The Hunchback Prophet: Victim Of The Muses Hugh Nibley gave a series of talks about sophic and mantic persons in society: the sophic offers the shallow, deceitful cleverness of public relations and spin, which often leads to success in this world, while the mantic (from Greek mantis, “seer”) looks to the eternal vision of things. My new book, Victim of the Muses, looks at the origins of poetics in western civilization from this perspective. The poet as prophet (Marsyas, Aesop, or Socrates, grotesquely ugly and a warrior with words) was often offensive to sophic society and became the pharmakos, or scapegoat, killed or cast out by political leaders. How do these ancient views of the poet/prophet compare to contemporary LDS understandings and prophetic iconography?

Todd M. Compton, Ph.D., Presenter