From Song to the Mask of Tragedy

Melpomene's name began as a general word for singing or celebrating with dance, and only in the later systematization of the Muses did she become the patron specifically of tragedy. Her standard attributes, the tragic mask, the high boots (cothurni) worn by tragic actors, and sometimes a club or sword, are the emblems of the Athenian stage, and through them she became one of the most recognisable of the nine in post-Classical art, habitually paired with her sister Thalia of comedy as the twin masks that still stand for drama. A late and minor tradition names her, improbably, as mother of the Sirens, a genealogical stray that ancient authors report without agreement. Her reception far outran her thin mythology: as an allegory of Tragedy she appears on theatres, tombs and title-pages across Europe.

The convention pairing Melpomene's tragic mask with Thalia's comic mask as the twin emblem of theatre generally, still used on playbills and theatre facades today, took its familiar visual form chiefly in eighteenth and nineteenth-century European art and architecture rather than in antiquity, when the nine Muses were not so rigidly assigned a single fixed attribute each; many opera houses and theatres across Europe and the Americas carry statues or reliefs of Melpomene on their facades as a direct descendant of this later convention.