Euterpe

Euterpe, whose Greek name means the well-pleasing or giver of delight, is one of the nine Muses, daughters of Zeus and the Titaness Mnemosyne. In the developed scheme of the Muses she is the Muse of music and of lyric song, and she is associated above all with the aulos, the double reed-pipe whose piercing, exciting sound accompanied so much of Greek public and religious life.

As with all the Muses, this precise assignment belongs to later antiquity: Hesiod, who first lists the nine, treats them collectively as goddesses of song and memory who inspire poets and kings alike, and only in the Hellenistic and Roman periods were the individual domains, comedy, tragedy, dance, astronomy, and the rest, distributed among them, with some variation between authors. Euterpe's link with the pipe and with lyric delight is among the more consistent of these, and it fixed her as the patroness of instrumental music and the pleasures of song.

Euterpe's name once belonged to a specific, still-surviving vessel with an unusually eventful history. In 1863 an iron-hulled sailing ship was launched from the Isle of Man and christened Euterpe, a name chosen in keeping with the period's fondness for classical figures as ship names, and she spent her early decades carrying cargo and, later, emigrants on long voyages between Britain, India and New Zealand, surviving several dismastings and changes of ownership along the way. In 1906 the ship was sold to American owners on the Pacific coast, converted for use in the Alaskan salmon trade, and renamed Star of India, the name by which she is known today; she survives afloat in San Diego, California, maintained as a museum ship and widely described as one of the oldest active sailing ships still in the world, occasionally taken out to sea under her own sail for special commemorative voyages.

The vessel's original name is now mostly a matter of maritime historical record rather than public memory, since the ship completed the greater and more storied part of her working career after her renaming, but naval historians and the museum that maintains her preserve the Euterpe name and its Greek origin as part of the ship's documented history, giving the Muse of music and delight an unusually concrete, physical afterlife: a still-floating iron hull that first went to sea, and first carried her name, more than a century and a half ago.