The Nine Muses The Nine Muses The Nine Muses, Or, Poems Written by Nine severall Ladies Upon the death of the late Famous John Dryden, Esq. (London: Richard Basset, 1700) was an elegiac volume of poetry published pseudonymously. The contributors were English women writers, each of whom signed their poems with the names of Muses. The collection was edited by Delarivier Manley (who wrote as "Melpomene" and "Thalia") and includes pieces by Susanna Centlivre ("perhaps," according to Blain et al.), Sarah Fyge Egerton ("Erato", "Euterpe", and "Terpsichore"), Mary Pix ("Clio"), Catherine Trotter ("Calliope"), and Sarah Piers ("Urania"). The poet writing as "Polimnia" (Of
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