Once again, there is a great deal of information to put down and which will be by me in the least organized or gracious way possible.
We opened with the altrenative name of the Muses, which is the Nine Daughters of Memory. This is so because their mother Mnemosyne mated with Zeus. Vladimir Nabokov wished to call his autobiography Speak Mnemosyne, but ended up going with the English translation instead. I think it flows off the tongue a bit more smoothly.
The four most prolific of ancient Greek dramatists are widely held to be Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes and Aristophones. The majority of the works by a great number of their contempories were lost when the great library in Alexandria was burned down. By anti-intellectuals as it were.
But even before the dramatists there was Homer and his contemporary Thesiod, composer of the theogony* of Zeus(and henceforth all the other Gods). A basic idea carried from here, as well as in the hymn to Demeter and in a great deal of erstwhile(sp?) myth is this, which is something my mother has been telling me for quite a long time: men are useful but not necessary(not to mention dangerous). Things are going along fine with the Mom and her daughter, when suddenly this dark, predatory male comes along and takes the daughter away. What is a mother to do? Well when she's a goddess of plants and agriculture, she suspends all the growth of flora on the earth, which puts the insignifigant mortals in hard straights. After all, "cereal", which we eat for breakfast, derives from Ceres, the Roman name for Demeter.

* This etiology goes interestingly with the name Antigone. Since gony means "birth" or "womb", then it means "against birth". What could this mean? Perhaps because she appeals for divine rights to the gods of the dead? So this prohibits her from being for life? More on this shall probably followat some point in time.