Were the Sirens in the Odyssey mermaids?

What Homer says, and what he leaves out

Read book 12 of the Odyssey looking for the Sirens’ bodies and you will come away empty-handed. Circe places them on the route home, just before Scylla and Charybdis, sitting in a green field by the sea with a heap of dead men’s bones around them. When the ship comes near, they call to Odysseus to “listen to our two voices.” That is as close as Homer comes to a portrait, and it tells us only how many there are: two. No tails, no wings, no hair, no water. Homer cares about what they say, which is a promise of knowledge, and that is why Odysseus had himself tied to the mast to hear it.

Bird-women on Greek pots

Greek artists filled the gap with feathers. From about 700 BC, Sirens appear on vases and in sculpture as birds with women’s heads, sometimes with arms to hold a lyre. The best known is the Siren Vase in the British Museum, an Athenian jar from around 480 BC: Odysseus stands bound to the mast while bird-bodied Sirens perch on the rocks, and one plunges toward the sea. Later writers explained the wings. Apollodorus counts three Sirens, daughters of the river Achelous and the Muse Melpomene, and says that “from the thighs they had the forms of birds.” Ovid asks them outright:

O Siren Maids, but wherefore thus have ye the feet and plumes of birds, although remain your virgin features?

His answer: they were companions of Persephone, and when she vanished they asked for wings to search the sea for her.

Where the fish tail came from

The tail took hold in the Middle Ages. The earliest text known to give the Sirens one is the Liber monstrorum, a Latin book of monsters from the early 8th century, which describes them as sea-girls with the body of a maiden and the scaly tail of a fish. Bestiaries spread the picture, sometimes keeping the feathers and adding the scales. By the time Hans Christian Andersen published The Little Mermaid in 1837, the singer of the meadow had moved under the waves, and her lure had changed from knowledge to love.

One word for two creatures

English kept two words: a siren sings sailors to their death, a mermaid lives in the sea. French, Spanish and Italian did not. A mermaid there is still a sirène or a sirena, so Homer’s singers and Andersen’s heroine share a name, and the confusion travels with it. The word took one more turn in 1819, when the French inventor Charles Cagniard de la Tour built a spinning, wailing disk that could even sound under water, and called it a sirène. Every alarm siren, on a ship or an ambulance, carries Homer’s word, though not his monster.