The Muses

The Muses are the nine goddesses of inspiration — patrons of poetry, music, dance, history, astronomy, and the arts and sciences. Daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, Memory, they are the source of the poet's song and the thinker's insight; every epic opens by calling on them, for the Greeks held that genuine creation comes not from the maker alone but as a gift from above.

Their birth from Memory is telling: for Plato, true knowledge is itself a kind of recollection, and the inspiration of the Muses, the 'divine madness' of the poet described in the Phaedrus, is one of the heaven-sent forms of madness that can lift the soul beyond mere reason. Led by Apollo as Musagetes, the Muses gave their name to the Museum of Alexandria — a shrine to them that became the home of all learning.