Lee Siegel writes an interesting item in the WSJ … here’s the incipit:

Whatever happened to the Muse? She was once the female figure — deity, Platonic ideal, mistress, lover, wife — whom poets and painters called upon for inspiration. Thus Homer in the Odyssey, the West’s first great work of literary art: “Sing to me of the man, Muse, of twists and turns driven time and again off course.” For hundreds of years, in one form or another, the Muse’s blessing and support were often essential to the creation of art.

Poets stopped invoking the muse centuries ago — eventually turning instead to caffeine, alcohol and amphetamines — but painters, musicians, and even choreographers have celebrated their actual female inspirers in their work up until recent times. And now, we learn, having a muse isn’t a benefit restricted to artists.

According to a recently opened exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion,” the muse lives on as the fashion model who inspires masses of women to dress in ways that capture the spirit of the age. With all due respect to the Met’s curators — and to the alluring fashion photographs that now grace the museum’s walls — such a definition of the muse would have made traditional muses run for the sacred hills.

The original muse could not have been further from an exemplar of style. Her function was not to inspire imitation, but to create new insights and new artistic forms. She was effectively invisible, a gust of divine wind that blew through the human vessel lucky enough to be graced by her attention.

In ancient times, the muse was a divinity, daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. At first, there were three muses, then the Greek poet Hesiod expanded their number to nine: Calliope, Clio, Euterpe, Erato, Terpsichore, Thalia, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Urania. It was the bureaucratic Romans who assigned a particular function to each muse: Terpsichore was the goddess of dance; Thalia, of comedy; Melpomene of tragedy and so on.

They were benign, helpful beings, who — according to Hesiod — approached a deserving poet and conferred on him three gifts: a laurel branch to use as a sceptre, a “wondrous voice” with which to sing his verse and knowledge of the future and the past. Still, they could be cruelly protective of their ethereal turf. When a Thracian poet named Thamyris challenged the nine muses to a singing contest and lost, they blinded him and struck him dumb. Legend has it that the Sirens, no mean crooners themselves, also tried to compete with the muses. They too were defeated and, as a result, lost their wings and fell into the sea.

… the article continues, of course, and there’s an interesting little slideshow of Muses through the years (including a well-known daughter of a certain Greek dictionary compiler) …

• Where Have All the Muses Gone?

Okay … even though I really don’t like baseball, I did get all excited when a piece from Newsday landed in my box beginning thusly:

Alex Rodriguez made his first visit since December to new Yankee Stadium on Friday night and instantly proclaimed it the finest structure since the Roman emperor Titus opened the Colosseum in 80 A.D. with a festival that lasted 100 days.

“Those Romans,” A-Rod said. “They knew how to party.”

… but then it went on to say:

OK, so A-Rod didn’t mention Titus or the Colosseum or talk about the Romans at all. We made that up.

Dang … so to console myself, I dug up Dio’s (66.25 ff)description of the opening of the Flavian Amphitheatre (via Lacus Curtius) … enjoy:

Most that he did was not characterized by anything noteworthy, but in dedicating the hunting-theatre and the baths that bear his name he produced many remarkable spectacles. There was a battle between cranes and also between four elephants; animals both tame and wild were slain to the number of nine thousand; and women (not those of any prominence, however) took part in despatching them. As for the men, several fought in single combat and several groups contended together both in infantry and naval battles. For Titus suddenly filled this same theatre with water and brought in horses and bulls and some other domesticated animals that had been taught to behave in the liquid element just as on land. He also brought in people on ships, who engaged in a sea-fight there, impersonating the Corcyreans and Corinthians; and others gave a similar exhibition outside the city in the grove of Gaius and Lucius, a place which Augustus had once excavated for this very purpose. There, too, on the first day there was a gladiatorial exhibition and wild-beast hunt, the lake in front of the images having first been covered over with a platform of planks and wooden stands erected around it. On the second day there was a horse-race, and on the third day a naval battle between three thousand men, followed by an infantry battle. The “Athenians” conquered the “Syracusans” (these were the names the combatants used), made a landing on the islet8 and assaulted and captured a wall that had been constructed around the monument. These were the spectacles that were offered, and they continued for a hundred days; but Titus also furnished some things that were of practical use to the people. He would throw down into the theatre from aloft little wooden balls variously inscribed, one designating some article of food, another clothing, another a silver vessel or perhaps a gold one, or again horses, pack-animals, cattle or slaves. Those who seized them were to carry them to the dispensers of the bounty, from whom they would receive the article named.

After he had finished these exhibitions, and had wept so bitterly on the last day that all the people saw him, he performed no other deed of importance; but the next day, in the consulship of Flavius and Pollio, after the dedication of the buildings mentioned, he passed away at the same watering-place that had been the scene of his father’s death. The common report is that he was put out of the way by his brother, for Domitian had previously plotted against him; but some writers state that he died a natural death.

Earlier in the epitome of book 66, Dio tells of Vespasian’s passing at the Aquae Cutiliae; the frigid waters there were said by Pliny (31.6) to be good for your tummy and other assorted body parts:

sed Cutiliae in Sabinis gelidissimae suctu quodam corpora invadunt, ut prope morsus videri possit, aptissimae stomacho, nervis, universo corpori.

… and of course, your rogueclassicist is usually imbibing Fiuggi water with his espresso as he composes these squibs; the source of Fiuggi water is a bit south of that of the Aquae Cutiliae.

In any event … A-Rod > Colosseum > Dio’s Account of the opening> Titus dies at Aquae Cutiliae > the waters at AC were good for you > so is Fiuggi, which is part of the rogueclassicist’s morning ritual. That seems to be six … (too much time on my hands this a.m., obviously).