Sirens- Greek CreatureCreature · Hybrid"The Deadly Singers"

Once Persephone's Handmaidens

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Sirens were once girls who gathered flowers with Persephone in Demeter's meadows. When the earth split open and Hades dragged their mistress underground, they searched for her across every land. They prayed for wings so they could search over the waters too, and the gods heard them. Feathers sprouted from their limbs. Their feet curved into talons. But their voices remained human, and the song they sang over the empty sea was a lament for the girl they could not find.

On Attic vases, they perch on rocks with mouths open in song: birds with women's heads, sometimes with women's arms alongside their wings. They were creatures of the air, not the water.

Apollodorus names their father as the river god Achelous and their mother as the Muse Melpomene. They settled on a rocky island called Anthemoessa, the Flowery Isle, off the coast of southern Italy where the Tyrrhenian Sea narrows between the mainland and Sicily. Whatever flowers grew there were hidden by bones. Homer describes two Sirens; Apollodorus names three, including Parthenope, who would one day give her name to Naples.

Their power needed no rocks or hidden reefs. In Homer, the sailors stopped willingly. They beached their ships and sat in the meadow to listen. They forgot to eat. They forgot to drink. They wasted away where they sat until only bones remained.

Pausanias records that the Sirens once challenged the Muses to a contest of song. The Muses won. They plucked the feathers from the Sirens' wings and wore them as crowns.

On funeral monuments across Attica, sculptors carved Sirens hunched on tomb columns with mouths open, singing the dead to rest.

Odysseus and the Mast

Circe warned Odysseus before he left Aeaea. Ahead on his course lay a meadow where the Sirens sat singing, she told him, heaped around with the rotting bones and shriveled skins of men. No sailor who heard them ever returned home. She instructed him to knead beeswax and stop his crew's ears so they would hear nothing. If he himself wished to hear the song and live, his men must bind him upright to the mast. And if he begged or commanded them to free him, they must bind him tighter still.

When the ship neared the island, the wind died as though a god had stilled it. The sea went flat and glassy. The crew stowed the sail and took up their oars. Odysseus sealed their ears with softened wax and stood against the mast while his men lashed him fast.

The Sirens called him by name: "renowned Odysseus, great glory of the Achaeans." They knew all the sufferings the Greeks and Trojans endured on the plain of Troy, they said, and everything that happened on the fertile earth. No one had ever passed without stopping to listen. Come closer, they sang. Anchor your ship.

Desire overwhelmed him. He twisted against his ropes and screamed at his crew to turn the ship. He begged. He commanded. They were deaf to the song and to their captain alike, and saw only his struggles. They bound him tighter, as he himself had ordered. The ship rowed on. The song faded. Odysseus was the only mortal who ever heard the Sirens and lived to tell what they sang.

The Argonauts and Orpheus

When the Argo rounded the headland on its return from Colchis, a sound drifted across the water. The sweet voices reached the ship before the crew could see the shore. Jason's men began to slacken their rowing. Orpheus, son of the Muse Calliope, snatched up his lyre and struck a hastening rhythm that drowned the singing from the island. The music of Calliope's son proved stronger than the song of Achelous's daughters. The Argonauts' hands returned to their oars.

One man failed. Butes, seated closest to the shore, caught the Sirens' voices through a gap in Orpheus's melody and threw himself over the rail. He swam toward the island and would have died there, but Aphrodite plucked him from the sea. She carried him to Lilybaeum in Sicily, and he became the father of Eryx.

The Sirens' End

A prophecy bound the Sirens to their island: they would live only until a mortal heard their song and sailed past unharmed. When Odysseus's ship grew small on the horizon and the song had not killed him, the Sirens understood that their time was done. They threw themselves from the cliffs into the sea. The waves closed over them, and the singing ended.

Parthenope's body washed ashore in southern Italy, at the bay where Neapolis would rise. The Greeks who settled there named their city for her. Strabo records that her tomb stood on the coast and received annual rites. The Neapolitans ran a lampadedromia, a torch race, through their streets in her honor and held athletic games beside her grave. Leucosia washed ashore at the promontory now called Punta Licosa. The bones on Anthemoessa bleached in the sun with no new dead to join them.