Mnemosyne
Μνημοσύνη
Goddess of memory and mother of the nine Muses.
She spent nine nights with Zeus and bore the nine Muses.
In an age when writing was rare, poets recited entire epics from memory — so the genealogy that makes memory the mother of the arts is closer to fact than metaphor.
In the underworld, it is said, the spring of Mnemosyne — memory — flowed alongside Lethe, the river of forgetting.
SourcesHesiod, Theogony