The Sirens

The song Odysseus chooses to hear

The best-known meeting with the Sirens comes in the Odyssey, Homer’s poem about the hero Odysseus and his journey home from Troy. Everything is prepared before their island comes into sight. The oarsmen’s ears are stopped with wax. Odysseus has himself tied upright to the mast, with the ropes fastened at their ends. The crew have orders to tie him tighter if he begs to be let go. Only his own ears stay open.

The Sirens call him by name. They promise him knowledge of Troy and of everything that happens across the earth. Odysseus strains towards them, and the sailors row on until the voices fade.

Homer never describes the singers’ bodies, never names their island and never states how many there are. He shows their number only through grammar. At Odyssey 12.52 and 12.167 he uses the dual, a Greek word form for exactly two. Their danger lies in the promise that a listener will leave wiser. Homer does not make it beauty or desire. Odysseus wants what they offer. He survives only because he arranged in advance for his later orders to be ignored.

The end of the Sirens

Homer’s story stops once the ship is past. In the account of Apollodorus, whose handbook retells the Greek myths, the Sirens do not survive the crossing. It had been foretold that they would die when a ship sailed past them. When this ship did, they died (Epitome 7.19).

The Sirens had met heroes before. The Argonauts, the crew of the ship Argo, pass them on the way home from the land of Colchis, before Odysseus ever sails. In the Argonautica, the poem by Apollonius Rhodius about that voyage, no wax or rope saves the crew. The musician Orpheus does. He strikes up his lyre before the crew can be drawn in, and his own tune holds them (Argonautica 4.891-921).

One man is not held. Butes swims off towards the Sirens. The goddess Aphrodite, and not the ship, carries him away and settles him at a place called Lilybaeum (Library 1.9.25).

A contest with the Muses

The Sirens had lost once before they met either crew. Pausanias, a Greek traveller who wrote a guide to Greece, tells the story. At Coroneia in Boeotia he saw a sanctuary, a sacred place, of the goddess Hera. It held an ancient statue of her, the work of Pythodorus of Thebes, and in her hand she carried Sirens.

Pausanias explains why. Hera talked the daughters of Achelous into challenging the Muses to a singing contest. The Muses won. They plucked out the Sirens’ feathers and wore them as crowns (Description of Greece 9.34.3).

How many, and whose daughters

Ancient writers do not agree on how many Sirens there were. A lost play by Sophocles about Odysseus, quoted by the writer Plutarch, keeps Homer’s two. It calls the Sirens daughters of the sea-god Phorcys. Apollodorus names three and gives each a separate part in the performance: one plays the lyre, one sings and one plays the flute. The writer Hyginus, who collected myths, names four. An ancient commentator on the Argonautica names three again, under other names.

Their parents divide in a similar way. Apollodorus names the river-god Achelous as their father and the Muse Melpomene as their mother, and he does so twice. Apollonius Rhodius also makes Achelous their father, but gives them a different mother, the Muse Terpsichore. An ancient commentator on the Odyssey and the commentator Eustathius give the mother as either Terpsichore or Sterope, daughter of Porthaon. Apollodorus mentions the Sterope version elsewhere in his book.

How they got their wings

Homer says nothing about how the Sirens looked. Their bird shape belongs to a later stage of the stories. Apollodorus describes them as human above the thighs and bird below (Epitome 7.19). Apollonius Rhodius already describes them as partly maidens and partly birds (Argonautica 4.898).

Later writers looked for a reason for the wings. The poet Ovid has the Sirens ask the gods for wings so they could search the sea for Persephone. They had been playing with her when the god Hades carried her off. Hyginus makes the feathers a punishment from the goddess Demeter, because they did not rescue Persephone. 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.

Places that claim the Sirens

Later geography moved the Sirens west, beyond the headland at Surrentum. The geographer Strabo knew a group of bare, rocky islets there as the Sirenusae. He reported a temple on the side facing the town, with the ancient offerings of those who honoured the place (Geography 5.4.8). The tomb of one Siren, Parthenope, was believed to lie near the city of Neapolis.

On Crete, Stephanus of Byzantium, who wrote a book about place names, explains the name of the city of Aptera. He says it means without feathers, and comes from the quarrel of the Muses and the Sirens. He places that quarrel at the Mouseion, a spot he says stood near the city and the sea.

The explanation cannot account for how old the name is. Aptera appears as the place name a-pa-ta-wa on the Linear B tablets, written records found at Knossos, in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC. That is long before anyone wrote the story down. The site was first dug in 1862 and 1864, and regular excavations have run since 1985. Among the Hellenistic finds it displays is a Siren figurine of the second and first centuries BC.