Siren
The singers of the Odyssey whose song drew sailors to their deaths, painted by the Greeks as birds with women’s heads and later merged with the mermaid.
Meaning
In the Odyssey, Circe warns Odysseus of the Sirens, “who bewitch all men”: whoever hears them sitting in their meadow never comes home, and round them lies “a great heap of bones of men”. Homer gives no description of their bodies. Encyclopaedia Britannica says Greek art showed them first as birds with women’s heads and later as women, sometimes winged, with birds’ legs, and our drawing follows the vase painters. In the Middle Ages the siren grew a fish’s tail. Dictionary.com gives the English word’s later senses: a seductively beautiful woman, and a device for a loud wailing warning.
Origin and history
Odysseus, warned, stopped his men’s ears with wax and had himself tied to the mast. The Sirens sang to him that they knew everything that happened at Troy “and all that shall hereafter be upon the fruitful earth”, and he begged to be untied, but his men rowed on. Britannica adds the other escape: when the Argonauts passed, Orpheus sang so well that only one of them heard the Sirens. Homer has two Sirens; later writers usually had three, and placed them near Naples, whose ancient name Parthenope, John Vinycomb notes, came from one of them.
Pliny did not believe in them. He put the sirens among his “fabulous birds”, in spite of the writer Dinon’s report that they lived in India and charmed men to sleep with their song before tearing them to pieces.
From bird to mermaid
The medieval writers changed the siren’s shape. Philip de Thaun’s bestiary, as Vinycomb quotes it, gives her “the make of a woman down to the waist, and the feet of a falcon, and the tail of a fish”. The Aberdeen Bestiary, made in England about 1200, uses the name for something else again: white winged snakes in Arabia, faster than horses. In heraldry, Vinycomb writes under the heading “The Mermaid or Siren”, she is a young woman above and a fish below, holding a comb and a glass.
Sirens on tombs
Vinycomb notes that because their song was death, the Greeks often carved Sirens on tombs as spirits of death, and Britannica records a gentler tradition in which they were Persephone’s companions, who searched for her when Hades carried her off. The bird-woman shape is shared with the Harpies.
Read next
- Next in Mythical creatures of Greece and EuropePegasusThe winged horse of Greek myth, born from the neck of Medusa when Perseus beheaded her, tamed by Bellerophon and later the steed of the Muses and a common charge in heraldry.
- The same shape in Catholic symbolsChalice and hostA cup with a round wafer above it: the chalice and host of the Mass, the Catholic sign of the Eucharist and of the priesthood.
See also
Harpy, Minotaur, Centaur, Chimera, Hydra, Griffin.
Sources
- The Odyssey of Homer (tr. Butcher and Lang), Homer, The Odyssey, translated by S. H. Butcher and Andrew Lang (1879), Project Gutenberg eBook #1728, Project Gutenberg, Book XII
- Siren (Encyclopaedia Britannica), Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Siren”, online edition (archived copy), Encyclopaedia Britannica, article
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 10.70 (tr. Bostock and Riley), Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley (1855), book X, chapter 70, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Book X, chapter 70, fabulous birds
- Siren (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com, “Siren” (Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary), Dictionary.com, entry
- Aberdeen Bestiary, folio 69v (University of Aberdeen), Aberdeen Bestiary (Aberdeen University Library MS 24, England, c. 1200), folio 69v, “Sirens”, transcription and translation, University of Aberdeen, Of sirens
- Fictitious and Symbolic Creatures in Art (John Vinycomb, 1906), John Vinycomb, Fictitious & Symbolic Creatures in Art, with Special Reference to Their Use in British Heraldry (London: Chapman and Hall, 1906), Project Gutenberg, The Mermaid or Siren, and The Sirens of Classic Mythology, pp. 243–253
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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