Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Calliope.
The gallery
Calliope, Muse of Epic Poetry
Charles Meynier, 1798
Painted by the French Neoclassical artist Charles Meynier as part of an Apollo-and-the-Muses ensemble now in the Cleveland Museum of Art, this canvas personifies Calliope, eldest and most distinguished of the nine Muses and patroness of epic poetry. She is shown seated in classical robes holding a stylus and a writing tablet — her traditional attribute as the inspirer of heroic verse — beside a volume of epic song. As the Muse who, in Hesiod's Theogony, is 'foremost of them all' and attends upon kings, Calliope embodies the elevated, measured eloquence of the epic tradition; she is also remembered as the mother of the singer Orpheus.
The Muse Calliope (Clio, Euterpe and Thalia)
Eustache Le Sueur, c. 1652–1655
From a cycle of the Muses painted by the French Baroque master Eustache Le Sueur for the Hôtel Lambert in Paris and now in the Louvre, this panel presents Calliope amid her sisters, identified by the attributes of epic poetry. Crowned and absorbed in study, she holds the book and writing instruments that mark her as the chief of the Muses and the inspiration of Homeric song. Le Sueur's serene, classicizing composition reflects the seventeenth-century French reverence for the Muses as guardians of poetry and learning, with Calliope foremost among them as 'the eldest' invoked by Hesiod and the epic poets.
Fresco depicting Calliope, the Muse of Epic Poetry
Unknown (Roman wall-painter, Pompeii), 1st century AD
This Roman wall-painting from Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, identifies Calliope by the attributes of epic verse: a scroll or writing tablet held by the standing Muse. Such Muse cycles adorned the dining rooms and gardens of Campanian houses, where Calliope — eldest of the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne and patroness of heroic poetry — presided over the literary culture the Romans inherited from Greece. The fresco attests how deeply the imagery of the Muses, and of Calliope as their chief, was woven into everyday domestic decoration in antiquity.