Euterpe- Greek GodDeity"Muse of Music"

The Giver of Delight

Euterpe was born to Zeus and the Titaness Mnemosyne after nine consecutive nights together on Mount Pieria — one of nine daughters who dwell on Helicon, where they dance around the violet-dark spring of Hippocrene and bathe in the waters of the Permessus. Hesiod met them there when he was a shepherd on the mountain's slopes. They called him a mere belly and then breathed divine song into him, gave him a staff of laurel, and told him to sing of the gods. Together the nine could sing of everything — past, present, and what would come — and their voices eased grief and made men forget their sorrows. Euterpe's name means "giver of much delight," and her province among the nine is music. Her instrument is the aulos, the double-piped reed whose sound accompanied the festivals of Dionysus — its voice penetrating enough to fill the open-air theaters where tragedies and comedies were staged, and mournful enough to lead funeral processions.

Mother of Rhesus

One tradition names Euterpe as the mother of Rhesus, the Thracian king who rode late to Troy's defense with his famous white horses — animals so fine they gleamed like snow. An oracle declared that if Rhesus's horses drank from the river Scamander, Troy would never fall. Odysseus and Diomedes could not let that happen. They captured the Trojan spy Dolon first, who told them where the Thracian camp lay and how Rhesus slept apart from the main army with his horses tethered beside him. The two Greeks crept in by night. Diomedes killed Rhesus and twelve of his men as they slept while Odysseus cut the horses loose and drove them back to the Greek lines before dawn. The oracle was broken before it could be fulfilled.

Some sources name Euterpe's consort as the river god Strymon; others assign Rhesus's motherhood to Calliope or Terpsichore, and the play Rhesus attributed to Euripides names his mother simply as "a Muse."