Clio

Clio (Greek Kleio, from a verb meaning to make famous or to celebrate) is one of the nine Muses, the daughters of Zeus and the Titaness Mnemosyne, Memory. She is the Muse of history: the one who preserves the memory of great deeds and confers lasting fame upon them, and she is portrayed in later art with a scroll or a chest of books. It is worth being clear about how the Muses came to have their fixed departments.

In Hesiod, who first names all nine, they are a chorus of goddesses of poetry, song and memory generally, without the neat division of labour by subject. The now-familiar assignment of each Muse to a particular art, Clio to history, Melpomene to tragedy, and so on, crystallised only later, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and the details varied from writer to writer. Clio's connection with history and with the fame that outlasts death is the most stable of these attributions, and it made her name a byword for the recording of the past.

Alongside her role as patroness of history, Clio has a distinct and less often repeated myth recorded by the mythographer Apollodorus in the Bibliotheca: that Clio once mocked Aphrodite for her infatuation with the mortal youth Adonis, and Aphrodite, in retaliation, caused Clio herself to fall in love with a mortal man, Pierus, son of Magnes. From this union, according to Apollodorus, Clio bore a son named Hyacinthus, a figure distinct from the better known Hyacinthus beloved by Apollo, whose beauty in turn drew the love of the musician Thamyras, setting off a further chain of desire and misfortune in the genealogy Apollodorus records. The episode casts Clio, ordinarily a rather abstract personification of historical memory and fame, into the same pattern of divine punishment through enforced mortal love that Aphrodite metes out to several other figures across Greek myth who slight her or her favorites.

The story survives only in this single mythographic source and receives no elaboration in earlier poetry, so classicists generally treat it as a comparatively late genealogical accretion, useful chiefly for connecting Clio to a minor line of descent involving Hyacinthus and Thamyras rather than as evidence of any earlier, independent cult tradition concerning Clio's romantic life. It nonetheless shows that even the Muse most associated with sober historical record was not exempt from the same currents of desire, jealousy and consequence that run through the wider mythology surrounding Aphrodite.