Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

One of the original Titans, Mnemosyne (Memory), was mother by Zeus to nine highly intelligent and creative daughters, the Muses, who lived at various times on Mount Helicon (where the Hippocrene fountain later played), on Mount Parnassus above Delphi, and in Pieria in Thessaly where the Pierian Spring, the metaphorical source of all the arts and sciences, flowed.fn3

We think of the Muses today as patron saints of the arts in general, and private sources of inspiration in particular. ‘O for a Muse of fire!’ cries the Chorus at the opening of Shakespeare’s Henry V. He or she is ‘my muse’ we might say of those who fire our creativity and spur us on to greatness. The Muses can be found in ‘music’, ‘amusements’, ‘museums’ and general ‘musings’. W. H. Auden believed that the image of a capricious goddess whispering ideas in the poet’s ear was the best way of accounting for the maddening unreliability of creative inspiration. Sometimes she gives you gold, sometimes you read back what she has dictated and see that it is dross. The Muses’ mother might be Memory, but their father is Zeus, whose faithless inconstancy is the subject of many stories yet to come.

But let us meet these nine sisters, each of whom represents and stands patron to their own particular art form.

Calliope

Rather an undignified linguistic end meets CALLIOPE, the Muse of epic poetry. Somehow she became a steam-powered organ commonly played in fairgrounds, which are just about the only places where you will hear her name spoken today. To the Roman poet Ovid she was the chief of all the Muses. Her name means ‘beautiful voice’ and she gave birth to ORPHEUS, the most important musician in all Greek history. The finest poets, Homer, Virgil and Dante included, invoked her aid when embarking on their great epics.

Clio

Now relegated to a model of Renault motorcar and a series of awards in the advertising industry, CLIO or Kleio (famous) was the Muse of history. She was responsible for proclaiming, for noising abroad and making famous the deeds of the great. America’s oldest debating union, founded in Princeton by James Madison, Aaron Burr and others, is called the Cliosophical Society in her honour.

Erato

ERATO was the Muse of lyric and love poetry. Her name is related to Eros and the erotic and she has sometimes been represented in art with a golden arrow to suggest the connection. Turtle doves and the myrtle are common symbols associated with her, as is the lute.

Euterpe

The Muse of music itself, the ‘delightful’ and ‘joyous’ EUTERPE bore, by the river god STRYMON, the Thracian king RHESUS who went on to play a very minor part in the Trojan War. Whether he gave his name to the monkeys that in turn went on to describe types of human blood factor is not agreed upon.

Melpomene

The tragic Muse, MELPOMENE (whose name derives from a Greek verb meaning ‘to celebrate with dance and song’) represented originally the chorus and then the whole of tragedy – a very important fusing of music, poetry, drama, mask, dance, song and religious celebration. Tragic actors wore a type of thick-soled boot,fn4 called a ‘buskin’ in English and the cothurnus in Greek; and Melpomene is usually depicted either holding or wearing these, as well as, of course, the famous tragic masque with its unhappy down-curved lips. Along with her sister Terpsichore, she was a mother to the Sirens, whose time will come.

Polyhymnia

Hymnos is the Greek for ‘praise’ and POLYHYMNIA was the Muse of hymns, of sacred music, dance, poetry and rhetoric as well as – slightly randomly one might think – agriculture, pantomime, geometry and meditation. I suppose today we would call her ‘the Muse of mindfulness’. She is usually portrayed as a rather serious figure, finger held pensively to her mouth in an attitude of solemn rumination. She is another contender, along with Calliope, for mother of the hero Orpheus.

Terpsichore

Cheese Shop Owner: Oh, I thought you were complaining about the bouzouki player.

Customer: Oh, heaven forbid. I am one who delights in all manifestations of the Terpsichorean muse.

This dialogue from Monty Python’s immortal ‘Cheese Shop Sketch’ introduced many, myself included, to TERPSICHORE, the Muse of dance.

Thalia

The finest, funniest, friendliest Muse of all, THALIA supervised the comic arts and idyllic poetry. Her name derives from the Greek verb for ‘to flourish’.fn5 Like her tragic counterpart Melpomene she sports actors’ boots and a mask (hers being the cheerful smiling one of course), but she is wreathed in ivy and carries a bugle and a trumpet.

Urania

URANIA derives her name from Ouranos, the primal god of the heavens (and a great-grandfather of the nine sisters); she is the Muse who presides over astronomy and the stars. She is also considered a figure of Universal Love, a kind of Greek version of the Paraclete, or Holy Spirit.

Threesomes