#61 Sun (8/21/22) - [OW] Gone to Boeotia

I encountered the phrase "I too have been in Boeotia..." in the Forward to Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi by Bioy-Casares and J.L. Borges.  The Forward was "written" by Gervasio Montenegro, who is in fact, just a character in the H. Bustos Domecq stories.  I did not immediately get the reference, but recalled, perhaps because I had just been reading about the Sphinx, that seven-gated Thebes is in Boeotia and that is where the scene of Oedipus takes place.  That reference did not seem apt, but this one, {below} remarking upon Hesiod encountering the Muses there, fits.  

How subtle these clues, how like a labyrinthine mind, in which references divers and divergent lie ready at hand to be deployed so casually. Without the internet, these gems would have been arduous to track down. I can with a flick of the finger, translate any passage from Greek, Latin, German, French, Spanish, scour libraries for learned references, read pages from books published in the 1600's or the manuscripts of Opicinus de Canistris, consult a translation of the Deipnosophistae or De Situ Orbis of Solinus. It is truly like living inside the mind of Borges made both real and virtual.

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Hesiod and the Muses

Born in Cyme, Hesiod was an ancient Greek philosopher, poet, and part-time farmer. He wrote the all-too familiar poems Theogony and Works and Days during his life and his work contributed to religious customs, astronomy, and economics after his death. 

In the tale, Hesiod claimed to have come across the multi-talented nine goddesses in Boeotia while he was shepherding sheep near Mount Helicon. He had gone to Boeotia which, according to his piece Works and Days, was “a cursed place, cruel in winter, hard in summer, never pleasant,” to visit his aging father.

Based on Hesiod’s account, the Muses presented him with a laurel staff, which established the man as one who wielded poetic authority and mastery. It is after this divine interaction that Hesiod felt inspired to write his most famous work, Theogony, thus abandoning his life as a meager merchant’s son in favor of one full of poetry and lifelong creative ventures.



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