, an epiphany, a revelation of the divine resulting in a reli- gious transformation. Previous to this encounter, Hes- iod had been nothing more than a shepherd of the field, a mere “belly.” Now he has become something wholly Other, a poet, one who knows how to tell lies that seem like truths but also one who knows how to speak the complete and absolute truth.

It is marvelous coincidence that the person to find- for our science haunted age-the truths in Hesiod’s lies (or is it the lies in Hesiod’s truths?) is named Euterpe Bazopoulou-Kyrkanidou. Dr. Bazopoulou-Kyrkanidou, obviously under the influence of her namesake, the muse of lyric poetry and flute-playing, detects beneath

Received for publication June 13, 1995. Address reprint requests to Dr. Michael Sexson, Department of

English, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT 59717.

the Hesiodic genealogies an astonishingly accurate tab- ulation of genetic concepts. Hesiod’s musings are, Dr. Bazopoulou-Kyrkanidou suggests, part of a larger pat- tern of empirically valid genetic observations traceable from the Homeric epics to the Greek playwrights and historians of the fifth and fourth centuries. The reason we have not seen the genetic patterns before is because we have been taught to regard poetic language as a mask rather than a revelation of the truth.

Dr. Euterpe Bazopoulou-Kyrkanidou, currently mas- querading as a member of the Department of Oral Pathology and Surgery in the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Athens, belongs with that small but growing community of scholars who resist making a radical distinction between the language of science and the language of poetry. Her work on genetic concepts hiding within the poetry of ancient genealogies may herald a new age of scholarship in which abstract invo- cations are supplanted by concrete evocations, and in which all human symbolic behavior may be seen as complicated polytropic narrative, the continuing story of who and what we are.

Who knows, after Dr. Bazopoulou-Kyrkanidou, it may be once again appropriate for everyone, even ge- netic researchers, to invokelevoke the muses, both at the beginning and at the end of their work.

0 1996 Wiley-Liss, Inc.