Euterpe, whose Greek name means the well-pleasing or giver of delight, is one of the nine Muses, daughters of Zeus and the Titaness Mnemosyne. In the developed scheme of the Muses she is the Muse of music and of lyric song, and she is associated above all with the aulos, the double reed-pipe whose piercing, exciting sound accompanied so much of Greek public and religious life.
As with all the Muses, this precise assignment belongs to later antiquity: Hesiod, who first lists the nine, treats them collectively as goddesses of song and memory who inspire poets and kings alike, and only in the Hellenistic and Roman periods were the individual domains, comedy, tragedy, dance, astronomy, and the rest, distributed among them, with some variation between authors. Euterpe's link with the pipe and with lyric delight is among the more consistent of these, and it fixed her as the patroness of instrumental music and the pleasures of song.