The Sirens: from Homer's Bird-Women to the Fish-Women of the Middle Ages

When we think of a siren today we picture a maiden with a fish's tail. The sirens of antiquity, however, looked quite different: they were bird-women, with a woman's face and the body or legs of a bird. The transformation into the sea creature we know took place slowly, between late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and the Italian language preserves both traditions in the single word sirena, which other languages distinguish with different names.

The Song in the Odyssey

The oldest account is found in the twelfth book of the Odyssey. The sorceress Circe warns Odysseus: the Sirens bewitch with their song anyone who comes near, and around them lie the whitening bones of men. Homer does not describe their appearance and seems to think of them as two, using a dual grammatical form for them. Odysseus has his companions' ears stopped with wax and has himself tied to the ship's mast, so that he can listen without dying.

The Sirens' song does not promise physical pleasure, but knowledge: they tell Odysseus that they know everything that happens on earth and all that Achaeans and Trojans suffered at Troy. For this reason many interpreters, ancient and modern, have seen in the episode a reflection on the dangerous allure of knowledge. In the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes the Sirens are instead defeated by Orpheus, who drowns out their voices with his music.

Bird-Women in Greek Art

Greek art represented the Sirens as birds with women's heads, sometimes with human arms. On an Attic red-figure stamnos of the fifth century BC, kept in the British Museum, Odysseus' ship can be seen while the Sirens fly around the mast, and one of them seems to plunge into the sea. Figures of sirens also appeared on tombs, as companions of the dead, perhaps in connection with the singing of funeral laments.

According to some traditions the Sirens were daughters of the river god Achelous and of a Muse. One legend tells that, defeated by Odysseus' passing, they threw themselves into the sea: the body of one of them, Parthenope, is said to have washed up on the Campanian coast, where a settlement bearing her name arose and became the nucleus of the future Naples. Neapolitans are still called partenopei today, in memory of that ancient siren.

The Fish Tail of the Middle Ages

The decisive transformation can be read in the Liber monstrorum, a Latin catalogue of prodigious beings probably composed between the seventh and eighth centuries. Here the sirens are sea maidens who from head to navel have the body of a virgin, but possess scaly fish tails with which they move through the waves. From then on the bestiaries often present both forms, sometimes blended into creatures with wings and tail together.

Romanesque sculpture abounds in two-tailed sirens, holding the ends of their tails raised in their hands; they can be found on capitals and portals in Italy, France and Spain. Medieval commentators read them as a warning against the seductions of the world. Later, in 1393, Jean d'Arras's romance devoted to Melusine spread the story of a lady who every Saturday became a serpent from the waist down, a figure akin to the sirens.

The siren has changed her body, but not her function. Whether she has wings or fins, she remains the voice calling from the border between the known world and the unknown, promising a knowledge or a pleasure paid for with one's life. In English the two forms are distinguished as siren and mermaid; Italian, using a single word, preserves the memory of a long and fascinating metamorphosis.