The Sirens

The Sirens are the creatures Odysseus sails past in the Odyssey, bound to his own mast so that he can hear their song and survive it. Homer gives them no shape, no home and no fixed number — he marks them as two only by addressing Odysseus in the grammatical dual — and what they promise him is not love but knowledge, of Troy and of everything that happens on the whole earth. Later sources make them bird-bodied daughters of the river-god Achelous, disagree on how many there were and who their mother was, and add an earlier defeat of their own: a singing contest against the Muses that cost them their feathers.

The facts

Parents: Achelous and Melpomene
Also known as: Sirenes

In short

Homer never says how many Sirens there are or where they live; he marks their number only by grammar, addressing Odysseus in the dual as "the voice of us two" (Odyssey 12.184–191).
What the Sirens offer Odysseus is not seduction but knowledge — everything the Greeks and Trojans suffered at Troy, and everything that happens on the whole earth (Odyssey 12.189–191).
Apollodorus names three Sirens, Pisinoe, Aglaope and Thelxiepia, and gives each a separate part in the performance: one the lyre, one the voice, one the flute (Epitome 7.18).
The sources disagree on their mother — Melpomene in Apollodorus, Terpsichore in Apollonius Rhodius, and, in one tradition, no Muse at all but Sterope, daughter of Porthaon.
In the Argonautica it is Orpheus, not wax or rope, who saves the crew: his lyre overcomes the Sirens' voice before Butes alone jumps.
Pausanias saw an image of Hera at Coroneia in Boeotia carrying Sirens in her hand, made to commemorate a contest the Sirens lost to the Muses, who plucked their feathers for crowns.

The song Odysseus chooses to hear

Odysseus orders his crew to bind him upright to the mast and tighten the ropes if he asks for release. Their ears are stopped with wax; his remain open. The Sirens address him by name and promise knowledge of Troy and of everything that happens across the earth. He struggles towards them, and the sailors row until the voices fade.

Homer never describes the singers’ bodies, names their island or states their number directly. The grammatical dual in their song points to two. What makes them dangerous is not beauty or erotic promise but the claim that a listener will leave wiser. Odysseus wants what they offer and survives only because he arranged beforehand to make his later commands powerless.

How many, and whose daughters

Ancient writers do not agree on the count. A fragment of Sophocles’ lost play Ulysses, reported by Plutarch, keeps Homer’s two and calls the Sirens daughters of the sea-god Phorcys. Apollodorus’s Epitome names three — Pisinoe, Aglaope and Thelxiepia — and gives each a separate part in the performance: one plays the lyre, one sings, one plays the flute (Epitome 7.18). Hyginus goes further and names four: Teles, Raidne, Molpe and Thelxiope. The parentage splits along similar lines. Apollodorus makes the Sirens daughters of the river-god Achelous and the Muse Melpomene, in both the Library and the Epitome. Apollonius Rhodius gives Achelous the same role but a different mother, the Muse Terpsichore. A scholiast on the Odyssey and the commentator Eustathius report a third version that drops the Muse altogether and names Sterope, daughter of Porthaon, instead.

Homer says nothing about what the Sirens looked like. The bird form belongs to a later layer of the tradition. Apollodorus’s Epitome describes them as human “from the thighs” up and bird below (Epitome 7.19), and the Argonautica, centuries closer to Homer, already calls them “fashioned in part like birds and in part like maidens” (Argonautica 4.898). Later writers went looking for a reason. Ovid has them ask the gods for wings so they could search the sea for Persephone, whom they had been attending when Hades carried her off; the Argonautica ties them to Persephone’s abduction too, without using it to explain the wings. Aelian says only that poets and painters gave them the feet of birds.

The one voice that beat them

The Argonauts meet the Sirens before Odysseus does, on the return from Colchis, and Apollonius Rhodius gives Orpheus the part that wax and rope later play in the Odyssey. He strikes up his lyre before the crew can be drawn in, and “the lyre overcame the maidens’ voice.” Only one man is not saved by it: Butes leaps into the sea, and it is Aphrodite, not the ship, who carries him to safety and settles him at Lilybaeum, on the western tip of Sicily (Argonautica 4.885–921; Library 1.9.25).

Their own contest

The Sirens lose once before they meet either hero. Pausanias records a temple of Hera at Coroneia in Boeotia holding an image of the goddess, the work of Pythodorus of Thebes, with Sirens carried in her hand. He explains why: Hera talked the daughters of Achelous into challenging the Muses to a singing contest, the Muses won, and they plucked out the Sirens’ feathers and wore them as crowns (Description of Greece 9.34.3).

A name that already existed

Crete keeps a version of that same defeat. Stephanus of Byzantium derives the city name Aptera — without feathers — from a contest between the Sirens and the Muses that he places at the Mouseion, a spot he says stood near the city and the sea. The Ephorate of Antiquities of Chania, which holds the site today, records the line as his. What the etymology cannot explain is the name’s age: Aptera appears as the toponym a-pa-ta-wa on Linear B tablets from Knossos, in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC, long before Stephanus or anyone else wrote the story down. The French School of Archaeology at Athens opened the site in 1862 and 1864, and excavation there continues under the Ephorate. A rival tradition put the Sirens’ end somewhere else entirely: Strabo places a temple of theirs, and the tomb of one of them, Parthenope, on the Sirenusae, a cluster of rocky islets off Sorrento, on the far side of the Ionian Sea from Crete.

Where to stand

Chania

Crete

Aptera, a fortified city on a ridge above Souda Bay a few kilometres east of Chania, carries the story in its own name: Stephanus of Byzantium derives 'Aptera' — the featherless place — from a contest between the Sirens and the Muses that he places at the Mouseion, a spot he says stood near the city and the sea. The name is older than that story: it appears as the toponym a-pa-ta-wa on Linear B tablets from Knossos, in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC, long before Stephanus wrote the explanation down.
Chania

Family

Achelous Father
Melpomene Mother