Melpomene was born among the nine Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. Hesiod names her fourth, after Clio, Euterpe and Thalia, and before Terpsichore. Her name is related to singing or celebrating, and Hesiod does not yet call her the Muse of Tragedy. That specialised domain develops later, when artists represent her with the tragic mask, theatrical costume and other attributes of the stage.

Greek tragedy developed through performance traditions associated especially with Dionysus, but its exact origins cannot be reduced to one fully documented line from the dithyramb. Aristotle connected tragedy's beginnings with improvisational leaders of dithyramb, while modern scholarship treats the development as more complex. By the fifth century BCE Athens held formal tragic competitions at festivals such as the City Dionysia. Judges were selected through civic procedures; the prize was not simply decided by a spontaneous vote of the theatre audience.

The golden age of her stage had three giants, and each enlarged what sorrow could do. Aeschylus had fought as a soldier at Marathon, where Athens turned back the Persian invasion, and his plays were broad and grave, full of gods and curses; his masterpiece, the Oresteia, told of Orestes, the prince who avenged his father Agamemnon by killing his own mother, and ended with the Furies, the ancient spirits of vengeance, being tamed into guardians of law. Sophocles, the most honoured of the three, wrote of the war between fate and pride, and his most famous play returned again and again to the house of Thebes, to Oedipus, the king who saved the city from the Sphinx and then learned that he had killed his father and married his own mother, and to Antigone, the daughter who buried her brother against the king's law and chose death over surrender. Euripides, the youngest and the most unsettling, filled the stage with raw nerve and doubt: his Medea showed a mother killing her own children to punish the husband who betrayed her, and his last play, the Bacchae, showed Dionysus himself arriving in Thebes and driving the women of the city, including the king's own mother, into a frenzy that ended with the king torn apart on the mountainside. A philosopher of the following century would define the art these men made as the imitation of a serious action that arouses pity and fear and, by arousing them, drains them away, a draining he named catharsis. Athens sat in its thousands and wept together, then walked home lighter. Melpomene's whole province is in that transaction: grief borrowed from the stage so that real grief becomes bearable.

One ancient genealogy makes Melpomene and the river god Achelous the parents of the Sirens. Pseudo-Apollodorus preserves this version, but it is not unique: other sources give the Sirens a different Muse, such as Terpsichore, or another mother entirely. Melpomene's connection with the Sirens should therefore be presented as one variant, not as their universally accepted genealogy.

There is a second sailing, gentler, where the Sirens lost to music rather than to wax. When Jason and the Argonauts, the heroes who sailed for the Golden Fleece, passed the Sirens' island, their ship was saved by a singer: Orpheus, the minstrel whose mother was Calliope, the eldest of the Muses, took up his lyre and sang so loudly and so sweetly that the Sirens' voices were drowned under his, and the crew rowed past unharmed. The two stories hang together as the twin lessons of her house. Song can kill, and song can save, and the difference is only which voice is stronger and which ear is sealed. The Greeks carved her emblems into their theatres to mark the bargain: the mask, because the actor was not himself but the face of grief itself; the high boots, called cothurni, that raised his stride to something beyond human; the dagger, because tragedy so often ends at the point of a blade. A day at the contests belonged to one poet alone, who offered three tragedies and then, as relief and release, a satyr play, a short drunken farce with a chorus of goat-men, after which the prizes were announced and the wreaths handed out. Through it all Melpomene stood at the edge of the stage as she stands at the edge of every calamity since: not causing the grief, but giving it a shape the human throat can sing.

Her sanctuaries were the shared sanctuaries of the nine, but her image travelled farther than most. At Delphi on Mount Parnassus, beside the Castalian spring where singers washed before they performed, the Muses kept their altar near the oracle of Apollo. On Mount Helicon, in the Vale of the Muses, statues of the nine stood in a row above the springs, and the guides showed travellers Melpomene among them, veiled and booted, the mask at her feet. When Rome took the Muses for its own it took her darkest province too, and Roman tragedy became a thing of ghosts and slaughter: the plays of Seneca, who was tutor to the emperor Nero, piled horror on horror in verse of frozen marble, monsters and tyrants and rivers of blood, far colder than the Greek stage had ever been, written for recitation in great halls rather than performance under the sun. Rome also gave her her strangest epitaph in story, which the Romans loved to repeat: that the bald head of Aeschylus, the father of tragedy, was once mistaken by an eagle for a stone, and the bird dropped a tortoise on it to crack the shell, so that the man who had taught Greece to weep died by the sky's own clumsy accident. Whether or not the story is true, it is exactly the kind of joke Melpomene's sisters would tell about her: in the house of the Songstress, even the endings are endings.

She is not finished singing. In June of 1852 the English astronomer John Russell Hind, sweeping the small planets between Mars and Jupiter, discovered the one he named 18 Melpomene, the first of his three Muse-asteroids, for the sister 23 Thalia followed in December of that same year and 27 Euterpe in 1853, so that the nine Muses now keep at least three stones circling the sun in their honour. Her mask met her sister Thalia's grinning comic mask somewhere in the centuries after antiquity, and the pair became the single most reproduced emblem of drama in the world, hung above the doors of theatres from London to Tokyo, stamped on playbills and drama school crests, and now shrunk into an emoji on every telephone, where her open mouth still wails silently beside her sister's smile. And her name passed into every tongue that borrowed Greek: when a disaster is called tragic, when an actor is said to have played a tragic role, when a story is praised for its tragic power, Melpomene is being invoked without her name being spoken. She asked for no gold and received the theatres of the world. From the goat-skin choruses of Corinth to the screens of the present age, she remains the Songstress, the voice that proves sorrow, once sung, is sorrow shared.