The Muse of Love Poetry

Erato is the Muse whom later tradition assigns to love poetry and erotic verse, an allotment that plays on the kinship of her name with eros, desire, though in the oldest sources the nine Muses share their inspiration without such division of labour. The pairing is old enough that Apollonius of Rhodes, at the point in his Argonautica where the poem turns from voyaging to the love of Medea and Jason, breaks off to invoke Erato specifically, asking the Muse of desire to help him tell how love undid a princess, one of the clearest surviving cases of a poet choosing among the Muses by subject. Roman poets of love elegy took up the same convention. In art she carries the lyre of the love song, and her figure became a stock personification of amorous verse in later European painting and emblem books.

Beyond Apollonius, Renaissance and later European poets frequently invoked Erato when writing love poetry or elegy, a convention visual artists echoed by giving her a wreath of myrtle or roses alongside her lyre; the convention of assigning each Muse a fixed domain, only loosely attested in the earliest Greek sources, hardened considerably in Roman and later European handbooks of mythology, which is largely where the familiar modern scheme of nine Muses with nine distinct arts comes from.