You rustic shepherds, shame: bellies you are,
Not men! We know enough to make up lies
Which are convincing, but we also have
The skill, when we’ve a mind, to speak the truth.

—The Muses, Zeus’s daughters, to Hesiod on Helicon, when they plucked and gave a staff of blooming laurel to him and breathed a sacred voice into his mouth to celebrate the things to come and things which were before