The pensive Muse is Polyhymnia, the melancholic goddess of song, music and dance. Represented with her hand on her chin, she invokes a particular state of innerness and intellectual pathos. She is the one who leads Luciano Emmer’s spiritual journey though the thought and marble faces of the Ancient philosophers. A journey of words and images that, from Homer to Marcus Aurelius, by way of Heraclitus, Pytagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus, takes us through a fundamental era in our Western culture.