Melpomene

Melpomene's name began as a general word for singing or celebrating with dance, and only in the later systematization of the Muses did she become the patron specifically of tragedy. Her standard attributes, the tragic mask, the high boots (cothurni) worn by tragic actors, and sometimes a club or sword, are the emblems of the Athenian stage, and through them she became one of the most recognisable of the nine in post-Classical art, habitually paired with her sister Thalia of comedy as the twin masks that still stand for drama. A late and minor tradition names her, improbably, as mother of the Sirens, a genealogical stray that ancient authors report without agreement. Her reception far outran her thin mythology: as an allegory of Tragedy she appears on theatres, tombs and title-pages across Europe.

The convention pairing Melpomene's tragic mask with Thalia's comic mask as the twin emblem of theatre generally, still used on playbills and theatre facades today, took its familiar visual form chiefly in eighteenth and nineteenth-century European art and architecture rather than in antiquity, when the nine Muses were not so rigidly assigned a single fixed attribute each; many opera houses and theatres across Europe and the Americas carry statues or reliefs of Melpomene on their facades as a direct descendant of this later convention.

Melpomene's occasional description as mother of the Sirens connects to a fuller myth, recorded by the geographer Pausanias, of a singing contest between the Muses and the Sirens themselves, bird-bodied singers who rashly challenged the goddesses of song to a match with high stakes attached: whoever lost would surrender feathers from their wings to the winner. The Muses won, and, according to Pausanias, plucked the defeated Sirens' feathers to fashion crowns for themselves, an image that cast the Muses as active, even slightly vindictive competitors defending their own domain of song against presumptuous rivals, rather than as purely passive sources of inspiration waiting to be invoked by a poet. The story exists in variant forms with differing details about which Muse judged or presided, and ancient sources are not fully consistent about the Sirens' parentage either, some naming other Muses, including Melpomene, as their mother, which sits uneasily beside the same tradition making the Sirens the Muses' defeated rivals rather than their offspring.

The inconsistency is worth stating plainly rather than smoothed over: ancient mythographers evidently felt no strong need to reconcile a story in which the Sirens are the Muses' children with a separate story in which the Sirens are the Muses' rivals, and both circulated without either driving the other from the tradition. What the contest myth does add to Melpomene's own thin profile is a rare glimpse of the Muses acting collectively and competitively, defending the primacy of divine song against challengers with wings and voices of their own.