Mnemosyne

Titaness of memory and the personification of recollection in the archaic poetic imagination — the faculty without which song could not transmit the deeds of gods and heroes across generations. Hesiod opens the *Theogony* with the Muses descending from Helicon and tells how Zeus lay with Mnemosyne in Pieria for nine consecutive nights; in the tenth year she bore the nine sisters who patronise every art.