Momus

Momus (also Momos) was the personification of blame, censure and mockery in Greek mythology. Hesiod lists him among the children of Night, and later writers make him the god who finds fault with everything, even with the work of the gods themselves.

Family

In Hesiod’s Theogony (lines 211–225) Night, though she lay with none, bore him, “Blame”, together with Misery (Oizys), Nemesis, Deceit, Old Age and Strife, among others. He is therefore a brother of Sleep and Death, and of Strife and Nemesis. His name means “blame” or “censure”. Cicero, listing the children of Erebus and Night in Latin, calls him Querella, Complaint (On the Nature of the Gods 3.17).

The Fault-Finder

In a fable of Aesop (Perry 100), Zeus, Prometheus and Athena each made something — a bull, a man and a house — and asked Momus to judge. Momus found fault with all three. The bull’s eyes, he said, should have been below its horns so that it could see where it struck. The man should have had a window in his chest so that his thoughts could be seen. The house should have had wheels so that it could be moved away from a bad neighbour. Zeus, angry at this fault-finding, drove Momus out of Olympus. In the version of the fable told by Babrius (59) the makers are Zeus, Poseidon and Athena. This story is the origin of the tradition that Momus was banished from the company of the gods, and it made him the type of the hostile critic: Plato has Socrates say that “not even Momus could find fault” with a certain argument (Republic 487a), and Callimachus wishes Momus away to live with Envy (Hymn to Apollo 105–113).

Momus also had a part in the greatest story of all. A commentator on the opening of the Iliad (scholia on Iliad 1.5), summarising the lost epic Cypria, says that when Earth was weighed down by too many people, Zeus took the advice of Momus and arranged the marriage of Thetis to a mortal and the birth of a beautiful daughter, Helen, so that the Trojan War would lighten her burden. In Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods (20.2) Aphrodite says she would accept even Momus as judge of her beauty, since he could find no fault with her; a later letter-writer, Philostratus (Letters 37), adds that all he could criticise was that her sandal creaked. Sophocles wrote a satyr play named Momus, now lost, and in the comic dialogues of Lucian, such as The Assembly of the Gods (also translated The Parliament of the Gods), Momus asks Zeus for leave to speak and then denounces the foreign and half-mortal gods admitted to Olympus, the licensed critic mocking the other gods to their faces.

See Also: Nyx, Hypnos, Thanatos, Eris, Nemesis, Zeus, Prometheus, Athena