(Gk. seirēnes; Lat. sirenes, sirenae).
Mythological creatures, usually thought to number three. They are first mentioned in the Odyssey (xii.39ff, 158ff); when Odysseus's ship approaches their island near Scylla and Charybdis, he has himself lashed to the mast and his crewmen's ears stopped up with wax in order to escape the hypnotic, fatal power of the Sirens' song, which Homer describes as high-pitched and clear-toned (liguros, 43, 183). Hellenistic genealogies make one or other of the Muses the mother of the Sirens (Apollodorus, i.3.4; cf i.7.10); older accounts assign their parentage to elemental or chthonic powers. Their many names (e.g. Thelxiepeia, Aglaophōnos, Ligeia) invariably refer to the beauty or the incantatory nature of the words or melody of their song. Originally they were represented as birds with women's heads; by the 5th century bce they had become winged women with feathered legs and claws for feet (Apollodorus, Epitome, vii.18–19).
These anthropomorphic Sirens were often depicted with a kithara (see illustration) or aulos. Hellenic writers connected them with music and also with the underworld: Sophocles (Nauck, frag.777) said that they sang the melodies of Hades; Euripides (Helen, 168ff) referred to them as playing the aulos, the syrinx or the phorminx, and associated them with Persephone. In an encounter with the Argonauts, the power of the Sirens is defeated by Orpheus, who sings an even more alluring song (Apollonius Rhodius, Argonauts, iv.891–921; Apollodorus, i.9.25), and when the Sirens challenge the Muses themselves to a contest of song, the Sirens are defeated, lose their wings and jump into the sea (Pausanias, Description of Greece, ix.34.3).
On Attic gravestones the Sirens were depicted as mourners and musicians. They are related to the figure of the musician, who through song or piping or harping represents the fascination of death. Celtic mythology contains accounts of women, magical singers and guides of the souls of the dead, who strikingly resemble the Sirens (see Gresseth), and the singing and playing of the Sirens were eventually taken over into the music of the Christian angels who guided souls to Heaven (but see Isaiah xiii.21 and xxxiv.13). Plato's myth of Er (Republic, x, 617b–d) depicts eight Sirens stationed on the eight celestial spheres, each singing one note. The ensemble, according to Plato, constitutes a modal complex (harmonia). Cicero (On the Greatest Good and the Greatest Evil, v.18.49) dismisses the music of Homer's Sirens as trivial and ineffective. Canonized by Ovid (Metamorphoses, v.551ff; Art of Love, iii.311–12) and further strengthened by the powerful authority of Isidore of Seville (Etymologiae, xi.3.30), the conception of the Siren as bird-woman remained dominant until the 11th or 12th century, when the fish-tailed Siren, ancestress of the Lorelei, became the accepted type in iconography and popular belief.
A. Nauck, ed.: Tragicorum graecorum fragmenta (Leipzig, 1856, 2/1899/R1964 with suppl. by B. Snell)
J.R.T. Pollard: ‘Muses and Sirens’, Classical Review, lxvi, new ser., ii (1952), 60–66
K. Marót: ‘Musen, Sirenen und Chariten’, Filológiai közlöny, iv (1958), 657–62
B. and A. Boehm: ‘Musik im Mythos der Griechen’, Antaios, i (1959), 246–56
R. Hammerstein: Die Musik der Engel: Untersuchungen zur Musikanschauung des Mittelalters (Berne and Munich, 1962), 81ff
H. Koller: Musik und Dichtung im alten Griechenland (Berne, 1963)
G.J. de Vries: De zang der Sirenen (Groningen, 1969)
G.K. Gresseth: ‘The Homeric Sirens’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, ci (1970), 203–18
R. Hammerstein: Diabolus in musica: Studien zur Ikonographie der Musik im Mittelalter (Berne and Munich, 1974), 82ff
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN