Muses

We now know the Muses started out as water sprites at natural springs. In perhaps the earliest reference to them, the Greek geographer Pausanius recorded that three were worshipped in Boeotia. But our popular ideas of them come from the invocations to them in the works of later writers like Plato.

Each Goddess inspires some branch of artistic expression, and is represented with a symbol that identifies her .

• Calliope of the beautiful voice, who inspires epic poetry and eloquence, holds a writing tablet.
• Clio, who proclaims and inspires history, reads a scroll.
• Erato, the lovely one who inspires erotic poetry, plays the lyre.
• Euterpe, the giver of pleasure who inspires lyric poetry, carries the flute or pipes.
• Melpomene, the singer who inspires tragedy, carries a club and a mask of sorrow.
• Polymnia, the one of many hymns who inspires rhetoric, merely wears a wreath because she has no symbol.
• Terpsichore, the whirling one who inspires dancing, plays the lyre with a string plucker called a plectrum.
• Thalia, who inspires comedy, carries a smiling mask and a shepherd's crook.
• Urania, the heavenly one who inspires knowledge of astronomy, points with a wand to a globe or compass, and may be dressed in stars.

In Plato's "Phaedrus" Socrates explains the power of the Muses:

« Come, O ye Muses, melodious, as ye are called, whether you have received this name from the character of your strains, or because the Melians are a musical race, help, O help me in the tale which my good friend here desires me to rehearse, in order that his friend whom he always deemed wise may seem to him to be wiser than ever. »

Further on in "Phaedrus", Socrates describes how the Muses give "an inspired madness which was a noble thing":

« The third kind is the madness of those who are possessed by the Muses; which taking hold of a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyrical and all other numbers; with these adorning the myriad actions of ancient heroes for the instruction of posterity. »

Socrates goes on to say that the man « who, having no touch of the Muses' madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art--he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man disappears and is nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the madman. »

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