(Gk. Mousai, Moisai; Lat. Musae, also Camenae, from cano).
The Muses are of unknown origin. They have been explained as water-nymphs who frequented mountain springs or streams. None of the etymologies proposed for the singular Mousa has won general acceptance.
Homer called upon one or more of the Muses at certain crucial points in his writings. In the Odyssey (xxiv.60), ‘Muses nine in all’ mourn Achilles. This ambiguous phrase probably generated the later belief in nine as the canonical number, observed everywhere except at Delphi and Sicyon. Homer remained imprecise, even omitting the distinctive name from the opening line (‘Sing, goddess …’) of his Iliad. By way of genealogy, he offered only the phrase ‘daughter of Zeus’ (Odyssey i.10). His successor Hesiod, writing probably in the late 8th century bce, provided the Muses with a mother as well: she is Mnemosyne or ‘Memory’, obviously an allegorical figure (Theogony, 915–18). More significantly, he described vividly how they visited him on Helicon and endowed him with the knowledge and command of words to be a rhapsode (22–34). For him, they numbered precisely nine and had individual names (75–9).
The Muses were worshipped at Pieria in Thessaly (near Mount Olympus) and Mount Helicon in Boeotia; similar cults were found elsewhere in Greece. They had particular fields of activity attributed to them principally in the literature and art of the later Roman Empire, although the distinctions among the fields are somewhat blurred: Clio (history, shown in representational art with the kithara), Euterpe (lyric, shown with the double aulos), Thalia (comedy, light poetry, the idyll), Melpomene (tragedy, Aeolic poetry and songs of mourning), Terpsichore (choral lyric and dance, shown with the lyre), Erato (song and the dance, and erotic lyric, sometimes shown with the lyre), Polymnia or Polyhymnia (hymns, dance and mime, shown with the barbitos), Urania (astronomy) and their chief, Calliope or Calliopea (heroic poetry and playing on string instruments) – the true leader of the Muses being of course Apollo Mousagētēs. In mythology, the Muses appear in various contexts: they act as judges in the contest between Apollo and Marsyas; in another contest they defeat the Sirens, who lose their wings and jump into the sea (Pausanias, Description of Greece, ix.34.3); and when the Thracian poet Thamyris is so audacious as to challenge the Muses, he is blinded and loses the power of song (Iliad, ii.594–600); Apollodorus, i.3.3).
The Muses eventually came to be linked with all the arts and sciences that later antiquity recognized as liberal pursuits. Originally their proper province included no more than the sung or chanted word with musical accompaniment and, secondarily, the dance. This had changed by the time of Hesiod, whose didactic epic was recited. By his time, however, Homeric poetry had established the Muses as an embodiment, collective or individual, of the forces of knowledge and inspiration within the singer. The dancer in Homer is an entertainer; the bard presents, by contrast, an august figure. As a follower of the Muses, instructed and inspired by them, he possesses an almost sacerdotal function. The vatic tradition thus begun survived as an aspect of European literary and musical Romanticism.
With reference to language, the most striking gift of the Muses is the term mousikē. Once descriptive of all that was thought to come within their varied domain, it underwent a reductive process to become the modern conception of ‘music’. The Muses themselves remain quintessentially Hellenic, without true analogues in any other mythology, representations of the ideal of supreme bodily and intellectual grace.
P. Boyancé: Le culte des Muses chez les philosophes grecs (Paris, 1937/R)
P. Boyancé: ‘Sur les oracles de la Pythie, II: Les Muses, le “pneuma” et la “tétraktys” pythagoricienne à Delphes’, Revue des études anciennes, xl (1938), 314–16
E. Buschor: Die Musen des Jenseits (Leipzig, 1944)
P. Boyancé: ‘Les Muses et l'harmonie des sphères’, Mélanges dédiés à la mémoire de Félix Grat, i (Paris, 1946), 3–16
J.R.T. Pollard: ‘Muses and Sirens’, Classical Review, new ser., ii (1952), 60–63
W.F. Otto: Die Musen und der göttliche Ursprung des Singens und Sagens (Düsseldorf, 1955, 2/1956), 23–9, 54–61
K. Marót: ‘Musen, Sirenen und Chariten’, Filológiai közlöny, iv (1958), 657–62
H. Koller: Musik und Dichtung im alten Griechenland (Berne, 1963)
E. Barmeyer: Die Musen (Munich, 1968)
M. Wegner: ‘Kalliope’, Musa – mens – musici: im Gedenken an Walther Vetter (Leipzig, 1969), 17–22
For further bibliography see Greece, §I.
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN