fn1 Homer’s Sirens do not devour men. It was later Greeks who thought they ate their victims.
fn1 It can also mean ‘fighting at a distance’, like an archer; so it was an appropriate name, because archery was one of Odysseus’s skills and he might have wanted to pass it on to his son.
fn1 The Classical Greeks were baffled by Homer’s dislike of fish; they thought fish the ultimate delicacy, and couldn’t understand why Homer’s heroes ate beef when they were so often sitting next to a prime fishing spot. This contempt for fish was perhaps a steppeland inheritance, from the time when a large herd of meaty animals was one of the identifying marks of a king or hero.
fn1 But see The Odyssey, Murray/Dimock (1999), which justifies Homer’s apparent mistake by explaining that between the two mentions of the rudder the Greeks had turned the ship around. There was of course only one rudder, or steering oar, at the stern, but within the course of the story the vessel was facing in two different directions.
fn1 There are 9,253 repetitive lines out of a total of 27,803.
fn1 This word, from the same root as the others, in fact means something like ‘clansman’ in Greek. The usual Greek word for brother is adelphos, meaning ‘from the same womb’.
fn2 In French they’re exactly the same word – hôte.