I like to picture the first stage of creation as an old-fashioned TV screen on which a monochrome game of Pong played. You remember Pong? It had two white rectangles for rackets and a square dot for a ball. Existence was a primitive, pixellated form of bouncing tennis. Some thirty-five to forty years later there had evolved ultra hi-res 3-D graphics with virtual and augmented reality. So it was for the Greek cosmos, a creation that began with clunky and elemental lo-res outlines now exploded into rich, varied life.
Creatures and gods that were ambiguous, inconsistent, unpredictable, intriguing and unknowable had arrived. To use a distinction made by E. M. Forster when talking about people in novels, the world now went from flat characters to rounded characters – to the development of personalities whose actions could surprise. The fun began.
The Muses
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
The three times three Muses remind me to introduce more triads. Gaia and Ouranos gave birth, as we know, to three Hecatonchires, three Cyclopes and four times three Titans. We have already encountered the three Erinyes, also called the Eumenides – those vengeful Furies who sprang from the blood-soaked earth at the moment of the castration of Ouranos. Three seems to have been a very magic number to the Greeks.
The Charites
During the course of the ten-year Titanomachy, apocalyptic as it was, Zeus always found time to fulfil his desires. Perhaps he saw it as discharging his duty to populate the earth. It is certainly the case that Zeus liked to discharge.
One day Zeus’s eye fell on the most beautiful of all the Oceanids – EURYNOME, daughter of Oceanus and Tethys. Hidden in a cave while the battle roared outside, Eurynome bore Zeus three ravishing daughters, AGLAEA (which means ‘splendour’), EUPHROSYNE also known as EUTHYMIA (glee, merriment, mirth) and THALIAfn6 (cheerfulness). Together they were known as the CHARITES or, to the Romans, the GRATIAE. We call them the Three Graces, favoured throughout history by sculptors and painters seeking an excuse to render perfect female nudes. Their sweetness of nature gave the world something to counteract the horrible malice and cruelty of the Erinyes.
Horai
The HORAI, or Hours, consisted of two sets of triplet sisters. These daughters of THEMIS (the embodiment of law, justice and custom) originally personified the seasons. There seem to have been two to begin with, summer and winter, AUXESIAfn7 and CARPO. The classical first triad of Horai was made up by the later addition of THALLO (FLORA to the Romans), bringer of flowers and blossoms, the embodiment of spring. The Horai’s most valuable quality derived from their mother: their gift of the propitious moment, the benign relationship between natural law and the unfolding of time – what you might call ‘divine serendipity’.