Terpsichore was born among the nine Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. Hesiod lists her fifth, after Melpomene and before Erato. He does not yet formally assign her dance as an exclusive domain, but her name itself is connected with delight and the chorus. Later Greco-Roman tradition develops that association into the familiar Muse of dance and choral song, usually represented with a lyre or plectrum.

Choral dance stood at the centre of many Greek festivals, especially in the education and public performance of young people. Alcman's surviving Partheneion gives a vivid Archaic example of a chorus of Spartan girls performing together, though it does not present Terpsichore as a character directing the event. The passage belongs to her later sphere because it shows how inseparable song, rhythm and coordinated movement could be in Greek culture.

The Crane Dance of Theseus is another tradition that later readers can place within Terpsichore's sphere without making it a personal adventure of the Muse. Callimachus and Plutarch preserve a Delian dance associated with Theseus after the escape from Crete, its winding movements interpreted as recalling the turns of the Labyrinth. The dance belongs to Theseus and Delian ritual; Terpsichore is its appropriate later patroness because her domain is dance itself.

Ancient sources do not agree on a single child of Terpsichore. Linus is given different parents in different traditions, including Terpsichore in some accounts, while the Sirens are also assigned to different Muse mothers by different authors. These variant genealogies are useful evidence for the way the Muses generated musical lineages, but they should not be turned into one settled family tree.

Her instrument in the later tradition was the lyre, and her poet was the maker of victory odes. When an athlete came home from the Olympic Games, the greatest festival of Greece, crowned with wild olive for a triumph in running, wrestling, throwing, or the chariot race, his city did not settle for a handshake. A choir of boys or young men was assembled, costumed, and rehearsed, and through the streets they danced his praise to the lyre, singing an ode written for the occasion by a master poet. The greatest of these makers was Pindar of Thebes, whose victory odes, stuffed with myth, image, and local legend, were choreographed for just such dances, each line fitted to a turn of the body, each stanza to a figure of the whole company. The ode was Terpsichore's art at its most public: memory praising the body with the body's own language, the city applauding through its children's feet. The athlete's crown of olive would wither within the week, but the ode, sung once and written down, keeps him a champion still. This is the trade her province made: perishable triumph, sung and stepped at the right moment, becomes kleos, undying fame, and the Muse of dance was its broker.

Rome received her with open arms and put her to new work. In the Greek cities she had been the patroness of citizens dancing for their gods, but in the Roman world dance became a profession, and its highest form was the pantomime, a masked solo dancer who acted out whole myths with nothing but gesture, while a singer at the side supplied the words. The Romans were half ashamed of loving it and defended it fiercely: one of their wittiest writers devoted an entire treatise to proving that dance was among the most ancient and honourable of arts, older than the lyre, older than the theatre, born with the gods themselves. The pantomime filled the great theatres, and dancers became the most famous performers in the empire, their names known in every city. Through it all Terpsichore kept her place in the row of nine, her image copied onto mosaics and gems and sarcophagi, a dancer who never tires, mid-step forever. When the empire faded, the church fathers thundered against the stages, but the village dances survived in every province of Europe, waiting out the centuries in barns and wedding yards, preserving her steps in the bodies of peasants who had never heard her name. The dance, unlike the theatre, never truly died; it only hid.

She has been found again. In September of 1864 the German astronomer Wilhelm Tempel, working at the observatory of Marseille, discovered a small planet of the belt between Mars and Jupiter and named it 81 Terpsikore, spelling her name in the old Greek way with a k. The English language keeps her in the adjective terpsichorean, meaning simply of or relating to dance, so that a critic can still describe a dancer's line as terpsichorean grace without knowing the goddess inside the word. Dance schools around the world bear her name, and when the makers of the 1997 animated film Hercules needed Muses to narrate their story of ancient Greece, they gave her the lead and let her dance through the film from beginning to end, crowned and glowing, exactly where she belongs. Every ballet studio where a barre is gripped at dawn, every street where a folk dance still turns the whole square into a single moving body, every stage where a body tells a story without a single spoken word, is her temple reopened. From the nine nights at Olympus to the tattoo of feet on a modern stage, Terpsichore remains She Who Delights in the Dance, the proof that joy, once set to steps, can be passed from body to body forever.