Mnemosyne was one of the twelve Titans, born to Uranus and Gaia in the generation of gods that ruled before Zeus and his siblings overthrew them. Hesiod's Theogony names her among the children of Sky and Earth and gives her a role no other Titan holds outright: she is memory itself, personified. After the Titans fell, Zeus lay with Mnemosyne for nine consecutive nights on Mount Pieria, and from that union she bore the nine Muses, the goddesses who preside over epic poetry, history, lyric song, tragedy, comedy, dance, hymn, astronomy and love poetry. In archaic Greek thought, memory and poetry were bound together far more tightly than they are today, since an oral culture preserved its history, its genealogies and its religious knowledge entirely in the memorized verse a poet could recite. A poet who invoked the Muses at the start of a work was, by the logic of the myth, invoking their mother's gift as much as their own, asking not for inspiration in the modern sense but for accurate memory of things otherwise lost. Mnemosyne herself plays almost no active role in surviving myth beyond this act of motherhood. She does not appear in the Titanomachy, is not assigned a domain to rule the way Oceanus governs the sea or Themis governs law, and no genealogy gives her children beyond the Muses. Her entire mythological identity is the abstraction her name announces, made concrete only through what she made possible in her daughters.