Siren (mythology)

• 1. Introduction

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  The sirens of Greek mythology are female humanlike beings, and in the Odyssey they make a bold promise to a passing ship. They tell the listener that they know the pains the Greeks and Trojans endured on the plain of Troy. Their song claims that all that comes to pass on the fertile earth, we know it all. The man who hears this is also offered a false promise, that he will live to tell what he learned. Almost everything else about these creatures was disputed by the people who wrote about them. How many sirens were there, and what were they called? Were they birds, women or fish? How did a singer in a Homeric epic end up on gravestones, in church sermons and in the margins of medieval bestiaries?

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• 2. Wax and Rope

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  Circe gave Odysseus his plan before his ship ever reached the sirens. On her advice, he had every sailor plug their ears with beeswax. Odysseus kept his own ears open, because he was curious what the sirens sang to him. He had the crew tie him to the mast. He ordered them to leave him tightly bound, no matter how much he might beg.

  When the song reached the ship, Odysseus signaled with his frowns for the sailors to untie him. They bound him tighter instead. Only when the ship had passed out of earshot did his men release him.

  Writers after Homer added a grim sequel to the voyage of Odysseus. They said the sirens were fated to die if anyone heard their singing and escaped. So when Odysseus sailed past, the sirens flung themselves into the water and perished. Circe's own description of the sirens' meadow is far darker than any sequel, and later writers kept returning to it.

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• 3. Names and Numbers

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  Roman poets placed the sirens on small islands called Sirenum Scopuli. Later, rationalized traditions tried to pin down the flowery island of Anthemoessa, also spelled Anthemusa. Some put it on Cape Pelorum. Others chose the Sirenuse islands near Paestum, or Capreae. Every one of these places was ringed by cliffs and rocks. The Greeks themselves pictured the sirens in a meadow starred with flowers, and not as sea deities, even though they lured mariners.

  Scholars still argue about the name itself. Robert S. P. Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek origin. Others connect it to the Greek seirá, meaning rope or cord, and eírō, meaning to tie, join or fasten. That would make a siren a binder or entangler, one who ties men up with magic song. The reading fits the image of Odysseus lashed to his mast.

  Most writers who name the sirens' father choose the river god Achelous. For their mother, the sources offer the Muses Terpsichore, Melpomene or Calliope. One account instead names Sterope, daughter of King Porthaon of Calydon. A fragment of Sophocles makes Phorcys their father. Epimenides claimed they were children of Oceanus and Ge. In Euripides's play Helen, the heroine in her anguish calls out to "Winged maidens, daughters of the Earth (Chthon)."

  The number of sirens ranges from two to eight, depending on who is counting. Homer says nothing of their names or origins and gives the number as two. Some later writers name three, such as Peisinoe, Aglaope and Thelxiepea, or Parthenope, Ligeia and Leucosia. The Suda lists Thelxiepea, Peisinoe and Ligeia. Hyginus counts four: Teles, Rhaidne, Molpe and Thelxiope. Eustathius names two, Aglaopheme and Thelxiepea, while an ancient vase painting labels two as Himerope and Thelxiepea. Spellings drift as much as counts do. Thelxiepea also appears as Thelxiope and Thelxinoe, and Aglaophonos as Aglaope or Aglaopheme.

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• 4. Rivals and Rescuers

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  Ovid made the sirens companions of the young Persephone. When Hades abducted her, Demeter gave the sirens wings so they could search for her. Hyginus tells a harsher version, in which Demeter curses the sirens for failing to intervene in the abduction.

  A statue by Pythodorus of Thebes once stood in the sanctuary of Hera at Coroneia, showing the goddess holding the sirens. According to the myth, Hera persuaded the sirens to challenge the Muses to a singing contest. The Muses won and plucked the sirens' feathers to make crowns for themselves. Stephanus of Byzantium adds that the defeated sirens, overwhelmed by their loss, cast off their feathers, turned white and threw themselves into the sea. A nearby city was named Aptera, meaning featherless, and the nearby islands were called the Leukai, the white ones. John Tzetzes says the Muses crowned themselves with the sirens' wings, all except Terpsichore, who was the mother of the sirens. Julian the Emperor mentions the Muses' victory in one of his letters.

  In the Argonautica, Chiron warned Jason that Orpheus would be necessary for the journey. When Orpheus heard the sirens' voices, he drew out his lyre and played more beautifully than they did, drowning them out. The sharp-eared hero Butes still heard the song and leapt into the sea. The goddess Aphrodite caught him up and carried him safely away.

  Geoffrey of Monmouth gave the sirens a place in his Historia Regum Britanniae, written around 1136. Brutus of Troy meets them at the Pillars of Hercules while sailing to Britain to fulfil a prophecy that he will found an empire there. The sirens surround his ships and nearly overturn them. Brutus escapes into the Tyrrhenian Sea, still bound for the island where the prophecy points.

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• 5. Feathers and Fishtails

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  Homer gave no physical description of the sirens in the Odyssey, so their appearance was left to the reader's imagination. By the 7th century BC, artists regularly drew them as human-headed birds. Early Greek art shows large birds with women's heads, feathers and scaly feet. Later images give them a human upper body and bird legs, with or without wings. They often hold instruments, especially the lyre, the kithara and the aulos. They may have been influenced by the ba-bird of Egyptian religion. Apollonius of Rhodes, writing in the 3rd century BC, called them part woman and part bird. Male sirens vanished from art around the fifth century BC. The tenth-century Byzantine dictionary Suda still described them as sparrows from the chest up and women below, or as little birds with women's faces.

  An earthenware bowl found in Athens already shows a mermaid-like siren in the 3rd century BC. Examples from that period call such figures mermaids or tritonesses. A terracotta oil lamp, possibly Roman, shows another. The first known written use of siren to mean mermaid comes from the Anglo-Latin catalogue Liber Monstrorum, from the early 8th century AD. It calls them "sea-girls... with the body of a maiden, but have scaly fishes' tails".

  The medieval Physiologus and the bestiaries that followed it carried the confusion into manuscripts. The Latin Physiologus of the 6th century kept the bird-like siren of the classical sources. Yet the Bern Physiologus of the mid-9th century drew a woman-fish, contradicting its own text, which described a bird. An English Latin bestiary dated 1220-1250 shows a group of sirens with fishtails swimming in the sea. Its text says they were winged fowl down to their feet.

  In the so-called second family of bestiaries, the pure mermaid became commonplace. She is shown with a musical instrument, as in the classical tradition, and sometimes holding what looks like an eel-fish. One of the earlier codices in the group, from the late 12th century, shows her this way. Other manuscripts keep to the text and draw three bird-like sirens. Still others show a hybrid with a human torso, a fish-like lower body, and bird wings and feet. In Harley 3244, the wings sprout from the shoulders. In other hybrids, the wings hang at the waist.

  Verse bestiaries then adjusted their words to match the pictures. Philip de Thaun's Anglo-Norman verse bestiary, from about 1121-1139, says the siren's other part may be like fish or like bird. Guillaume le Clerc's Old French verse bestiary, from 1210 or 1211, says the same. Some of these books also show a siren holding a comb or a mirror, because they describe her as a vain creature who needs them. Mermaids across Europe still carry that comb and mirror today.

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• 6. The Song and the Grave

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  Statues of sirens in funerary settings are attested from the classical era in mainland Greece, Asia Minor and Magna Graecia. The so-called Siren of Canosa comes from Canosa di Puglia, a site in Apulia that belonged to Magna Graecia. She was placed among the grave goods of a burial. She seems to have acted as a psychopomp, a guide for the dead on the journey to the afterlife. The cast terracotta figure shows a woman with the feet, wings and tail of a bird, and it still bears traces of white pigment. It is kept in the National Archaeological Museum of Spain in Madrid.

  The ancients sometimes called the sirens the Muses of the lower world. The classical scholar Walter Copland Perry, who lived from 1814 to 1911, wrote that their song was irresistibly sweet but no less sad than sweet. In his words it "lapped both body and soul in a fatal lethargy, the forerunner of death and corruption." Their song, according to this tradition, is continually calling on Persephone.

  The linguist Jane Ellen Harrison, who lived from 1850 to 1928, found it strange and beautiful that Homer made the sirens appeal to the spirit and not to the flesh. She compared them to the Sphinx, as mantic creatures who know both the past and the future. In her view, their song takes effect at midday, in a windless calm. The end of that song is death. The phrase siren song now describes any appeal that is hard to resist but leads to a bad end if heeded.

  Circe paints the scene in grisly terms, with the sirens lolling in their meadow, surrounded by heaps of corpses rotting away, rags of skin shriveling on their bones. Later writers took this to mean that the sirens ate humans. Harrison pointed out that rotting flesh suggests the bodies were never eaten at all. One proposed explanation holds that the sirens, with their feathers stolen, were kept alive by their divine nature. They could not provide food for their visitors, who refused to leave and starved to death.

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• 7. Temptation and Doubt

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  Clement of Alexandria, preaching in the 2nd century, described the siren as a beautiful courtesan who sings pleasant melodies to men. For him she was the symbolic vice of Pleasure. Ambrose, in the 4th century, repeated that the siren stood for worldly temptations and not for an endorsement of the Greek myth. Isidore of Seville, who lived from about 560 to 636, gave the idea a long-lasting boost in his Etymologiae. He wrote that the Greeks imagined three sirens, part virgins and part birds, one singing, one playing the flute and one the lyre. Isidore claimed the truth was that they were prostitutes who led travelers down to poverty. He said they had wings and claws because Love flies and wounds.

  Saint Jerome, who produced the Latin Vulgate, used the word sirens to translate the Hebrew tannīm, meaning jackals, in Isaiah 13:22. He also used it for a word meaning owls in Jeremiah 50:39. The Physiologus gives the siren and the onocentaur a single chapter, since the Septuagint places them together in Isaiah. According to the ancient Hebrew Book of Enoch, the women led astray by the fallen angels will be turned into sirens.

  Dante Alighieri puts a siren in Canto 19 of Purgatorio. The pilgrim dreams of a woman who is stuttering, cross-eyed, crooked on her feet, with stunted hands and a pallid color. As he gazes at her, she becomes desirable and reveals herself as a siren. She boasts that she turned Ulysses from his course. Dante had no access to the Odyssey, and in Homer the sirens never turn Ulysses from his path. Scholars suggest Dante may have misread an episode in Cicero's De finibus. A holy and quick lady then appears and cries, "O Virgil, Virgil, who is this?" Virgil tears the clothes from the siren's belly, and the stench that rises from it wakes the pilgrim.

  By the Renaissance, female court musicians known as courtesans filled the role of unmarried companions. Musical performances by unmarried women could be seen as immoral. Female singers came to be linked with the siren, a creature that could control a man's reason. Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his notebooks that the siren sings so sweetly that she lulls the mariners to sleep. Then, he says, she climbs upon the ships and kills the sleeping mariners.

  Pliny the Elder, in the first century, dismissed sirens as a pure fable. He noted that Dinon, father of the celebrated writer Clearchus, asserted they exist in India. Dinon said they charm men by their song, lull them to sleep and tear them to pieces. In the 17th century, some Jesuit writers insisted the sirens were real. Cornelius a Lapide described a woman's voice as a siren's voice that enchants. Athanasius Kircher argued that compartments must have been built for sirens aboard Noah's Ark.

  Charles Burney, writing around 1789 in A General History of Music, took a rational view. He cited Bochart, who derived the name from a Phoenician word implying a songstress. Burney thought there may once have been excellent singers of corrupt morals on the coast of Sicily who seduced voyagers. John Lemprière repeated the idea in his Classical Dictionary of 1827. He credited the critic Damm with picturing the sirens as singers who held travellers with music until they forgot their native land.

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• 8. Music and Paint

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  Claude Debussy, the French impressionist composer, gave his orchestral work Nocturnes a third movement titled "Sirènes". Debussy said it depicts the sea and its countless rhythms. Among waves silvered by moonlight, the mysterious song of the Sirens is heard as they laugh and pass on.

  In 1911, the French composer Lili Boulanger wrote "Les sirènes" for a mezzo-soprano soloist, a choir and piano. The contemporary British composer Alma Deutscher, a former child prodigy, wrote the orchestral "Waltz of the Sirens".

  The English artist William Etty painted The Sirens and Ulysses in 1837 and showed the sirens as young women in fully human form. Later artists copied the practice. In everyday speech, the word siren now needs no wings or fishtail at all, since it can simply mean a woman considered both very attractive and dangerous.

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