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 grammar, using the dual of them at Odyssey 12.52 and 12.167 — and what they promise him is 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, using the dual of them at Odyssey 12.52 and 12.167, and the Sirens sing of "the voice of us two" (12.185).
What the Sirens offer Odysseus is 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); Hyginus names four, Teles, Raidne, Molpe and Thelxiope.
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 counter-melody holds them, and Butes alone swims off to the Sirens.
Pausanias saw an ancient image of Hera at Coroneia carrying Sirens in her hand, and explains them by a contest the Sirens lost to the Muses, who plucked their feathers for crowns.

The song Odysseus chooses to hear

Wax in the oarsmen’s ears and rope at the mast: the crossing is arranged before the island comes into sight. Odysseus is bound upright in the step of the mast, the ropes made fast at their ends, and the crew have orders to tie him tighter if he begs for release. His ears alone are open. The Sirens call him by name and promise him 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 outright. He marks it by grammar alone, using the dual of them at Odyssey 12.52 and 12.167. 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. Homer stops at the crossing; in Apollodorus the Sirens do not survive it. It had been predicted of them that they would die when a ship passed them, and when this one did, so did they (Epitome 7.19).

How many, and whose daughters

Ancient writers do not agree on the count. A lost play of Sophocles about Odysseus, quoted by Plutarch, keeps Homer’s two and calls the Sirens daughters of the sea-god Phorcys. The Epitome names three and gives each a separate part in the performance: one plays the lyre, one sings, one plays the flute (Epitome 7.18). The mythographer Hyginus names four, and a scholiast on the Argonautica three again under other names.

The parentage splits along similar lines. Apollodorus names the river-god Achelous as father and the Muse Melpomene as mother, in the Library and again in 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 give the mother as either the Muse Terpsichore or Sterope, daughter of Porthaon, and Apollodorus mentions the Sterope version elsewhere in the Library.

Homer says nothing about what the Sirens looked like. The bird form belongs to a later layer of the tradition. The Epitome describes them as human above the thighs and bird below (Epitome 7.19), and the Argonautica already describes them as partly maidens and partly birds (Argonautica 4.898). Later writers went looking for a reason for the wings. Ovid has the Sirens ask the gods for them so they could search the sea for Persephone, whom they had been playing with when Hades carried her off. Hyginus makes the feathers a punishment from Demeter for not rescuing her; Eustathius has Aphrodite turn them into birds because they chose not to marry. Aelian, who wrote on the nature of animals, says only that poets and painters gave them wings and 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 his counter-melody holds them. One man it does not hold: Butes swims off towards the Sirens, and it is Aphrodite, not the ship, who carries him away and settles him at Lilybaeum (Argonautica 4.891–921; Library 1.9.25).

Their own contest

The Sirens lose once before they meet either hero. At Coroneia in Boeotia, Pausanias saw a sanctuary of Hera holding an ancient 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).

The rocks off Surrentum

Later geography moved them west, beyond the promontory at Surrentum, to a cluster of desert rocky islets that Strabo knew as the Sirenusae. He reported a temple on the side towards the town, with the ancient offerings of those who venerated the place (Geography 5.4.8). The tomb of one of the Sirens, Parthenope, was believed to lie near Neapolis.

A name that already existed

The same defeat is told on Crete. Stephanus of Byzantium derives the city name Aptera — without feathers — from the strife of the Muses and Sirens, which 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 the Linear B tablets of Knossos, in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC, long before anyone wrote the story down. The French School at Athens dug the site first, in 1862 and 1864, and systematic excavation has run since 1985 under the Ephorate. Among the Hellenistic finds it sets out is a Siren figurine of the second and first centuries BC.

Where to stand

Chania

Crete

Aptera, a fortified city on the Paliokastro hill dominating the southeast side of Souda Bay, near present-day 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