lemmatizing: ἔσπετε νῦν μοι Μοῦσαι Ὀλύμπια δώματ' ἔχουσαι
In this verse, which can be translated ‘tell me now, you Muses who have your dwellings on Mount Olympus’, we see a rhyming of … Mousai, situated before the primary mid-verse word-break, with … ekhousai, situated before the verse-final word-break. Such rhyming is rare and archaizing. (On archaic patterns of rhyming in early Greek poetry, see Nagy 1974:99–101.) On the poetics of re-invocation here, there will be more to say in the comments on I.02.761, Ι.11.218, I.14.508, I.16.112. For now, it suffices to observe that the re-invocation of the Muses here at I.02.484 pictures these goddesses in the plural, by contrast with the singular Muse who had been initially invoked at I.01.001. There will be another invocation of the singular Muse at I.02.761, to be followed by invocations of plural Muses at Ι.11.218, I.14.508, and I.16.112. In the case of each invocation, there is a heightened level of poetic self-awareness about the importance of what is about to be narrated. Here at I.02.484, for example, the Master Narrator shows his concern about the need for accuracy in re-creating a comprehensive catalogue of essentially all the cultural ancestors of the Greek-speaking world. On other occasions of re-invocation, there will be comparable poetic concerns, as we will see in comments still to come.