THE NINE PLUS THREE

I am presently turning my attention to the arts, as befits the Sonnets section. Now, who is best suited to introduce this beautiful cluster of beautiful subjects than the beautiful daughters of the Greek gods, the Muses? And so, here they are… But wait, there is a sticking point here, and we must address it first, in the next paragraph, starting it with a puzzlement and ending it with a satisfying resolution.

To give a lazy mind an easy visual reference here, the nine muses (known as the Nine) are the ever-young, ever-beautiful, ever-modest, and ever-chaste daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, who are, for some strange reason, denied the status of full-fledged divinity. Indeed, they are often described merely as nymphs, or as inferior divinities, despite the well-known fact that both their parents were no “mudblood,” to use the apposite term, coined by J. K. Rowling in her Harry Potter. In fact, their father Zeus needs no introduction, but, being a rather indiscriminate father, we have to judge his offspring’s credentials solely by the credentials of the mother. And here we have a case of an even more impeccable pedigree, for, Mnemosyne belongs to the Noble and most Ancient House of the Titans, daughter of the oldest of them all Gaea and Uranus! Why, then, have our Muses been denied their full-fledged godship inheritance?!

So, here is my answer: Perhaps, for the same reason that some other princesses have been denied their inalienable attributes by their wise fairy godmothers: to keep them modest, andprotect them from the unspeakable evil of well-justifiable vanity!

(Curiously enough, the Time Almanac resolves the problem of the Muses’ underrated status, by introducing the following change of fairly recent origin: The Muses are now called Goddesses! Good for them! Perhaps they have outgrown the restrictions of young age by this time, or perhaps in the modern age of my Almanac every male in good standing is a god, and every properly liberated female is a goddess. Then, of course, the word nymph, has long lost its Bulfinch signification, allowing us the rather limited choice between zoology and pornography…)

The next hurdle to overcome, in a preliminary fashion, is the exact number of the muses. Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian of the first century BC, testifies to the difference of opinions on their number, but settles the matter by appealing to unimpeachable authority:

“…Writers similarly disagree also concerning the number of the Muses; some say that they are three, and others say that that they are nine, but the latter number nine has prevailed, since it rests on the authority of the most distinguished men, such as Homer and Hesiod, and others, like them.”

The number has thus been settled as the Nine, and we now have the recurring expression “the Tenth Muse,” first applied by Plato to the poetess Sappho of Lesbos, similar to our reference to an “Eighth Wonder of the World,” used as an apocryphal comparison to the established Seven.

The nine Muses are traditionally known as Clio, the Muse of history (as a shrewd sage may enquire, what is history?); Euterpe, the Muse of music and of lyric poetry; Thalia, the Muse of comedy and again of idyllic poetry; Melpomene, the Muse of tragedy; Terpsichore, the Muse of dancing; Erato, the Muse of erotic/lyric poetry; Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry and of rhetoric; Urania, the Muse of astronomy; and lastly, Polyhymnia, the Muse of sacred hymns and of harmony.

But we are not done yet with the question of number. The more refined minds of our civilization, whenever they are talking at length about the Muses seldom fail to mention their bona fide complement in the persons of the Three Graces, that is, of “the three sister goddesses who had control over pleasure, charm, elegance, and beauty in human life and in nature.” (In Webster’s definition.)

The Three Graces (Charites in Greek, or Gratiae in Roman mythology) are Aglaia (Splendor, Brilliance), Euphrosyne (Joy, Mirth) and our old acquaintance (by name, but, apparently, not the same person) Thalia (Abundance and Good Cheer), all three legitimate Daughters of Zeus and of the demonstrably respectable mother Eurynome, daughter of the Titans.

What are we going to do with these, though? I wish that the nine and the three had been good friends, and somehow stayed together, to prevent a confusion about them among the mortals, but, alas, no legends to this account are in existence, for some reason, or for no reason at all…

For my part, however, I am not going beyond the mere observation of their “co-existence.” I shall not tinker with the hallowed number “the Nine,” and only for the purpose of this entry, and within its strict constraints, I shall lightheartedly refer to their combined lot not as the nine, or the three, or even the twelve, but only as the Nine Plus Three.