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In the trees above them nine magpies have perched. Minerva is perplexed for a moment, because the voices sound so human. But the Muse explains to her that these magpies are newcomers.20 They were mortal women, daughters of the wealthy landowner Pierus and his wife, Euippe. And they have found themselves in this birdish predicament because they – like so many others – lost a contest with the Muses.
If you trust your talent, you’ll compete against us. We won’t be beaten in voice or in skill. And we number nine, just like you. If you lose, you give us two sacred springs. And if we lose, we’ll give up our home and our lands.
We’ll see more of these stories of unwise mortals and their attempts to be superior to the gods in later chapters. But it does seem to happen to the Muses with uncommon frequency.
The Muses don’t come across as dangerously beautiful, but rather – as Hesiod presents them – as beautifully pretty, part of a gorgeous bucolic landscape.
Their dancing doesn’t even make their feet rough, let alone result in any limb-tearing. Though the Muses referred to by Pindar are ioplokamōn,21 they have hair the colour of violets, which does at least give them a pleasingly Gothic vibe.
we might think of them as constructively beautiful, rather than destructively so. They make us better by their existence.
Ceres begins searching for her stolen daughter and – who could have predicted it? – another nymph, Arethusa, offers help. She saw the frightened Proserpina being taken down to the Underworld to become its queen.
Jupiter is no help, preferring to define Pluto’s sustained sexual assault on Proserpina as an act of love.
That sadly tracks.
The compromise which Jupiter settles on – that Proserpina can return for only part of the year, which is why we have cold, dark months without her in winter – is the grudging response of male deities having to accommodate a goddess who will not give up.
Our patience has run out, she says, and we’ll punish you as our anger demands. The women laugh at this Muse and scorn her threatening words. And as they laugh, their skin grows feathers, their faces form beaks, and their arms become wings.
If you want to show the Muses proper respect, it’s pretty clear that you shouldn’t challenge them to any sort of musical duel. The more appropriate thing to do is address a poem to them, as poets throughout the ages, from Homer to Byron, have done.
Polymnia has sadly not survived to the present day.
where is the Muse for painting?
But while these paintings are inspired by the Muses – their appearance, their beauty – the artist did not need to appeal to a specific Muse to help him with his creation.
A second point to note is that the Muses – for all their focus on the arts – are also involved in scientific endeavours.
The Muses have chosen to inspire scientists as well as artists.
Why wouldn’t you want your scientific pursuits to be beautiful?
The distinction that only sciences are useful and only arts are spirit-enhancing is a nonsensical one.
These Muses always remind me that scientists and artists should disregard the idiotic attempts to separate us. We are all nerds, in the end.
Amen!
Their relationship was always troubled and marginalized, and Maar’s skills as both photographer and painter were largely overlooked until recent exhibitions allowed her to be rediscovered as something more than a man’s inspiration.
Muses are socially subservient in this modern setting, their only role to be seen or heard as the predominantly male artists see and hear them; they are bodies and names, hymned for their beauty and their love.
So let us return to the subject of these goddesses from ancient myth, rather than their modern namesakes with no power and terrible taste in men.
Burn.
The film Xanadu was not a box office hit, in spite of this arresting opening sequence. This was probably more surprising in 1980 than it now seems: Newton-John was hugely popular after starring in Grease two years earlier.
Firstly, the plot of Xanadu is pretty thin. This is by no means enough to sink a musical: Cats has no discernible plot at all, yet it played on stages around the world for decades, generating billions of dollars.
But Xanadu does try to tell a story – it just doesn’t do it terribly well.
And the premise is a bit shaky: if roller discos are so great, why would anyone need a Muse’s help to open one?
Also, why would Zeus and Kira feel so strongly that LA – a roller-skating paradise in cinema and television at that time – was in need of their assistance?
Then there is the problem that the plot offers no real setbacks for the characters to overcome, which robs the movie of any sense of drama: no evil billionaire owns the venue they want to convert and is refusing to sell, no officious town mayor has staked his reelection campaign on opposing roller discos,
No jeopardy ever threatens the enterprise: they build Xanadu in the first venue Kira shows Sonny, the builders are delightful, the process is painless, and the club opens. The end.
Additionally, the film is off-balance because neither of its stars plays the lead: Newton-John’s name appears before the credits, but she doesn’t have much to do except for her songs. You might think that introducing nine Muses at the beginning of the movie would give plenty of scope for both music and wit – we only had five in Disney’s Hercules, and they created a glorious all-singing, all-dancing, all-plot-recapping chorus.
Indeed, the movie is so uninterested in the idea of women playing actual named characters that Kira is the only Muse named in the credits. The others are given numbers: Muse #1, Muse #2, and so on.
And even then cinemagoers might have forgiven the sidelining of Newton-John had the producers placed Gene Kelly in the lead. He was, after all, Gene Kelly. In this, his final film role, Kelly – pushing seventy but looking fifty – plays Danny, a former big-band clarinettist and zillionaire property developer who wants to open a new club.
But any hint of an intergenerational love triangle is quickly crushed by the film’s relentless focus on Sonny, by far the least interesting of its characters. He is a mildly tortured genius who just wants to paint, but it’s hard for the audience to invest in his artistic career.
Sonny even quashes our chance to know for sure which Muse Kira is. When she tries to tell him her real name, she begins ‘T—’ but he kisses her before she can say, ‘Terpsichore,’ the Muse of dance.
Rude.
Down to Earth was released in 1947, and stars Hayworth as Terpsichore, a high-minded goddess living on Mount Parnassus. She is appalled to discover a decidedly lowbrow show is in rehearsals on Broadway, featuring all nine Muses as a bunch of boy-crazy gals.
Terpsichore does a deal with the heavenly world’s head administrator (even goddesses are subject to the whims of men in suits in this universe) and heads down to earth to improve the theatrical offering.
Since she is now playing the role of Terpsichore in his show, she needs a new name and decides on Kitty as her alias.
As the company discovers at the first preview, she has accidentally pushed Danny towards creating a huge theatrical flop: the audience are falling asleep in their seats.
Luckily, Danny is able to explain to the Muse of dance what a successful Broadway show should look like and salvage the production. If this sounds like a terrible example of mortalsplaining, I should say that it is a delightful film, not least because it knows who its star is.
The notion that the lyric poet Sappho is the tenth Muse is one that dates back to ancient times.
It can be found in the work of Antipater of Sidon,27 a second-century BCE writer, who confirms this trope that Sappho doesn’t belong in the traditional list of nine lyric poets alongside Alcaeus, Stesichorus, Pindar, and more.
So is it a compliment that Sappho doesn’t belong there, because she belongs with the Muses, or is it a way of removing her from the conversation about who makes great art? Great poets must be male, because there they all are, proving it.
Sappho is and was a mysterious figure whose biography is almost entirely invented by whoever is reading the minuscule fragments of her work that survive to us
Guesses have been made about her profession, her sexual preferences, her age, her marital status, and much more.
It’s hard not to feel that Sappho is being praised and demoted at the same time: a goddess, but not really a poet, therefore.
Sappho was a woman and a poet, a creator of beautiful verse that is as immortal as the Muses who inspired her. And just like her male contemporaries, this was enough to make her an artist, but not a god.
THE PEACOCK was a wildly exotic bird to the ancient Greeks: Alexander the Great is said to have been captivated by their beauty in India in the fourth century BCE.
And if you plan to raise peafowl, Aristotle has some advice for you: your best chance is to remove a couple of the eggs and let a regular hen sit on them. Peahens are not the problem here, in case you have them pegged as being rather flighty; they do their best to keep their eggs warm and safe. The problem is the peacock, which attacks a broody peahen and tries to crush her eggs. Because of this threat, wild peahens will often disappear and lay their eggs in secret.
Beautiful, jealous, destructive, comical: the peacock was the perfect match for Hera, the goddess everyone loves to hate.
She is the goddess linked most frequently to spectacular and creatively unpleasant revenges (one woman is punished for collaboration with Hera’s enemy by being turned into a weasel, of which more below.
