One of the nine Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne; Hesiod heads his roll of the nine with 'Cleio,' and Pseudo-Apollodorus lists her second among the sisters borne by Memory to Zeus.1
Clio belongs to the nine Olympian Muses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. When Hesiod names the sisters who dwell on Olympus, he opens the catalogue with Cleio and closes it with Calliope, chiefest of them all; Pseudo-Apollodorus, reckoning the children Memory bore to Zeus, places her second, after Calliope and before Melpomene. Her name carries its own meaning: it is formed from kleos, fame or glory, marking her as the proclaimer of renown.2
Pseudo-Apollodorus alone preserves a love-story of Clio. Through the wrath of Aphrodite — whom Clio had taunted for her love of Adonis — the Muse herself fell in love with Pierus, son of Magnes, and meeting him bore him a son, Hyacinth. So the goddess of fame is punished by being made to feel desire, and from that union springs the youth later beloved of Apollo.3
Around the Muses' very parentage the ancient authors diverge. Pausanias records a Boeotian tradition that Pierus, a Macedonian who gave his name to the mountain, came to Thespiae and established nine Muses, changing their names to the ones now used; and others held that Pierus himself had nine daughters bearing those same names, so that the figures the Greeks called children of the Muses were really sons of the daughters of Pierus. This rival reckoning stands against the older descent from Zeus and Mnemosyne.4⚖
Ovid turns the doubled set of names into a contest. The nine daughters of Pierus of Pella, presuming on their number, challenge the Muses to a singing match and lose; for their pride they are transformed into magpies, condemned to chatter their stolen eloquence in the woods. Clio is not singled out in these accounts as the Muse of history — that specialised assignment, like the canon dividing the arts among the nine, is a late Roman ordering laid over the older undifferentiated chorus of song.5
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
