MUSAEUS OF ATHENS

“Orpheus and Musaeus,” says Plato’s Socrates, and the obvious question is “Musaeus Who?!” Everybody seems to know Orpheus, and of course Orpheus is unique. As for Musaeus, there were at least half-a-dozen of them, and for most of those who are familiar with the name, the best-known is hardly better known than the least-known of them. Yet Socrates says “Orpheus and Musaeus,” and so we are obliged to find out who the other one is, and this is what this entry is about.

The early Christian historian Bishop Eusebius (263-339 AD) presents us with this clever, but outrageously unreliable bombshell:

[The Pharaoh’s daughter] “…being barren, took a supposititious child from one of the Jews and called him Mouses (Moses): but by the Greeks he was called, when grown to manhood, Musaeus.”

Even though this connection to Moses is an obvious invention (Eusebius is also infamous for unabashedly faking Christian references in the shamelessly “redacted” manuscripts of Josephus Flavius), the importance of the phonetic connection between Musaeus and Moses is sufficient to bring our close attention to the real person of Musaeus, or Musaeus of Athens, as he is being called, to distinguish him from his namesakes.

In a short article on him, the Wikipedia introduces Musaeus as “a legendary polymath, philosopher, historian, prophet, seer, priest, poet, and musician, said to have been the founder of priestly poetry in Attica.” The significance of this introduction, particularly with the reference to Musaeus being a philosopher, makes it a necessity to qualify him as a bona fide pre-Socratic, although there isn’t much material in his case, to work with.

Regarding Musaeus’ relationship to Orpheus, Diodorus Siculus and Tatian are probably within the bounds of reason, one calling him Orpheus’ son, the other calling him Orpheus’ disciple. As usual, Eusebius succeeds in making the most ridiculous claim of all, calling Musaeus Orpheus’ teacher! (Sure thing: can you imagine Moses of the Bible being anything less than the teacher of the Greeks?!) On a more serious note, however, had Musaeus been indeed Orpheus’ teacher, he, Musaeus, rather than Orpheus, would have been the legend of the Greeks… A sort of argumentum ad legendam here, on my part.

Although we are utterly deficient in Musaeus’ authentic output, references to him are abundant in ancient Greek literature, and obviously Herodotus mentions him too. But for our purpose, it should be quite enough what the great Socrates says about him, according to Plato (see the earlier entry Socrates’ Company), which I cannot help repeating at the end of this entry:

“What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus, Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again.”

If Socrates, indeed, says this, and I see no reason to doubt Plato’s account, his testimony alone unquestionably secures Musaeus a niche of honor in this PreSocratica section.