The Nine Sisters Behind "Music" and "Museum"

You say their name every single day. You say it when you put on a song. You say it when you walk into a museum. Most people have no idea they are calling on nine sisters the ancient Greeks sang about by name.

I went back to the oldest poem that lists them, one by one, and to the Greek writers who explained where our words came from. Here is what the text records.

Daughters of Memory

The poet Hesiod opens his Theogony by singing to the Muses, and he tells us exactly who their mother was:

"Them in Pieria did Mnemosyne (Memory), who reigns over the hills of Eleuther, bear of union with the father, the son of Cronos, a forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow."

Their father was Zeus, the son of Cronos. Their mother was Mnemosyne, Memory herself. The sisters were born to be "a forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow."

Hesiod even tells us where they lived: "a little way from the topmost peak of snowy Olympus. There are their bright dancing-places and beautiful homes."

Nine Names, Word for Word

Then Hesiod names every one of them:

"nine daughters begotten by great Zeus, Cleio and Euterpe, Thaleia, Melpomene and Terpsichore, and Erato and Polyhymnia and Urania and Calliope, who is the chiefest of them all"

• Cleio
• Euterpe
• Thaleia
• Melpomene
• Terpsichore
• Erato
• Polyhymnia
• Urania
• Calliope, the chief of the nine, who Hesiod says "attends on worshipful princes"

And he tells us what they gave the world: "For though a man have sorrow and grief in his newly-troubled soul ... when a singer, the servant of the Muses, chants the glorious deeds of men of old ... at once he forgets his heaviness and remembers not his sorrows at all."

From the Muses to Music

The Greeks knew where the word came from. In Plato's Cratylus, Socrates ties the name of the Muses directly to the whole art of music: "The Muses and music in general are named" from the Greek word for searching.

So when you say music, you are saying the art of the Muses. The Greek word was mousike.

From the Muses to the Museum

The word museum comes from the Greek Mouseion, a home of the Muses. The most famous one stood in Alexandria in Egypt. The geographer Strabo described it in his Geography:

"The Museum is also a part of the royal palaces; it has a public walk, an Exedra with seats, and a large house, in which is the common mess-hall of the men of learning who share the Museum."

He even recorded that it had "a priest in charge of the Museum." A house of the Muses, with its own priest, in the royal palaces of Alexandria, on the African continent. That is where the word you see on every gallery door was standing.

Examine the Receipts Yourself

Read the lines for yourself:

• Watch the full film: Watch on The Swarthy Channel | Watch on YouTube
• Read Hesiod: The full Theogony in the 1914 Evelyn-White translation is free at Perseus.
• Explore the archive: More original texts live in our Source Library.
• Join the Scroll: Get the receipts behind every film free in your inbox at news.theswarthychannel.com.

Memory was their mother. So why have we forgotten the nine sisters whose names we speak every day?