Muses daughters of Harmonia (the daughter of Aphrodite and Ares), which contradicts the myth in which they were dancing at the wedding of Harmonia and Cadmus. The Muses had several temples and shrines in ancient Greece, their two main cult centres being Mount Helikon in Boiotia and Pieria in Makedonia. Strabo wrote: The cult of the Muses where also commonly connected to that of Apollo. Some Greek writers give the names of the nine Muses as Kallichore, Helike, Eunike, Thelxinoë, Terpsichore, Euterpe, Eukelade, Dia, and Enope. In Renaissance and Neoclassical art, the dissemination of emblem books such as Cesare Ripa's "Iconologia"
Muses and Avestan "Mazda". The Muses, therefore, were both the embodiments and sponsors of performed metrical speech: "mousike" (whence the English term "music") was just "one of the arts of the Muses". Others included Science, Geography, Mathematics, Philosophy, and especially Art, Drama, and inspiration. In the archaic period, before the widespread availability of books (scrolls), this included nearly all of learning. The first Greek book on astronomy, by Thales, took the form of dactylic hexameters, as did many works of pre-Socratic philosophy. Both Plato and the Pythagoreans explicitly included philosophy as a sub-species of "mousike". The "Histories" of Herodotus, whose primary