Clio (Greek Kleio, from a verb meaning to make famous or to celebrate) is one of the nine Muses, the daughters of Zeus and the Titaness Mnemosyne, Memory. She is the Muse of history: the one who preserves the memory of great deeds and confers lasting fame upon them, and she is portrayed in later art with a scroll or a chest of books. It is worth being clear about how the Muses came to have their fixed departments.
In Hesiod, who first names all nine, they are a chorus of goddesses of poetry, song and memory generally, without the neat division of labour by subject. The now-familiar assignment of each Muse to a particular art, Clio to history, Melpomene to tragedy, and so on, crystallised only later, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and the details varied from writer to writer. Clio's connection with history and with the fame that outlasts death is the most stable of these attributions, and it made her name a byword for the recording of the past.