Almost everyone has heard that the Sirens in the Odyssey sing too beautifully to resist, and that it is the beauty of their voices that drowns the sailors. Homer's text promises something else, more interesting than the legend that survived: the Sirens do not offer pleasure, they offer knowledge. And what Odysseus, or Ulysses, in the name Latin made famous, does in the face of that offer is one of the most lucid scenes in the whole poem about self-knowledge.
What everyone imagines
The common idea is one of seduction by beauty: voices so perfect that no one can resist, a song that hypnotizes through pure sonic pleasure. It is a reading that explains itself, because song and seduction have gone together in almost every tradition since Homer. Only that is not what the poem says.
What the text actually says
The Sirens call Odysseus by name, and what they promise next is knowledge, not pleasure:
"We know everything that, in wide Troy, the Argives and Trojans suffered by the will of the gods. We know everything that happens on the much-nourishing earth." (Odyssey, Book XII, 184-191, based on the Portuguese translation by Christian Werner, Cosac Naify, 2014)
The trap closes precisely because they offer what that particular man wants most. He is the hero who gets by because he understands, the most intelligent of the Greeks who returned from Troy, and they offer to understand everything that exists.
Tied to the mast: wanting to hear, without being able to obey
What Odysseus does about this is a piece of ingenuity that still surprises today. He has his companions' ears sealed with wax, so they row deaf to the song, and asks to be tied to the mast himself. He wants to hear. He just does not want to be able to obey.
Notice what this choice means. He does not try to resist temptation through sheer willpower, nor pretend he will not feel the pull. He makes his own surrender impossible, knowing in advance that he would have no way to resist if he were free.
The wise man does not trust his own willpower
This is the lesson that crosses almost three thousand years and arrives intact today: Odysseus survives precisely because he does not trust himself. The wise man, in the poem, is not the one who believes himself immune to temptation. He is the one who knows himself well enough to tie himself up before it arrives.
On the island of the Sirens, the text describes a pile of bones (Odyssey, Book XII, 45-46). Whose bones these were, the poem does not say, and it is worth marking the difference: to say they are the bones of those who trusted they would hold on is our reading, not a claim made by the text.
Waterhouse painted birds, not fish-women
A curiosity helps measure how much the image of the Sirens has changed over time: in ancient Greek, they are not half woman, half fish. They are birds with a woman's face, and that is how the English painter John William Waterhouse portrayed them in 1891, perched on the boat, their dark wings beating near the mast. The fish-woman that most people imagine today comes from another tradition, that of the Nordic mermaids, which only later merged with the Greek one.
The Sirens' song, in the end, is not about music. It is about the most dangerous temptation for anyone who lives by thinking: believing you can manage to know everything, without paying the price of never coming back to tell it.
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See recommended readingsFrequently asked questions
What do the Sirens in the Odyssey actually offer?
Not pleasure or beauty. They call Odysseus by name and promise to know everything that happened at Troy and everything that happens on earth (Odyssey, Book XII, 184-191). It is the perfect bait for the hero of intelligence: they offer to understand everything.
Why does Odysseus ask to be tied to the mast?
Because he wants to hear the song, but he knows that if he is free he will obey the impulse to go to them. He does not trust his own willpower, so he makes surrender impossible before he needs to resist it.
Were the Sirens in the Odyssey half woman, half fish?
Not in the Greek text. The ancient form is that of birds with a woman's face, and that is how the English painter John William Waterhouse portrayed them in 1891. The fish-woman image comes later, from the Nordic mermaid tradition.
Continue: Nobody is my name: Odysseus and the Cyclops · Métis: the intelligence of Odysseus · The Odyssey, by Homer: summary and analysis · Le notti bianche: Visconti films Dostoevsky in Rome
Source class: Odisseia, de Homero