Polyhymnia

Polyhymnia (Greek Polymnia, of the many hymns) is one of the nine Muses, daughters of Zeus and the Titaness Mnemosyne. In the later, systematised understanding of the Muses she is the Muse of sacred hymn, of solemn religious song and eloquent oratory, and in some traditions also of dance and of mime, and she is shown in a thoughtful, veiled pose, often leaning on a pillar. Her name itself, made from the words for many and hymn, points to her domain of abundant praise-song.

As with her sisters, the assignment of a single art to Polyhymnia is a development of the Hellenistic and Roman periods rather than of the archaic religion: Hesiod names the nine but treats them together as the source of poetry, memory and inspired speech. Where the domains were later parcelled out, Polyhymnia was given the grave and reverent registers, the hymn to the gods, the oratory that moves an assembly, distinguishing her from the Muses of lighter song and playful verse.

Polyhymnia's distinctive veiled, pensive pose, leaning in thought against a pillar, belongs to a recognizable and much reproduced type in ancient sculpture, one piece of a wider Roman fashion for commissioning complete sets of the nine Muses as matched sculptural groups to decorate the gardens, libraries and theaters of wealthy villas. Archaeologists have recovered numerous Roman-era copies of a canonical Muse sculptural series, most dating from the first to third centuries CE and evidently based on lost Hellenistic Greek originals, in which each Muse is given a distinct, identifiable pose and attribute so a viewer could recognize the whole set of nine at a glance, Polyhymnia's veiled thoughtfulness standing out among sisters shown dancing, holding instruments or gazing at the stars. Complete or partial sets of these sculptural groups have been excavated at major Roman sites including Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, reflecting a broader practice of educated Roman patrons surrounding themselves with a visual encyclopedia of the arts the Muses collectively represented.

Because so many of these Roman copies survive, scattered today across museums in Europe and beyond, art historians can reconstruct with reasonable confidence which pose and attribute ancient viewers associated with which Muse by the imperial period, even where the pairing of a given Muse with a given art developed only gradually and unevenly in the literary sources. Polyhymnia's veiled, contemplative figure is one of the more consistently rendered types across these surviving copies, suggesting that sculptors working for Roman patrons had settled on a stable, recognizable visual shorthand for her well before many literary sources fixed the same assignment in words.