Almost everyone who knows the story of the Sirens pictures them the same way: beautiful women from the waist up, fish tails below, sitting on rocks in the sea, singing. The image is so thoroughly embedded in popular culture that it has effectively replaced the original. Statues of it stand outside seafood restaurants. Starbucks uses a version of it as its logo. The mermaid-siren is one of the most recognisable mythological figures in the world.
It is also almost entirely wrong. The Sirens of Greek mythology, the ones who nearly destroyed Odysseus and his crew, were not mermaids. They were birds. Specifically, they were bird-women: creatures with the head, and usually the upper body, of a woman and the wings and lower body of a large bird. They sat not in the sea but on an island, surrounded by the rotting corpses of the sailors whose ships they had wrecked. And in Homer’s account, which is the oldest and most authoritative source for the story, he does not describe their appearance at all.
What Homer Actually Wrote
In Book 12 of the Odyssey, Circe warns Odysseus about what he will encounter on the next stage of his journey. Her description of the Sirens is specific about some things and silent about others. They sit in a meadow. Men’s corpses lie heaped around them, mouldering on the bones as the skin decays. Their song is honey-sweet and irresistible. Any man who hears it will never return to his wife and children because he will never be able to leave. Circe tells Odysseus to stop the ears of his crew with wax and, if he himself wants to hear the song, to have himself tied to the mast so that he cannot act on whatever the music makes him want to do.
What Circe does not say, and what Homer does not describe anywhere in the poem, is what the Sirens look like. This is notable. Homer describes Scylla in gruesome anatomical detail. He describes Charybdis with precision. He describes the Cyclops, the Laestrygonian giants, Circe herself. The Sirens get no physical description whatsoever. Either Homer assumed his audience knew what they looked like and needed no reminder, or the question of their appearance was simply not what interested him about them.
What interested Homer was the song and what it promised. The Sirens speak in the poem, and what they say is remarkable. They tell Odysseus that anyone who hears them goes on his way a wiser man, because they know everything that happened at Troy and everything that happens on the fruitful earth. They are not promising pleasure. They are promising knowledge. Total knowledge of the past and present, delivered in the form of music that no one who hears it can resist. The danger of the Sirens in Homer is not sexual. It is epistemological. They offer the one thing that a man like Odysseus, who has spent ten years away from home fighting and wandering, might find more irresistible than any merely physical temptation.
Bird-Women and Soul-Birds
The visual tradition of the Sirens as bird-women is consistent in Greek art from at least the 7th century BC, and it predates the association with the sea that would eventually transform them into mermaids. In early Greek pottery they appear as large birds with women’s heads, sometimes holding lyres, sometimes shown in scenes directly related to the Odysseus episode. The combination is not arbitrary. Birds in the ancient Mediterranean world carried specific associations with the souls of the dead, with knowledge of things hidden from the living, and with the boundary between the human world and whatever lay beyond it.
The likely origin of the Siren figure is older than Greek mythology and comes from further east. Britannica identifies the image as coming from an Asian tradition of soul-birds: winged creatures that were understood as ghosts or spirits, capable of stealing the souls of the living to share their fate. This tradition appears to have entered Greek culture during the orientalising period of Greek art, roughly the 8th and 7th centuries BC, when contact with Near Eastern and Egyptian cultures was introducing new artistic and mythological elements. The Egyptian ba-bird, a human-headed bird that represented one aspect of the human soul, belongs to the same general tradition.
In this context, the Sirens’ bird form carries a specific meaning that the mermaid form loses entirely. They are death figures. Their meadow full of rotting corpses is not incidental decoration. It is the landscape of the underworld brought to the surface of the world, and the Sirens themselves are the agents of that transition, beings who exist at the boundary between life and death and who draw the living across it with the promise of what lies on the other side. Their song offers knowledge. What it does not offer is a way back.
How Many Were There
Homer mentions the Sirens without specifying a number. Later writers disagreed. The most common tradition settles on three, and the names that appear most frequently in ancient sources are Aglaope meaning splendid voice, Thelxiepeia meaning charming voice, and Peisinoe meaning affecting the mind. Hesiod gives slightly different names. Other ancient sources add more. Plato, in a passage of the Republic describing the music of the spheres, mentions eight Sirens, one for each celestial sphere, which is a very different mythological context from the island of rotting corpses but suggests how widely the Siren concept spread beyond its Homeric origins.
Their parentage is also disputed. The most common accounts make them daughters of the river god Achelous and one of the Muses, which explains the musical gift. Other traditions give them Phorcys as a father, which places them in the family of sea monsters that includes Scylla and the Gorgons. One tradition makes them former companions of Persephone who were transformed into Sirens as punishment for failing to prevent her abduction by Hades. This last version gives them a tragic backstory that the Homeric account does not contain, turning them from predatory death-figures into grieving women condemned to exist at the threshold of death because they could not stop one of the most famous deaths in Greek mythology.
The Wax and the Mast
The two methods Odysseus uses to navigate the Sirens are among the most discussed strategic decisions in the Odyssey, and they reveal something important about his character that distinguishes him from other heroes.
His crew stop their ears with beeswax, kneaded soft and pressed in firmly so that they hear nothing. They row past the Sirens’ island in safety, unable to be tempted by something they cannot hear. This is the sensible option. It is also the option that costs them nothing and gives them nothing.
Odysseus does something different. He has himself tied to the mast of the ship, bound tightly enough that he cannot free himself regardless of what he does or says. He hears everything. He experiences the full force of whatever the Sirens’ song does to a person. He strains against the ropes and signals to his crew to release him and they, following his prior instructions, bind him tighter instead. When the island is far enough behind them that the song can no longer be heard, they untie him.
This is the choice that has fascinated readers and philosophers for centuries. Odysseus does not resist the Sirens. He structures the situation so that his resistance is irrelevant. He wants to hear the song, he knows he cannot trust himself if he hears it, and so he removes his own agency from the equation in advance. The philosopher Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, in their Dialectic of Enlightenment written during the Second World War, read the episode as a founding moment of Western rationality: the capacity to use reason and foresight to bind yourself against your own desires in order to achieve an end. Odysseus is the first modern man in that reading, and the Sirens are the first object of the kind of pleasure that must be heard but cannot be acted upon.
Whether or not you find that reading convincing, the episode is genuinely strange. Odysseus is the only person in the tradition who hears the Sirens and survives. The Argonauts pass the Sirens before him, but they have Orpheus aboard, whose own music is good enough to drown the Sirens out. Nobody else in the tradition encounters them and lives. What the song actually does to Odysseus, what he hears and what it costs him, Homer leaves almost entirely unspecified. He hears it. He is bound. The ship moves on.
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Sign up here →When They Became Mermaids
The transformation of the Sirens from bird-women to fish-women happened gradually across the medieval period, driven by a combination of factors that had little to do with Homer. The Physiologus, an early Christian text from around the 2nd or 3rd century CE that described real and imaginary animals with moral lessons attached, depicted the Siren as half-woman half-fish rather than half-woman half-bird. The bestiaries that descended from the Physiologus repeated and spread this image across medieval Europe. By the time most people in Western Europe had any access to descriptions of Sirens, the fish-tail version had been standard for centuries.
The connection to the sea is probably what drove the shift. Sirens in the literary tradition were always associated with maritime danger, with the threat that faced sailors on long voyages. Fish, rather than birds, felt like the natural body for a creature of the sea. The soul-bird associations of the original form, meaningful in the context of ancient Mediterranean religion, had no particular resonance in medieval Christian Europe. The mermaid was already a familiar figure. The Siren merged with it.
The resulting creature, the mermaid-siren, is a genuinely different mythological being from the bird-women of the Odyssey. She is associated with seduction and with the sea rather than with death and with knowledge. The rotting corpses on the island have vanished. The promise of total omniscience has been replaced by the promise of beauty. She is a much less frightening figure than the original, which is perhaps why she proved so durable.
The bird-women are still there in the ancient sources, sitting in their meadow among the bones, offering to tell you everything you could possibly want to know about the world. The question Homer leaves open is whether anyone who heard everything they knew would actually want to go home afterward.
For more from the world of the Odyssey, the Circe article covers the sorceress who warned Odysseus about the Sirens. Scylla and Charybdis, the monsters he encountered immediately after, are covered separately in the Ancient Mythology section.
