Everyone knows the Sirens as beautiful singers who lure sailors onto rocks. It is a good summary, and it is not quite what Homer says. In the Odyssey the Sirens do not offer love, or gold, or rest. They offer something much more dangerous to a man like Odysseus: they say they know everything, and they begin by telling him about himself. This article looks at what the song actually contained, why it was fatal, and what the poem shows us about how to hear it and live.
What Homer actually says
The warning comes first, from the sorceress Circe, before Odysseus ever reaches the island. She tells him that the Sirens bewitch every man who comes near them. Anyone who sails up unaware and hears their voice will never see his wife and children again, because the Sirens sit in a meadow and sing, and around them lies a great heap of bones, with the skin still shrivelling on them. That is the detail I never forget. There is no monster, no whirlpool, no rock. There is just a field of people who stopped to listen.
Her advice is practical. Plug the crew's ears with beeswax. If you want to hear the song yourself, have them tie you to the mast, and tell them not to untie you, however hard you beg, but to bind you tighter. Odysseus takes the advice. As the ship nears the island, the wind drops and the sea goes flat. The crew furl the sails and row, and Odysseus, tied to the mast, hears the Sirens sing.
A small point that is easy to miss: Homer uses the dual form, grammar for exactly two. In his version there are two Sirens, not a chorus. Nor does he say what they look like. The famous bird bodies are a later addition, and for Homer they are simply voices.
A song about the listener
The words they sing are given in full. They call to Odysseus by name and title, great glory of the Achaeans, and tell him to bring the ship in and listen. No one has ever sailed past in a black ship without hearing the honey-sweet voices from their lips, they say, and the man who listens goes away delighted and knowing more. Then comes the pitch. They know all that the Greeks and Trojans suffered at Troy by the will of the gods, and they know everything that happens on the fruitful earth.
This is the part that I think gets lost. The Sirens are not tempting him with pleasure. They are tempting him with a flattering mirror and with knowledge. They are offering to sing his own story back to him, the war he fought and the pain he endured, and to add everything else he has ever wondered about. For a man whose defining characteristic is curiosity, and whose greatest wish is that his deeds be remembered, it is the one offer he cannot turn down.
That would explain the bones. The men in the meadow did not die in a shipwreck. They stayed, listening to the story of themselves and the world, until they starved. The danger of the Sirens is that their song is interesting.
The same song at a feast
Here is a connection that I think is worth making, and it is mine, not an ancient commentator's. Four books earlier in the poem, Odysseus is a guest at the court of the Phaeacians, and the court singer Demodocus is asked to perform. He sings about a quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles at Troy, and later, at Odysseus's own request, about the wooden horse and the sack of the city, in other words about Odysseus himself. Odysseus, who has not yet told anyone who he is, hides his face in his cloak and weeps, and the poet compares him to a woman mourning a husband killed in battle.
It is the Sirens' song, almost word for word in subject: the toil at Troy, sung by someone who knows what happened. But it does not kill him. It makes him cry, then speak, then tell the whole story of his journey to the people in the hall. The difference between the two is the setting. In a meadow, alone, with nobody to answer to, the story of your own glory is a trap. At a table, with a host, an audience and a place to go afterwards, it is a way of grieving and of coming home.
That is what the rope on the mast is for. Odysseus cannot be trusted with the song when he is alone and free. He has to build a structure around himself, a set of people and instructions, that will hold him in place while he listens. The wax in the crew's ears and the ropes on his own body are, in effect, the table and the audience, made portable.
Wax and rope
Modern readers have often seen the scene as a lesson in precommitment: when you know you will want something badly later, tie yourself down now. That is a fair reading, and the text supports it. Odysseus tells the crew in advance to ignore his future orders, and when he begs them to release him, they bind him tighter, exactly as instructed.
But there is a second feature of the arrangement that I find just as important. The crew hear nothing, and Odysseus hears everything. He is the only one who gets the knowledge. The sailors do not need to know what is on the island, only that they have to row. The scene divides the work between those who listen and those who act, and the poem says it takes both, kept apart, to get a ship through.
Bird bodies and grief
By the time we get to Greek art in the seventh century BCE, the Sirens have grown wings. They appear as birds with women's heads, perched on rocks or on the corners of tombs. A famous Athenian vase from the fifth century, now in the British Museum, shows Odysseus tied to his mast with three Sirens, two perched on the rocks and one apparently tumbling into the sea.
That last detail comes from a later tradition. Apollodorus says that it had been prophesied that the Sirens would die when a ship passed them without stopping, so when Odysseus sailed by, they threw themselves into the sea. He gives their names as Pisinoe, Aglaope and Thelxiepeia, and calls them daughters of the river god Achelous. In the Argonautica, Orpheus saves his own crew by playing his lyre louder than the Sirens can sing, though one man, Butes, dives overboard and has to be rescued by Aphrodite.
The bird bodies also tied the Sirens to death. In Euripides's play Helen, the heroine, stuck in Egypt and grieving, calls on the winged Sirens to come and accompany her laments with pipes and lyre. They are mourners as well as seducers, which makes sense. A creature that sings of the dead to the living can easily be turned into a creature that weeps for them.
Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, offers a very different origin. He says the Sirens were once ordinary girls, the companions of Persephone, and when she was abducted they were given wings to search for her across land and sea. In that version they are not predators but searchers, and the bird bodies are a mark of loyalty, not of menace.
The city built on a grave
The Greeks living in southern Italy took the legend seriously enough to tie it to real places. A group of small rocky islands near Sorrento was called the Sirenusae, and Strabo says there was a shrine to the Sirens on the headland nearby. Another Siren, Parthenope, was said to have washed up on the shore at the site of Naples, and the city, according to Strabo, grew up around her tomb, with a torch-race held every year in her honour. Naples was, for a time, known as Parthenope, and a city founded around a Siren's grave is a nice answer to the question of what happened to the singers after Odysseus got away.
The music of the spheres
Plato gave the Sirens one last strange job. In the closing myth of the Republic, a man named Er, who has returned from the dead, describes the structure of the heavens: eight great circles turning around a spindle. On top of each circle stands a Siren, singing a single note, and the eight notes together form one harmony. The deadly voices from the meadow became the music of the universe, and the singer who kills turns into the singer who holds the cosmos together.
What it is for, and a word that stayed
The word survived in everyday English in a way no other Greek monster managed. In 1819 the French engineer Charles Cagniard de la Tour built a device that made a piercing tone by blowing air through a spinning disc with holes, and noticed that it could sound underwater. He called it a sirène, after the singers who lured sailors at sea. Every emergency vehicle that has sounded one since has been named after the voices on Homer's island.
That seems about right. The Sirens' lesson was never about beautiful women. It was about the pull of being told your own story, and the need to arrange your life so that you can hear it without stopping. It is a very old warning, and every alarm that goes off in the street is still carrying it.
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