The Dancing Muse and the Greek Chorus

Terpsichore, whose name means delight in dancing, is assigned in the developed scheme to dance and choral song, the art in which movement and music were inseparable in Greek practice. That inseparability is the point: the choros of Greek festival and drama was at once a singing and a dancing body, so a Muse of dance is really a Muse of the whole performing chorus rather than of steps alone.

Like Melpomene she is named in a stray tradition as a mother of the Sirens. Her name has had an unusually long afterlife as a common word: terpsichorean survives in English as a slightly arch adjective for anything to do with dancing, and her figure, seated with a lyre to which a chorus moves, became the presiding image over ballet and social dance in later European allegory. Terpsichore lends her name directly to "the Terpsichorean arts," a standing English phrase for anything related to dance, one of the more durable linguistic legacies among the nine Muses; as with her sisters, the specific assignment of dance to her, rather than to the Muses collectively, is a convention that hardened in later antiquity and the Renaissance rather than one fixed from the earliest sources, which generally treat the Muses as an undifferentiated chorus of inspiration rather than nine specialists.