Mariella Reynoso, Period 2, 3/9/23

Literature Circle 2

In A Thousand Ships, Calliope is the muse that inspires Homer to write both the Iliad and the Odyssey. As a character, her function is to convey the meaning of the story. Her chapters include some of my favorite lines, like: “I have picked up the old stories and shaken them until the hidden women appear in plain sight” (Haynes). After finishing the book, I decided to learn more about Calliope and her fellow muses.

In mythology, Calliope is the leader and most important of the nine muses (Miate). According to Hesiod’s Theogony, the muses are daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. Their role in the world was to inspire artists, and each muse is the patron of a different art form. Clio is the muse of history, Euterpe of music, Thalia of comedy, Melpomene of tragedy, Terpsichore of dance, Erato of erotic poetry, Polyhymnia of sacred poetry, Urania of astronomy, and Calliope of epic poetry (Gill). Calliope was called upon for inspiration by poets throughout history, including Ovid, Virgil, and Dante (Miate). She also appeared in various myths. She and the muses were said to sing for the gods at Mount Olympus. Calliope was the mother of Orpheus and taught him how to sing. She mediated Aphrodite and Persephone’s fight over the beautiful mortal man Adonis. (Her judgment that he should spend half of the year with each goddess led Aphrodite to cause Orpheus’ violent death.) Calliope sang on behalf of the muses when they were challenged by Pierides and his nine daughters, and won the competition for the team.

My deeper dive into the mythology of the muses brought me new questions. If the muses are so talented, why do they only inspire? Why are they all women when, for the most part, only men were allowed to be poets in Greek society?

It turns out that muses have long been stereotyped as female in art history, and there are two layers to them. On the surface, a muse is a beautiful model who male artists capture in their work. She is “an empty canvas” the artist can portray however he likes, projecting his “deepest desires, fantasies, and fears” onto her (“The Muse: A Female Sacrifice”). Often, she is an artist in her own right, and her own work is overshadowed by how she inspired male creators (Frey).

For example, Sappho, a prolific female poet from the 600s BCE, was regarded as one of the greatest poets of all times by later Greek writers. In Anthologia Graeca, Plato writes of her: “Some say the muses are nine: how careless! Look, there’s Sappho too, from Lesbos, the tenth” (Bryan). As the centuries pass, she indeed becomes a muse, and male poets make up stories about her life and death that become the subject of male painters’ art. The legend that she jumped off a rock to her death because of her love for Phaon is just that (“Sappho”).

In the 1920s, Zelda Fitzgerald was an inspiration for many of her husband Scott’s stories, and he even quoted her letters through the voice of his female characters (Willett). She was a writer, dancer, and even painter, but she was remembered for her romance with Fitzgerald and flapper lifestyle rather than her art (Willett; “#NotYourMuse”).

There is a long list of women artists I can talk about. Even Frida Kahlo, famous for her self-portraits and the quote “I am my own muse,” was once called a hobby artist beside her husband and “master artist” Diego in a 1930s newspaper (Antoniou; “The Muse, A Female Sacrifice”).

The lesson I’ve learned from writing this blog is one I think Nathalie Haynes would approve of. Next time I find myself admiring an old painting of a beautiful woman at an art museum, I’ll make sure to check for the name of the muse and see if she made any paintings of her own.

Works Cited
Angelica Frey. “The Problem with the Muse in Art History.” Art and Object, 2020.
    https://www.artandobject.com/articles/problem-muse-art-history.

Eleanor Antoniou. “The Paradox of the Female Muse.” Varsity, 2022.
    https://www.varsity.co.uk/arts/23173.

Erika Willett. “Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: Artist, Writer, Dancer and Wife.” PBS, n.d.
    https://www.pbs.org/kteh/amstorytellers/bios.html.

Liana Miate. “Calliope.” World History Encyclopedia, 2022.
    https://www.worldhistory.org/Calliope/.

Natalie Haynes. A Thousand Ships. HarperCollins, 26 Jan, 2021.

“#NotYourMuse: The Problematic History of Women In the Eyes of Men.” Make Muse, 2019.
    https://medium.com/@makemuse/notyourmuse-the-problematic-history-of-women-in-the-eyes-of-       men-b3fd97906594.

N.S. Gill. “Who were the 9 Greek Muses?” ThoughtCo, 2019.
    https://www.thoughtco.com/the-greek-muses-119788.

“Sappho.” Britannica, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sappho-Greek-poet.

“The Muse, A Female Sacrifice.” Womensartblog, 2020.
    https://womensartblog.wordpress.com/2020/02/29/the-muse/.

Van Bryan. “Sappho: The Tenth Muse.” Classical Wisdom, 2021.
    https://classicalwisdom.com/people/poets/sappho-the-tenth-muse/#:~:text=The%20

    philosopher%20Plato%20wrote%20of,from%20Lesbos%2C%20the%20tenth.%E2%80%9D.