Excerpt from American Beauty Personified as the Nine Muses<br><br>Olympus'and in Boeotia on Mount Helicon. According to Hesiod they were born on Olympus, near the pinnacle on which Jupiter (zeus in the Greek) was enthroned, whence they visited Helicon to bathe in Hippocrene and celebrate their choral dances around the altar on the crest of the sacred mountain. In Homer, as in laterauthors, they are described as singing festive songs at the banquets of the gods, and conferring on mortals the gift of poetry. Though occupied only with the gentler and more graceful arts, the sweet-voiced deities were not without their sterner traits. They doomed Thamyris, who had presumed to excel them in music, to blindness; stripped the Sirens, who had dared to contest the laurel with.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.