This post is part of the series “Gender and Atlantic Ocean Environments,” co-edited with Written in the Waves journal, for their special issue Soil and Sea.

The Sirens became aware of the sea-swift vessel running by them: wherefore they clearly sang to use their song—“Hither, come hither, O much-praised Odysseus: come to us, O Glory of Achaea. Bring your ship to land that you may listen to our twin voices. Never yet has any man in a dark ship passed us by without lending ear to the honey-sweet music of our lips—to go away spirit-gladdened and riper in knowledge…” Such words they sang in lovely cadences. My heart ached to hear them out.

Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey (Arcturus, 2025), 586-87.

With filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s adaption of the ancient epic, The Odyssey, hitting theatres as the summer’s much anticipated blockbuster, Homer’s popular tale returns to the attention of audiences everywhere. In this tale from the eighth century BC, Odysseus, a veteran of the Trojan War and departed king of Ithaca, narrates his gruelling return journey to his family and subjects over the span of ten years. Throughout his odyssey, Odysseus encounters monsters, gods, giants, witches, and tempests that test his resolve and endanger his life as well as the lives of his men. Among the creatures that Odysseus must face on his route to Ithaca are the beguiling sirens whose magical voices enchant the minds of unwitting sailors, luring them to a watery grave. Nolan’s siren scene is relatively brief and uneventful except for one sailor who jumps overboard to the sirens after removing the beeswax from his ears mid-song. The other men survive, rowing with grit through the dangerous passage, deafened to the sirens’ spell, though Odysseus—tied securely to the mast so that he may be able to hear their song and survive it—cries out in anguish at the sirens’ calls.

The Odyssey’s influence on the western literary canon is irrefutable, with most scholars perceiving it as one of the cornerstone texts of the tradition. Its mythical and magical elements have captivated conceptions about the sea since the story’s genesis, and many of our modern notions about the legends of sirens, and later, mermaids—acting as proxies for women more broadly—can be traced back to Homer’s epic through the innumerable works that other Classical writers, early Christian thinkers, and Renaissance poets have produced according to the male imagination. Notable works produced about sirens and mermaids by male writers and thinkers not only articulate but perpetuate the enduring myth of female depravity.

Homer’s depiction of the siren sisters and the mythical monster, Scylla, allude to the more sinister origins of what gradually became recognized as the mermaid. Both female beasts were known to bring men to horrific deaths, bearing very little physical resemblance to the lovely half-human, half-fish creatures we now understand as mermaids. A former nymph, Scylla, is described as an immortal twelve-foot misshapen beast who preys on the opposite side of the Strait of Messina to her counterpart—the great sea serpent—Charybdis. Scylla bears six necks and heads, armed with three rows of crowded teeth in each hungry mouth, and was often portrayed in antiquity as a reef or a rock that lays waiting to attack travellers.¹ We see this depiction of Scylla in Nolan’s film: shortly after leaving the sirens’ haunt, Odysseus (played by Matt Damon) and his ship are attacked from above by a massive rock-like monster that devours several men before recoiling back into the cliffside. In Homer’s work, six of Odysseus’ “stoutest and best” men are doomed to this fate.²

Both Scylla and the siren sisters are depicted as man-eating monsters that appear innocuous at first, but soon after degenerate into their true forms when men come into their view. In The Voyage of Argo (third century BC), Apollonius of Rhodes notes that the sirens were “half human and half bird in form” and spent their days “watching for ships from a height that overlooked their excellent harbour.”³ At times, Classical writers described the siren as a woman above and a bird below the waist, or a girl with wings, or having a bird’s body with a woman’s head.⁴ These creatures might be found playing the lyre and pipes and singing in a “sinister sort of musical trio or quartet.”⁵ According to Rhodes, the sirens were fathered by Achelous with Terpsichore, the Muse of dance and choral song, and their seductive melodies bewitched sailors moored at the mythical island of Anthemoessa.⁶ However, there is notable diversity in the information provided about the sirens by other Classical authors: Homer notes that there are two of them, but later writers state as many as eight with various parentage and names.⁷ Their names also are suggestive—for instance, Aglaophonos (Glorious-voiced), Ligeia (clear-voiced), Molpe (Music), and Thelxinoe (Mind-enchanter).⁸ The sirens of Greek myth were not the beautiful half-women, half-fish hybrids that we associate with mermaids today, but bird-women with claws, wings, and strong appetites.⁹

Different tales exist that explain how the sirens shed their feathers to achieve closer resemblance to our modern conceptions of mermaids. One story describes the sirens entering a singing contest with the Muses, which the latter wins, humiliating the losing sirens by plucking out their feathers to wear as victory crowns for themselves.¹⁰ An alternate ending states that the sirens themselves tore off their feathers and jumped into the sea off Aptara in Crete (now Palaikastro), whose name was adjusted in literary sources to Aptera (“Featherless”).¹¹ Early Church Father, Clement of Alexandria, argued that sirens were symbols of pleasure—a deadly trap that men must flee.¹² Similarly, the third-century AD theologian, Hippolytus of Rome, compared the “good Christian sailing through the sea of heresy to Odysseus passing the enticing songstresses. Early Christians came to view the mast (with its cross-stay) as the cross on their ship (the church) and Odysseus tied to the mast as the Christian holding firmly to the cross while making the port of salvation.”¹³

In the early eleventh century, Physiologus of Theobaldus describes the bottom-half of the siren as a bird, although later manuscripts, and a related German version, change bird to fish.¹⁴ In 1215, Gervase of Tilbury echoed similar sentiments, informing the emperor Otto IV that off the coast of Britain there were sirens resembling women down to the naval, but fish beyond it, who lured sailors to shipwreck with their singing.¹⁵ In canto XIX of Purgatorio in Dante’s (1265-1321) The Divine Comedy, he falls asleep atop a mountain and dreams of a club-footed woman with crippled hands and an ashen complexion.¹⁶ At his gaze, her cheeks acquire a lively colour as she draws herself upright and begins to sing, vocalizing that she is the Siren who leads sailors astray.¹⁷ John Milton (1608-74) presented a depiction of a siren that is not unlike what we associate with more modern conceptions of mermaids in Comus 880ff.: “fair Ligea’s golden comb,/Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks/Sleeking her soft alluring locks.”¹⁸ Not only did the image of the siren became more equated with the mermaid familiar from folk tradition—exchanging her music instrument (though not her beautiful voice) for glass and comb—the word sirene or sirena in Romance-speaking countries also remained the standard word for “mermaid.”¹⁹

By the time widespread interest in classical works revived during the Renaissance, a long tradition of mermaids being symbolic of the dangers of worldly pleasures in general and of women in particular was firmly established.²⁰ Exemplifying earthly (albeit mythical) perversion in the eyes of the Church, the mermaid is evidence not of the richness of God’s creation but how it can be maligned and corrupted by female influences.²¹ These beautiful creatures could be spotted sitting on tidal rocks, ledges and reefs, holding a comb or a mirror (representing pride), playing an instrument (representing temptation), or clutching a fish in one hand (symbolizing a sinner in the grasp of sin).²² In Samuel Daniel’s (1563-1619) poem, Ulisseus and the Syren, he depicts “two different courses represented by two opposing characters … Ulysses [Latin for Odysseus] is manly, honourable, virtuous and steadfast … the Siren … is insidiously beautiful and alluring, but also soft and weak, lacking in worth and high moral purpose.”²³ She tries to tempt Ulysses with pleasure, peace, and safety, but he rejects her, preferring danger, fame, honour, and bettering the world.²⁴ Ulysseus’s strong moral centre starkly contrasts with the Siren’s, who, like her kind, are morally shipwrecked. Unlike Ulysseus and mankind, these beautiful creatures are incapable of betterment due to their intrinsic corruption, cursed to lure sympathetic boatmen using their “foolish pitty” as “her guilefull bayt.”

Despite the siren’s pagan origins, early Christian thinkers and Renaissance writers espoused the sirens in Homer’s Odyssey as proxies for women, concerning their perceived moral dangers as conceived by the male imagination. While depictions of sirens have shifted over time to a more physically flattering image of the mermaid, the deceptive nature of these mythical creatures has remained unchanged in western society for much of history. In his modern adaption of Homer’s epic, Christopher Nolan’s sirens are perched at a distance on towering tidal rocks overlooking Odysseus’s struggling ship. The details of the sirens’ appearances in this scene are ambiguous; even their siren song is muffled by Odysseus’s screams—which is the only visible indication of their apparent danger. Classical and medieval literature indisputably informs us that sirens are evil, man-eating monsters that preyed on innocent and benevolent mariners. Yet, it should not be lost on us that, like Nolan’s film, it is repeatedly works produced by men that have informed generations of audiences about how to interpret these mysterious, beguiling creatures and their suspicious likeness to women.

Featured Image: Ary Renan, “Charybde et Scylla,” (1894), Paris, musée de la Vie romantique (Wikisource)

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[1] Homer, Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey, 584.

[2] Homer, Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey, 588.

[3] Apollonius of Rhodes, The Voyage of Argo, trans. E. V. Rieu (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1959), 171.

[4] Paul Murgatroyd, Mythical Monsters in Classical Literature (London: Bloomsburg Publishing, 2013), 67-70

[5] Murgatroyd, Mythical Monsters, 67-70.

[6] Rhodes, The Voyage of Argo, 171.

[7] Murgatroyd, Mythical Monsters, 67-70.

[8] Murgatroyd, Mythical Monsters, 67-70.

[9] Vaughn Scribner, Merpeople: A Human History (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), 31.

[10] Murgatroyd, Mythical Monsters, 67-70.

[11] Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditskaya, Music of the Sirens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 19.

[12] Murgatroyd, Mythical Monsters, 67-70.

[13] Murgatroyd, Mythical Monsters, 67-70.

[14] Austern and Naroditskaya, Music of the Sirens, 33.

[15] Austern and Naroditskaya, Music of the Sirens, 34.

[16] Murgatroyd, Mythical Monsters, 70-72.

[17] Murgatroyd, Mythical Monsters, 70-72.

[18] Murgatroyd, Mythical Monsters, 70-72.

[19] Austern and Naroditskaya, Music of the Sirens, 36.

[20] Wood, Fantastic Creatures in Mythology and Folklore, 52.

[21] Wood, Fantastic Creatures in Mythology and Folklore, 54.

[22] Wood, Fantastic Creatures in Mythology and Folklore, 52.

[23] Murgatroyd, Mythical Monsters, 70-72.

[24] Murgatroyd, Mythical Monsters, 70-72.

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