In Greek mythology, somewhere on the sea routes of the western Mediterranean, lay an island surrounded by the bones of dead men. On it lived the Sirens, creatures whose singing was so beautiful that no sailor who heard it could resist. They would steer their ships toward the island, forgetting home and family, and die on the rocks — or simply waste away on the shore, listening forever.
Only two crews ever passed the Sirens and lived: the Argonauts, saved by the music of Orpheus, and Odysseus and his men, who blocked their ears with wax. The Sirens have become one of the most enduring images of fatal temptation, and their name survives in the “siren song” of something irresistible and dangerous — and, in the modern world, in the wailing alarms of police cars and ambulances.
Bird-Women
Modern readers often imagine Sirens as mermaids. But in ancient Greek art and literature, the Sirens were bird-women: creatures with the bodies of birds and the heads (and sometimes arms and breasts) of women. They appear this way on Greek vases from the seventh century BCE onward, often perched on rocks, playing lyres or pipes. Their image may have been borrowed from Near Eastern and Egyptian art, where human-headed birds represented the souls of the dead (the Egyptian ba).
The Sirens were also depicted on tombs and grave monuments, mourning the dead. They were associated with death, lament, and the passage to the underworld.
Origins and Parentage
The Sirens’ parents vary in different sources. They were usually said to be the daughters of the river god Achelous and one of the Muses — Melpomene (tragedy), Terpsichore (dance), or Calliope (epic poetry). Their musical gift came from their Muse mother.
Their number also varies. Homer speaks of two Sirens; later writers usually give three, with names like Parthenope, Ligeia, and Leucosia, or Peisinoe, Aglaope, and Thelxiepeia.
Why They Became Monsters
Several myths explained how the Sirens got their bird bodies.
- In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Sirens were companions of Persephone. When Hades carried her off to the underworld, they searched the world for her and asked the gods for wings so they could search the seas as well.
- In another version, the goddess Demeter turned them into birds as a punishment for failing to protect her daughter.
- In yet another, Aphrodite punished them for refusing to marry.
The Sirens in the Odyssey
The most famous encounter comes in Book 12 of Homer’s Odyssey. The enchantress Circe warns Odysseus about the Sirens: “Whoever approaches them unawares and hears their voice never returns home to wife and children… The Sirens bewitch him with their clear song, as they sit in a meadow, and all around them is a great heap of bones of rotting men, with the skin shrivelling on them.”
Circe tells Odysseus how to survive. He must plug his crew’s ears with beeswax. If he himself wishes to hear the song, he must have his men tie him to the mast, and order them to tie him tighter if he begs to be released.
As the ship approaches the island, the wind drops and the sea goes calm. Odysseus softens wax in the sun and seals his men’s ears. They bind him to the mast. The Sirens see the ship and begin to sing:
Come here, renowned Odysseus, great glory of the Achaeans; stop your ship so that you can hear our voice. No one has ever sailed past here in a black ship without listening to the honey-sweet voice from our lips; he goes on his way delighted and knowing more. For we know everything the Argives and Trojans suffered in wide Troy by the will of the gods, and we know all that happens on the much-nourishing earth.
What the Sirens offer is not sex, as later writers often assumed, but knowledge — the story of the Trojan War, and all that happens on earth. For Odysseus, the man who loves stories and longs to know everything, this is the most irresistible temptation.
He struggles and signals to be released. His men, deaf to the song, row on and tie him tighter. They pass the island safely.
Orpheus and the Argonauts
A generation earlier, the Argonauts had passed the Sirens on their way home from Colchis with the Golden Fleece. Orpheus, the greatest musician of the age, played his lyre and sang so loudly and so beautifully that the sailors heard his song instead of the Sirens’. Only one man, Butes, heard them through the music and leapt overboard; the goddess Aphrodite rescued him and carried him to Sicily (see Orpheus and The Quest for the Golden Fleece).
The Death of the Sirens
According to a prophecy, the Sirens would die if anyone ever heard their song and escaped. In some versions, after Odysseus (or Orpheus) passed, the Sirens threw themselves into the sea and drowned. Their bodies were washed ashore along the coast of Italy.
The body of Parthenope was said to have washed ashore at the site that became Naples, whose original Greek name was Parthenope. Her tomb was venerated there in antiquity, and the Neapolitans still call themselves partenopei. Other Sirens were associated with Cape Pelorus in Sicily and the Sirenuse islands off the Amalfi coast, now called Li Galli.
Contest with the Muses
In one myth, the Sirens challenged the Muses to a singing contest. The Muses won, and plucked out the Sirens’ feathers to make crowns for themselves.
From Bird to Fish
How did the bird-women become mermaids? The transformation happened gradually in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. The seventh-century Liber Monstrorum (“Book of Monsters”) described the Sirens as sea-maidens with the bodies of maidens down to the navel and the scaly tails of fish below. By the High Middle Ages, the fish-tailed siren had largely replaced the bird-siren in European art, merging with native traditions of sea-maidens (see Mermaids). Some medieval bestiaries described sirens as having both wings and fish tails.
In many European languages today, the word for mermaid is derived from “siren”: French sirène, Italian sirena, Spanish sirena.
Christian Allegory
Early Christian writers used the Sirens as a symbol of the temptations of the world. Odysseus tied to the mast became an image of the Christian soul bound to the cross — the mast of the ship of the Church — sailing safely past the seductions of pleasure and pagan learning.
The Siren Today
The word “siren” came to mean any dangerously alluring woman, and then, in the nineteenth century, a loud warning device. The French engineer Charles Cagniard de la Tour named his acoustic invention the sirène in 1819, reportedly because it could sing under water.
Modern writers have reimagined the Sirens in many ways. In Franz Kafka’s short piece “The Silence of the Sirens” (1917), the Sirens have an even more terrible weapon than their song: their silence. Margaret Atwood’s “Siren Song” (1974) has a Siren confide that the song is a cry for help — and that it works every time. The Sirens remain a powerful image of the lure of knowledge, pleasure, and beauty, and of the discipline needed to resist.
Last reviewed: September 2026.