Erato

Erato is the Muse whom later tradition assigns to love poetry and erotic verse, an allotment that plays on the kinship of her name with eros, desire, though in the oldest sources the nine Muses share their inspiration without such division of labour. The pairing is old enough that Apollonius of Rhodes, at the point in his Argonautica where the poem turns from voyaging to the love of Medea and Jason, breaks off to invoke Erato specifically, asking the Muse of desire to help him tell how love undid a princess, one of the clearest surviving cases of a poet choosing among the Muses by subject. Roman poets of love elegy took up the same convention. In art she carries the lyre of the love song, and her figure became a stock personification of amorous verse in later European painting and emblem books.

Beyond Apollonius, Renaissance and later European poets frequently invoked Erato when writing love poetry or elegy, a convention visual artists echoed by giving her a wreath of myrtle or roses alongside her lyre; the convention of assigning each Muse a fixed domain, only loosely attested in the earliest Greek sources, hardened considerably in Roman and later European handbooks of mythology, which is largely where the familiar modern scheme of nine Muses with nine distinct arts comes from.

Erato's name was carried into the sky in the nineteenth century, part of a systematic astronomical practice of naming newly discovered asteroids after figures from Greek and Roman mythology. The asteroid 62 Erato, a large main-belt asteroid roughly ninety five kilometers across, was discovered in 1860 by the German astronomer Karl Theodor Robert Luther and named for the Muse of love poetry, one of several asteroids from this productive period of nineteenth century discovery given the names of individual Muses as astronomers worked their way through the standard mythological repertoire available to them. Like most objects of its type and era, 62 Erato is a large, dark, distant body about which relatively little is known beyond its orbital parameters and approximate size, its main interest to history being the naming choice itself rather than any distinctive physical feature.

The practice of naming Muses for asteroids reflects the wider nineteenth century astronomical convention of drawing systematically on classical mythology for new discoveries, a convention that by the century's end had assigned names to hundreds of minor planets and left several of the nine Muses, Erato among them, permanently attached to a specific, catalogued object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, a considerably more literal kind of sky placement than the purely poetic association the Muses held in antiquity, when none of the nine was assigned a fixed home among the stars.