SIRENS in CLASSIC MYTHOLOGY

The Siren, John William Waterhouse, c. 1900.

Private Collection/Bridgeman Images

IN HOMER’S THE ODYSSEY, WRITTEN AROUND the eighth century BC, Greek war hero Odysseus encounters numerous obstacles and delays on his ten-year journey back home to Ithaca from the Trojan War. The most seductive and dangerous of all are the sirens, creatures who are half bird, half woman, and who lure all within earshot with their hypnotic voices, then literally sing them to death.

The witch goddess Circe warns Odysseus before he sets sail: “If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men’s bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them.”

She goes on to advise him to stop his men’s ears with wax to block out the sirens’ song. But she says, “if you like you can listen yourself,” in which case “you may get the men to bind you as you stand upright on a cross-piece half way up the mast, and they must lash the rope’s ends to the mast itself, that you may have the pleasure of listening. If you beg and pray the men to unloose you, then they must bind you faster.” This is indeed what comes to pass, in a famous scene, as Odysseus, overcome by longing upon hearing those enchanted voices, begs his men, in vain, to untie him, and ends up riding to safety.

Today the word “siren” is commonly associated with the mermaid and feminine wiles in general, but to the ancient Greeks the siren was a bird-woman, with early paintings depicting her in a form that is not exactly comely. According to Jane Harrison in Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), the siren was originally a ker, or ghost, who had links to the world of the dead and might have functioned as an emissary between this world and the next. It was Homer who gave the siren her gorgeous, otherworldly voice, which later became a key attribute of the mermaid and turned her into a noir-worthy femme fatale. Homer himself doesn’t actually depict the sirens as having bird bodies or fish tails, but as Benwell and Waugh describe, the early Greek artists “had no doubts on the subject, and invariably portrayed the sirens as woman-faced birds, never as mermaids or sea nymphs, when they illustrated the episode of Odysseus with the sirens.”

Ulysses and the Sirens, John William Waterhouse, c. 1891.

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia/Bridgeman Images

The shift from powerful and otherworldly bird-woman to mermaid was gradual; it began much later, around 300 BC, and was completed in the Middle Ages. It was only with the rise of Christianity that the avian attributes slowly became replaced by aquatic ones, according to Benwell and Waugh. During the time of transition, the siren occasionally appeared in art with both wings and webbed feet. Some Latin bestiaries, for example, show a “syren” with a fish tail as well as claws and feathers. Scholar Roberta Milliken goes so far as to say that “the mermaid is more of a parasitic figure. It essentially fed off and usurped the siren’s history and made it its own.” But instead of holding great knowledge and power like the sirens did, the mermaid figure became an “emblem of danger and lust,” especially in the early church, where she represented the sin and temptation that godly men were tasked with resisting. Indeed, she appears in churches and cathedrals all through the Middle Ages as a cautionary (yet glamorous) figure.

While the siren evolved from half woman, half bird, to half woman, half fish, there were other Greek divinities who were more mermaid-like in their original forms. Nereus, a predecessor of the Greek sea god Poseidon and father of the sea nymphs called the nereids, sometimes appeared in art with a fish tail. Poseidon and the nereid Amphitrite were parents to the magnificently tressed merman Triton, whose name was later used more generally to describe the tritons, half men, half fish, who grew, according to the second-century geographer Pausanias, “hair like that of marsh frogs,” and who had “tail[s] like a dolphin’s instead of feet.” In one tale, a fisherman named Glaucus empties his daily catch into the grass on a little island in the river. He is sorting through the fish when they suddenly revive and begin moving their fins as if they’re underwater. Startled, he watches as they all scurry to the water, plunge in, and swim away. Wondering at the magical transformation he’s just witnessed, he tastes a bit of the grass the fish were lying on—and is then overtaken by an irresistible longing and plunges into the sea, where he is transformed into a triton. It is not an unpleasant or unhunky transition. Bulfinch’s Mythology (1855) describes it this way: “His hair was seagreen, and trailed behind him on the water; his shoulders grew broad, and what had been thighs and legs assumed the form of a fish’s tail. The sea-gods complimented him on the change of his appearance, and he fancied himself rather a good-looking personage.”

The Sirens, Edward Coley Burne-Jones, c. 1875.

South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa/Bridgeman Images

Glaucus and Scylla, Filippo Lauri, seventeenth century.

The Trustees of the Weston Park Foundation, UK/Bridgeman Images