The Sirens

The Sirens are birds with women's faces in the oldest art, not the fish-tailed figures the word later came to mean — that confusion with mermaids is a medieval development. Homer never describes their bodies at all. He describes their meadow, and the heaps of men rotting in it.

What they actually offer is the detail most people forget. The Sirens do not sing about love or beauty. They sing about knowledge: they promise Odysseus that they know everything that happened at Troy and everything that will happen on earth. It is a trap baited with the one thing a clever man cannot refuse.

Circe warns him and gives him the method. He plugs his crew's ears with beeswax and has himself lashed upright to the mast with orders to ignore any command he gives while the song lasts. He hears it, he strains against the ropes, and the ship keeps going — the only man to hear the Sirens and live.

The Argonauts got past differently. They had Orpheus aboard, and he simply played louder and better, drowning the song out. One man was still lost overboard toward it. Two crossings, two solutions: restraint, or a better song.

There was a prophecy attached to them: the Sirens would die if any mortal ever heard their song and sailed past. Both Odysseus and the Argonauts managed it, and in one version the Sirens throw themselves into the sea afterwards. A monster undone by the existence of a solution is unusual, and it is the only ending the myths give them.