Muses "music", and "musing upon". In current literature, the influential role that the Muse plays has been extended to the political sphere. In "Down to Earth", the Muses, espcially Terpsichore (Rita Hayworth), are offended by a vulgar Broadway musical called "Hot Muses", in which they are portrayed as besotted by two American flyers who crash-land on Parnassus. Terpsichore masquerades as a mortal to get the show "improved". All nine Muses appear in the 1980 film "Xanadu", with actress Olivia Newton-John as Terpsichore. Many of the Greek gods, including five of the Muses (Thalia, Clio, Calliope, Melpomene, and Terpsichore) appear in the
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