Musaeus of AthensMusaeus of Athens (Greek: Μουσαῖος, Mousaios) was a legendary polymath, philosopher, historian, prophet, seer, priest, poet, and musician, said to have been the founder of priestly poetry in Attica. He composed dedicatory and purificatory hymns and prose treatises, and oracular responses. LifeA semimythological personage, to be classed with Olen, Orpheus, and Pamphus. He was regarded as the author of various poetical compositions, especially as connected with the mystic rites of Demeter at Eleusis, over which the legend represented him as presiding in the time of Heracles.[1] He was reputed to belong to the family of the Eumolpidae, being the son of Eumolpus and Selene.[2] In other variations of the myth he was less definitely called a Thracian. According to Diodorus Siculus, Musaeus was the son of Orpheus,[3] and according to Tatian he was the disciple of Orpheus. Others made him the son of Antiphemus, or Antiophemus, and Helena.[4] Alexander Polyhistor, Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius say he was the teacher of Orpheus. In Aristotle[5] a wife Deioce is given him; while in the elegiac poem of Hermesianax., quoted by Athenaeus (xiii. p. 597), Antiope is mentioned as his wife or mistress. The Suda gives him a son Eumolpus. The scholiast on Aristophanes mentions an inscription said to have been placed on the tomb of Musaeus at Phalerus. According to Diogenes Laërtius he died and was buried at Phalerum, with the epitaph: "Musaeus, to his sire Eumolpus dear, in Phalerean soil lies buried here." According to Pausanias, he was buried on the Mouseion Hill, south-west of the Acropolis,[6] where there was a statue dedicated to a Syrian.[7] Attributed worksHerodotus reports that, during the reign of Peisistratus at Athens, the scholar Onomacritus collected and arranged the oracles of Musaeus but inserted forgeries of his own devising, later detected by Lasus of Hermione.[8] The mystic and oracular verses and customs of Attica, especially of Eleusis, are connected with his name. A Titanomachia and Theogonia are also attributed to him by Gottfried Kinkel.[9] We find the following poetical compositions, accounted as his among the ancients:—
Aristotle also quotes some verses of Musaeus in Book VIII of his Politics: "Song is to mortals of all things the sweetest." but without specifying from what work or collection. William Smith noted a theory that the Musaeus who is named as the author of the Theogony and Sphaera was a different person from the legendary bard of the same name, but he suggests that there is not any evidence to support that view. The poem on the loves of Hero and Leander is by a very much later author, known as Musaeus Grammaticus.[7] Legacy
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