The Muses come up again and again in my reading on Greek myth, from the mountains where they lived to the Sirens who were said to be their daughters. These are the pages where I wrote about them.
Their mountains
Mount Helicon is known as the home of the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts, literature and sciences, with a famous sanctuary on the mountain and the Hippocrene spring whose water was believed to inspire poets. Mount Parnassus is also called their home, a mountain sacred to Apollo, who was said to lead the Muses, with Delphi on its southern slopes.
Parents and children
The Olympian Gods gives Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, as the mother of the Muses by Zeus. On The Sirens captivating voices and perilous allure one of the two main genealogies makes the Sirens daughters of the river god Achelous and a Muse, most often Melpomene, Terpsichore or Calliope, which explains their musical gifts.
Rivals and later echoes
Argiope, a silver-faced water nymph, reside in Mount Helicon in Boeotia tells how, in some versions, her son Thamyris, a Thracian singer, challenged the Muses to a contest; they punished him by removing his eyesight and his ability to sing. In the Apocalypse of Adam, as I give it on Adam and Eve were created by the god Sakla out of the earth, the ninth of the thirteen kingdoms says the illuminator was born of a muse who became pregnant from her own desire.
Plato gives them a role in education. In Laws by Plato, in Benjamin Jowett’s translation, the Athenian Stranger says the Gods had pity on us and gave us Apollo and the Muses as playfellows and leaders in the dance, with Dionysus as the third. He also calls the poets artists far inferior to the Muses, who would never give the words of men the gestures and songs of women. The name lives on in Stewart Pearce’s series of Angelic Muse channelings, the third of which is The angels of Atlantis.
Related pages
- Mount Helicon
- Mount Parnassus
- The Olympian Gods
- The Sirens captivating voices and perilous allure
- Argiope, a silver-faced water nymph, reside in Mount Helicon in Boeotia
- Adam and Eve were created by the god Sakla out of the earth
- Laws by Plato
- The angels of Atlantis
For every page I tagged with Muses, see the Muses tag archive.
