Clio ("the proclaimer") was the Muse of history. Her attribute in late antique and Renaissance art was a scroll or a book; she was the inspiration of Herodotus, Thucydides, and the historians who came after. The historians invoked her with somewhat more diffidence than the epic poets invoked Calliope, since the truthfulness of historical narrative was conceived as a matter of investigation rather than of inspiration; but the invocation was conventional.
Before thisCalliope
Next on the wallErato
Curator’s note
What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay
Hesiod, Theogony 77; her historical specialty is post-classical.
When the sources speak
Dated witnesses for The Margins and the Monsters. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline
- c. 1600–1100 BCE
- Mycenaean palace tablets in Linear B record offerings and divine names, but little continuous myth.
- c. 1100–800 BCE
- Post-palatial oral traditions and changing cult landscapes precede the surviving alphabetic epics.
- late 8th–7th centuries BCE
- The Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiodic Theogony and Works and Days give influential but non-exclusive divine orders.
- 7th–6th centuries BCE
- Homeric Hymns, lyric poetry, colonization, and local sanctuary traditions multiply regional narratives.
- 6th–5th centuries BCE
- Orphic, Pythagorean, and mystery materials develop alternative cosmogonies and afterlife doctrines.
- 5th century BCE
- Athenian tragedy and comedy recast heroic houses and divine justice for civic audiences.
- 4th century BCE
- Philosophers, antiquarians, and local historians interpret or criticize inherited myth.
- 323–31 BCE
- Hellenistic poets and scholars systematize variants across an enlarged Greek world.