Before the Greek Muses had become familiar at Rome, the Romans had their own Muses — the Camenae — who were not the goddesses of the arts but water-nymphs of a particular spring just outside the city, by the Porta Capena, in a sacred grove. There were four of them according to the older traditions: Antevorta, Postvorta, Carmenta, and a fourth whose name varied (Egeria is sometimes given). They were the nymphs of poetic and prophetic inspiration, drawing-water-of-prophecy.

When the Greek Muses were imported by the educated Romans of the third century before our era, the Camenae and the Muses were equated, and Livius Andronicus in translating the Odyssey into Latin Saturnians spoke of "divine Camena" where Homer had "Muse." The substitution stuck for a generation but did not last; by Cicero's time the Greek Musa was the standard Latin word for the divinity of poetry, and the Camenae had become a pious archaism, mentioned in the antiquarian books and not invoked elsewhere.

Yet the spring at the Porta Capena remained, and the Vestal Virgins drew water from it daily for the sacred rites; the bronze shrine that stood beside it was carried at last to the temple of Hercules and the Muses by the censor Fulvius Nobilior in 187 BCE. There the Camenae and the Greek Muses stood side by side, in a temple where Roman tradition and Greek learning met as they so often did — the Roman cult marking what the Romans had been before they became the Greeks' inheritors, the Greek cult marking what they had become.