The Muses

Nine daughters born in Pieria

The early Greek poet Hesiod opens his poem on the birth of the gods by beginning from the Heliconian Muses, who hold the great and holy mountain of Helicon in central Greece. Later in the same poem he says where they came from. Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, lay with Zeus and bore nine daughters in Pieria, the country below Mount Olympus. They were all of one mind, Hesiod says, and their hearts were set upon song.

He then gives their names: Cleio, Euterpe, Thaleia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polyhymnia, Urania and Calliope. Calliope he calls the chiefest of them all, the one who attends on the princes men hold in reverence. That is the list most readers meet, and it is one account among several that the ancient writers never reconciled.

What the Muses said on Helicon

Hesiod does not only invoke the Muses. He says they came to him on Helicon and spoke to him, and what they told him is unusual for goddesses who grant song. They know how to speak many false things as though they were true, and they know, when they will, to utter true things.

In Hesiod’s account the goddesses who give a poet his song also choose whether it tells the truth. He reports this at the start of his own poem.

The mountain kept a place of worship for them. Pausanias, an ancient writer who described the sites of Greece, says the grove of the Muses on Helicon lay along the road, with the spring Aganippe to the left of it as you went towards the grove.

The poet asks because he cannot know

The Muses are the goddesses a Greek epic calls on before it starts. The Odyssey asks in its first line: tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways. The Theogony begins from the Muses of Helicon. The Iliad does something different. Its opening line asks a goddess to sing the wrath of Achilles, and in the Greek the word is thea, a goddess, with no name attached and no mention of the Muses.

The Iliad names them later, before the Catalogue of Ships in its second book, and gives the reason for calling on them there. The Muses live on Olympus, they are present and they know all things, while the poet has heard only a rumour and knows nothing. The invocation is a request for information the singer does not have.

When the Muses were three

The count of nine was not the only one. Pausanias reports that the sons of Aloeus held the Muses to be three, and named them Melete, Mneme and Aoede. He also says that Pierus, a man of Macedon, came to Thespiae in Boeotia, established nine Muses and changed their names to the ones in use. For a third arrangement he cites the early poet Mimnermus, who had two generations: elder Muses fathered by Uranus, the sky, and younger Muses who were children of Zeus.

Diodorus Siculus, a later Greek writer who compiled a history of the world, records the same split twice over. Most writers on myth make the Muses daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, while a few poets, Alcman among them, make them daughters of Uranus and Ge, the earth. On number, some say three and others nine, and Diodorus says nine prevailed on the authority of Homer and Hesiod.

The arts and the name

Diodorus is also the source for the division most readers expect, in which each Muse has a subject of her own. He says men assign to each of them her special aptitude for one of the branches of the liberal arts, among them poetry, song, dancing and the study of the stars. He does not credit that scheme to Hesiod, whose list names the nine and singles out Calliope and goes no further.

Diodorus gives the name itself a meaning. He derives Muses from the Greek word muein, which he connects with the teaching of what is noble and useful and is not known to the uneducated. The derivation is his.

The three Muses of Delphi

Delphi kept three. In Plutarch’s Table Talk a speaker says the ancients celebrated three Muses, and that the Delphians named theirs after the stops that make the intervals of the lyre: nete, mese and hypate. The Delphians’ own account divided the universe into three portions and gave one Muse the care of each, Hypate the first, Mese the middle and Nete the last.

Plutarch puts the Muses on the ground as well. He has his company sit on the temple steps at Delphi, where a shrine of the Muses once stood close by the source of the small stream that supplied the water for the sacrifices. The wiser sort, he says, placed them there as guardians of the springs and assistants to prophecy, beside the shrine of Ge. Delphi lies between the two Phaidriades rocks of Mount Parnassus and holds the sanctuary of Apollo, a sacred precinct belonging to the Muses’ brother. The Castalian Spring rose from the Phaidriades slope, and its stone fountain stood along the road leading to that precinct.

The hymns cut in stone

Two inscribed stone blocks from the Treasury of the Athenians at Delphi carry two hymns to Apollo and the most extensive musical notation surviving from antiquity. They are now in the Archaeological Museum of Delphi, and both begin by calling the Muses.

The first is a paean, a song of praise. It asks the fair-armed daughters of loud-thundering Zeus, whose appointed place is deep-wooded Helicon, to come and praise in song their brother Phoibos, which is a name for Apollo, and it follows the god to the abundant waters of Castalia’s spring. The second calls the Muses of Pieria, who inhabit Helicon’s snow-covered crags, to conduct its hymns to twin-peaked Parnassus. Both call the goddesses from the Boeotian mountain to the Delphic rock.

The blocks were set below Athenian decrees concerning the Pythais processions of 138, 128, 106 and 97 BC, and modern scholars take the hymns to have been performed on those occasions rather than in any single settled year.