greek and roman mythololgy

Mnemosyne

kings and poets receive their powers of authoritative speech from their possession of Mnemosyne and their special relationship with the Muses. zeus, in a form of a mortal shepherd,[] and Mnemosyne slept together for nine consecutive nights, thus conceiving the nine muses. Mnemosyne also presided over a pool in hades, counterpart to the river lethe, according to a series of 4th-century BC Greek funerary inscriptions in dactylic. Dead souls drank from lethe so they would not remember their past lives when reincarnated. In orphism, the initiated were taught to instead drink from the Mnemosyne, the river of memory, which would stop the transmigration of the soul.

Although she was categorized as one of the titans Mnemosyne did not quite fit that distinction. Titans were hardly worshiped in ancient greece, and were thought of as so archaic as to belong to the ancient past. They resembled historical figures more than anything else. Mnemosyne, on the other hand, traditionally appeared in the first few lines of many oral  —she appears in both the lliad and the odyssey, among others—as the speaker called upon her aid in accurately remembering and performing the poem they were about to recite. Mnemosyne is thought to have been given the distinction of "Titan" because memory was so important and basic to the oral culture of the Greeks that they deemed her one of the essential building blocks of civilization in their creation myth.