Terpsichore- Greek GodDeity"Muse of Dance"

Daughter of Memory

Zeus lay with the Titaness Mnemosyne for nine consecutive nights on Mount Pieria, and she bore nine daughters. Hesiod describes them dancing with soft feet around the violet-dark spring of Hippocrene on Helicon, their voices carrying through the mountain mist as they sang of what is, what was, and what will be. They bathed in Permessus and danced on the peak of Helicon before descending to sing for their father on Olympus, the dark earth echoing beneath them.

Terpsichore — "she who delights in the dance" — governed choral song. Her art was not solo performance but the movement of bodies together through space, voices and steps in concert. In Greek worship and theater, the chorus danced in the orchestra, tracing strophe and antistrophe while singing their odes. The dithyramb, a choral hymn danced for Dionysus, is the form from which Aristotle says tragedy itself descended.

Mother of the Sirens

Apollodorus names Terpsichore as the mother of the Sirens by the river god Achelous, though alternate accounts give them to her sister Melpomene. Before they were a danger to sailors, the Sirens were companions of Persephone. When Hades seized her, they asked the gods for wings to search the earth and sea — and received them, though they kept their human voices. They settled on a flowering island and sang to passing ships. No sailor who heard them could turn away.

When Odysseus sailed within earshot, he had his crew stop their ears with beeswax and lash him to the mast. The Sirens called to him by name, promising knowledge of Troy and of all that happens on earth. He strained against the ropes, begging his men to untie him, but they bound him tighter and rowed until the song faded. The island was ringed with the bones of sailors who had no one to bind them.